Sermon from Lent 5B

Lent 5B

March 25, 2012

Jeremiah 31:31-34

I think one of the most potentially dangerous platitudes in our modern age is “forgive and forget.”  In some situations it is helpful.  Like, say, if your best friend Sally, who you’ve known for 10 years and has been a very loyal friend, ditched you after promising she would go with you to the opening night of the Hunger Games.  Or, if you happen upon an acquaintance who is having a bad day and you accidentally say the last thing they wanted to hear that day and they read you the riot act.  In both of those cases, forgiving and forgetting are helpful in restoring and rebuilding relationships that are healthy. 

When the pain caused by sin is deep and the relationship is beyond repair, however, the words “forgive and forget” can do more harm than good.  The parents of Trayvon Martin might forgive the man who killed their son, eventually, but they will never forget who, why, or how their son was taken from them.  There may be peace in this country right now, but we will never forget the time when this country was divided between confederacy and union.  We may be allies with Japan now, but we will never forget the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  We may forgive the person who turned our lives upside down in a negative way, but we try to learn from what happened so we can avoid that situation in the future.

And maybe this is why the text from Jeremiah can prove to be troubling at times, but especially in times that we are unable to forget, and in times that we don’t want to forget. 

It may have been just as troubling for the Israelites living in Jerusalem right after the temple was destroyed and Jerusalem itself fell to the Babylonians.  Living in the midst of the dust and the rubble of the sacked city, the people were wondering why this had happened…and who was to blame.  They only needed to look north to Judah, which had been destroyed by the Assyrians, to see that there wasn’t much hope left, if any.  It probably seemed as though God had forgotten them. 

But then again, the Israelites had memory issues of their own.

The folks in Jerusalem had issues with forgetfulness…not anything like dates on the calendar or things of that nature, but rather they had a real easy time forgetting a certain covenant. A few generations had passed since the exodus and the people had forgotten was it was like to be delivered out of the hands of slavery in Egypt and be brought safely into freedom.  And they had forgotten just who it was that had rescued them from the Egyptians.  Maybe they had even already forgotten what it was like to live in the time before Jerusalem was destroyed.  In doing all of this forgetting, the Israelites had broken the covenant they had entered into with God at Sinai, a covenant that was very much like a marriage covenant, God being their faithful husband…but the Israelites were unfaithful to this covenant with God and had taken other lovers, as it were, being led by their leaders to seek out other deities to worship instead of the one who had brought them into the land promised by Abraham and Sarah and their descendants. 

Even in the midst of this forgetfulness on the part of the Israelites, paired with the unfaithfulness, the betrayal, and the sinfulness, God had remained faithful and present with God’s people, remembering his covenant.  In seeing all that was going on in the hearts and minds of his people, God decided that the best way to deal with God’s people was to choose join the people in forgetting.  God’s forgetfulness, however, doesn’t land in the same category as that of the Israelites.  In spite of all the ways that they had been unfaithful and had sinned against God, God decided that the best way for the relationship between God and the people to be restored and rebuilt was for God to wipe the slate clean and to choose the path of amnesia where sin is concerned. 

God formed a new or, more accurately, a renewed covenant with God’s people.  One that required nothing like the covenant at Sinai, in which the people were held accountable for their actions, and ultimately did not hold up their end of the deal.  This renewed covenant required no sacrifice, no down payment, no signature…instead, God decided to write the law on the hearts of the people…to put it inside of them, as opposed to tablets of stone which can break or be lost or stolen...and God promises in this covenant to forget the sins that had been committed that fractured the relationship between God and the people.  Nothing was asked or is asked in return for this. 

This is God’s way of reaching out in love and allowing us to start fresh each day, without the guilt of I should haves, or I shouldn’t haves following us around.  It is no wonder this passage comes from the portion of Jeremiah called the book of consolation.  What comforting words to hear, that God will remember our sin, no more. 

Sometimes I wonder, though, if it would sound more comforting to us if God’s chosen forgetfulness was selective.  What do we do if God’s forgetfulness extends to people who have done really awful things? Shouldn’t God’s forgetfulness of sin go to a certain level?  And what if God forgets something I cannot?  Has God forgotten the sin of the perpetrators of the holocaust, or 9/11?  Has God forgotten sin of the men who killed Malice Green or beat Rodney King or shot a teenager armed with iced tea and skittles? 

I want to say that it’s a really comforting thing when God says that God is going to remember our sin no more…but at the same time, I have a hard time thinking about God forgetting about the sin involved in those atrocities.  And I’m pretty sure that I’m not alone in that.

This discomfort gives us a couple options.  We can forget we heard the words of Jeremiah and go along on our merry way pretending that the phrase “ignorance is bliss” is true.  Or we can take our discomfort and use it to help us to speak out when the injustices of the world take place…and we can use this discomfort to keep us awake and to remember.  This doesn’t mean remembering our own sins and the sins of others, but rather to remember as Christ asked us to remember.  When Christ sat at the table with the disciples the night of his betrayal, he asked them to observe similar meals in remembrance of him…a man who devoted his earthly ministry to spending time with the outcast, speaking out at injustice, and in teaching about a kingdom of God that made some of the more comfortable folks around him pretty uncomfortable…in fact, he made them so uncomfortable that they hung him on a cross, in hopes that his message would fade into the sunset.  But even on that cross, Christ cried out that God would forgive those who put him there. 

There are certain things that are easy to forgive and forget, whether it is forgiving others or forgiving ourselves.  And there are things that are significantly more difficult, even seemingly impossible to forgive or forget.  But we have a God who does what we cannot, choosing to renew his covenant with us without asking anything from us…instead doing all the work, wiping our slates clean and remembering our sin no more.