Maybe I just tuned it out when I heard it was another reality TV show. Hate those things! Don’t we have enough reality in everyday life? I want my TV to give me news and sports and a little unreality, thank you very much. But PBS put on a show in May called Colonial House. I don’t know pastor Jeff Wyers of the Community Baptist Church in Waco, but I figure I’d like him better than the character he played. See, Jeff, his family, and about 20 volunteers agreed to live for four months in New England as if they were a Puritan colony in 1628. They milked goats, raised corn, and produced goods to repay their British backers. Women submitted to male headship, and everyone submitted to the pastor, who was also the governor. As it should be, don’t you know?! Then there was mandatory attendance at three-hour church services. Ah, the good old days!

Well, things didn’t go heavenly for the moderns trying to live off the land and on the laws of God. Work was hard and food was bad, but the worst of it seemed to be the rigidity of life in the community regulated by strict interpretation of the Ten Commandments. Of course, whenever we do that, the tendency is to pick out which of the commandments we think need our attention the most, which is usually the ones we are least guilty of ourselves, so that someone else will get the worst of the judgment. With the Puritans it was usually taking the Lord’s name in vain by using swear words, breaking the Sabbath by not attending church or doing the wrong things on that day, or a wife getting too close to a man not her husband—men usually didn’t have it as bad as the women on that one. Often the accuser was guilty of bearing false witness, but that was seldom considered as grave a sin.

Well, what did pastor Wyers, aka. John Winthrop, learn in all of this? His words: “You can't force people who don’t have faith to believe by putting a knife to their throat. You may get acquiescence, but you’re not going to get faith. Faith is something God does, and a person responds to. With persecution you get the exact opposite. Instead of people listening to the nudging of the Holy Spirit, they focus on pressure from this other human being. We had people who had been warming to the gospel that suddenly were standing flatfooted and saying, You’re not pushing me any farther. Persecution brings the wrong results. It works against the spirit of the gospel.” [“Enforced Christianity,” in LeadershipJournal.net,  2004.]

Good for Pastor Wyers! But he sounds more like the heretic would-be Baptist of the colony, Anne Hutchinson, than John Winthrop.

But now, we’re not exactly in the gospel per se when we’re in the book of Jeremiah, are we? I mean, isn’t it the usual way in the church to contrast the Old Testament with the New, the Old Covenant with the New, the God of the Jews with the God of the Christians, the letter with the spirit, the law of stone with the heart of love? The whole thing about how the days are coming when God makes religion a matter of experience instead of rules makes us jump right from Jeremiah to Jesus with no stopping in between. But that would make no sense to the text we are reading or the experience of those who wrote and celebrated these words of Jeremiah as good news. This kind of thinking needs to be checked in the church. We need to realize that what is new in this new covenant is already under way in Old Testament religion.  What’s more, the tendency to define our faith life by the love of law rather than the law of love is present in the church as much as it was in Israel long ago. You don’t have to go back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony to see how easily it creeps into our way of being.

Perhaps the Puritans failed in the end because they failed to capture the essence of the new covenant of God’s great grace, the law written upon the heart. They were so concerned with conformity and control that they could not hear the prophetic voice of God from one of their own. Anne Hutchinson was scary and dangerous to Winthrop and others. They believed that democracy in religion—the idea that everyone from the greatest to the least could know God, as Jeremiah promised—could not be trusted. Anne Hutchinson held that since strict conformity to rules does not save a person; it ends up competing with the grace of Christ that produces hearts of love. Hearts filled with graceful love do not need rules or rulers other than the living presence of the Spirit of Christ.

That does not mean the law doesn’t matter, that we are supposed to move beyond the commandments if we are really to know God (although Anne did kind of believe that, too). It means that the law has to be written on our hearts and seared on our consciences; it has to become second nature to us the way it is first nature to God. The rules that regulate our faith life together are designed to give us a peek at God’s heart. They teach us how God loves us and how we are to love one another. God wants love to rule us rather than law. God wants our hearts to beat as one with God’s heart.

When you first meet someone you are attracted to or want to know, you have to ask lots of questions and listen carefully to see what she loves, what he likes, what bothers her, what moves him, that sort of thing. As you come to know that person deeply, there comes a desire to please and to anticipate what would please the one you love. After a while you learn what to say and not to say, how to act and not act. Before long you get to where you move before you are asked. You finish each other’s sentences. Words are unnecessary because you come to know your lover or friend by heart.

