Jesus: The Only Sap You'll Ever Need

I’ve seen this cashier about six times in the last three months. Each time I bring my items to her counter we exchange the shallow pleasantries customers and clerks speak to one another. Not in a uniform, she’s always dressed in what we call work-casual. Like most women her age, she tries to look younger than she is. She colors her hair. Her jewelry looks somewhat girlish. She wears make-up more suitable for a cocktail party than for early evening retail. But, hey, it’s a liquor store; so what do I know?

The crew at this 21st Amendment branch doesn’t turn over much. She’s the new kid on the block; the only female. The place is seldom crowded. The employees often converse in ways customers can’t help but overhear as they shop. Sometimes I’ve felt like I was interrupting when one had to drop out of the talk to tell me my purchase’s cost.

Last week, the counter between us, I didn’t think much the woman and a manager absorbed in conversation. Both seemed more intent on completing their thoughts than completing my transaction.

I heard her say, “I just can’t be sad anymore; not ever again. All I want is to be happy. That’s what life’s about.” “No,” said the manager. “Life is about doing your duty and meeting your responsibilities.” “I don’t think so,” she shot back. “I’ve had my share of sadness. From now I’m just going to look for happiness.” Then, in a voice sounding like a plea, she looked at me and asked “Don’t you think life is supposed to be happy?” How would you answer?

Caught me way off guard! It clearly wasn’t the time or the place for where that kind of conversation should go. But since I’m always urging believers to seize the evangelical moment I couldn’t take a pass. “Well, no,” I said, haltingly. “See,” said the manager, looking at me like we were sharing a guy-thing. “No,” I glared at him, sensing this wasn’t the first time men had dissed her insights.

“There’s joy in living,” I said; sounding more like I was speaking in riddles than with wisdom. “Happiness is a by-product, not a goal. Even when sadness hits, or we don’t meet all our responsibilities, we can still walk with a joy that’s deeper than happiness, frustration, or guilt.” “Yeah,” she smiled, “joy; that’s it!” “Nah,” the manager harrumphed, with a laugh, “that’s so sappy.”

Jeremiah’s done more with the oracle God gave him than I was able to do with the opportunity I had to share the whole truth. Jeremiah uses clear, earthy images to describe the awesome grace and blessings God has in mind for all God’s children.

Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit. The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse — who can understand it? I the Lord test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings. (Jeremiah 17:5-10)

Jeremiah wrote these poetic interpretations of the insights God gave him to God’s already divided chosen people. Israel lived in two separate kingdoms. Each had made political alliances with different pagan rulers. Each was failing to live, in heartfelt ways, the duties and responsibilities of God’s covenant. Each mixed its rich ritual economies with the coins of ungodly realms, not as worship and praise, but as transactions to appease consciences already more deeply rooted in the other side; the dark side.

Jeremiah tallies accurately the potential for profit and loss God’s gamble yields. God bet that we creatures, made in God’s image and likeness, would recognize the difference between bogus efforts to go it alone and the genuine joy that could be ours rooted in God’s original grace and blessing.

That’s why God made us little less than the angels. That’s why God gave us all God’s own attributes: freedom, rationality, the ability to make decisions, and the power to receive and give love. That’s why God gave us God’s own garden to tend; God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. (Genesis 1:28)

As Jeremiah sees it, that’s a bet God keeps on losing, yet it remains a gamble God won’t go back on. The judgment may sound too harsh, without first hearing the charges. Listen to what it is God sees that causes God to deliver this indictment:
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: Stand in the gate of the Lord’s house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah, you that enter these gates to worship the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you* in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’

For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors for ever and ever. (Jeremiah 7:1-7)

Not only does God see the fruits of a people rooted in ideas, deities and personalities other than God’s own, God also grieves over how deeply this people’s roots go. Look at 17:1. The sin of Judah is written with an iron pen; with a diamond point it is engraved on the tablet of their hearts, and on the horns of their altars… I’m thinking Jeremiah is seeing this as a rather permanent, indelible, fixed condition.

Let’s do a quick anatomy lesson. These near eastern folks understood the heart to be the organ that controls the human will, our disposition and intentions. They would not have understood the romance of our Valentine’s Day hearts. Likewise, they located the place in the body controlling emotions, translated here as mind, to be the kidneys. (That has more truth to it than we realize when we remember that the adrenal glands, sitting atop the kidneys, are the source of our chemistry necessary for our fight or flight reflex to kick-in.)

So what does it mean when God says it’s time to search the devious heart? God examines the ways our mind is so sly and slippery as to cause us to trust in ourselves, or others like us, over trusting in God, and God finds that perverse, i.e., incurable. Now everybody here knows you don’t have to be old, or in a pre-Alzheimer condition to have your mind play tricks on you, right? Everybody here can remember a time or two when we thought the smartest thing God might do is to pass that bad-boy, run-the-world baton to us for a time, that would fix everything and make us real happy!

So, too, God examines, as in tests to prove – the way we might test to prove that a gall bladder works or doesn’t work - the seat of our emotions and finds that these, too, drive us to prefer what is alien to our well-being over what is beneficial for our well-being, namely, rootedness in God. Now everybody here knows you don’t have to completely round the bend to have your emotions carry you away, right? Everybody here can remember a time when, without any particular drug ingestion, we were ready, willing and able to carry out on somebody that had done us wrong that swift, sweet vengeance belonging only to God. That, too, would make us happy, right?

What’s a body to do? Even though we know more anatomy than Jeremiah’s generation, our minds and hearts, our wills and our emotions are just as eager to displace God and to take God’s place. What’s a body to do? Neither Jeremiah, nor his God, will give up on the bet. In another place God tells Jeremiah to write this: 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 (Jeremiah 31:33.) These are those days, when we know what a body can do.

In Luke 6:18-19, just after Jesus has chosen the apostles, and just before he teaches the Beatitudes, “on a level plain,” Luke says: Folk from everywhere, all kinds of folk came to listen, to understand, to comprehend, to finally “get it,” to be re-minded – not as in remember what they’d forgotten - but to receive a new mindset. And they came to be made whole of their dis-ease; and those who were disturbed, confused by unclean spirits (pneuma / wind) - thrown about, and off course by gusty, ghastly winds - were “therap-ied,” made whole, again. And all in the crowd were trying to cling to him, to become attached or rooted to him, because power, dynamis in Greek (dynamic / dynamite), went out of him, and they were made whole. That’s what a body can do. Come to hear Jesus. Come be made whole in Jesus.

From him we can receive the new instruction God chooses to write on our hearts. It’s an instruction that, for all the world, looks to turn things upside down. Like the hymn (Magnificat) Jesus’ mother sang, God’s otherwise vision brings woes on those who are full, proud and hoarding wealth. To those who receive the word, who become rooted in the promise, whose routes follow Jesus’ path to the sap-delivering, life-giving, fruit-bearing waters of the living God, God delivers not fleeting happiness, but a new justice, a lasting kinship that bestows blessedness, blessing, new dignity and truly unending joy.