March 25, 2012
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
I can remember growing up watching cartoons that would have the character trying to decide on what is the right thing to do. On this cartoon character’s shoulders would be a little red devil telling him to be bad and on the other side would be a little angel telling him to be good. For entertainment purposes, it seems like the character always did the bad thing! We call this his conscience or lack of one.
Last year’s Youth Camp theme was “Do the Right Thing” focusing on living a moral and an ethical life. While we have the Ten Commandments written on stone tablets to guide us, there are other situations that require us to decide on doing the just thing. Some years ago, we wore those WWJD bracelets—“What Would Jesus Do?” in this particular situation?
Today’s lesson comes from the prophet Jeremiah who gives us the opportunity to reflect upon the prophetic promise that one day God’s law will be written on our hearts.
Jeremiah’s images are amazingly intimate. Most of us think of God as being that being, up in heaven, or somewhere far removed from us. But in this passage Jeremiah calls God a loving, resourceful “husband.” The “new covenant” will not be like the old covenant that was given to Moses on the distant mountain, laws that God’s people repeatedly broke. God says, “I took them by the hand” and led Israel like a parent leads a child, like a husband committed to his wife.
The context for this passage is that Jeremiah was speaking these words during a dark, difficult time in Israel. The walls of Jerusalem were in ruin. They were weeping in Babylon. Languishing in captivity, they heard this vision of a God who graciously refuses to hold our past wrongs against us. But they had found obedience to God and love of God to be difficult to sustain over a long haul. Their good intentions did not lead to results that were worthy of their good intentions.
So the Lord says, “I will be their God and they shall be my people.” I will not remain unknown to them. I will write my innermost thoughts upon their hearts. They will know me as I know them. This is the good news for today—a new covenant, the law of God that is the conscience of a Christian.
Ethical
When I was in seminary, I took a course in Christian ethics. I was taught that “ethics” happens when there is careful deliberation about your moral choices. It’s ethical if you carefully think about what you are doing. It’s “unethical” when you don’t. It’s like having the little red devil and the little angel on my shoulders debating on what’s the right thing to do.
But we know that some of the most “ethical” things we do are not carefully, deliberately thought through. In fact, some of the best behavior just seems to happen by “second nature,” as we sometimes say. In other words, it does seem that within each of us there truly is a conscience.
You have heard people asking, “Why did you behave in that way?”
Some would say, “I just follow my own little voice inside that tells me the right thing to do.” That’s an everyday understanding about the realty of conscience.
Conscience
But where does our conscience come from? Is conscience something that everyone has—an innate inner voice that would guide us if we would just listen to it? Listening to the little angel on our shoulder?
The word conscience comes from the Latin conscientia. The Latin prefix con means “together with,” while scientia means “to know.” Hence, the word, conscience means “knowing together with.”
The Greek word in the New Testament translated as conscience is the word syneidesis, which also carries a similar meaning: “to know together with, to see together with, to agree together with.”
So conscience, which we sometimes think of as innate, personal, a little voice within, doesn’t stand alone. Conscience is therefore not so much when we refuse to listen to other voices and instead listen only to our own little individual voice. Conscience is when we think with outside help!
In today’s lesson from Jeremiah, God is writing the law on the hearts of every one of the faithful, even as God once wrote the law on tablets of stone for Moses. When we speak of “conscience” we are talking about something very much like this: “law written on the hearts.”
Conscience has got to come from somewhere. It is not a law unto itself. For Christians, conscience comes from God. Our consciences, as followers of Jesus Christ, are not just a product of our environment’ they are the result of a host of ways that God gets to us and forms us, making us into certain sorts of human beings that we would not have been without the influence of God upon us.
In fact, as you sit here listening to me, I hope and pray that there is a good possibility that your conscience is being formed, strengthened, and focused for situations in the future when you may need to make an ethical decision. Besides what pastors may say in their sermons, the songs and hymns that we sing, the prayers that we say, the Lord’s Supper that we celebrate are all ways that God gets to us and forms us.
Let’s look at some biblical passages that might help us to understand this better. Paul said in Acts 24:16, “I strive always to keep my conscience clear before God and people.” Paul’s talk about striving implies that we can work on our consciences, that we can better develop our consciences.
Paul wrote to his protégé Timothy, urging him, among other things, to pursue and keep a “good conscience” (1 Timothy 1:5, 19). Paul himself was a model of this; we remember what he said to his fellow Jews in Jerusalem: “My brothers, I have fulfilled my duty to God in all good conscience to this day” (Acts 23:1).
And in 2 Corinthians 4:2 Paul says that “we commend ourselves to every person’s conscience in the sight of God,” reminding us that we exercise our consciences under God. At last year’s Youth Camp, we were working on our consciences!
Conscience is always related to something else: our parents, the early influences from family and friends on our lives, the things that have happened or not happened to us as we grew up.