Many of you know that my father-in-law died a couple of weeks ago in Florida. He suffered from the debilitating effects of Alzheimer’s disease. Among the many pernicious losses that happen is that simple functions become impossible where they were once natural. My father-in-law lost his capacity to speak and to swallow in his last days. They had to load up liquids with syrupy substances like honey in order that the fluids might slide down his throat without him having to help. He was often thirsty, but he could not communicate with words, so my mother-in-law would have to guess what he wanted from his grunts. She seemed to know, in a way others didn’t, what he wanted. They had been together for nearly 50 years. One day near the end, he was particularly frustrated as he lay in bed. His daughter Zetta was there, sensing his sadness with what was left of his conscious mind. She wondered if he was more worried about his wife than his life, about what would happen to her after he was gone. She assured him that we would all take care of her and that he could trust us to let go. Tears of recognition filled his eyes as he looked at his wife. They didn’t need words to know what it meant to say I love you.

This is the kind of relationship God wants with us. God does not want people to have to say to one another, Know the Lord, as if they do not and need to be instructed by written codes and enforced by others who claim to know God better. That kind of Christianity ends up like the Puritan piety with people looking at their neighbors for what they are doing wrong, pointing fingers, and creating a climate of mistrust. A community that lives in fear of wrongdoing rather than by faith in right-doing is a sick community. Relationships based on oughts and shoulds never rise to the freedom and joy God desires.

The something new in the promised new covenant is that God will not rest until we know God so well that we don’t need to be taught anymore because we have caught the heart of God. God moves the ten words from stone tablets to human hearts. God promises to become even more involved under our skin until our faith is formed and character reformed.

During the Vietnam War, American bombers would fly over rivers every day bombing every bridge in sight. And yet thousands of Vietnamese troops would cross those rivers anyway. Years later an American pilot met up with a former Vietnamese general who is now a businessman. He asked him, How’d you get them across the river? The guy replied, Well, we built the bridges six inches under the water. [American Way (Aug. 1, 1998): 113.] Who builds bridges six inches under water? Someone desperate to win.

Like God. God’s new covenant plan is to take what has been an external code of morality and begin to build it inside of us—six inches under the skin, so to speak. God knows we are not capable by sheer willpower of being good or loving well. Something in the human heart needs fixing. And God promises to be about that work.

Don Henley put out an album a few years ago during a hiatus from The Eagles. In one memorable song, The Heart of the Matter, he recounts his emotions over hearing that his ex-wife had met someone new:

I’m learning to live without you now
But I miss you sometimes
The more I know, the less I understand
All the things I thought I knew, I’m learning again
I’ve been tryin’ to get down
To the heart of the matter
But my will gets weak
And my thoughts seem to scatter
But I think it’s about forgiveness
Forgiveness
Even if, even if you don’t love me anymore …

When you get down to the heart of the matter, knowing God deeply and intimately is about forgiveness—God’s forgiving nature and our acceptance and practice of it. It isn’t just a matter of getting all the dos and don’ts tattooed on our hearts; it’s about having the heart of God transplanted into our own. To the point where we realize we are forgiven as the Lord promises. To the point where we begin to practice forgiveness toward others ourselves. We usually think that what ruins relationships is hurt that comes from wrongdoing of some kind. But it isn’t sin that comes between us as much as the lack of forgiveness. When we forgive one another, we build a bridge back to the heart of our beloved. When we are forgiven, we can be at ease in the presence of our beloved again. Which is just what God has done to enable us to know God intimately. God has forgiven our iniquity, Jeremiah tells us, and remembers our sin no more.

Last fall a group of Amish youth in rural Ohio hid in a cornfield and threw tomatoes at cars as they passed by.  One driver came back with a shotgun and fired into the cornfield, killing one of the young people. Turns out, the father of the dead prankster was a friend of the shooter.  The youths wrote a letter of apology to the local papers, asking the community to forgive them for the prank that turned deadly.  The family of the child who was killed offered forgiveness to the guy who unloaded the shotgun blast into the field.  The dead boy’s mother said, I had forgiven him before I knew who it was. [Thanks to Jimmy Gentry, Temple Baptist Church, Carrollton, Georgia, for this illustration: “Membership in the Unchained Gang,” Oct. 10, 2004.]

Now, that’s a woman who knows God by heart. Do you? I think it’s about forgiveness. …