Reformation Day
October 30-31,2010
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Salem Lutheran Church, Sycamore, IL
Hear with me, once more, the words of the prophet Jeremiah today:
31The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt — a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. 33But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know the LORD," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
I opened up my Facebook page the other day and someone had posted pictures of the demolition of my old high school. Step by step the photos take you through it --- circling around recording the building from all angles before the wrecking balls and cranes came in to systematically tear it down, brick by brick until all that’s left is the front stops where I spent many an evening sitting and waiting for a ride home. It made me remember all that building symbolized for me, all it held, especially the gifts there that stay with me still ---- the English teacher who beat into us the importance of not writing with cliché’s, the History teacher whose love of Civil War history deepened my own understanding of forces past that shaped us, the choir director who taught me to sing alto, the speech teacher who saw something I couldn’t see myself and urged me to join the speech team ,and locker number 339 with its combination of 29-39-49 or the grind of running the stairs in the old girls gymnasium. It all came flooding back as I watched the building that hosted it all come down and the dust rise in its wake and as I realize that now if I drive by? All that’s left to see now is a green expanse of lawn and a Walgreen’s sitting on the corner. It’s progress, I suppose. The building was old when I graduated, and no doubt it needed to be done. And once I got over the surprise of seeing it again and watching, for the first time, it actually come down, I found myself remembering that it’s not the building or what stands there that matters so much--- but the thousands of lives who were shaped within it who sat on the same front steps that I did waiting for a ride home.
It’s this kind of truth that Jeremiah is shouting out today to a people in exile. To a whole nation of folks whose homes have been destroyed, whose temple: the center of their lives of faith --- had met its time’s equivalent of a wrecking ball and had been demolished --- It’s the wonder of this kind of truth that Jeremiah is speaking to a people who have been defeated in battle and who have been deported to a land far from home. And to be sure, it’s this kind of truth that Jeremiah wants them never to forget: that the wonder of the faith, the gifts of God don’t live in any one building ---- no matter how precious --- and that these gifts of God can’t be compromised or taken away no matter what life does to you or what you do in your life --- but rather now and forever after are engraved on our very hearts and for that reason can never be taken away. Even if the buildings are gone. Even if nothing on the outside looks familiar even now. Even if it’s been replaced by a Walgreens. The gifts still live because by God’s own doing, they are etched on the very hearts of God’s people. And God’s people carry those gifts wherever we go.
Only on this Reformation Day we are reminded that these gifts are not ours by our own effort, not even if we’re of that generation who through pain staking repetition committed to memory much of the pieces of the faith we hold dear. No, indeed, first and last these are gifts by God’s hand and God’s doing.
The amazing gift of knowing God made this world and all there is and all we are --- and we are simply grateful recipients and caretakers of these gifts.
The at first heart-wrenching realization that there is nothing we can do to earn God’s grace, for we will always fall short.
The wonder that when we could not, because we cannot ever be good enough, God sacrificed his own son in our behalf.
The gift of resting in that grace, that forgiveness, that hope for this life and the next.
God has imprinted these, engraved them on our hearts, in a way that can never leave us. Not when buildings fall and history appears to have been erased. Not when jobs are lost or children stray or loved ones die or hope eludes us. Not now and not ever will these truths leave us and not now and not ever will God leave us either.
It was these truths that a monk named Martin Luther staked his life on better than 500 years ago. It was the same truth offered to a people in exile thousands of years before that that is written on your heart and mine as well. You are God’s own beloved child. And by God’s power and God’s wonderful grace, God will never leave you and God will never let you go. May this truth imprinted on your heart fill you with courage and hope and joy every single moment of every day. Amen.
