Yesterday was the Crystal Beach Triathlon. Daniel Hiler ran it, I swam it, and one of the students I used to work with in Charlottesville, Kristin Brubaker, was our biker, (though she did the whole thing). It was a beautiful day. A really unique event. And it reminded me again of what an interesting place the Eastern Shore is. It is the kind of place that inspires me to get a little piece of land and stay. I know there are troubles. I know these are hard times on the Eastern Shore. But I don’t think God is through with this place, this little piece of land and water, yet.
This makes me think of Jeremiah, who bought a little piece of land in the story we read for today. And it makes me think of a week in late September nine years ago when I had an argument with a radio preacher and felt convicted that God is not content with our pious words; God is ready for some action.
September 2001. If you were alive then you remember it. The towers had fallen. We had been attacked. We were beginning to talk about war in Afghanistan. I was a campus minister in Charlottesville and a part-time preacher at a small church north of town and trying to work on a PhD in theology. I don’t know who I thought I was and how I could do it all. I guess I thought I was Peter Surran.
At any rate, a few weeks after 9/11 I was going to Philadelphia for a conference at Villanova on the thought of St. Augustine. Surprise, surprise. I know you’ve never heard me talk about him, but anyway, that’s what I was doing. The trip to Philadelphia was about five hours long and I had a lot of time to listen to the radio. I listened to music, I listened to radio preachers, I listened to the news, I listened to commentators reflecting on the terrorist attacks, I argued with the commentators I didn’t like in a very loud voice—you can do that when you’re driving alone in a car—and I struggled with this text from Jeremiah, because it was up in the lectionary. What was I going to tell my congregation and my students in worship this week? What in the world would God have me say in those crazy, upside down days?
My first hint of God’s discontent came when I was almost to Philly. A music reviewer came on the radio to talk about how music had helped him through the days after the planes crashed and the towers fell in New York City. He said that he was not a very religious man, but he found himself going to church anyway in the days after the attack. He enjoyed the music. It moved him in ways that words could not. It helped him identify all those emotions he had inside that he just didn’t know how to deal with. But the words of the preacher, he said, came across as the kind of smug self-confidence that churches always seem to display. I listened to his evaluation and I felt indicted and then I felt angry.
I was thinking: Is that how the church’s reaction to the events of September 11 came across? Smug? It was really just a passing remark. He wasn’t really trying to make a big point about church language, he was just trying to point to how powerful the music was---and I understood that, and I even agreed that we had used far too many words. We hadn’t allowed for silence and music and other things that transcend words to touch us and move us. We had tried to move on with life and fill up the void we felt with more words and more activities, and I’m doing it right now as I go on this tirade—filling the air with more words—but how dare he! Smug! Does he realize…I thought…does he realize what a tremendous cost bought those words of assurance we used in prayer vigils after the event? Does he realize how much pain and suffering lie behind the words when we say things like, “Fear not, for I have overcome death.” When we say, “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid,” we’re not saying that everything is just hunky dory despite appearances to the contrary. We’re not saying that there is nothing to fear, that the world is not a scary place, that death and destruction and grief don’t get their licks and that we can be Pollyanna prophets always looking on the bright side of life as if it were just a matter of calling the glass half-full instead of half-empty. Every one of those words of confidence and hope was bought in the pain of slavery in Egypt, in the wrenching experience of exile in a strange land, in the trials of persecution in Ancient Rome, and most importantly on the wood of the cross of Calvary. Don’t tell me, Mr. Reviewer, that those words come easily, that they ignore the struggles of the world, that they turn us away from what we should really be looking at, because those words know the pain of human life and death and still they claim that the end is assured because of the crucified Christ that we serve.
It would have been fun to watch if you had pulled up beside me on the way into Philly. Me yelling at the car radio. And I realized that it wasn’t just the poor reviewer, who had no idea he was going to spark such a reaction…it wasn’t just the reviewer who was discontent—it was me, and it was God. God is not content with our pious words; God demands action. That’s when I realized how smug and self-confident my faith had really been in these weeks since all hell broke loose. It was time to put my money where my hope is.
