Today's reading from Jeremiah is one of the most referred to scripture passages in the New Testament, which all tell us Jesus Christ fulfills God's promise for a new covenant. But how does Christ do that? And what does this new covenant mean for us 21 st century Americans? Part of the answer lies in the context in which God makes this promise of a new covenant.

The prophet Jeremiah lived and wrote when Josiah was king of Judah . Now if you've read or studied the history of the Jewish kingdoms as recorded in the OT books of Kings or Chronicles, you know that after King David and Solomon, Jewish kings were notorious for allowing, and even participating in, the worship of foreign gods.

But King Josiah was different.

The Bible tells us in Chapter 22 of 2 nd Kings that King Josiah did what was right in the sight of the Lord and walked in all the ways of his ancestor David. Verse 2 tells us Josiah did not turn aside to the right or the left in worshipping false gods but steadfastly kept to the path of the one true God. 2 nd Kings goes on to proclaim: “before him there was no king like him, who turned to the Lord with all his heart, with all his soul and with all his might according to ALL the law of Moses.” The bible tells us Josiah did everything right. Not even Kings David or Solomon are lauded with such high praise by the writer of 2 nd Kings.

Josiah tore down all the altars and shrines to foreign gods through out Judea . He outlawed worship of Canaanite and Assyrian gods and child sacrifice to the god Moloch. Cultic prostitutes and priests were banished. Josiah restored the temple where, Yahweh, the God of Israel was exclusively and continually worshipped. Finally at long last, the Hebrew King and his people, the chosen people of God, mended their ways and there were no other gods before Yahweh.

So what happens next? A peaceful and prosperous reign rivaling that of Kings David and Solomon? A thousand years of Hebrew culture, and exclusive allegiance and worship of Yahweh? Sadly no. A mere sixteen years after Josiah instituted his reforms he was killed and his army defeated at the battle of Me-gid-o, paving the way for Babylonian invaders to obliterate the Jewish kingdom.

Jeremiah flees to Egypt as a refugee a nd sends the words we hear this morning back to a defeated, dispirited and questioning people. Their world was not only turned upside down, but also utterly destroyed. Babylonians leveled to rumble the restored Jewish temple. They looted the city. Enslaved the leaders and marched them hundreds of miles from Judea to Babylon , their center of political and religious power.

Where was the God of the chosen people in the midst of this cruel enslavement and unbearable suffering? How could Yahweh have allowed this to happen? Especially to the Holy temple that King Josiah had so meticulously restored? Were the Babylonian gods and goddesses stronger than the God of Israel? Why? How could God allow this to happen?

Don't we sometimes ask these same questions? We try to do everything right and get hit with cancer. People we love are tragically and senselessly killed or injured. Horrific disasters occur and we wonder, where is God?

The defeated and enslaved Israelites were left with two unacceptable answers—either Yahweh was to weak to defend them against the Babylonian deities, OR Yahweh had abandoned them permanently.

In the midst of such hopelessness and such utter defeat Jeremiah writes: “The days are surely coming says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I led them out of slavery in Egypt. The covenant they broke. No, this is the new covenant I will make. I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people . No longer will they teach one another who I am, for they will all know me, from the least to the greatest. And I will forgive their wrongdoings and forget their sins.

 Jeremiah plants seeds of hope in a season of despair and hopelessness. A new covenant, says the Lord, where I will Be their God and they will be my people, and all will know me starting with the least and going on to the greatest.

But why a new covenant?

I wonder if it's because the Israelites forgot their relationship with God was a covenant, and treated the relationship like a contract.

Contracts are agreements that spell out what each party to the contract will do, or not do. Fulfillment of contracts is based solely on actions or inactions.

Covenants are not contracts. Rather covenants are promises, vows about how each party will BE with one another. Contracts are concerned solely with actions and inactions. Covenants are concerned with attitudes, dispositions ways of thinking and being and from them flow actions congruent with that attitude or disposition. MARRIAGE is the covenant we maybe most familiar with—where both the bride and the groom promise to love, honor and care for one another under all conditions and circumstances of life-not perform a laundry list of actions.

The OT prophets tell us that many Jews, especially those in power and authority, treated the original covenant—the one made after God freed them from slavery in Egypt--- as a contract. They believed that as long as they offered the correct sacrifices to God, obeyed the dietary and other religious appearance laws, that they were then fulfilling their end of the covenant. This is why Josiah was so keen on restoring the temple, right worship practices, and outlawing the worship of pagan gods. In doing these outward acts of obedience, Josiah and others in power believed Yahweh would indeed make of them a great nation. But these acts of exclusive worship and piety are only external signs of allegiance to God. The real test, then as now, is covenant living, and in this crucial test Josiah and other Jewish leaders failed miserably.

