by Abigail Hastings
Text: Jeremiah 31:31-34
I bring greetings from my home church, Judson Memorial in New York City, a sister Alliance and UCC church with deep Baptist roots as it’s a memorial to Adoniram Judson, missionary to Burma in the early 1800s. One thing I love about Judson is that it’s always full of surprises—always swimming upstream with the unexpected. I was at a church last month that had a humongous cross up front that reminded me of the 18-footer we had at Judson over 50 years ago. Then we decided it was more authentic to desacralize the space, to recognize the deep marriage of sacred and secular when you see it embodied, literally for example, in our space with the dancers and artists of the time (Judson is generally regarded as the birthplace of postmodern dance). So in that tradition of “guess what we’re doing now?” — Judson’s been having Bible study, ya’ll!
And not the easy parts—we’ve been muckin’ around with major and minor prophets, and recently studied today’s passage, Jeremiah 31. It’s a familiar prophetic playbook: basically, clean up your act, O Israel, or Yahweh will go elsewhere. What the Lord required was pretty basic: treat others fairly, don’t exploit the stranger, the orphan and widow, don’t shed innocent blood, and knock off following other gods.[1]
Theologian Walter Brueggemann sums up the message of the prophets: that the Ten Commandments were broken with economic policies that abused the poor, with foreign policy that depended on arms, with theological malpractice and illusions of privilege before God…”[2] Sound familiar? And yet, this Jeremiah passage conveys a deep resolve—instead of solving a problem with force, as happened in a big way with Noah and the flood, there was a new reckoning, one that gave the Israelites another chance, this time with forgiveness—for I will forgive their iniquity—and astonishingly, letting it go—and their sin I will remember no more.”
Sometimes thought of as the new covenant, or a presage of a new covenant of Jesus, some 600 years later—if nothing else, it is a reboot, a Yahweh Covenant 2.0. Maybe this new oracle came to Jeremiah in early January when God was making up new resolutions for the year. It’s a great pastime—take an arbitrary date and assign meaning to it with a do-over list or chance to do something different. You don’t realize how important that is until you’ve lived as long as I have. I recently learned that the word burden can also mean refrain—the part of the song that repeats, and repeats, and repeats. At a certain point in life, it gets difficult, a burden, to keep doing the same things over and over, like brush your teeth, keep chewing your food, or pull up your pants—happily I managed to do all those things today!
Life needs reboots and when better than in the bleak midwinter when things go dark and dormant. If the trees are not renewing—except in these spells of freakishly warm weather—maybe we can renew ourselves. Some suggestions:
Mind the gap. We’re referring to the mind-body gap here and you might think it’s the losing weight thing, but it’s not. It’s a recognition that more than ever, researchers are finding that our bodies are more intricately connected to our minds than we ever realized. We weren’t asked if we wanted to grow up and be a "neurogastroenterologist" — but now you can be one. Turns out “the gut has a mind of its own,” researchers say, “[one that] records experiences and responds to emotions.”[3] That gut feeling you have is real.
This complexity illustrates the beauty of the body, the elegant system of a beating heart, the way the lungs fill and recede. Maybe you don’t look up lung transplants on youtube but I do—I think they’re miraculous, the moment the lungs expand into a diaphanous life-giving orb, makes me want to weep for how exquisite it is. So don’t think of the usual resolutions about the body this time around—don’t think “I want to be beautiful” but instead: “I am beautiful. Fearfully and wonderfully made.” Celebrate that.
Mind the Mind. I hate repetitive thoughts, those I don’t want or need—and I know meditation would help. Skeptics take note that the science confirms that regular meditation is healing, empowering and makes you more creative. There’s a group meeting at my church each week for meditation. I couldn’t get there for it, but decided to co-meditate at the same time they were. I flat out fell asleep, a deep and beautiful sleep—so a slow start but I’m hopeful that this is the year for a more meditative me.
Forgive. The word needs a makeover. It is not acquiescence. It is not to ignore. It is about power, in the same way that “turning the other cheek,” properly understood, is also about power and equality, not subservience. “I will forgive their iniquity,” says the Lord. There is reconciliation afoot there, not always with the offending party, but within your heart and mind. If you’ve received the mercy of forgiveness, you have a taste of what that means; if you have forgiven, you know that you’ve gained valuable real estate in your everyday thoughts, especially the repetitive ones.[4]
Laugh. I found a handwritten note in longtime Judson minister Howard Moody’s papers, he’d written down a quote that said: “It is a cliché, and it is also true, that humor springs from existential pain—from a need to blunt the awareness that life is essentially a fatal disease of unpredictable symptoms and unknown duration.” (Gene Weingarten) Oh how I miss that man. He was a great combination of uplift and dread. More to the point, Howard Thurman talks about how in those times when “life is taking out all of its grievances upon us …then there is no antidote quite like a central chuckle of the spirit. Humor may not be laughter,” he writes, “it may not even be a smile; it is primarily a point of view, an attitude toward experience… a certain quality of objectivity — the inspired ability to step aside and see one’s self go by.”
And one more widget for your consideration….
