by Parrish W. Jones, Ph.D.

©2005. All rights reserved.

 

Jeremiah 31:31-34

Psalm 46

John 8:31-36

Given my interest in science, physics and math, I've done a little reading in what is referred to as chaos theory. The theory is really a mathematical concept that may be applied to a number of areas of science and organizational theory. At root is the notion that no mathematical model can be developed to account globally for all the elements that affect an event. You may have heard the saying that a butterfly flapping its wings in China will affect the time and intensity of the next hurricane. That seems unlikely to most of us, but chaos theory tries to study just such a thing.

Some of us are very uncomfortable with any amount of disorder while others of us are quite comfortable with disorder and even thrive on it. In fact, my tolerance for disorder makes me a perfect personality for interim ministry. Most of the time when we enter a church as an interim, we enter a high level of chaos. Our mission is to bring order to a system that has been thrown into chaos by the departure, and often the abrupt departure of the pastor. In a case where that departure was occasioned by conflict, the chaos is greater.

The church has a gift of grace in dealing with such concerns because we are not dependent on mathematical models, sociological or institutional theories, or organizational theories to get us through. Many of you work for organizations that look to the latest guru of organizational or institutional or sociological theory to reorganize your agency or company.

While some of that theoretical work is of importance to us, and we are using a bit of that, the value of our approach is that it is also biblical. The thing that is most valuable to us when facing times of transition, chaos, uncertainty, is our Bible. Through all that we do and say the next couple of months in developing our vision and the mission plan for achieving that mission we must remember the guidance of the Word of God as we find it in the Bible.

Our lessons today are known as important texts of the Reformation. We use them in part to celebrate that movement that birthed our Christian Tradition.

The text we read from Jeremiah was written as a letter from Jeremiah, still living in Israel, to the people of Israel who were now living in exile in Babylon. There are four major historical movements in the Old Testament: the Exodus, the development and collapse of the Kingdom of Israel, the Exile, and the Homecoming and rebuilding of Israel. These are all accompanied by theological, liturgical, cultural and political developments unique to each movement.

Our lesson from Jeremiah suggests a movement that does not see reality for another six hundred years. At least, that is what Christianity understands about this New Covenant.

We have been talking about our context, or what is, our vision or what God would like it to be. The chart that we looked at last week is a helpful tool in interpreting most texts in the scriptures. If we were to do that with this one, we could say a couple things about the Now for Israel and God:

1. Israel has failed to keep the covenant. It's failure is represented in the prophecies against the political, religious, and economic powers of Israel. They were the persons sent into exile. The poor and marginalized remained for the most part at home and came to be known as the Samaritans.

2. The leadership of Israel is exiled from their homes because of their covenant breaking a judgement promised by God if they did not repent in Amos, Jonah, Micah, Obadiah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and so on.

3. The people in Exile were broken and alienated from home while the people left at home suffered from loss of the paternalistic systems that provided a semblance of order.

We cannot deal with all of these, but the theme most important to our text is the covenant breaking by a fallen people. God is ever faithful to the vision of a people of faith committed to the goals of God for a faithful community of justice and peace. What will God do to rectify the situation of a failed covenant and the vision of a covenant people.

Jeremiah answers that question in part in our text today. In the future God will not covenant with a nation or a ethnic group, God will make covenant with those on whose hearts God will write the covenant and will know it without being taught. I do not wish to elaborate Predestination here, but that is why this is a text of the Reformed tradition. There is no mention of persons who choose to have faith. God is the actor and initiator of covenant even with individuals.

Turning to our Gospel, we see the mission carried out in the words of Jesus. Following him, being in covenant with him has nothing to do with ancestry and everything to do with relationship with Jesus and his word. The issue here is that one is either a slave to sin or freed by the truth. Again we can chart this with the now and the then. Now we are slaves to sin. Then we are liberated from sin's oppression. The way between, the mission for closing the gap, is listening to Jesus word.

When I arrived here about six months ago, the one thing I heard time and again is that nobody knew where we were going. Opinions differed on why people felt that way. Whatever the reason, we could place that on our chart and call it a lack of vision toward which we were all working. Obviously, any organization will always have some chaos. However, the hope is that organizations will have more than just a general goal towards which they are moving. As the scriptures tell us, "Without a vision the people perish." Our bulletin over the last several months has had at the top of the page one or the other translation of that text. We are now trying to correct that major problem through our survey and Summit Gatherings.

Another issue large on the anxiety scale is that the church was without a pastor and many just want a new pastor. Some of us forget that there is a pastor, just not a permanently installed one. One thing to remember is this, there is only one Messiah and his name was Jesus and he will not be your next pastor. Some frail human being will be your next pastor. The purpose of our Summit Gatherings is to discover who you are as a church and what the vision of God for this church is so the Pulpit Nominating Committee can search for that kind of minister. This process is the most democratic way we know to do this. It is slow. It is laborious. In some respects, it may be chaotic and frustrating, but let us keep our eye on the main thing, that we be as faithful to God in the process and work through this behaving in a manner becoming our Savior. Let us not be slaves to sin but liberated by the truth of the Gospel.