Broken Covenants

Lent 5, Week of March 22
Jeremiah 31.31-34

ANOTHER new covenant (a very loud sigh!)? How can this be?

So far, in our Lenten texts, we have witnessed three—with Noah, Abraham and with Moses and the people of Israel—covenants that were broken, repeatedly. Although God has remained faithful, we, God’s people, have not. So God, relentless in pursuit of us, offers yet another chance today through the prophet Jeremiah, to a people exiled by their faithlessness. This time the covenant will not depend on our actions—doing God’s will or keeping God’s rules. This time there is no flood, no fire, no verbal contract. This time God will write the covenant on our hearts. It will not need to be taught; it will not depend on us. This time the covenant will simply be part of our DNA.

It’s a bit like the peace process in the Middle East. Agreements that were made over the years—1979, 1994, 2007—have been broken.........on both sides. If a peace process depends on the people who are fighting, it will never succeed. After all, we are human. Humans get angry; we are easily misled to think we are more important that we are; we are impatient to get our way, and stubborn in our demands.

Camp David, Oslo, Madrid, Wye River—the names are seemingly endless. But because we are human, the agreements are always broken—new settlements are constructed on Palestinian lands; more rockets are fired on Israeli towns; more Palestinians are harassed at checkpoints; a suicide bomber explodes on a bus; the construction of the wall keeps going on, right on Palestinian land, even though the international community has called for stopping the building. It’s a lot like God’s repeated attempts to get Israel to be faithful.

But our story tells us that God is eternally hopeful; God does not tire of trying again; God will not abandon this stubborn and fickle people, no matter how obstinate or rebellious they are. It is simply not God’s nature to abandon us, even when all logic would say, Give up!

And this is the story that lives in the hearts of the people who work for peace—people like Hannah and Angela and Mitri and the teachers at Dar Al-Kalima, the school in Bethlehem, teaching nonviolence as a way of life in a community where violence has traumatized everyone—killings, beatings, imprisonments and the daily humiliation of lifting your shirt to show the soldiers at the checkpoint that you don’t have any weapons. This story of a God who does not give up on us is also the story of those working for peace.

And we, who follow this God in North America? What are we to do? Give in to our hopelessness that this conflict is not resolvable? Give in to our boredom with the same old-same old ways of the world? Some people are not giving up, but stubbornly continuing their work for peace. And we need not give up. Sign up for email alerts, subscribe to email lists and learn about action you can take to change things, here in the U.S.:

End the Occupation: http://www.endtheoccupation.org/
JStreet: http://www.jstreet.org/
Jewish Voice for Peace: http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/
ePalestine: http://epalestine.blogspot.com/
Churches for Middle East Peace: http://www.cmep.org/
And listen to David Wilcox's song while you do it: "Three Brothers": http://davidwilcox.com/

O God, you do not get bored waiting for us to behave. You do not give up; your love keeps on pursuing us, reminding us of your way of peace and justice. You have written your hope for us on our hearts; show us where we can begin. Amen.