A Little Piece of Land

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.

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-19 (NRSV)

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.

Born to the Burden and Beyond

Milton Martin, better known as Milty to everybody who knows him, was looking at a picture of himself as a child and not liking what he saw. His mother loved it because to her it was a reminder of that brief period of time when Milty had been a child. The little boy bouncing up and down if you even hinted at a trip to go get ice cream. The little boy with the gap-toothed grin always waiting on a visit from the tooth fairy. Those two themes sort of came together in the picture because it was a picture of a 7-year-old Milty standing in the backyard of their home on a summer afternoon, face lathered in Marsh Mud ice cream with a huge gaping smile. It wasn’t quite as bad as the naked baby in the bathtub pictures most parents harbor in their homes, but for Milty, who was now 22 years old, it might as well have been.

It was Saturday night. If he were back in Richmond, where he was going to college at VCU, he would be out with friends or playing games on his roommate’s new X Box or having some great philosophical discussion over questions like, “What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about?” Instead he was back home in Mattaponi, waiting for his mother to return from a dinner, wondering what Tara Tucker was up to, and staring at the mantelpiece over the fireplace. That’s where the embarrassing picture was.

That’s also where his mother kept his 8^th grade basketball trophy and a funny little ceramic statue she had once made. It was fairly roughly done and all in an interesting shade of green, but you could make out two figures in it—one a man with a stethoscope around his neck, the other a small child which the man was holding aloft. Milty had never understood the statue, but it had been there his whole life.

Now all of the stuff on the mantel just reminded him of how hard it was to come back home. The transition to college hadn’t been easy. He’d had to work his way there through community college and lots of odd jobs. Once he got there, the course work didn’t come easily, even though he was a good student. But through it all there had been an excitement that he hadn’t known before. He was challenged, but he could feel himself growing, could feel his whole world stretching and expanding, could feel like he was finally discovering what it was like to be him, on his own, making his own decisions, charting his own future.

Coming home was like going back in time now. He liked Mattaponi. He had enjoyed growing up here. He still got along pretty well with his mom. But he didn’t want to go back to the snaggle-tooth days, didn’t want to be reminded of the times when he was dependent on other people for everything; didn’t want to be a child anymore. And as well-meaning as everybody in his hometown was, they had a hard time believing that their little Milty was all grown up. They weren’t quite ready to let him be the adult he knew he was becoming. And that included his mom.

Milty checked his phone for texts. None. Then he stared back at the mantel, bored. That’s when his mom came in the house. “Milty,” she said, “anything moving on that mantel?”

“I wish there were something moving. It’s a pretty slow night around here. How was your dinner? I didn’t hear any bagpipes.”

Magdalena, after fifteen years as a single parent, had finally been out on a date. Angus McPherson had invited her out to the annual Tartan Day celebration at the firehouse. It was a wonderful occasion when all the folks who had or imagined they had Scottish blood running in their veins would get together to play bagpipes, wear kilts, sing “My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean,” and, of course, to eat haggis, that Scottish delicacy that looks like an oblong balloon and is made out of…well, it’s best I not mention what it’s made of, but let’s just say that someone once described it as a sheep turned inside out, and that’s not far from the truth. At any rate, that’s where Magdalena and Angus had been, although the tradition was relatively new in Mattaponi and the celebrations tended to be less than authentic.

“Oh, Milty,” his mom said. “The bagpiper came, but I wish he hadn’t. He had some minor surgery yesterday and the anesthesia hadn’t fully worn off, so when he played ‘Auld Lang Syne’ it sounded like a goat trapped in barbed wire fence. You know, Milty, there is no more beautiful sound in the world than the sound of a bagpipe…hitting the accordion at the bottom of the trashcan.”

“Sounds like a painful experience, Mom.”

“And that’s not even the worst of it, Milty! T.P. Tolliver was supposed to fix the haggis, but he forgot to get to the butcher’s yesterday and, you know, it’s the centerpiece of the dinner. Well, at the last minute he substituted an old football. Not that I really wanted to eat any anyway, but still…”

“So the date was a bust?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” Magdalena had a twinkle in her eye. “Angus promised me dinner again next week, this time with no sporting goods or wounded goats. But what about you? You came all the way home for the weekend and I waltzed out on you. I hope you haven’t been too bored.”

