“Divine Relationship, Part 4: God Gathers Us” by the Rev. Don Wahlig, March 21, Lent 5 Year B - Jeremiah 31:31-34 • Psalm 51:1-12 or Psalm 119:9-16 • Hebrews 5:5-10 • John 12:20-33

THEME:  God’s love is relentless and we are vessels of his love.

Do we have any history buffs here? Anyone who has ever studied history, even casually, is inevitably struck by the remarkable similarity of humanity down through the ages. As Abraham Lincoln famously said, “Human nature will not change.”  As we have seen over these last few weeks, that is certainly true of the people of Israel. We have seen a certain pattern. First God seeks out his chosen people. He gathers them and binds them to himself through his covenant.  But then the people rebel. They break the covenant. God punishes the people, but then he finds a way to restore his covenantal relationship with them.

From Abraham to Moses, from Egypt to Mt. Sinai, we have seen this pattern. Despite God’s love for his people, time and time again, the people turn away from God. Now, a thousand years after God first made his covenant with Abraham, God’s rebellious children are in trouble yet again. It’s 400 years or so after the glory days of King David and his son Solomon. Subsequent kings have been progressively worse. Some even lead the people to worship idols. The people have once again rebelled against God. They have broken his covenant - again. So, God has permitted the Babylonian army to conquer Jerusalem. The city lies in ruins and Israel’s best and brightest are led off into captivity. It is an unmitigated disaster, the worst thing that has ever happened to God’s people.  And Jeremiah witnessed it first-hand. The people know they have sinned. They wonder, has God finally run out of patience with us?  Has he scrapped the covenant altogether?  Has God given up on us? 

What a horrible thought. But we sometimes wonder that, too, don’t we?  Like the people of Judah, sin is our nature.  It shapes our reality. Like them, we also rebel against God.  You don’t have to look very far to see it. News headlines are daily testaments of a world that looks eerily similar to the world the exiles inhabited. War and violence abound, chaos reigns. Greed and fear prevail. The world is seemingly hell-bent on destroying itself. We wonder have we finally gone too far? Has God finally given up on us?

But Jeremiah tells us just the opposite. We may be a lot like the people we encounter in scripture, with the same faulty faith and rebellious tendencies, but there is good news, too. God is the same God.  God continues to forgive our iniquity and remember our sin no more. God wipes the slate clean. That is what his New Covenant in Jesus Christ is all about. 

That means three things. First, the law of love is the same law God gave Moses on Mt. Sinai. It is what Jesus summarizes in the Great Commandment: love God with your whole being, and love your neighbor as yourself.  The difference is that the law of the New Covenant is not written on stone tablets and carried around in an ark. It is written on our hearts. We do not just learn it. We live it. We fulfill the law as we walk, guided by the Spirit, and following in the footsteps of Jesus who is the living embodiment of God’s New Covenant.

Second, not only is the law of love the same as the law God gave Moses, it is also the link between our inner desires and our external actions. What we do flows from our intentions.  A loving heart necessarily produces acts of loving kindness. If our actions are not loving, then the first place to look is our heart. That is where trouble starts. Sin is real. It distorts even the best of intentions. We may think we are acting solely for the benefit of others, but Satan is sneaky. He has a way of leading us to lie even to ourselves. We may believe that we are serving others, when deep down the motivation is really to serve ourselves, to pat ourselves on the back and puff up our ego.

In my experience, doing mission work is where I encounter this temptation most often. It is all too easy to think we are giving of ourselves selflessly out of service to Christ when personal pride is what is actually driving us. We know that is happening when our sense of self-satisfaction exceeds our sense of gratitude for the opportunity to do Christ’s work. It is not only in mission where we face this temptation. All that we do to serve Christ has to be examined.  To be candid with you, this is one of the chief temptations that we pastors face.

All of us have to make sure that our motivation is to glorify God and nobody else. There is no better time than right now, in this season of Lent, to take a good hard look at ourselves to make sure that we are acting out of love. Because loving actions only flow from loving hearts. And God knows the difference.

Finally, not only is the law of love the same as the law God gave Moses and the link between loving intention and loving action, we also need to remember who wrote that law on our hearts. God is the writer, not us. In other words, the New Covenant is not a covenant of works. It is a covenant of grace. The inclination and the ability to walk with Christ originates with God, not ourselves. The redemption that God promises in the New Covenant is by grace through faith. It is not something we earn. It is not even something we deserve. It is sheer gift – given from God.

Those are the three things we take away from Jeremiah’s comforting proclamation of the New Covenant. So, let’s take a step back. What does this say about God? That is the question we’ve been asking these last 4 weeks.  What kind of God is this who continually finds new ways to reach out to us, to gather us and bind us to himself – even when we keep walking away from him? The answer is, simply, the God of love. The God who IS love. The God Moses knew as Yahweh, and the God you and I know as Jesus Christ. 

That reminds me of a story I recently came across. The other day, I was flipping through some YouTube videos. I don’t know why, but I fixated on a safari video. It was about a lioness and her cubs in South Africa. Jeeps were slowly following her as she walked briskly down the road. Behind her were her two cubs trying to keep up with mom. What I soon learned was that there was a third cub. But it was nowhere to be seen. It had gotten lost. What unfolded was the remarkable story of this lioness as she relentlessly searched for her missing cub.  She walked miles with her other cubs in tow. She would occasionally stop, sniff for her lost cub’s sent, and then let out a call hoping that her lost cub would recognize her voice and respond. But no sign of the lost cub.

So, she walked further and further into the bush. Finally, several miles and many hours later, mother and cub were reunited. That, in itself was remarkable. It was heart-warming. But what I learned next made it even more so. What makes this story so spectacular is that this was not the first time her cub had gotten lost. This cub had been wandering off repeatedly, going its own way and leaving its mother and family behind.  But the mother lioness never stopped looking for her cub. She never gave up on her wandering child.

Friends, that is how God is. God is relentless. His love for us is more fierce and far deeper than any love we have ever known. No matter how many times we walk away from him, or how far we go, God refuses to leave us alone. He pursues us. He pursues us relentlessly until we are gathered to him and reunited with all our siblings, all his other children.  And, like that lost cub, imprinted from birth to respond to its mother’s voice, we recognize and respond to God’s call because we are imprinted with his law of love - written on our hearts.

So, where are you, friends? Are you somebody who has wandered away from God? If so, you can be certain that God is reaching out to you, searching for you in order to bring you back. And he will not stop searching for you until he has gathered you to himself. Don’t be surprised if that call comes through the loving voice and actions of another. Or, maybe there is someone in your life who has wandered away from God.  If so, don’t be surprised if God wants to use you to reach out to them with his love.

That is the promise of the New Covenant in Jesus Christ. God is love. And God’s love is relentless. And you and I are the vessels of his love.   May it be so. 

Amen.