This is where Jeremiah comes in. Because, you see, Jeremiah knows about this very problem. Whenever I think that the preaching conditions are bad for me, I remember poor Jeremiah, who was called to preach just as his country was falling apart.
Jeremiah was a prophet in the small kingdom of Judah, which was all that was left of the great King David’s great kingdom. The Northern Kingdom of Israel had been defeated and destroyed, its peoples exiled or dispossessed of land, some 150 years earlier. The kingdom that had once stretched from the land of Egypt to the headwater of the great Euphrates River, a nation that had been at the crossroads of the known world, was now reduced to a small patch of land in the hill country of Palestine, not much larger than the Eastern Shore of Virginia.
But Judah still had the king, who was a direct descendent of David. Judah, still had its independence, despite the fact that it had to pay tribute to foreign superpowers. It still had its sense of invulnerability and destiny. And Judah still had Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple, a reminder of Yahweh, its God.
Jeremiah got the plum job of going to the king and leaders of Judah, while the Babylonian army was besieging the city and declaring that it was doomed. You can imagine what a popular guy this made him. The whole country is about to go under and he’s going around saying, “The Babylonians are going to win.” Must have sounded pretty treasonous. Which is why Jeremiah ends up thrown in prison and thrown in a pit.
Jeremiah didn’t like his message. It didn’t feel like good news to him. He talks about how hard it is to have to keep talking about destruction and ruin. The only thing that keeps him talking is that it is more painful for him to try to close the message up inside, where it becomes like a fire in his bones, demanding to be released.
In this passage, Jeremiah does something absolutely amazing. Anyone who knew what he knew would have been guarding his resources for the terror to come. He knew the Babylonians would overrun the city. He knew Jerusalem would be destroyed. He knew everything they had would be lost. He should have been pulling his money out of the stock market and socking it away in precious metals. He should have been liquidating his assets before the bottom dropped out of the market. But what does Jeremiah do? He buys some land.
At ground zero, Jeremiah buys some land. It’s going to be a worthless, abandoned lot without a person even to till it. It’s going to be in a country that everyone assumed was God-forsaken and God-awful. But that’s where Jeremiah places his hope.
God tells him to do this, of course. Jeremiah was sitting in the king’s house under arrest. He hears God telling him that his cousin, Hanamel, was going to come and ask him to buy a piece of property that had been in their family for generations. And what do you know, old cuz’ Hanamel comes to him and asks him to buy a piece of property that had been in their family for generations. So Jeremiah does it. He makes a big deal about getting the appropriate witnesses, paying a fair price for the land, executing a proper deed, and placing it in an earthenware jar for safe keeping. But why? Why does he do this when the Babylonians are knocking on the door, when the world as he knows it is coming to an end, when he knew that his people and he himself were going to be exiled, either to Egypt in flight, or to Babylon by force? Buying a piece of land might seem like a not so hot investment.
Jeremiah buys the land because he knows that the destruction of Jerusalem and the Exile are not the last words to be spoken over God’s relationship with Israel. No, Jeremiah says, I am buying this property because “houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.” It’s all about hope, you see? Jeremiah is not just a prophet of doom and gloom after all. He sees the hope as well—even though he himself might not see the fruits of the future. And he is not just spouting platitudes; he is making a real investment in this future. He is placing his money and his faith in the hope that comes from God. God didn’t want his pious words; God wanted action that revealed the hope by which Jeremiah lived.
Now, I still disagree with Mr. Music Reviewer. The words that were spoken in churches and in other parts of our land in the days after September 11 were not just fond wishes for unbelievable outcomes. We weren’t just whistling in the dark. In the Christian Church we were turning back to the story that gives our lives meaning and which is behind everything we do. That story didn’t change because the world changed on that day. We still find our lives in Jesus Christ. We still live out of a kingdom of heaven that is both now and yet to come. We still are claimed and called and saved by that story that was initiated by God and begun before we ever had the opportunity to respond. That’s our story.
