Written On My Heart

Not sure you can hold on to hope as the nation's foundations crumble around you, listen to the promise in Jeremiah 31

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Transcript

Sermons from 

Mission Hills UCC

San Diego, California

Rev. Dr. David Bahr

david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org

August 31, 2025

“Written on My Heart”

Jeremiah 31: 31-34 – Common English Bible

The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. 32 It won’t be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant with me even though I was their husband, declares the Lord. 33 No, this is the covenant that I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my Instructions within them and engrave them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. 34 They will no longer need to teach each other to say, “Know the Lord!” because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord; for I will forgive their wrongdoing and never again remember their sins.

Labor Day didn’t begin with barbecues and mattress sales.  And it didn’t begin as a gift to workers but as damage control.  In 1894, President Grover Cleveland was desperate to calm the nation’s anger over the Pullman Strike that shut down railroads across the Midwest.  Workers whose wages could barely feed their families went on strike when the company tried to squeeze even more rent in their company-owned housing.  As usual, the government sent in troops to break the strike.  Violence erupted and dozens were killed.  Six days after the strike ended, Congress hurried through a bill declaring a new national holiday:  Labor Day.
 
 

The late 1800s were full of labor unrest — more than 37,000 strikes erupted in 25 years, disrupting railroads, mines, and factories.  Most governors reached for the same answer:  call in the militia, crush the protest, and restore “order.”  Colorado had one rare exception.  Governor Davis Waite believed government should serve the people, not just the mine owners and railroad barons.  So, when Cripple Creek miners struck in 1894 for an eight-hour day, mine owners demanded he send in the state militia.  He did, but to keep the peace, not to enforce their will.  The owners backed down.  It was the only successful strike in Colorado’s bloody history – encouraged by a Denver pastor who saw the struggle of the workers as the very heart of the gospel. 

Denver had quickly grown from a dusty mining camp built overnight in 1858 into a bustling hub of railroads and smelters.  Mansions rose on Capitol Hill with gleaming marble staircases and stained glass announcing sudden wealth.  In 1875, First Congregational Church looked for a new pastor.  By the way for those who don’t know.  Mission Hills is part of the Congregational tradition.  

They sought someone cultured and educated to match the city’s aspirations.  Myron Reed fit the bill:  Oberlin-trained, well-read, eloquent.  The congregation thrived and in 1881, among those mansions they built a grand stone sanctuary seating nearly 900.  It was one of Denver’s proudest, most respectable institutions.  And then, two years later, he preached a sermon that lit a fire.

Denver’s newspapers had been constantly warning of a new menace:  “the tramp.”  Men without steady work, sleeping in boxcars, painted as criminals and a threat to prosperity.  The cry was for vagrancy laws and more police, more prisons. 

In the midst of this context, city papers often published sermon titles for the next day, and so, one Saturday, readers of the Rocky Mountain News saw the title at First Congregational:  “The Evolution of the Tramp.”  The next morning, the sanctuary filled with the curious.  Would Reed also echo law and order from other respectable pulpits?  Instead, he declared that the tramp was the product of an unjust society – not a villain but a victim. 

Industrial capitalism, he said, had created “surplus men.” Railroads discarded them when no longer needed.  Mines boomed and just as quickly went bust.  Where did workers go, or when they were old or broken?  “The tramp,” Reed thundered, “is the child of our system, not his own sin.”  It was the rising Social Gospel confronting Gilded Age excess, as I spoke of last Sunday.

On Monday, the Rocky Mountain News reported on the sermon.  Now the entire city heard Reed’s indictment.  Newspapers scolded him for excusing “criminal vagrants.”  The business elite fumed, but workers heard a minister describe their lives honestly.  They began calling Reed the “laborers’ chaplain.”  

There’s one more thing interesting thing I’d like to share about him.  In 1887, Reed and three other clergy co-founded the Charity Organization Society of Denver, the nation’s first federated community fund.  Instead of every charity knocking on doors separately, they raised and pooled their resources into one fund and distributed it fairly and more efficiently to families in need. This became the United Way, which officially recognizes Reed and their efforts as their founding.

“The Evolution of the Tramp” became a defining moment of Reed’s ministry.  After this sermon, workers began filling the pews of his church, while some members with mansions on the same block slipped quietly out the back. 

It was an illustration of today’s gospel lesson. Jesus went to eat at the home of a Pharisee and watched as the guests scrambled for the best seats. Then he told a parable: “When you are invited, don’t take the place of honor. Sit instead in the lowest place, for all who lift themselves up will be brought low, and those who humble themselves will be lifted up.”  And he went further. “When you give a banquet, don’t invite your friends or your rich neighbors. Invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind — and you will be blessed.”

From Reed’s pulpit, that parable came to life. The tramp, the miner — were not intruders but the honored guests.  Not a nuisance to be jailed but a neighbor to be loved.  They are a living sign of what happens when a society forgets justice.

