Jeremiah 31:31-34
Perhaps anyone who has had experience with divorce and a hopeful remarriage gains intuitive purchase into this reading.
Jeremiah pulls upon our memories of broken relationship. That feeling of a covenant gone wrong--infidelity, either of the sexual variety or of the far more common and pernicious varieties, tearing through promises made. Rending people back into disparate elements. Divorce is primarily about paperwork, even in Jeremiah's time, which serves as poor sacrament for what is lost in the end of a relationship, even when divorce was obviously the best solution for everyone involved. All the dreams of that relationship not killed so much as orphaned, left sitting alone outside. Never forgotten, but not visited anymore, languishing away in memory and dream nursing homes, longing for a kind of health that simply cannot be again.
And against that divorce backdrop, a flash of inspiration and light. The promise of something new, something grand--a better relationship. One where love will not always have to be checked on, schooled, managed, disciplined. Intuitive love and dedication, tattooed in our center. The meeting of a new person, exactly when we thought we had become unlovable. That 'teenage feeling,' but not only the chemical thrill of another person's presence, but also the promise that the feeling might be mutual. New dreams--but even more than new dreams, this new covenant offers to redeem our old dreams out of rehab, to show that they were not so much impossible as deferred.
That is some slice of the powerful emotional chemistry of Jeremiah in the reading for today. It simultaneously acknowledges the painful tragedy of separation with the low-rumbling pleasure of hope. Not denying one in favor of the other, but moving through death into resurrection.
As we watch the many dialogues of our age--sexuality, health care, impending economic disaster, the health of the planet--everyone tells us a different resurrection story, a different story about dissolved covenants and now renewed promises. Folks in support of gay rights speak of years death, and call upon now to be a time of a new covenant based on dedication rather than sexual orientation. Folks opposed to same sex unions or rights describe this time as one of death, hoping for a renewing of the covenant through constitutional amendments. In every one of those issues above--and for many others--people all tell their version of the argument, making it sound like a movement from death to resurrection.
All that to say: I wonder if we've all grown tired of the death/resurrection story. It seems, well normal. Commonplace. Jeremiah--and then Easter--ask us to plum some of the deepest parts of humanity, pushing toward God. But resurrection looks, in sense, pretty banal these days. Resurrect the economy! A new covenant of healthcare! 3 days in the tomb, and our planet shall rise again in carbon balance!
But what if we've grown bored, not of the deeper meaning and meat, but of the story?
How do we celebrate Easter in a world full of easters?
