March 25, 2012 – Jeremiah 31:31-34; John 12:20-33
Jeremiah 31:31-34; John 12:20-33
A Heart of Love
Fifth Sunday in Lent – March 25, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
I have an aunt that my wife and I sometimes visit in a nursing home.
She’s very old now,
and I can remember visiting her in her home here in Winnipeg when I was very young.
I remember entering the side door of her house, walking up the few steps to her kitchen,
and being lifted onto the kitchen counter by her husband.
These are cherished memories, but my aunt doesn’t remember them most days.
She’s suffering from memory loss.
The thing is, on days when she’s not even sure who I am, she makes sure, before I leave,
to say, “I love you. I just love you.”
The Lutheran pastor David Lose tells a similar story about a beloved uncle with Alzheimer’s
who was once unable to attend a family reunion.
The message he sent to his family was this:
“Tell everyone that even though I don’t remember them, I still love them.”
There is something about the core identity of these people that isn’t dependant on memory.
(David Lose at http://www.workingpreacher.org/dear_wp.aspx?article_id=569)
We are rightly concerned about memory loss, both for ourselves and for people we love.
It’s a frightening prospect both because memory loss entails great vulnerability and because
so much of our sense of who we are comes from memory.
Who are we, we wonder, if we can’t remember?
Are we still the same person without those memories?
If so, are we then somehow a lesser person?
What I have learned from my aunt is that
there is something deeper about our core identities as human beings than memory.
There is something about us that goes deeper, something that is closer to the heart of
who we are: love, and the remembrance that when memory fades we are still
bound to one another in love.
Love never ends, says Paul in First Corinthians.
When everything else fades away and crumbles to dust, he writes, one thing remains and
one thing retains a quality of the eternal: and that thing is love.
In this week’s reading from Jeremiah, God does something, well, divine.
The people of Judah are in captivity in Babylon due to their poor choices and sinful behaviour.
And what does God choose to do in this situation?
God chooses to forget.
God decides not to brood on the past faithlessness of the people.
God decides not to hang on to their past slights.
God chooses to forget their infidelity, their apathy, their worship of other Gods.
God chooses to forget their trust in violence.
God chooses to forget that the people have forgotten their part in God’s loving mission to
love bless and heal this world and every person in it.
God chooses to forget their ingratitude, their lack of wonder, and their grumbling.
God chooses, in short, to forget their sin.
I will forgive their iniquity, says God, and remember their sin no more.
And then God does something else.
God erases all the stuff that seemingly defines the people: their sinfulness,
their seeming inability to do things for God and do good things for their neighbours.
What you need to know is that about 14 chapters before this, Jeremiah claimed that
there was something else written on the peoples’ hearts.
That thing was sin: selfishness, greed, injustice, a lack of compassion for the vulnerable,
a desire for vengeance and violence.
The sin of Judah, writes Jeremiah in the beginning of chapter 17, is written with an iron pen;
with a diamond point it is engraved on the tablet of their hearts.
In other words, it is seemingly indelible.
But God comes to recognize that that is not what the people were made for.
That is not really what was meant to be written on their hearts.
And so, in this wondrous passage today, God erases what is seemingly indelible.
God chooses to forget.
And put something else in its place, something that really is indelible: love.
God writes the covenant of love on their hearts.
The covenant of the 10 commandments written at Mount Sinai was summarized by Jesus:
The God of compassion and steadfast love would be their God always.
In turn the people were to love God and love their neighbour.
This external writing, though, on tablets of stone wasn’t enough.
A deep desire to love, to love God and God’s mission, and love one’s neighbour:
this needed to be written on the very hearts of the people.
That is what their heart – their deepest, core identity – was meant to consist of.
And so God erases – God chooses to forget – what was there previously: their sinfulness.
And writes the word love deep inside them, at the deepest level of their being,
even beyond the reaches of memory.
God chooses to forget out of love, because love is more core to God than memory.
And this morning, as we take God’s loving grace in holy communion deep within ourselves,
we are reminded that God writes something in our hearts deeper even than our memories.
Forgiveness. Love. Compassion. A thirst for justice.
That is who we truly are.
But it’s hard to let go of some things.
The good news this morning is that if God can, perhaps we can too.
In the Academy Award nominated film The Descendants, George Clooney portrays a man
who is offered the opportunity to let go and forget some pretty difficult things.
Clooney plays Matt King, a Honolulu lawyer with a wife and two daughters.
After a tragic boating accident leaves his wife in a coma from which she will not recover,
Matt discovers from one of his daughters that his wife had recently been having an affair.
We see him angry, we see him grieving, we see him regretting that he has spent so much time
and energy on his work that he has been a less than good husband and father.
He feels not only his injury deeply, he also comes to recognize his own failures.
It’s as if in one hand he is holding all the stuff that’s been done to him that’s injured him.
And in the other hand is all the stuff he himself regrets doing.
In the midst of other difficult decisions he must make about his daughters and
his family’s very valuable ancestral land, we wonder if he’ll be able to
forget that stuff in his hands and let it go and start something new.
I think our lives are a lot like that, right?
Who among us can’t relate to Matt King?
Professor Lose invites us to consider this. (Ibid.)
Open one of your hands in front of yourself now and imagine that in it you are holding
something done to you that you wish you could forget:
a betrayal, a slight, an injury, an insult, a disappointment that still bothers you.
Now open your other hand before you and imagine that in it you are holding
something you yourself have done that you regret that you wish God would forget:
an unkind word you have said, a deed of which you are not proud.
Now listen to these words:
I will forgive your iniquity, and remember your sin no more.
Can you forget about the thing you have done? Because the thing is, God already has.
Now how about the other thing, the thing done to you?
Think in the coming week if this is possible.
Sometimes it is, I think, and sometimes it isn’t because some things have marked us so deeply.
Perhaps we can say that God promises to do what we cannot: forget.
I think sometimes we can forgive, although we cannot always forget.
The resurrected Jesus, we remember, still has the marks on his hands from the nails.
But in his new life, those marks no longer hold him captive to a painful memory,
But become something else, something wondrous: the sign of his deep, deep love for us.
Perhaps if we can’t always forget like God has, perhaps God at least can open a way for
us not to be held captive by difficult memories but bring something life-giving for
someone else from them.
In the end of The Descendants, Matt King is able to forgive his wife before she dies for
what she has done to him.
And he does appear to become a better father: a new way is opened for him.
Whether he forgets or not, I don’t know.
Sometimes what is possible for God is not possible for us in this life.
But let us all remember, at least, that the best and most essential part of ourselves – our heart – is
not contained in our memories, but in a love that has been mercifully,
beautifully given to us.
Let us remember the uncle who says, “Tell my family that although I do not remember them,
I still love them.”
Let us remember the aunt who, although sometimes she doesn’t remember me,
tells me she loves me.
Let us remember the good news about the God whose identity is not dependant chiefly on
memory but on love. Who is love.
And who writes on our hearts something deeper than memory:
love for God, and love for neighbour.
And let us remember that that is who we are and what we’re about as God’s people.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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