And that’s exactly what Jeremiah and other prophets kept saying, century after century:  stop crushing the poor, stop hoarding wealth, stop pretending worship can cover injustice.  

But the warnings went unheeded and Jeremiah warned:  this path can only end one way.  And finally it did.  In 587 BCE, Babylon swept through Jerusalem, tore down the walls, burned the temple, and carried the people into exile.

Imagine being marched past the rubble of your city, the courthouse, the library — everything gone.  Imagine your own church burned to the ground, your sanctuary in ruins.  Imagine trying to teach your children songs of God while your neighbors mock you for singing at all.  No wonder Psalm 137 remembers: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. Our captors demanded songs… but how can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

For those dragged into Babylon, Jeremiah made a promise cut against everything they could see with their own eyes.  The temple that held God’s presence was ash.  The king who claimed David’s throne was in chains. Priests had no altar, prophets no city to speak to.  Every visible sign of God’s covenant was gone.  And Jeremiah dared to say: the covenant is still alive — not on stone that can shatter, not in scrolls that can burn, not in institutions that can collapse, but written where no one can take it — on the human heart.  

That word gave the exiles something to carry when they had nothing left.  It was not comfort so much as defiance: you are still God’s people, and the future is not finished.

And that’s why Jeremiah still matters. Because exile is not just their story.  Exile belongs to anyone who finds home itself turned foreign, who wakes up a stranger in their own nation.  That’s where I find myself.  A stranger our country while behind the scenes, it changes into something that distorts its promise – some of it not behind the scenes.

This week alone we have seen national guard units federalized to occupy and intimidate Washington, D.C., with threats of the same to Chicago, New York, and beyond.  We have seen lifelong public servants and experts in their fields purged from their jobs — not for incompetence, but for refusing blind loyalty – public health be damned.  We have watched helplessly as our own history at the Smithsonian is stripped of Black, Latino, and queer stories.  Are we entering into a time of exile — exile for those who still hold faith in a government of the people, by the people, and for all the people?

The foundations of a democracy are crumbling into rubble and Jeremiah dares us to say: we are still God’s people, and the future is not finished.  Exile might be a helpful theological framework for feeling powerless watching your nation disintegrate, frightened.  Lost.  For what it feels like to have your songs stolen, whispering with the psalmist: How can we sing the Lord’s song in such a strange land? 

In exile, when everything else is stripped away, God gives us what cannot be taken:  not comfort that dulls the pain but a claim that no despair will ever sink us so low that we ignore the cries of our neighbors.  To never arrive at the point where we ask, why bother caring?

For neighbors like Martha and her children in Queens.  They fled violence in Ecuador in 2022 and earlier this month did what the law required:  they showed up for a routine immigration check-in and were – like others with troubling regularity – detained instead.  Within days, Martha and her 6-year-old daughter were sent to a Texas detention center while her 19-year-old son Manuel was sent to a detention center in Newark and locked away like a criminal while his mother and sister were then deported to Ecuador.  Two more children remain in Queens — including a 16-year-old daughter now carrying the weight of a family scattered across three states and two countries.  So, this is not ancient history.  Not metaphor.  It’s exile with names and faces.

And now Kimar Abrego Garcia is threatened with exile in Uganda, a country he has never known, where he has no family, no language – chosen only for how absurdly cruel it is.  First, he’s mistakenly detained, then thrown into a Salvadoran prison known for torture, brought home and reunited only to be torn away from his family again.  Exile upon exile.

And yet, exile is not only about headlines and nations.  It’s personal.  For example:

• Exile is when someone you love dies, and suddenly the place that once felt like home feels foreign.  Their chair is empty, their voice is missing, and you find yourself a stranger in your own life.
• Exile is when the doctor says cancer and your very body feels like strange land — familiar yet no longer safe, carrying you where you never wanted to go.
• Exile is when a friendship shatters, or work that gave you meaning is stripped away, or from which you retired.  Who am I now?
• Exile is when you sit by the rivers of Babylon in your own soul and ask, How did this happen?  How can I keep faith in a place like this?

But, if we’re going to live in exile — as if we had a choice — feeling exiled in a nation that forgets its promise, alone in homes touched by death, estranged in bodies that betray us — even still, exile is not the final word.  Exile is the space in between.  Exile is a place we can become for what is next.  

Think about it.  Exile can strip us bare, take everything away, but it can also teach us what matters most – get us on the right track.  Exile can be a school, where we learn endurance, compassion, and the strength of standing together.  

So, instead of living like victims, let’s embrace our exile and join Jeremiah’s invitation to live into defiant hope.  To remember songs will rise, justice will come, and our land shall be made whole again – more proudly diverse, equitable, and inclusive than even before.  

Jeremiah dared his people — and dares us — to hold on because we are still God’s people and the world around us may be crumbling, but God is not finished with us yet.  God is not finished with you.  It is written on your heart.