What covenant living requires are not acts of outward religious piety and worship, but inward dispositions of loving God and neighbor, especially our defenseless and powerless neighbors in need. In ancient Israel the classes of people in perpetual powerless and therefore need were orphans, widows, and foreigners—those who had no family, no safety net to care for them, and could easily be exploited by the powerful. Jeremiah writes these words From God in chapters 7 and again in chapter 22: “if you do not oppress the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow or shed innocent blood, then I will dwell with you.”

Jesus affirms that the entirety of the OT law can be summed up in one commandment--love God with all your heart, mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. Obeying the covenant, old or new, means immersing, infusing our relationships with God, our self and others with love from which flow loving actions. This is what living in covenant with God means, and why Jesus embodies God's fulfillment of the new covenant. In Jesus, God becomes one of us, fully human. From the first moments of his birth in a dwelling not fit for humans Almighty God experiences the uncertainty and pain of what it means to be powerless. Son of an unwed teenage girl, Jesus childhood is spent not in his native land, but in Egypt , where his parents' eek out a living as best they can manage as immigrants in a strange land. Where we find God being with us is not with the powerful, but with refugees, longing for home.

In the gospels we find the adult Jesus where he said he would be-- with the poor, the hungry, the demon possessed, the sick, sinners, lepers, prostitutes. We find Jesus with people who were powerless in first century Palestine . People who needed Jesus, who wanted to BE with Jesus.

An example where we see this kind of radical covenant living in our own time is in Archbishop Oscar Romero. His appointment as Archbishop of El Savador was hailed by the country's military dictators and ruling families as a prudent choice. Romero was not expected to take up the cause of justice in a country ruled by fear and intimidation. But he did. He spoke out against the killing of priests and thousands of men and women by paramilitary death squads.

Like Jesus, Romero's message and his following among the masses of powerless people, threatened those in power. In his sermon given just minutes before he was shot and killed upon the church altar, Archbishop Romero preached on today's gospel lesson where Jesus speaks only days before his death about the grain of wheat that dies and enables new life.

Romero said: "Those who surrender to the service of the poor through love of Christ, will live like the grain of wheat that dies. It only apparently dies. If it were not to die, it would remain a solitary grain. The harvest comes because of the grain that dies. We know that every effort to improve society, above all when society is so full of injustice and sin, is an effort that God blesses; that God wants; that God demands of us.

Like Jesus, Romero could have acted differently in response to the threats to kill him. Jesus and Romero could have toned down their message, and stopped confronting the power structures. But as Romero so succinctly and clearly put it: “The shepherd does not want protection when his flock is denied it.”

“Where I am,” says Jesus, “there my servant will be also.”

In this Lenten season before Palm Sunday and Holy Week, you and I know that through Jesus, God is about to experience a violent humiliating death at the hands of the religious and political powers. Jesus dies for what he said and did. He was a threat to both the Roman peace and Jewish religious authority. His vision of what loving God and neighbor require was not the same vision as the temple priests, the Pharisees, or the roman rulers. Both the religious authorities and Pilate kill Jesus in the name of the god they worshipped. Jesus shows us the truth about God's love in the words of martyred Oscar Romero: “The shepherd does not want protection when his flock is denied it.” God became incarnate to become one with humankind in our struggles against the forces of evil and idolatry. God came as a human being to Be with us in Covenant living.

Jeremiah assures us that God will affect our human hearts so that we can keep this new covenant of love. Our new heart can know God's compassionate forgiveness no matter our formal teachings about God, our status, or our history of sin and brokenness. New hearts mean new life. As we open ourselves to God's promise of a new heart, we find that God has created our new hearts to love. Through our relationship with Jesus Christ we have the power to love our selves, one another and to love God.

Lent calls us to a health check of our new hearts. How open is your heart to allowing God's love, God's acceptance of who you are with all your faults and brokenness? Will you claim God's promise? Will you dare to live as a forgiven and forgiving person? Will you risk showing love to the unlovable, particularly those in your family and our church family? It's easy to love strangers in the abstract, but hard to love the people we must interact with.

Where Christ leads us, will you follow?

Let us pray: Gracious God you have written the law of love within us. Empower us to live according to that law. Sustain us with your love and presence as we go forth to be your people in a broken and hurting world, serving and loving our neighbors in need. Amen.

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