The Gift of a New Chance
by Rev. Dr. Amy Chilton on 06/23/23
As I am traveling for the American Baptist Churches Biennial Mission Summit, I share with you these words from Walter Brueggemann.
Blessings,
Pastor Amy
No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “know
the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and
remember their sin no more.
–Jeremiah 31:34
What God has forgotten we no longer need remember. Our guilt, of course, lingers and haunts us and slowly cripples us. Our sin is so serious because it violates God. Now, however, God will no longer notice or credit, and the sin will not linger or haunt or cripple. We shall be free. There are libraries that have book amnesties in which you can turn in old books without risk. There are communities with gun amnesties in which you can get rid of unlawful guns. Until the amnesty, we must hide the book or gun, and we cannot get rid of it. So it is with our bad conscience, our moral failure, our sin before God. No place to put it, no place to hide it, we cannot get rid of it. And now a general amnesty. The power of guilt, fear, and resentment evaporates, and we are free. What God has unloaded, we no longer need carry as burden.
You see, the problem is that our actions toward each other are so irreversible. We make a gesture, speak a word, take an action. We may do it maliciously or carelessly. In either case, the word or gesture or action generates misunderstanding, distrust, hostility, alienation, and we live with it forever and ever. There is no way out. Things grow more and more abrasive, until the alienations are deep and the hurt is beyond measure. I know families where a harsh word spoke forty years ago continues to alienate. Marriages stay frozen; parents and children are at deep odds. Among the nations, the great nations have so much for which to be forgiven by the little people, and the barbarity of race relations goes on and on in its poison. We ache for a chance to start again. But it costs so much–empty-handed, vulnerable, a vision of God’s ready suffering for our freedom.
Jeremiah makes us pause for a moment before the prospect of a new innocence. Things need not go on and on. The cycle can be broken. A new chance is offered. Notice well, the new chance is demanding. It takes a broken heart, an end to self-sufficiency, abandoning a pretense of being right. This invitation, however, is not just advice on acting differently. This gospel is not advice but assurance. The assurance is that what we cannot do for ourselves is given us.
Forgiving God, we fall to our knees at the thought of a truly new beginning, a fresh start. Our hearts are broken, and we offer them to you in the assurance of our undeserved grace—the power that creates in us new hearts able ?to love. Amen.
~ Walter Brueggemann, Devotions for Lent: A Way Other Than Our Own, pp. 70-71.
