• Jeremiah 31: 27-34

At a low point in their long history with God– humiliated in exile– God’s people receive from the prophet Jeremiah a promise  of not just the renewal of the old covenant, but the making of a “new covenant.”  This new covenant will be different because “I will put my law within them, and I will write it in their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”  This new experience with God will not be mediated through any human intervention, but directly to each person, “from the least to the greatest….”

• Psalm 119: 97-104

In the first person singular, the psalmist offers personal testimony of the vital importance of the Lord’s teachings in her life.  It is more direct than what she has learned from her teachers and elders and makes her “wiser” than her “enemies.”  Her experience of the Lord has been direct and personal: “You Yourself instructed me.”

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• Genesis 32: 22-31

Written in such a way that heightens the strangeness of the encounter, Jacob “wrestles” with “a man” “until daybreak.”  The unidentified figure does not prevail and Jacob refuses to let go of him “unless you bless me.”  They are at a standoff.  The figure asks Jacob his name and tells him he will henceforth be known as “Israel,” “for you have striven with God and with humans and you have prevailed.”  Jacob/Israel ask the man his name.  Instead of disclosing a name, the man blesses him.  In honor of this transformative experience, Jacob/Israel names the place of the encounter “Penel,” “because I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.”  He also took from  this experience another reminder– a limp–because “the man” had “struck him at the hip socket” during their tussle.

• Psalm 121

The psalmist testifies to his experience with the Lord, whom he knows both as “the Lord/Maker of heaven and earth” and as “My help….”  He has learned that the Lord’s “guard does not slumber….”  The Lord protects from daily assaults around the clock, expressed poetically as under the light of the sun and of the moon.  The Lord guards your life, “your going and your coming, now and forevermore.”

• II Timothy 3: 14-4:5

“Timothy’s” mentor alludes to the fact that he was nurtured by believing parents in “the sacred writings….”  The scripture was “inspired by God” for human teaching, reproof, correction and training so that “everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.”  He then encourages “Timothy” to persevere in his own unique ministry, in every circumstance as a preventative for those times “when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires….”  “[D]o the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.”

• Luke 18: 1-8

Jesus tells this story, which is only found in Luke’s gospel.  Once there was a scoundrel judge who did not fear God nor respect others.  A widow relentlessly hounded him for justice.  He finally gave in, we are told, just to get rid of her.  Using a device he frequently uses of arguing from the lesser to the greater, Luke’s Jesus asks his listeners to consider this question: If a lazy, lousy, callus, arrogant judge will respond to a relentless petitioner, how much more eager would you imagine is God to “grant justice to the chosen ones who cry… day and night?”  God will not dally.  God “will quickly grant justice to them.”  But this comforting story ends with a disturbing, open-ended question:  “When the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Jeremiah’s relayed announcement that the Lord will not just renew the old covenant but initiate a “new covenant” is more the striking because it is not only addressed to the whole community, but to every individual, “from the least to the greatest.”  The psalmist (119:97-104) pays respect to her teachers and elders for teaching her about the Lord’s ways, but comes to realize “You Yourself instructed me.”  Out of the tussle between one man, Jacob, and God comes a new identity for himself and, subsequently, a whole nation.  The psalmist (121) knows God both as “the Maker of heaven and earth” and as “My help.”  Timothy’s mentor first honors the parents who immersed their son in “the sacred writings,” but concludes with a charge which only Timothy can fulfill on his own.  Luke’s Jesus tells a straightforward story about the persistence of one person and a lousy judge to encourage believers to pursue God because God “is eager” to grant justice.  But the episode concludes with a question that haunts: if individuals do not pursue God, will there be any faith on earth?

Because Ludwig Wittgenstein was interested in the overbearing impact of Plato and Descartes on the Modern Western imagination, he thought deeply about the dynamic between public, common knowledge and personal, individual “certainty.”  On the one hand, he concluded, “it isn’t just my experience, but other people’s that I get my knowledge from.” (On Certainty, p. 36e)  But on the other hand, he also wrote: “‘I know” only has meaning when it is uttered by a person. (p 77e)  We rely on gaining knowledge, information, wisdom from others, (parents, teachers, mentors, “elders” as well as our communities), but we claim “certainty” only when as an individual we live our lives based on these certitudes, which we have approprirated for ourselves.  In his study, Theology after Wittgenstein, Fergus Kerr considered the dynamic communal and personal this way: 

“There is no world for me or anyone else other than  the world that the language gives us.  It is a world that we have in common: the predicament of private worlds is an illusion.  And it is when I talk about the world that I appear on the scene, in the glory of my self, if you like.  But until I speak or act, I am  not to be found; and then it is this human being that you encounter.” (p. 97)

We acknowledge the individuals and communities who have told us about God’s promises, (we would not know them otherwise), but we also come to realize that that lineage continues or ends with  individuals who take up the words they were taught and become articulate in speaking them from the heart and in doing the deeds those words require.  It is only when what we have learned from others comes out in our own words and in our own deeds in our unique life and time that “I am to be found.”  As Luke’s story tells us, sometimes it only takes one person to respond for God’s work to continue.