But it does not leave us as passive recipients of God’s grace – it moves us to action. And like Jeremiah, God calls us not to circle the wagons and pull our resources in so that we can protect what little security we feel we have remaining. God calls us to put our resources at the service of the future, believing that our hope is built on something far more lasting than we are.
What Jeremiah does is fairly risky by the financial security standards of the world. He invests in hope, in the future. He places himself where he would not be if the message he proclaimed were not true. Jeremiah would not buy property if it were not for his absolute conviction that God was not through with Israel, even at that dark moment.
We have that opportunity as well. We have the chance to place our resources and ourselves where we would not be if the good news we proclaim is not true. Because when you get right down to it, what we have committed to God, even if it’s only the brief amount of time we spend in this place of worship each week, even that makes no sense if we do not hope in a future that is different from what the world promises. We are here because we want to put our money where our hope is. And not just our money but our very lives.
God is not content with our pious words. God doesn’t want a little bit of our time or a little bit of our money like every other good works organization in our lives. This is not the PTSA or the Rotary Club. God wants everything, our whole lives, our entire hope, all of our trust in the future. And God wants us to move and act like people who have been invited to participate in the greatest work there is—the work of love. And God wants us to accept that invitation. Where’s your little piece of land? Thanks be to God.
The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD in the tenth year of King Zedekiah of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadrezzar.
At that time the army of the king of Babylon was besieging Jerusalem, and the prophet Jeremiah was confined in the court of the guard that was in the palace of the king of Judah, where King Zedekiah of Judah had confined him.
Jeremiah said, The word of the LORD came to me: Hanamel son of your uncle Shallum is going to come to you and say, "Buy my field that is at Anathoth, for the right of redemption by purchase is yours."
Then my cousin Hanamel came to me in the court of the guard, in accordance with the word of the LORD, and said to me, "Buy my field that is at Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, for the right of possession and redemption is yours; buy it for yourself." Then I knew that this was the word of the LORD. And I bought the field at Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel, and weighed out the money to him, seventeen shekels of silver. I signed the deed, sealed it, got witnesses, and weighed the money on scales.
Then I took the sealed deed of purchase, containing the terms and conditions, and the open copy; and I gave the deed of purchase to Baruch son of Neriah son of Mahseiah, in the presence of my cousin Hanamel, in the presence of the witnesses who signed the deed of purchase, and in the presence of all the Judeans who were sitting in the court of the guard. In their presence I charged Baruch, saying, Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Take these deeds, both this sealed deed of purchase and this open deed, and put them in an earthenware jar, in order that they may last for a long time. For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.
After I had given the deed of purchase to Baruch son of Neriah, I prayed to the LORD, saying: Ah Lord GOD! It is you who made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you. You show steadfast love to the thousandth generation, but repay the guilt of parents into the laps of their children after them, O great and mighty God whose name is the LORD of hosts, great in counsel and mighty in deed; whose eyes are open to all the ways of mortals, rewarding all according to their ways and according to the fruit of their doings.
You showed signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, and to this day in Israel and among all humankind, and have made yourself a name that continues to this very day.
You brought your people Israel out of the land of Egypt with signs and wonders, with a strong hand and outstretched arm, and with great terror; and you gave them this land, which you swore to their ancestors to give them, a land flowing with milk and honey; and they entered and took possession of it. But they did not obey your voice or follow your law; of all you commanded them to do, they did nothing. Therefore you have made all these disasters come upon them. See, the siege ramps have been cast up against the city to take it, and the city, faced with sword, famine, and pestilence, has been given into the hands of the Chaldeans who are fighting against it. What you spoke has happened, as you yourself can see.
Yet you, O Lord GOD, have said to me, "Buy the field for money and get witnesses" -- though the city has been given into the hands of the Chaldeans.
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