Soul Surgery: Jeremiah 31:31-34 - Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Of all the scams lurking in the online world, few are as destructive as the online romance scams.

The prime target is lonely adults, often those who’ve lost their spouses. 

Prowling social media and online dating sites, scammers pose as the ideal romantic partner, using photos stolen from random people’s social media accounts.  Skillfully, they form a strong emotional bond with their victim, to the point that the relationship becomes their whole world. Yet before they can “meet in person,” some crisis develops. They need money fast, and their victim is the only one who can help.

Over time, scammers manipulate their victims into handing over vast sums of money. Friends and loved ones try desperately to convince them that they’re being scammed, but they refuse to believe it, because they’re so invested in that relationship. They need that relationship to be real. If or when they finally realize they’ve been scammed, the loss of that relationship and the shame that goes with it can be deadly. 

But here’s the thing: these victims aren’t fools. They’re intelligent people with real pain and real human needs. But where there’s pain, an unmet need, or an overwhelming desire for something, there’s vulnerability. 

Image by zofiaEliyahu from Pixabay

This can help us to understand just how God’s people turned to idols and abandoned the divine law which bound them together as a people for generations. They didn’t fall into idolatry because they were stupid or evil. They fell into idolatry because they were human.  And they lived in a world, just as we do, full of dangers, threats, and temptations. Like us, they wanted security, they wanted control, they wanted belonging. To achieve those ends, they turned to the world and its gods. Through worship and sacrifices, they invested themselves in these gods, believing they could deliver on what they promised. Their pride convinced them that what they were doing was right. 

This is why they ignored the prophets’ warnings, and why they lashed out so violently against them. Their minds were made up. There was no turning back. No one could convince them to abandon their idols and return to God.

This reminds me of when I was a teenager, and my family went on a horse-drawn buggy ride during a visit to Pennsylvania Amish country. The driver of the buggy asked us, “do you think you could live without television?” We said, “yes, of course.” Then he asked us, “are you going to go home and get rid of your television?” We hesitated for a moment, then said, “probably not.” And he said, “That’s what being Amish is all about.” He was free to something that was holding us captive.

The world’s gods lure is in with promises to satisfy our needs and wants, and often, they do. In time, though, they keep demanding more, and we keep giving them more, because we cannot live without them. How does your screen time compare to the time you spend on faith practices? How does the amount of money you spend on tech and tech services compare to what you give to the church or charity? We say we can live without our devices, but we’re not going to give them up!

Consider how divisive our politics have become… Politicians, pundits, social media influencers, and cable news networks exploit our fears and grievances in order to gain our trust. They tell us what we want to hear, and we give them power. We give them our loyalty. We worship powerful them is if they’re God. We embrace social and political agendas as Gospel. We fear and hate those different from us as if they’re Satan. We make families, schools, churches, and institutions into culture war battlegrounds. But are we any better off?

Surely, we need Jesus to save us from the sins for which we are aware and already suffering the consequences. But we really need Jesus to expose the unrighteousness that we cannot see or refuse to see in ourselves. We need him to smash the idols we cannot live without. We need him to extinguish the fires of fear, suspicion, apathy, and hate. We need Jesus not only to heal our broken hearts, but to break our hardened hearts. 

Jeremiah knew that the only way that God could save his people from perishing in their sin was by breaking them. God saved his people by allowing Jerusalem to be destroyed and his people taken into exile.

There are few acts of faith as audacious as asking God to break your hard heart. We treat God’s judgment as something to fear. But it’s not. It’s soul surgery, with God, the great physician, identifying the sin’s sickness in you and surgically removing it from you. No one who’s ever been through surgery will say that it was fun. It’s traumatic and painful, just as repentance is traumatic and painful. You are asking God to crucify you with Jesus. You are throwing yourself into the refining fires of the Holy Spirit to be purified of ungodliness. It’s hard to imagine living life without things you never thought you could live without. But what you gain is Jesus and his righteousness. What you gain is freedom, a life unburdened by the baggage of idols.

It is in our brokenness, in our humility, in our absolute poverty before God and man, that God writes his word on our hearts; words which bind us to God in love and righteousness forever. That’s the power of God’s love, to bring life to birth in you that you never thought possible. God’s Word written on your heart. The resurrected Jesus living, breathing, working, waiting, hoping in you for God’s promises to be revealed.

Jeremiah 31:31-34 (NRSVue)

³¹ The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. ³² It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. ³³ But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. ³⁴ 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.