I hate to tell you this but when it comes to living a good life, young adulthood is much too late to begin the formation of a good conscience. The way I see it is that most of us receive our most important moral formation as very young children. Also, our most important moral formation tends to be unconscious, without our even knowing that we are being morally formed. This is the reason why parents bring their children to be dedicated to the Lord. They invite the whole church to help the baby to become morally just. The parents in front of all of you publicly announce that they will promise to raise their child with a good conscience.
Did you know that fidelity in marriage begins in infancy? When parents, caregivers, grandparents, nannies become people whom the baby can trust, they will develop a pattern of faithfulness in marriage. Most of us learn how to be married by watching our parents being married.
Conversely, if we experience the world as an unfaithful, untrustworthy sort of place, then it is difficult for us to develop high levels of trust, no matter how well our later lives proceed. The most important training in how to be faithful in marriage is accomplished in us before age six! Now you know why Day Camp is so important in our church—it’s forming children to trust the world through the lives of the counselors and CITs and eventually, these children will develop a conscience that will lead them to live good, faithful and productive lives.
Not only can we work on developing our conscience, God works on our consciences too.
When we behave justly and faithfully in our conscience, we are fulfilling what God promised: “I will write my law on their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33).
The prophet Ezekiel says much the same thing: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26).
Paul thought this happened in Christ. He told the Corinthians, “You show that you are a letter from Christ…written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (2 Corinthians 3:3).
Three Images
Robert Solomon in his book, The Conscience: Rediscovering the Inner Compass, offers us three different images to understand what conscience is. The first is that conscience is like a sundial.
A sundial is a passive instrument that tells us what time it is. When the light is absent like at night, the sundial is useless. At night, the sundial cannot function to tell us time. The sundial’s function is totally determined by the amount of light that shines upon it.
A sundial can only provide us a roughly moral clock. No light from outside, no conscience. Could it be that our modern society is in the midst of a moral dusk and darkness, and the dimmer the social moral light becomes, the more useless the conscience becomes? If conscience is like a sundial and today’s society is morally in darkness, then conscience can’t come from just the world.
Robert Solomon said conscience is like a compass. A compass is made to point north. It operates on the basis of some larger forces at work—the electromagnetic fields created by the magnetic poles of the earth. Wherever one is, the compass can point out true north. The compass works even at night—I have a compass in my car when I get lost.
If you are an individual living in a society that is fast losing its moral directions, you can still have your moral sense working within. That is why, in history, persons have spoken out against the sins of the majority and the moral madness of the crowd.
But the compass can go wrong. The lack of regular use can render it useless because of rusting or misalignment of the parts. If a compass malfunctions, it may need recalibration or a major overhaul. In reality, many people have their conscience weakened or malfunctioning such that they do not hear its weak voice or it gives the wrong signals. During the Holocaust, people wondered what happened to their moral compass.
The third image is the GPS, a global position system that takes its position from a number of satellites orbiting the earth in fixed orbits. By taking several readings, the device can tell you where exactly you are. And the software loaded into it, can then tell the user how to get to any destination. Along the route, a GPS can also point out details like the nearest gas station, food places, and attractions to visit. But when the software is corrupted, it won’t function well. It won’t be able to read your conscience or God’s moral law.
From these three images, I find conscience as compass to be the most useful metaphor for how the conscience functions and malfunctions. When working properly, it points north. If God is like that electromagnetic field that surrounds the world, the compass as a conscience points to a true north.
True North
Our lives can be going east or west, north or south, but our conscience always pointing north to Jesus Christ gives us the moral bearing to be God’s people. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” We follow the steps of Jesus and strive to live our lives according to his will and teachings.
The conscience is designed to show moral directions. It cannot actually show us how to be reconciled with God, or how to live the new life in Christ. For that experience, we need the word of God and the Holy Spirit’s assistance. But with our conscience as a moral compass, we are on this journey of living faithful lives being reconciled by Jesus Christ that rebuilds that broken relationship that we had with God. When we fix our eyes on the Lord, we begin to see that God’s inner thoughts are being written on our hearts. We know this truth as Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
But our conscience as a compass can still fail us. The sunbursts can affect the electromagnetic waves rendering it useless. When there are great social disorders in the world, our moral compass can become confused due to the lack of using it regularly.
So how are we going to maintain our consciences, our moral compasses to be consistently in good working order? I think this is the reason why you are here this morning. Being in worship with your fellow members of the people of God, listening, reflecting, singing, praying, asking and receiving the continuing active grace of God working in your life; you are here renewing your hearts and minds in Christ.
And when that happens, Jeremiah’s promise is being fulfilled in our midst; God is graciously, intimately now writing on each of our hearts that which God once wrote on tablets of stone.
Let’s read this verse together.
Let us pray.
Almighty God, who has instilled in our hearts a desire to know you, to be with you, to love you, and to follow your way, reveal your way to us that we may faithfully walk in it, that we might obey your law, and that better obeying you we might fully love you. This we ask in the name of our dear Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who did not wait for us to come to God, but rather became God to us, for us, in us. Amen.