A radical defense of tenderness. This is what George Saunders said was the reason he wrote a book for his daughters (The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip). “I thought what they need to hear,” he said, “is a radical defense of tenderness—the fact that the world does sometimes go bad but when it does, we have resources. Our world has become more materialist, more analytical, more fact-based, more shareholder-honoring . . . a gradual shift to the rational side of things and I think what we need to understand is our gifts, our real powerful gifts are love, tenderness, [and] patience.”[5]
Just four things here, all proven to build resilience—you’re thinking of others, that’s good. You might keep in mind the Sufi proverb: "There are two rules on the spiritual path: Begin. Continue.”[6] Let me know how that works out for you.
Did you notice that these little “makeovers” are essentially internal adjustments? There’s a reason for that. Notice that Yahweh did not deliver a message of deliverance, like “I’m sending plagues and armies to smote your enemies.” Instead it was a change of heart and mind—Yahweh forgives, Yahweh forgets. A new page is turned and offered so that a new story can be written.
In his seminal book, Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman describes the world Jesus was born into. The decline and desecration of Israel would have been as viscerally remembered as WWII stories are to us today. King Herod, though an Israelite, had come to represent all that had gone wrong with the once mighty nation (in much the same way things had tanked during Jeremiah’s time). When Jesus was just a boy, Judea was annexed to Syria, and over time the religious leaders—Pharisees and Sadducees—made the bargain religious leaders sometimes do: as Thurman put it, “they loved Israel, but they seem to have loved security more.”[7]
It was this broken House of Israel, a fractured minority within the Greco-Roman world, that Jesus spoke to, ones “smarting under the loss of status, freedom and autonomy…,” Thurman writes. “Jesus’ message focused on the urgency of a radical change in the inner attitude of the people… that out of the heart are the issues of life and that no external force [can] destroy a people if it does not first win the victory of the spirit against them… Again and again, [Jesus] came back to the inner life of the individual placing his finger on the ‘inward center’ as the crucial arena where the issues would determine the destiny of his people.”[8] This is what Nancy was talking about last week in her sermon, touching on the mainstays of her inner life while working at the prison, finding companions for repairing her inner life in the Bible, Etty Hillesum, and this book by Thurman.
Not for nothing, the resilience of your inner life is an equation that factors into our collective ability to write a new page. Never is that more obvious than with the things the media is trying to scare us with… when I was young, they said Cubans were in our backyard; so I stared out our back window in Texas and kept looking for them. Now it’s ISIS or a lone wolf or a natural disaster. But these terrible things, terrible though they be, are not so likely to happen to most of us. What could be happening, and could easily get sidetracked by that fear-mongering, is a very real opportunity for a change of hearts and minds, a turning the page, that needs to happen around race.
Listen to Howard Thurman writing in this same section on the inner life—and this over 65 years ago: “For the most part, [for Negroes], their status as citizens has never been clearly defined. … The Negro has felt, with some justification, that the peace officer of the community provides no defense against the offending or offensive white man; and for an entirely different set of reasons the peace officer gives no protection against the offending Negro. Thus the Negro feels that he must be prepared, at a moment’s notice, to protect his own life and take the consequences therefor.”[9]
My eyes burned when I read that—how disheartening to think that the same feeling prevails among many in the black community today. But Thurman quickly points us to what Jesus prescribed as “the logic of which would give to all the needful security. There would be room for all,” he writes, “and no man would be a threat to his brother [for] the kingdom of God is within…. By inference [Jesus] is saying, ‘You must abandon your fear of each other and fear only God. … Hatred is destructive to hated and hater alike. Love your enemy, that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven.”[10]
So the promise of a reboot—within us, perhaps within our nation, even during this very, very challenging election year. So what’s the Bonobo Year? In two weeks, the Chinese new year will begin the Year of the Monkey, with these excellent characteristics: smart, quick-witted, frank, optimistic, ambitious and adventurous. Great things to aspire to in 2016.
But I’m voting that it be specifically the Year of the Bonobo Monkey. Let me not dwell on the fact that the bonobos are a female-dominant society—let’s reflect more on the fact that “unlike chimps and humans, which are often violent and aggressive with each other, bonobos would rather make love than war.”[11] In other words, they have a lot of sex—and more to the point, they don’t kill each other. So 2016—make love, not war.
We’ll need to be brave, brave enough to break our own hearts.[12] We may be afraid at times, that’s ok—I love the description of a young choirboy, scared before his audition: “My legs were almost between liquid and solid.”[13]
Though the idea of “resilience” has gotten a lot of play of late, I’ve been interested in it for over 20 years, ever since James Garbarino talked about Cambodian orphans who survived the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge because they were accompanied in recovery by loving and attentive adults. More recently, Dr. Dennis Charney of Mount Sinai studied resilience in prisoners of war. “We have found that social support, particularly close meaningful relationships, can be important to a person’s resilience to stress,” he said. “The POWs used a tap code as a way of communicating non-verbally through cell walls using an algorithm. The tap code kept many of the POWs’ spirits up, even when they were in solitary confinement. Everyone needs a tap code. Everybody needs people in their lives to help them get through the tough times.”[14]
I hope you find a tap code in this community, on this sacred ground. We’ll be brave enough together to break our own hearts. Happy Bonobo Year, ya’ll—live it in the peace that passes all understanding and in the assurance of Jeremiah 29: For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the LORD. They are plans for peace and not disaster, plans to give you a future filled with hope.
