New Beginnings

On the last Sunday before Lent one member of the congregation who will remain anonymous, said to me that I shouldn’t expect to see much of her for the next few weeks because she really hated Lent - how gloomy it is and then there is all that emphasis upon penitence and feeling sorry for what a wretched sinner one is. We both admitted that the thought of giving up chocolate for six weeks was a frightening one. Our lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures, Jeremiah, this morning however, gives us another possibility. In it the prophet holds out to the Israelites in exile a new option, a new covenant, a new beginning. God not only called them to look back at the past, but to look forward to the future. Stanley Hopper, in his classic commentary on Jeremiah, speaks of today’s lesson as “the gospel before the Gospel,” the good new before the good news. Jeremiah saw further, perhaps, than even he imagined. He saw a new Israel, not of a people in slavery in Babylon, not even of a people back in their homeland trying harder to obey their part of the covenant by obedience and worship, but of people whose hearts were implanted with God’s love. A possibility within this hope was a time when Jews would not be the only ones to seek and follow the one true God, but Gentiles too. He foresaw the possibility of today’s Gospel, in which Greeks and others would come seeking to know and follow the truth - all people in fact who were willing to surrender the past for a new and sometimes uncertain future.

Lent is not just a time of breast beating. It is a time to look forward, a time of new beginnings, of looking forward to resurrection, new life. Of course the new beginning that Jeremiah proclaims is not easy to accept. In a way many of us are bogged down in the past, too focused on the good or bad of our lives. A recovering alcoholic friend of mine in Chicago had been sober for about twenty years and had been a great help to others struggling with addiction. His new life and ministry had been even more fruitful than his earlier one, but then something happened which shocked us all. He relapsed. He began drinking again. For his wife, it was the last straw and she, with others, gave up on him, but after a short time he re-entered treatment and began the hard work of recovery. He has started life all over again, proving to all of us that new beginnings are possible, even when the struggle is complicated by the loss of family members and friends. Of course new beginnings seldom mean going back to the way things were, to the former place. In a sense, we never can “go home again.” I saw this years ago working with couples in therapy. One or both of the couple often hoped to make things like they used to be before the affair or family crisis, but this is almost never possible. Forgiving and forgetting are rarely complete. Forgetting is almost impossible, but new beginnings are possible. The good news is that though the new reality will most certainly be different from the past, it may be better, have more to give us than did the old reality. Those of us who have been married for over fifty years have certainly discovered that marriage after fifty years is quite different and in many ways superior to marriage and relationships in their early years.

New beginnings are also possible in our religious lives, in our lives of believing. One person confessed that, over the course of his life, he had believed in quite a few gods. It wasn’t that he had dropped the Christian God for another one. It is just that his image of God had been transformed over his lifetime. The literal god of his childhood had been replaced with a more abstract god after college philosophy. That god had been replaced by a more experiential god as he was confronted by the trials and tribulations of adulthood. As he aged he had discovered a more mystical God, a God Tillich described as the “God above God.” Sometimes we have to give up our preconceptions about God and trust that our emerging new image of God will be as reliable as any we have known. The gospel advice to “become as little children” does not call for us to go back to our six year old image of God, but to have a trust like that of a child. We may become as children in seeing the world through childlike eyes of delight or faith, but we can’t be children, or adolescents again. There is sadness to this, but there is also good news, the good news of a new covenant, a new creation, of starting over.

Jeremiah tells his people and us about an essential feature of new beginnings when he writes, “...they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” Forgiveness is essential to new beginnings, our forgiveness of others, and ourselves, and God’s forgiveness of us. I’m certain that most of us have people we have had a hard time forgiving, but the bourdon is not so much on them as it is on us. An article in the journal Spirituality and Healing tells of a former prisoner of war who was asked if he had come to forgive his captors. When he answered, “No. Never!” his spiritual guide responded, “Then I guess they still have you in prison.” We may not be imprisoned by our lack of forgiveness, but we are often hampered by the bourdon. But as we need to forgive, we need also to know ourselves forgiven. Our faith is not a call for us to wallow in our sin, but rather it is the good news that we can let it go and have the good grace to accept the fact that we are forgiven. So often our prayers for forgiveness or our words to our confessor consist of going over and over the same sins, treating them like the vaccination that didn’t take the first or second time. If there are “rules” of confession they are first, to feel sorry for what we have done and second, to intend not to do it again. Then, knowing that God forgives us, we can get on with our lives.

The “good news before the good news.” “Behold 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...” New beginnings are possible for all of us, in part because we know that we are forgiven. This is the good news of Lent and of Good Friday and ultimately of Easter.