Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
Written on our Hearts
Scriptures: Jeremiah 31:31-34
As a young person I could be very literal-minded and I had issues whenever something looked inconsistent. I clearly remember reading our lesson from Jeremiah and being confused by the reference to God as Israel’s husband and similar things, like our closing hymn later, where the church is referred to as female – an echo of imagery in the book of Revelations.
That one was more straightforward, but I knew that Israel was simply the new name for the patriarch Jacob – a big ol’ bearded guy – and this in the days before same sex marriage was taken seriously; so the idea of a husband had to be accompanied by the idea of a wife.
I have learned to think more inclusively since those days and I have also learned that although same-sex relationships were condemned in Jeremiah’s time, the idea of “husband” was a lot less about gender and a lot more about a role in a relationship. So, while the first hearers of Jeremiah’s message might have had a twinge of gender identity crisis at this choice of words, the main effect would have been to get their attention and make them think deeply about what God was saying.
God taking on the role of husband is a profound statement: it is close, even intimate but it particularly carried a responsibility of protection, even oversight. In that culture, the father and husband was the arbiter of the law and the final authority. The husband had the job of caring for everyone but also expected to be respected and obeyed.
If you think about the word “patriarchy” then that is literally what you will get in this picture. Although it is significant that Jeremiah did not say “father” – because the role of father carried more authority – there was an understanding back then that there was a partnership between the parents and, in fact, the women were given a lot of responsibility. They had organizational and financial charge of the household which, if the patriarch was successful, could be a huge operation with dozens of staff, large quantities of food to prepare – not only for individual meals, but to store and plan after harvest for the needs of the household through the season ahead – handling the household accounts, dealing with all the merchants, and haggling for the best deals in the marketplace.
The women were expected to be good managers. There’s a whole section of the book of Proverbs dedicated to this. So, while it was not a balanced partnership in that the Husband could lay down the law, there was also an understanding that the woman had a lot of autonomy within her sphere of authority. It wasn’t all one sided – the 5th commandment explicitly tells us to honour our father and our mother – so, it wasn’t all about the fathers.
The language here reminds us that Israel should not have been disobedient; that in doing so Israel was violating the relationship. But it is also saying that the relationship is not simple: the covenant between God and the people is like a covenant of marriage with all the complexities of such a relationship.
Remember also, that in those days most marriages were arranged marriages: the couples sometimes met for the first time on their wedding day if they came from a distance.
I can just imagine that this would be the kind of relationship that would start off rather stiff and formal as the partners got to know each other and worked out how they would be together. That was one reason for the rules about the roles of husband and wife: so that people went into marriage knowing what society expected of them, whether or not they were happy about it.
Eventually, love might come; eventually they might even get to the place where they could finish each other’s sentences, but it wouldn’t start out that way.
This Jeremiah reading gives us a vision of the relationship between God and Israel as developing, growing, becoming deeper and more personal as they grow to know each other better, with the final state being the one described: where God’s law doesn’t have to be taught anymore because the people have fully internalized it; they have caught God’s vision so completely that they live it out naturally, every day.
The marriage analogy stumbles a bit here because in our society today we declare that partners are equal regardless of their gender, even if we don’t fully live out that equality yet.
And it offends me, theologically, if we try to claim equality with the creator of the universe. I have lost a fair bit of the arrogance I used to have and even as a young person who thought he had all the answers, I never thought that I could match the infinite wisdom of our creator.
But it is a wonderful and encouraging thought that our creator could care for us enough to claim this ancient role of husband; inviting us to be so close, to grow in love so much that we could begin to know in our very hearts what is in the mind and heart of God.
When we do get to the place where we don’t need to teach each other about God’s love I will be out of a job forever, but I do hope for that day and I hope we can draw closer to it all the time.
That’s part of what we are striving for when we discuss our vision statement. We are trying to express our heart-felt understanding of God’s love as expressed in our community of faith and to put into words what that looks like going forward. Our goal should be to reflect in the statement what is written in our hearts, so that when people read the words and look at us there will be no dissonance but a real reflection of God’s love as it is lived out in this place.
May we do well at crafting these words and living out their truth.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 