“Well…” Milty’s voice trailed off.

“Why did you come home this weekend, Milty? Not that I’m complaining.”

“I’m not sure myself, Mom. I guess I wanted to tell you about a big decision I’ve made, even though I’m not too comfortable with it myself yet.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, you know I’ve been trying to sort out my major and all. I don’t know how in the world we’ll ever pay for it, but, Mom, I think I want to go pre-med. I think I’m going to be a doctor.”

Magdalena’s eyes lit up and she smiled a smile that seemed to say, “I knew it!” But she didn’t say that. What she said was “What brought this on?”

“I can’t say for sure. It wasn’t like I sat down and wrote down all the pros and cons. It wasn’t even that I’m doing super well in my biology and chem classes. I just have this sense that it’s what I’m supposed to be doing. I’ve been fighting it. I don’t really want to go to school for the next ten years. I know I don’t want to do all the extra jobs to get me through and take on a lifetime of debt. I just kept thinking about Grace and Isaiah Gilmore. They went to med school and they did something really wonderful with it, going off to Bolivia as medical missionaries. I want to do something to help children, too, like I’m doing with that child care center in Richmond volunteering. But more than that, too.”

“Sounds like you’ve gotten a call,” Maggie said.

“A call? What are you talking about, Mom?”

“You know, like a prophet or a disciple in the Bible. You got a call from God.”

“This is hard enough as it is, Mom. Don’t make it into a mission from God.”

“But, of course, it’s a mission from God, Milty. This didn’t just appear out of the blue. You didn’t just decide to do this. You’ve been meant for this.”

“What do you mean I didn’t just decide to do this? I just decided this week, Mom. That’s why I came home.”

“Milty, you didn’t look at that mantelpiece long enough. Go pick up that statue and bring it to me.”

Milty was totally confused and a little irritated that his mother was talking to him like he didn’t know what he was saying and now ordering him around. But he went to the mantel and got the weird green statue and brought it to his mother.

“I never told you this, Milty, but I made this while I was pregnant with you. All the time I was pregnant I had the most incredible dreams and I decided I needed to get them out somehow, so I took some pottery lessons and made a few little figures like this. Most of them were pretty sad looking. Some of them broke. But I always liked this one. After you were born, I took a marker and I wrote on the bottom of it.” She carefully turned the statue over. “It’s kind of worn out over 22 years, but you can still make it out. See what I wrote there?”

Milty looked at the pale black lettering on the base of the figure and made out the letters: M-I-L-T-O-N, his name. His name was on the bottom of the figure of the doctor and the child. He looked up at Magdelana. “But which one am I?”

“Well, I always thought you were the child, Milty. I never understood the doctor part. It was just part of my dream. But all of a sudden, I’m beginning to think you’re the one with the stethoscope. Milty, I think you have been on this course for a long time.”

Milty didn’t know what to say. He was speechless and then he was angry. “No. No way, Mom. That’s a great story and it kind of gives me goose bumps, but I’m not going to let you take away the work I’ve done to get to this point. I mean, all that struggle has to mean something. You can’t tell me that my future has been sitting on this shelf all along, gathering dust, waiting for me to wake up and smell the Betadine. What kind of call is that if it ignores everything that’s happened to me for 22 years? Do you think God just determines everything for us? No, I want to believe I had something to do with this!”

Magdalena looked at her son who now towered over her. Behind him she saw the photo of the chocolate ice cream mask on the beautiful child, but in front of her was someone no less special, but no longer a child. She put her finger gently to his lips. She shook her head. “Milty, when you were born, you couldn’t talk. You cried and I often wondered what you were trying to say. When you got older you started to copy me. You’d toddle around the house saying, ‘What’s the story here?’ just because you heard me saying it. When you learned to speak on your own, you still used my words, but suddenly they were yours. You found your voice--your own, unique voice—and suddenly my words had a whole new meaning because of what you put into them.