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thunderstorm. (Thanks, Naomi and Geoff.) 
NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced the official record for last year's runaway temperatures, an average of 58.62 degrees Fahrenheit (14.79 degrees Celsius). That's 1.62 (F) degrees hotter than any average year in the 20th century. "It's getting to the point where breaking records is the norm," Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe told the Associated Press. —
poor, is among 16 social justice initiatives to watch in 2016 cited by the 
¶ In 1962, Crayola renamed its “Flesh” crayon color as “Peach” in an attempt to . . . well . . . make room for 70% of the global population.
Yancey.
line.’ And we know that it is still a horrifying problem of the twenty-first century, along with the gender line, the sexual orientation line, the immigration line, the religious line, the economic line, the class line. The lines are drawn along the ancient human problem of entitlement, with one group feeling entitled to have power and control over another group. The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the past centuries, the problem of the power line. I’ve found myself on both sides of that line, at once powerful and then powerless. But in prison, it was clear that I was on the side of the line of privilege and power.” —read 
ce / Day by day your salvation / Though I know not their extent.’ (Psalm 71:14-15)
•For more information, see “How pillows can change the Syria refugee narrative,” 
Inclusion, for whom the plight of immigrants has a special history. It was in early 1942 that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive order 9066, consigning citizens of Japanese descent to concentration camps. The first of those incarcerated were from Bainbridge Island, Washington. Spencer’s painting is a take on the 15th century icon, variously known as "The Trinity" and "The Hospitality of Abraham," depicting the scene in Genesis 18 where “the Lord” appeared to Moses under the oaks of Mamre in the guise of three travelers. Numerous variations have since been produced.
¶ Benediction. “To suceed in life you need three things: a backbone, a wishbone, and a funny bone.” —country music start Reba McEntire
when King felt like the wine had run out on his strength and courage. He’d received a late night threatening phone call. He was overcome with a sense of powerlessness. He prayed to God at his kitchen table and received the sense of a divine presence like he’d never known before. So I read his words:
wall.” (As you can see, my copy is tattered and stained and so well worn that it's coming apart.) The book examines power lines, and what happens to the people who are experiencing the relentless pain and humiliation of being disinherited.
similar to that of Psalm 128: “They have blessings (and, in subsequent verses, “peace,” “joy,” and “well-being”), those who pray.”
2,204,622,800,000,000 pounds.] A typical snow crystal weighs roughly one millionth of a gram. This means a cubic foot of snow can contain roughly one billion crystals. A rough estimate of the number of snow crystals that fall to Earth per year is “about 1 followed by 24 zeros,” Nelson told LiveScience. “If another scientist says that I'm off by one or two zeros, then I won't quibble.” —
the United States, with more than seven million members—has placed five Israeli banks on a list of companies that it will not invest in for human rights reasons, the board said in a statement on Tuesday. It appeared to be the first time that a pension fund of a large American church had taken such a step regarding the Israeli banks, which help finance settlement construction in what most of the world considers illegally occupied Palestinian territories.” —
indicating their product caused climate change, read Robert Brulle’s “
in the United States over the next two decades, with derailments expected to occur an average of 10 times a year, costing billions of dollars in damage, and putting a large number of lives at risk. The grim projection was revealed exclusively by the Associated Press, which cites a previously unreported analysis by the Department of Transportation from last July. —
tween climate change and the Syrian civil war. Indeed, when a major peer-reviewed study came out on in March making this very case, Retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley said it identifies “a pretty convincing climate fingerprint” for the Syrian drought. Titley, a meteorologist who led the U.S. Navy’s Task Force on Climate Change when he was at the Pentagon, also said, “you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.” —
orial in Washington, DC. —bangitout
their state to prevent angry white men from getting in, a poll released on Monday shows. The survey indicates that Oregonians are fed up with irate male Caucasians pouring into their state and bringing with them guns, violence, and terrorism. ‘This used to be such a nice state,’ said Oregon State Senator Carol Foyler, a pro-wall lawmaker. ‘Since the angry white men came here, parts of it are unrecognizable.’” —
'twixt old systems and the Word; / Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— / Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, / Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own. —James Russell Lowell, “The Present Crisis”
ersonal note. For Christmas my wife enlisted a friend, singer-songwriter Ken Medema, to record a new arrangement of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” using new lyrics drawn from Psalm 23. 
Islam, would present it as the religion of killing, violence, whips, extortion and injustice?” —Reuters new story, quoting Iranian 
st, Chicago
Our friends at the Mennonite Central Committee’s Peace Education office have put online a large collection of personal stories of faith from veterans. I've put the descriptive list, with weblinks, at “
¶ Altar call. “
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