“Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found.”
This is part of the Collect for today that we will pray again in a few minutes. The collect for each Sunday was written with the lectionary readings in mind. Sometimes the readings have since changed and the collect seems to have nothing to do with readings. Such is truly not the case this Sunday.
Please take note that there is nothing inherently onerous about commands from God. This prayer expresses the hopes that our thoughts and desires might not just react or respond to God’s thoughts and desires but ALIGN with God’s thoughts and desires so that we find joy, or maybe that might be better worded, that slow down enough and pay attention so that joy catches us.
In scripture, joy does not have the flavor of unbridled giggles, but instead more completeness, a at one with God feeling, a sense of having done what is good or right. This may also include unbridled giggles, but it is definitely not required.
The passage from Jeremiah has been a favorite of mine for a long time, even before seminary. I love the poetry of it. The phrase “And they shall be my people, and I shall be their God” just kind of sings. Although in Hebrew, there is a word for “heart”, in this case, the word that is translated as “heart” is means more like “innards.” Although clearly not as aesthetically pleasing, this actually makes a world of sense. In the Hebraic belief system, the innards are the seat of the soul. In other words, one believes with one’s gut. If we think about that from today’s perspective, one could picture how anxiety can trouble not just one’s head, but also one’s gut. Let’s face it, the world can give you indigestion, an upset stomach, or put you in intestinal knots. If this gut trouble is calmed, then this is written in your gut; it is written on your heart. Perhaps not quite as poetic, but earthy and real, and relatable. Although throughout history, people have read this covenant in Jeremiah as the new covenant that Jesus speaks of in Luke, this covenant written on our innards is different. In no way is any place in the world, or in the history of the world approached a time or place where we do not need to be taught of God’s ways or statutes. It is in Jesus that we see it is universal. It is not just we who know this. And so, O Lord, please let our guts be troubled, for otherwise, we do not know you. Lord, let us learn your ways, let us learn your commandments. This new covenant needs to be writ large on our guts, we need to be troubled.
And so it is that this is at least one of the ways that the disciples knew that Jesus was the Messiah. It went against thousands of years of the people’s understanding of God, but Jesus, and no one else before or since, seemed to embody this new covenant, this new commandment. It was written clearly on his gut. For Jesus there was no cherry picking of scripture to make his wrong-headed accusations pass for something else. From the account of the Gospels, Jesus could say clearly the lines from the psalm, “My delight is in your statutes; * I will not forget your word.” Jesus operated as if God’s statues and covenant was in his heart.
Jesus himself identifies what it is like to live following God’s statutes in a world that is not following God’s statutes. His soul is troubled, frequently, not just because he sees the writing on the wall. In Jesus’ case, it is not that he feels that he is doing something wrong according to God’s statutes, it is not that which gives him a troubled soul. Instead, it is knowing that the world is upside down and in order to do the right thing will require everything from you. To recognize that his life would be required of him as a seed of wheat, to die in order to bring newness and growth—this perhaps defines a Messiah as well as a saint. This covenant plays out to adhere to God’s word and statutes even if it requires your life. This is what we mean when we say the way of the cross is the way of life.
Lent is our time to journey with God, get closer to God, allow joy to catch up with us. It is a time of self-examination. Maybe our Lenten journey has something to do with monitoring our gut. Our guts need to be disturbed appropriately. We need to intensely feel the right things, we need to feel them in our gut when the world is wrong. We need to recognize racial and ethnic division, we need to own white terrorism for what it is, every last one of our baptismal covenant promises need to give us productive psychic anxiety and indigestion when we don’t fulfill them. Ignoring these is making sure they are never written on our heart. That is worse than dying. This gut disturbance is the Good Trouble of which the late Senator John Lewis spoke. Martyrs know this. Dying as a seed of wheat in order for God’s goodness to come into the world is never the worst thing that can happen.
Paraphrasing St. Ignatius, the closer you get to God and where God is calling you to be, the freer you are. Maybe this freedom is the freedom to do be disturbed by the world, and then respond so that we have the covenant writ on our hearts. May we become, finally, like Jesus: ourselves tablets on which is written the law of life, so that others might read, and live.