Jeremiah 31

Summary

The reading this morning from Jeremiah is one in which Jeremiah is speaking on behalf of God to the people of Judah who have been taken into captivity in Babylon.  Through Jeremiah, God is promising to his people a new day, a day that will dawn for them at some time in the future.  It will be a day marked by a promise. The promise would be God’s love shown in forgiveness and new life.  Jeremiah tells of the time when God’s presence in his people’s hearts would guide them each day, through thick and thin, through good and bad, it would not be a promise for the future anymore, but the reality of God’s law lived in loved, for the now.

During high school I delivered the weekday morning newspaper to houses in my neighborhood. I have always been interested in what’s happening in the world, and so as I carried the morning’s news from door-to-door, I would read the headlines. If a story interested me, I would read whatever else I could from the front page, and then when I arrived home with our paper, I would read more as I sat and ate my breakfast.

One of the major locales for news during that time was Lebanon. It was the focus of the struggle between the PLO and Israel, but it was never that clear cut. Besides the stories of fighting, bombings, and shelling, there were the stories surrounding the various individuals whom had been kidnapped, and held for ransom. The ransom that was sought was not money, but the political actions of governments.

Terry Anderson and Terry Waite were each kidnapped. They were taken separately but by related Palestinian groups as a means to try and persuade their governments, Anderson was American and Waite British, to enact different policies in regard to Lebanon and the Palestinians.  Neither government allowed the men’s captivity to alter their policies, and so each man’s days as a hostage turned into weeks, that turned into months, that eventually became years.  Their years in captivity were mostly comprised of solitary confinement, being blindfolded most of the time, and not being allowed to speak or sing. They were chained to beds, walls or radiators. Usually they were alone only occasionally sharing their makeshift cells with other hostages, in the later years of their captivity.

Anderson, Waite, and the other hostages struggled to maintain their sanity, their dignity, and most of all their hope that someday their captivity would end, and they would see their families and homes again. In many ways they could’ve found some shared realities with the Jewish people held in Babylonian captivity, to whom Jeremiah spoke and wrote. Each were held captive, not allowed their freedom, nor did they have the ability to go home, and so they lived in hope.

The people of Judah hoped that God would someday release them that they could go back to the Promised Land, and worship God in the temple in Jerusalem.

Anderson and Waite had an advantage over Jeremiah’s people, they did not have to wait to worship God in the temple, for God lived in their hearts.

Terry Anderson, the American, upon being released shared his key to survival over all of the days of his captivity, his Christian faith.  Six months before his kidnapping he had returned to the Roman Catholic Church, in which he’d been raised, and he said, “It was what you might call providential.  I really needed that faith.  I must have read the Bible 50 times from start to finish.  It was an enormous help to me.”

Faith, Anderson said, also helps explain why he doesn’t hate his captors: “I am a Catholic.  I am required to forgive.  I have no room for hate.  I have no time for it.  My life is full, very happy.  My hating them is not going to hurt them an ounce.  It’s only going to hurt me.”

Anderson’s faith in God, which was written upon his heart, gave him the strength that he needed to make it, to literally stay alive day after day.  In a place and situation in which he should have had no hope, the hope that only Jesus can give is what made life possible.

In a similar way, Terry Waite’s faith gave him the will to survive.  Waite’s faith was deeply ingrained in his life and his soul, in fact he was in Lebanon on behalf of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the leader of the Anglican Church, to help mediate the release of other hostages.  So, Waite’s faith was an intimate part of who he was.  Waite talked of his early life and the birth of his faith in an interview after his release.

Waite shared, that every day, as his muscles deteriorated and his skin grew whiter from lack of sun, he took a piece of bread he’d saved from his scant meals, dipped it into water and experienced a true communion, mentally traveling to his home country of England, or to Africa, uniting with the worldwide fellowship he’d known. And he said a prayer from his youth that had exceptional meaning now: “Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord …”

Waite shared that, “being starved and beaten in that basement, he felt isolated and alone. But faith isn’t dependent on how one is feeling, and Waite never lost his faith.”

I remember from when I read the two autobiographies of these men, that what they had memorized earlier in their lives in church and from the Bible, was what gave their faith a foundation during their many years spent as hostages in Lebanon.

Praying the Lord’s Prayer and confessing the Apostle’s Creed, reciting the 23^rd Psalm, and being able to even sing parts of the liturgy in their minds, helped to see them through.

These two men understood what God said through Jeremiah, with the words, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.”

The Lord’s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed, liturgies, and various verses from the Bible that these men had, “learned by heart”, had memorized, gave them the strength to survive, because they knew that Jesus was with them.

We live after Christ’s life, death and resurrection to new life, and so we understand that God’s love is shown us in Jesus Christ.  Jesus’ presence in our hearts, guides our lives and gives us strength for each day.  We may not be undergoing the terrible things that Anderson and Waite did, but perhaps they are some of the best examples that we have in our modern times of what it can mean for survival to have the word of God written upon our hearts and to have Jesus’ love present in our lives.

I am not saying that to have God’s word written upon our hearts simply means to have memorized the Lord’s Prayer or the Apostle’s Creed.  No, what I am getting at here is that as we walk in faith with Jesus, our relationship with him colors our entire lives.

One very ordinary way to look at this is like when you put a tea bag in a cup of hot water. The water does not stay clear, rather the presence of the tea leaves changes the water, it becomes tea. Jesus’ presence in our hearts changes our very lives, and prepares us for all that is to come. Whether we are experiencing joy, or hardship, pain or happiness, we can walk in faith, in the presence of our Savior, Jesus.

We need to pray every day for Jesus to provide for the needs of others as well as ourselves, and we need to think about how Jesus calls us to think, speak and act each day.  We need to read, to memorize, to take in the gospels, psalms and teachings of the Bible.  Like the tea bag that changes the water into something more, Jesus will change our lives into so much more, if we’ll only let him live within our hearts.

For as we have seen in the stories this morning, we never know when we might have to truly depend upon Jesus for our very lives. Amen.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.