“Just because I had a dream doesn’t mean your struggle was meaningless, Milty. It just means that now the dream is yours.”

The next day Milty went with his mother to the Mattaponi United Methodist Church. They were having a special service because the church had just bought a new electronic organ and they were baptizing the Tolliver’s new baby girl. The organ was amazing. The church had never had an organ before and this one could do everything. Hazel Jenson, the choir director, could even play through a song and record it so that on Sunday she could press a button on a remote and the organ would play itself while she directed the choir. She had done that for this consecration service and when the time came for the choir to sing she pulled out her remote and pressed a button. Everyone stared at the organ, waiting for it to spring to life. Nothing happened. Hazel pressed the button again. Still nothing. But this time T.P. Tolliver, who was sitting by the window, called out, “Hazel, I think you’ve got the wrong remote. I just saw the trunk door fly open on your Buick.” Hazel turned bright red, but she found the right remote and this time the organ impressed everybody.

A little later, Rev, Eleazar Filbert was standing by the baptismal font holding little Constance Tolliver. He looked out at the congregation and said, “This is a crazy thing we’re doing here today. We’re going to take this water and place it on this child’s head and what we’re saying is, ‘Constance, God loves you and God accepts you just as you are.’ Now that’s a daring thing to say to a baby that can’t even turn herself over yet. Who knows what she’ll turn out to be?

“And how will she feel that she has been marked in this way? Before she could choose it for herself? Before she gets a chance to exercise her free will?

“But you know what? She’s going to have free will because God has claimed her. She’s going to be able to choose life because God has chosen her. She’s going to be free to be who she was meant to be because God has known this child since before she was born, and God is not going to let her go. When she gets older, because all of you are going to help her remember this day, she’ll be able to claim God’s love for herself. But today, before she even has a chance to prove herself, we’re going to baptize her, because even today she is God’s own child. And so are you.”

When he said those last words, Rev. Filbert seemed to be looking right at Milty. This kind of took him back for a minute. He looked over at Magdalena who had noticed it, too. She just smiled. And Milton Martin left that service a little more confused than he had been before he arrived. He drove back to Richmond that afternoon thinking about his mother’s dream and his preacher’s glance and he still felt a little angry that no one could accept that he was making decisions on his own now. He was an adult now and didn’t like to think he was in the same position as Constance Tolliver, even though the preacher made it sound like he might be.

But he wasn’t as angry as he had been. And he had to admit that there was something comforting about trusting that God had marked him from the moment of his birth to be something special. He felt just a little more assured that underneath all the hard decisions he had to make and all the struggles he was going through there was an intention, a goal. He began to think that maybe he was able to speak now in words that were as ancient as God’s own word of creation, and yet which now were his. And he began to believe that whoever he became he would always be God’s.

When he unpacked his overnight bag in the dorm room he found that his mother had placed a box in it. He knew what it was before he even opened it. Sure enough, inside, underneath the bubble wrap, was a roughly done green statue of two figures. He put it on his desk next to his computer monitor. He stared at it for a few moments and for the first time realized that both the doctor and the child were smiling.

“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I set you apart.” Those were God’s words to the prophet Jeremiah and they are God’s words to you and me. We can be many things, but the thing we are meant to be is God’s own. Thanks be to God.

Jeremiah 1:4-10

The word of the Lord came to me saying:

“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you

And before you were born I made you holy;

As a prophet to the nations I appointed you.”

I said, “Ah, Adonai Yahweh, look, I don’t know how to speak because I am just a youth.”

But Yahweh said to me:

“Don’t say, ‘I am just a youth;’

because you will go to all to whom I send you

and you will speak all that I command you.

Don’t be afraid of them,

because I am with you to deliver you, says Yahweh.”

Then Yahweh put out his hand and touched my mouth. Yahweh said to me:

“Now, I have put my words in your mouth.

See, this day I have set you over nations and kingdoms

to pluck up and to pull down,

to destroy and to overthrow,

to build and to plant.”