I want you to know I’m a rule follower from way back. If it is on the books, I try to follow the rules.
There are rules and laws that are written down. There are the ones my mother graciously supplied through the years: “Don’t hit your sister. Don’t touch that. Don’t do that. Get away from that. Do your homework. Clean your room.”
You become a teenager, and the rules change, but the fact that you have rules never changes. “Clean your room. Be home by 11:30. Don’t talk that way to your mother.”
Even when we become adults, there are still rules. “Drive 65.” I confess I have broken that rule, too.
Have you noticed that sometimes the rules given to us have the tendency to overpower and overwhelm us? How about these: “Don’t disappoint anyone. Don’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Work hard. Don’t get mad. Don’t get on God’s bad side.”
Maybe that is the way people felt back in Jeremiah’s day. After so much of Jeremiah talks about destruction and exile, there are these words from the thirty-first chapter. These are among my favorite words in all of Scripture.
Jeremiah has God saying, “The days are surely coming.” Those words are almost as great as the words we hear of Jesus, “In the fullness of time…”
“The days are coming,” says this prophet, “when I will watch over them and I will build and I will plant.” Instead of giving them the how, when and where of that homecoming, the prophet talks about how we come home in our hearts and in our souls. Jeremiah talks of a spiritual homecoming.
God takes the initiative. Jeremiah has God saying, “I will make the covenant. I will put my law within them. I will write it on their hearts. I will be their God. I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
What is our part in that? Nothing. Know the Lord, that is the only thing that you have to do. Know the Lord.
Yes, God knows of our brokenness — but God takes broken things and makes them whole. God sees us as who we might be — as who we have never stopped being. It is possible because God says, “I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”
I used to like when school started because it gave me the chance to start over anew with a new teacher. They won’t know about all the mistakes that I made.
A new chance and a new start — it isn’t just about students and their fall classes. It is about all of us.
All of us have done things in our lives that we wished we had not done. This is why we confess our sins and seek repentance. Some of us have whole seasons in our life we would like to erase.
But the good news is that God is always more willing to listen than we are to confess. God is always more willing to restore than we are to repent. God is always more willing to forgive than we are to bow in humility. God is always more willing to heal than we are to be made whole.
The days are surely coming, says the Lord. In the fullness of time, says the gospel writer. In the fullness of time, Jesus came into the world, and God gave us a new chance so that we could have a change of heart.
Special thanks to my Lord, who has forgotten my sins and who continually gives me second and third and fourth … (you get the idea … chances).
The Rev. David Wise is pastor of Otterbein United Methodist Church in Greenfield. This weekly column is written by local clergy members. Send comments to [email protected].
