Greetings!

I think that sometimes—even for the happiest and most easy-going people—we can get weighed down by regrets. Maybe it’s something you did to someone a long time ago, for which you could never make up. Or perhaps there was someone to whom you really intended to reach out when they were in need, but the busyness of your days just got in the way.

Whatever the reason, I think it’s a reality of human life that we have these regrets, because the memories of the ways we have failed others or ourselves just lingers long after the incident itself has passed. These things can make us awkward around each other. They can make us avoid one another, or sometimes even to break off relationships altogether!

Wouldn’t you like to live a life free of this kind of regret and guilt? This Sunday we’re going to look at a promise that Jeremiah offers to God’s people—a promise of this kind of life. I hope you’ll come be with us as we listen for how this promise might come true in our own lives.

Faithfully,

Hardy

Image: Newgrange, Ireland

Theme for Sunday

God’s expectation (torah) will be in our hearts. Not only will we know what God wants and intends, but we will want to be obedient. This is the end of the restless resistance and self-sufficiency we know so well. Now there will be glad solidarity that comes in trust. This is in contrast to our usual way with laws, rules, and expectations that grate on us and generate hostility. Think what it would be like to be in such a relation of trust that there was no occasion for hostility.

—Walter Brueggemann, The Gift of a New Chance

Jeremiah 31:27-34

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord. In those days they shall no longer say: “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge. 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. 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. 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. 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.