Sermon for Sunday, October 19, 2025 || Proper 24C || Jeremiah 31:27-34

A few weeks ago, I preached a sermon about hope. With the Babylonian armies beating down the walls of Jerusalem, the Prophet Jeremiah purchased the field at Anathoth. Jeremiah then had the deeds of purchase sealed in earthenware vessels to last a long time. This prophetic action signaled that the Israelites would return from their exile and once again purchase houses and fields and vineyards in their own land. Today’s reading from Jeremiah begins with the realization of that hope. “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.…I will watch over them to build and to plant.”

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Along with this return from exile, God promises to make a new covenant with the people, a covenant to replace the ones that God made with their ancestors. The original covenant spoke of making a great nation out of Abraham’s offspring and of granting that people the right to inhabit a particular land. The next covenant, which you could describe as a continuation or deepening of the first one, was made when the people were fleeing Egypt. Through Moses, God set the expectations of what it meant to live as God desired, via the framework of the Ten Commandments and the rest of the laws that followed.

The new covenant that God makes with the people in Jeremiah’s day “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.” No, the new covenant will be this, God says through Jeremiah: “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.” God goes on to say that everyone “shall know me, from the least of them to the greatest.”

With these three expressions of covenant relationships, we can see a progression of the people’s awareness of God, an awareness that gets closer and closer to the individual believer. The covenants move from (a) the promise of future generations and land to (b) the right way to live as a people in community to (c) the knowledge of God alive in the heart of each person. Viewed in this way, the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ makes sense. The people experience God coming closer and closer with each covenantal relationship, until God is walking among them in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. And what did Jesus do if not call people back to the transformational way of living deeply and authentically into covenantal relationships with God?

Indeed, in the Gospel, Jesus calls people to renew their covenantal walks with God. Those walks had become rote, mechanical, no longer able to stimulate the kind of transformation God yearned for. Then Jesus came along, a living embodiment of the promises of God, and he called people back into lifegiving relationship with God.

And not just back then. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus continues to call us back into that same lifegiving relationship. We are inheritors of the covenants God made with the people so long ago, first through Abraham, then Moses, then Jeremiah. Jesus did not supersede these covenants; he showed us how to live deeply into them. In our own day, we can, with God’s help, embrace again the covenantal relationship because we, too, have God’s instructions written on our hearts.

The Episcopal Church created the Baptismal Covenant back in the 1970s as a way to help us fulfill our mission as a people called and sent out by God into the world to work for healing and reconciliation, justice and peace. We have been talking about this covenant in our Adult Forum for the last six weeks, and I commend it to you. You can find it on page 304 of the Book of Common Prayer. Rather than talking more about the Baptismal Covenant today, I’d like to spend the second half of this sermon speaking about two very specific ways we can live out our covenantal relationship with God right now.

The first concerns the advent of Artificial Intelligence. The current form of AI is not “intelligence” in the sense of “consciousness.” AI is not self-conscious (yet). Rather, AI is a vast web of algorithmic models that “learn” by integrating all of the data that humans produce. Because AI “trains” by studying human creations and because the algorithms AI uses began as human-written code, AI necessarily includes all of the biases, historical injustices, and modern prejudices that perpetuate unjust systems in the world. Added to this embedded bias are AI’s lack of emotional capacity and AI’s ability to generate false narratives, especially through deepfake audio and video, which is getting harder and harder to distinguish from the real thing. Taken together, AI enables a perfect storm of malicious content, uncoupled from any baseline morality. 

Our response to this scary new horizon reflects our covenant relationship as we practice compassion and truth-telling in our work for justice. We look for the real in the midst of the artificial. We challenge false narratives by embracing fact–based reporting and human-generated content. We train ourselves to be aware of our biases in order to move past them in our personal and collective relationships. We spend time outdoors where we can interact with real things like trees and birds and rain.

The second way we can live out our covenantal relationship with God right now is by proclaiming Gospel values in the face of increasingly extreme rhetoric. Throughout history, one of the primary ways to gain power has been to scapegoat an underprivileged group, blaming them for the problems in society as a way to bring the rest of the people together. We see this pattern right now with the scapegoating of two primary groups: immigrants and transgender people. Immigrants – both legal residents and undocumented people – are being targeted right now and reduced to the pieces of their identities like language, skin color, and country of origin. While people across the political spectrum agree that immigration reform needs to happen, what is occurring today has nothing to do with reform and everything to do with creating an “other” to coalesce against. The same is true with the scapegoating of transgender people. Being transgender is not a new phenomenon – transgender and gender nonconforming people have been recorded in the histories of many human groups across history and are found across the world, not just in our country. Neither are transgender people an existential threat to ways of expressing gender identity that feel more comfortable to most of us.¹

In both cases, concerning immigrants and transgender people, we live out our covenantal relationship with God by affirming their essential humanity, their dignity, and their right to live free from the fear of violence. We follow Jesus to the margins of society and recognize that wherever Jesus goes becomes the center of society. We embrace the many biblical directives to allow immigrants to live safely in our land and to protect the widow and the orphan, which is biblical shorthand for those who are most vulnerable in society. Those of us who are insulated from violence can use our voices to advocate for those who are afraid to speak up. Those of us who are able can walk alongside those who are most vulnerable and help them know they are not alone.

As we renew our covenantal relationship with God, just as Jeremiah did in his day, I invite you to take seriously the biblical witness that seeks truth and justice, that protects the vulnerable, that puts down the mighty from their seat and exalts the humble and meek. Jesus calls us over the tumult to walk in his covenantal way. Jesus’ Way rejects the concepts of the enemy and the other. Jesus’ Way moves to the margins and centers them. Jesus’ Way brings all people back into right relationship with God and one another. With God’s help, we will follow Jesus’ lifegiving Way together.

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Photo by Mubinuddoula Arefin on Unsplash.

1. Thank you to my friend Rowan who helped me nuance the language in the paragraph about transgender people and gave me some good suggestions across the rest of the sermon. ↩︎