Continue in My Word
October 30, 2011 | Anita Retzlaff | Jeremiah 31: 31-34, Psalm 46, Romans 3: 19-28 John 8: 31-36

Grace and peace to you from God the Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ. One of the greatest threats to our health and calling in life is that of hopelessness. Hopelessness is a killer. Some have felt the impact of this in a sad and poignant way in the last days. There are a good number of people in this congregation who knew Justin Andres whose funeral took place in Saskatoon this last week. He died by his own hand at the age of 30 years. His family was very up front about that at his funeral. He saw no hope in his life or in his future. Justin was a good and kind young man who had a lot of friends and a lot of potential. According to those who knew him well he had a strong faith. Yet even so, for him, the future appeared bleak – he saw no hope. We mourn with Justin’s family and thank God for the many connections Justin had in the community and the many ways that he was a friend and a joy to others. The mysteries of life and of death elude us!

How it is, that some of us are more inclined to experience hope while others see none, is also a mystery. Hope that a new thing will happen in our lives; hope is the thing that so often keeps us moving forward, keeps us going. We come here to worship Sunday after Sunday in anticipation of experiencing something of God that moves us, that instills within us hope for the future. We take heart that a new thing will happen in our lives if we hit the dead end of the old and unproductive. All that we know and understand about the God of Creation is tied to a hope that has the power to do a new thing.

“If you continue in my Word you are truly my disciples” Jesus tells his friends. He too is alluding to the power of God’s love to turn things around. Continuing in the word of Jesus, that is, the word of love and grace is an acknowledgement that a new thing will happen if we are open and willing to wait. So to remain true to Jesus is to remain true to the promises that God has given over millennia - to us and to those who have gone before us.

Reformation Sunday is an expression of the hope that comes from continuing in the Word. The story of the Reformation is a story of great change, of faith in the new thing that God will do. The Reformation is a story of freedom and a new word from God for all people. Martin Luther agonized over what he saw as the abuses of the church and with study and prayer came to a new understanding of what grace means and how the Bible should be read. The Anabaptist tradition as a part of this Reformation reworking of scripture and interpretation proposed several alternatives according to a slightly different understanding of what it means to continue in the Word.

So what was so new about the Reformation? What did Luther and later Menno Simons and others discover that was so unique and revolutionary in their understanding of the way God works? What’s new? Nothing really! At least if we define “new” as “never existing before.” God’s love and God’s desire for people has always been the same. What’s new is our human understanding of what that means and continues to mean over time, through generations and around the world. It is our discovery that is new – for us! I would have to say that even though the Reformation of the 16th century brought about a new way of being the church together and developed new tools for reading scripture, in themselves even these were not new. The possibilities had always existed and in other places these ways of being and understanding had already been discovered and written about and practiced in small ways. It just happens that at a particular time and place all of a sudden something takes off that catches on in a big way and the world is transformed. So it is not God that is new or even the experience itself that is totally unique rather it is finally about the way in which a transformational truth or insight directly affects our lives and we know that we are experiencing a new thing – and it changes us.

And so this is why in the text from Jeremiah this morning God says, “I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” For those of you who know the biblical story well you will know that by this point in the story of God’s people, by the time of the prophet Jeremiah, God has made several significant covenants already. God places Adam and Eve in the garden and sets them free to experience just about anything their hearts desire. And you know what happens with that. They do the one thing that they are asked not to do. Later God makes a rainbow covenant after the people fall away again. Then comes the Ten Commandments and when the people fell away yet again the covenant is re-produced on new stone tablets. Time and again God sets out a new trust agreement and begins a relationship on a new footing acknowledging that the people have encountered unique trials and temptations and a new contract is necessary.

Still, after all those covenants even now in the time of Jeremiah God continues to propose something new and “it will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors,” the Lord says, “when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant which they broke, though I was their husband… but this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days…” And so our Bible shows us again how God continues to do a new thing and yet it is not new to God!

And isn’t that after all the entire contents of the Bible? Story after story, chapter after chapter, book after book and even testament after testament, Old and New, God continues to watch people self-destruct and then does a new thing for those who are open to it. The Bible is a continuous recital of new covenants. In the Women’s bible study our work is focused now on the book of Judges. We have already been through the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and Joshua. In some sense it has been a soap opera of human failing. You name it; the people of Israel have done it! God has forgiven it and the people fall into self-centredness, into sin, again. God speaks a new word of hope and the cycle repeats itself. Of course we get sidetracked by the level of violence in some of the Old Testament stories and are scandalized by the ways in which God is portrayed as vengeful and spiteful and punitive. I would suggest that it is the mind and the ways of the people who recount these stories over generations who ascribe to God all of these malicious things which just happen to describe the human condition more accurately than the divine heart. That is a great topic for another discussion.

The Word for us today is that God continues to do a new thing for us. The story of the Reformation which we mark today is old news in a sense. The story of Martin Luther and a few years later the beginning of the Anabaptist movement from which the Mennonite church derives; this story is old and gone. The full extent of my world travel has brought me to Germany to retrace some of the footsteps of the Reformation. It was a particularly striking moment for me when in the small village of Mansfeld, we saw the house where Luther lived for a few years as a child, that an elderly gentleman walking on the other side of the street started yelling at us. In German he shouted with disgust “that happened 500 years ago. Go away and leave us alone!” The story of Luther is history; it is no longer the new thing that is being done in our midst. St. George’s, the old Lutheran church in that town in which Luther was baptized, the church is old and cold. The paint is peeling and gone. It is dank and damp and dark in there attended only by a few old women who make postcards and sell them trying to make a bit of money to keep the doors of the church open just a little longer. The vitality of the new covenant is long gone from that place. God remains in the hearts of these few women however the story of Luther is now but a story.

However, we teach these stories to our children. We want them to know that God continues to do a new thing whether it be through the history of the church or in the biblical story of God with the people. So we have given Bibles to our children today. We have passed along the stories of new covenants that characterize the heart of God: the promise of new things. Hope is the message of this Bible, our Holy Scripture. We consider scripture holy because it recounts the ways in which God remains faithful and constant in our lives; that God is greater than anything we can grasp and that we need not despair because God is with us always. The Bible reminds us of the kindness of God. The story of the Reformation reminds us that God continues to do new things for those who seek answers. There is power in remembering the story and the history. There is power in remembering the stories of God’s deliverance and God’s presence. Out of a hopeless situation God will do a new thing. So we need not live as people without hope. We possess a great and living treasure in the hope and the freedom that God continues to offer in new and astounding ways.

Prayer: God of our ancestors, Lord of life, you fill us with your Spirit as we worship this day. Help us to continue in your Word as you fulfill your promise to be with us. May the hope that surrounds us always, be especially real in those times when despair threatens to overwhelm. Our hope is in you. For this we give you thanks and offer ourselves to your service in the world. AMEN