Investing in Hope

Ordinary Time XXVI; September 30, 2007

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15

Sometimes the very important things seem as mundane as a property transaction. God commands Jeremiah to invest in hope and he does it.

Here is the situation. The Prophet Jeremiah has been warning the government and people of Judah – not that anybody has been paying attention – that if they continued on their current course, then the nation would fall. That may not seem strange to you – after all, nations rise and fall with depressing regularity – but imagine their situation. They have been an identifiable nation for several hundred years, the last 400 with a consistent ruling dynasty, the House of David. Furthermore, their God – who happens also to be our God – had made their capital Jerusalem the city “where my name abides” and had made several promises to protect the city for God’s sake, for God’s sake. So for a prophet to claim that the city would be overthrown – the temple torn down, the walls destroyed, the leaders taken to exile – would sound both treasonous and blasphemous at the same time. Yet that is what Jeremiah claimed.

The government wanted to shut Jeremiah up without actually killing him, so they were keeping him under confinement in the palace. He could receive visitors and he could continue writing, but he wasn’t allowed to leave. Meanwhile, what Jeremiah had been predicting was coming true: the army of Babylon had invaded and had captured the entire kingdom, with the exception of the capital, Jerusalem. They had Jerusalem under siege and were patiently starving the inhabitants into submission. Several months after the events in today’s story, the army of Babylon finally took the city, tearing down its walls, burning down the Temple and destroying the rest of the buildings, and carrying all the leading citizens, including the King, into exile.

But that’s in the future. In the meantime, Jeremiah has a vision. In this vision, his cousin Hanamel comes to him proposing that Jeremiah buy his field from him. Now, to buy a field in Anathoth at this point is about the craziest waste of money you can think of. Anathoth has already been captured by the Babylonians; Jeremiah is stuck in Jerusalem under guard and under siege; how is he to make any use of such a field? You might as well buy a piece of farmland just before it’s flooded to make a lake.

But when Hanamel does show up to ask Jeremiah to buy the field, the Prophet realizes that his vision must have come from the Lord and he buys the field. Now, the way property worked in ancient Israel and Judah, it was not just land that you made use of for your economic purposes. It was part of your family heritage. So if you needed or wanted to sell a piece of land, you sold it to your next-of-kin, in order to keep it in the family. Jeremiah was next-of-kin, so he was Hanamel’s target.

There’s no telling why Hanamel wanted to sell. Perhaps he was hoping to raise a little cash and thought his cousin, being a prophet, would have no sense about such things and would buy some worthless land. God-guys are an easy mark, you know. Or perhaps God gave Hanamel a vision also, because God was trying to make a point here. At any rate, Jeremiah’s secretary, Baruch, kept a precise record of the transaction so everyone could see that it was done with all the legal niceties. It’s clear from the Book that Jeremiah did not buy the land because he thought he was getting a good deal or because he wanted to do his cousin a favor but because God told him to do it; God wanted to make a point.

When I was in my first pastorate I was working in a town that had dim prospects for the future. The Phoenix newspaper did a feature story on our town and the one next to it, entitled “Portrait of Two Towns Dying.” I bought a piece of land in town in order to build a house on it, saying that I wanted to make an investment to show my commitment to the town. Sometime later I was telling some colleagues about it; I said I wanted to do something like the Prophet Jeremiah did, buying that piece of land. They told me that didn’t sound very Presbyterian. Then I added that the sellers were giving it to me for $100 plus assumption of the payments. They said, “Now, that sounds Presbyterian!” I got a good deal.

Jeremiah did not get a good deal. He didn’t pay much for the land, but then again, he probably didn’t buy all that much. Hanamel was a Levite, John Calvin suggests, and so this field wasn’t enough to plant crops on, just enough to graze a cow on, or maybe two. But it was not a good deal to buy land that was occupied by the Babylonians just as the country is about to fall and deeds would be no good for anyone, any more. Jeremiah did it because God told him to, and he made sure the deed was recorded so everyone would know, and also made sure a copy of the deed was hidden away where it could be found some time in the unknown future.

And there we come to the point of the transaction. Sure, their way of life is about to be destroyed. They will lose their country, many will lose their lives, and the entire future will be terribly uncertain. But, “Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.” God does not mean to make an end of them; he means to wipe the slate clean, do away with the injustice-encrusted wickedness that Judean society had become and give them a taste of exile, but he means also to bring them home and give them a chance to start over. Things may never be what they had been during the Golden Age, but “houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”

Sometimes hope makes itself known by simple acts of ordinary life. An old man plants a tree that he does not expect to see grow tall, but he hopes someone will, perhaps his granddaughter. You have a child, and you expect to put two decades of effort, love and money into the project, and you have no guarantee that you have not given birth to a serial killer or a corporate raider, but you hope. You buy a piece of property, or you join a civic organization, or you start reading to children, not because it looks like a good deal or will pad your resume, but because you want to give some hope. Or maybe even, like Jeremiah, God tells you to do it.

The sign you should remember that God has given to invest in hope is the big investment God has made. God obviously has a great deal of hope for us, since God has invested in us. How amazingly stupid to give a piece of yourself to a world of people who will mostly ignore you, largely misunderstand you, frequently misuse your teaching to make themselves feel better or to maintain their power or to exclude others, and will ultimately nail you to a Cross because you dare to question their ways and offer them a better way. It seems the height of stupidity, right alongside buying a piece of land that the enemy has just overrun.

Yet God would hardly ask his Prophet to do something that God is not willing to do as well. Although Jeremiah would never live to see the fulfillment of his hope for Judah, he bought a piece of property simply because God told him to. And then God, still waiting for the fulfillment of his hopes for us, has invested his living and dying in us, through Jesus Christ. Imagine the hope God must have in you and me, to have invested so much.

Generous God, your call may seem strange, but never stranger than what you yourself have done. Thank you for the gift of hope; show us how to invest ourselves in the way Jesus Christ has invested in us. Amen.

Robert A. Keefer

Westminster Presbyterian Church

Clarinda, Iowa