How would you respond if you saw the following ad in the
classifieds? "For sale: One field,
suitable for growing wheat or barley. Family property. Convenient location. In
need of some TLC. Currently in use as campground by invading army. Price negotiable.
All offers considered." Would you respond to that ad? I confess that I
probably wouldn’t. After all, why buy a field when an enemy army is occupying
the territory? Life doesn’t go on as usual during a war, nor for a long time
afterwards. Who would buy a field under those circumstances?
The answer is that Jeremiah would – and did. The scripture
reading this morning tells us that Jeremiah’s cousin Hanamel came to him and
asked him to buy a field just like that. It was family property; and it would
be lost to them if someone outside the family gained control of it. The trouble
was, that someone was the Babylonian army; and they were well on the way to
controlling not only that field, but the whole country of Judah! Why in the
world would Jeremiah buy a field in circumstances like that? To understand the
answer, you need a little background.
The prophet Jeremiah had been a thorn in the side of Judah’s
King Zedekiah for years. The king, his generals, and everybody else in
Jerusalem thought that their city was invincible. After all, the Temple of the
Lord stood there; and surely God wouldn’t let his Temple fall to an enemy army!
But Jeremiah loudly and publically proclaimed otherwise. God wasn’t happy with
the people’s behavior, he said. They relied more on their foreign allies than
they did on God. And one of these days… one of these days… the chickens were
going to come home to roost. God would give their nation up to one of the
foreign nations that they relied on so much. Jerusalem would fall. And now, in
today’s scripture reading (Jeremiah 32:1-2. 6-15), Jeremiah’s prophecy is
coming true. Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, has had enough of Judah’s
attempt to play both ends against the middle; and he has sent his army to wipe
out Jerusalem once and for all. As the story takes place, they are besieging
the city. Crack troops are camped all around Jerusalem. No one can come into
the city, and no one can go out. Although Jerusalem has a reliable internal
water supply, their food is running low. At some point, the city will either
surrender or become so weak that the Babylonian army will breach the walls with
little resistance. Anybody with a grain of sense can see that; and Jeremiah
says so. But the king insists on hanging on to the traditional belief that God
will defend his city against all comers – Babylon included – and so, he throws
Jeremiah in jail. He just doesn’t want to hear the truth.
So, I ask again… why would Jeremiah buy a field under
circumstances like that? After all, Jeremiah was the ultimate realist. He knew
that Babylon’s victory was certain. (And, in fact, they did conquer Jerusalem
not long after this story takes place.) What in the world was Jeremiah
thinking? Jeremiah was thinking that, no matter how hopeless the situation,
there is always hope in God. Remember that God told him to buy the field from
his cousin as a sign of hope in the future. After he bought the field and gave
the deed to the scribe Baruch to record, Jeremiah proclaimed, “This is what the
Lord Almighty, the God of Israel says: ‘Houses, fields, and vineyards will
again be bought in this land.’” Now, he never used the word “hope.” But hope is
exactly what Jeremiah had. And it’s important to understand where Jeremiah put
his hope. He didn’t have hope in the king’s ability to hold out against
Babylon. He certainly didn’t have hope that Babylon might have compassion and
spare Jerusalem! No, Jeremiah had hope in the god of his fathers who promised
to bring his nation through warfare and exile back to their families and to their
ancestral lands. Although the circumstances appeared to be hopeless, Jeremiah’s act proclaimed that in
God, we always have hope. Despite the presence of the Babylonian army and the
immanent destruction of Jerusalem, Jeremiah’s act began to reclaim the
neighborhood for God’s people.
God calls us today, just as God called Jeremiah, to reclaim
the neighborhoods in our lives. And there are a lot of neighborhoods that need
to be reclaimed, aren’t there? Some are the burned-out, tumble-down, boarded-up
neighborhoods of our inner cities. There’s precious little hope to be found
there. Whole families exist on welfare for generations, because there are no
jobs to be found there; and what work exists is low-wage and menial. You can’t
support a family on that kind of job, much less get ahead. Some are the affluent, upper-class neighborhoods
of the suburbs. Does that surprise you? Think for a moment: where is the hope
of most owners of sprawling McMansions with a golf course view? Why, it’s in
the stock market… or in the family inheritance. Surely the recent economic
disaster teach us that money is the worst
place to put our hope! And some of the neighborhoods that we need to reclaim
aren’t neighborhoods at all. They are groups of people – battered women, bullied
students, homeless men who have given up on life. Hope? Not for them.
God calls us today, just as God called Jeremiah, to spread
hope through our actions. The good news is that God is with us always, and that
God will make a way through even the most difficult circumstances! And we are the ones who are called to take
action against all those situations that drive hope out of the lives of
millions of people. Now, we don’t have to find an abandoned property in the
middle of west Dayton and renovate it. Sure, some Christians do that. But
others reclaim the neighborhood by working for Habitat for Humanity… or speaking
out against laws that restrict opportunity instead of expanding it… or maybe
even intervening if they see someone being bullied. Hope, you know, begins
small. But once it starts, it doesn’t stay that way for long.
On the way home from the east coast on one of our recent
trips, Fred and I stopped by the Flight 93 memorial in western Pennsylvania.
You will recognize it as the site where the third hijacked plane crashed on 9/11.
The courageous actions of its passengers prevented that plane from destroying
the Capitol building or possibly even the White House in Washington, D.C. on
that terrible day. All of those passengers were killed in the crash. On the
site is a long, white marble wall engraved with the names of the brave people on
that plane who sacrificed their lives to prevent the success of terrorism. At
the base of the wall lay items that visitors leave there – a rosary… a teddy
bear… a single rose. One item caught my eye and my heart. It was a set of
military dog tags. Why did a visitor choose to leave dog tags? Did it signify
that the passengers on Flight 93 were as brave as any member of our military
forces? Did it honor the sacrifice that civilian passengers on a commercial
airline aren’t supposed to have to make? We’ll never know. But to me, it was a
symbol of hope – hope that one day, we can give away all our dog tags. On that day,
all of creation will be the neighborhood. On that day, we will care as much
about people who are different than we are as we will about people who are the
same. On that day, we won’t talk about “we” and “them,” but about “all of us.” On
that day, God has promised that there will be no more hate, no more terrorism,
no more war. On that day, all the money that we spend to build tanks and drones
and missiles will be used to sustain life instead of to destroy it. On that
day, there won’t be any more need for dog tags.
That is the hope that we are called to share. May its
fulfillment come soon!
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