Saturday, March 28, 2015

Saturday, March 28, 2015

Jeremiah 31: 27-34

“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.”

If only our Christian faith were as easy to live as it is to state. Jesus’ famous summary of the Torah is simple, “Love God and love your neighbor,” but we know how difficult it is to practice.  We’re aware how much we need this prayer from the BCP: “Lord, have mercy upon us, and write both these thy laws on our hearts, we beseech thee.”

            Jeremiah was also keenly aware of the disconnect between knowing the terms of the covenant and fulfilling them. Trying to understand the devastating events of 587 B.C., the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, and the subsequent exile of the nation, Jeremiah indicts the people for continually breaking faith with God.  The covenant is simple, Jeremiah seems to say. Why do you keep breaking it?

            The concepts are simple, but the follow-through is another story. I think of students I’ve worked with over the years. I notice they seldom struggle with the basic concepts of math or science, for example. Instead, they often struggle to apply those concepts to the homework problems the teacher assigns. Take a typical math textbook, and you’ll notice that many of the problems at the end of a chapter are the most creatively difficult exercises a student will ever see. There’s logic to this process, I think. When a teacher introduces the simple concept, she doesn’t have the time to work through every possible way the concept can be applied. Instead, by doing problem after problem (and struggling with the challenging ones), a student notices patterns to follow, pitfalls to avoid, and shortcuts to use. The student, in short, gets a feel for the work by internalizing the basic concepts instead of simply following the rules. The student’s mathematical imagination flourishes.

            I wonder if our moral imagination grows in a similar way. Jeremiah seems to think so. He longs for this sort of creative absorption of God’s law. Jeremiah envisions a day when his people are so full of God’s presence and love that God’s very law is embedded in their hearts. 

     

            Theologian John Shea tells a story of a daily encounter in his Chicago neighborhood. A man without legs would position himself on the sidewalk in front of the local drugstore, and beg for change. Each time that he passed the man, Shea would throw some money into his cup. One day as he passed, he noticed a woman squatting down beside the man, and he heard her say, “So, you haven’t always lived in Chicago…?” Instead of throwing him some money and walking by, the woman was caring for the man in a personal way. Where did the woman get this generous spirit? Shea wondered. He was convinced that she had an inner consciousness of love (“God’s law written on her heart”) that she found a way to express.

            During this season of Lent, what practices help us to “get a feel” for and internalize God’s love and presence, so we can creatively express God’s intentions for the world?  

- David Shumaker