Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday September 25, 2022
Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 32:1-15
On Sunday mornings, we usually follow the Revised Common Lectionary – this is a 3-year cycle of bible readings that are used across many different denominations around the world. Each Sunday, they give you a reading from somewhere in the Old Testament, a Psalm reading, a reading from the Epistles, and a reading from one of the gospels.
This week, I was listening to my favourite lectionary podcast, The Pulpit Fiction Podcast, and when they came to the Jeremiah reading, they said, “let’s be honest, no one is going to be preaching on this passage this week. After all, you’ve got a beloved parable with Lazarus and the rich man, and you’ve got a great stewardship passage in 1 Timothy. And then you have Jeremiah with a real estate transaction outlined in tedious detail. No one is going to preach Jeremiah this week!”
And listening to this, my first thought was “don’t go dissing my favourite passage!” Back in my first semester at AST, in my Old Testament Foundations course, we each had to choose a 15-20 verse passage to work on for our final paper, and we could choose it from anywhere in the Old Testament, and I went straight for Jeremiah, chapter 32, where Jeremiah buys a field.
I love this story, but I admit that it doesn’t make any sense without the background of what is going on at this point in the story.
Jeremiah is in Jerusalem, and the time stamp at the beginning of the story – in the tenth year of the reign of King Zedekiah – this tells us exactly when it was happening. And any reader coming to this story after the fact will know the historic significance of this date.
Ancient Israel was always a tiny country surrounded by superpowers. In the time of Moses, they had been enslaved by the Egyptian empire. Just as they established themselves in the promised land, they were surrounded by the Assyrian Empire. This empire was replaced by the Babylonian Empire. Once the Babylonian Empire fell, it was the Persian Empire, and then the Greek Empire, and by the time of Jesus, it was the Roman Empire who was in charge.
In the tenth year of the reign of King Zedekiah, the northern part of ancient Israel had fallen to the Assyrians a generation ago, and Jerusalem had been filled with refugees from the north. Then the Babylonians had made their move and had taken over most of the southern part Ancient Israel, and they made their way to the very gates of the city of Jerusalem.
In the tenth year of the reign of King Zedekiah, the city of Jerusalem was filled with people who had fled their homes outside of the city, and the city itself was under siege. Within a couple of months, the city was going to fall to the Babylonians, the temple which was considered to be the home of God was going to be destroyed, and any survivors were going to be carted off to exile in Babylon. They were going to be without their homes, without their community, without their city, without their God.
Things were not good at this point in time. So what does Jeremiah, the prophet do? God has told him that things are bad now, but they are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better; but God has also told Jeremiah that things will eventually get better. And Jeremiah trusts God. And Jeremiah goes out and buys a field. Jeremiah doesn’t say, “Yeah, God, I trust you and all, but let me go and prepare my home and my family for exile.” Instead, in the middle of a siege and on the verge of exile, Jeremiah goes out and buys a piece of land. He trusts that a time will come when he or his descendants will be able to use this land.
To me, this is an ultimate act of hope. It isn’t just a thinking hope or a feeling hope, but a doing sort of hope. When life is good, we don’t need hope, but it’s when things are at their absolute worst that hope says to us, no matter how bad things are right now, they are going to get better. Even if things are going to get worse before they get better, they Will. Get. Better.
And for Jeremiah’s people, things did get better – the story did turn around – but it took a couple of generations for this to happen. 70 years after going into exile, the people were allowed to return to their land and rebuild their cities and rebuild the temple. Jeremiah didn’t have a chance to use the field that he bought, but his descendants did.
In the Revised Common Lectionary, this fall, there is a thread of hope woven through the readings, and that is the thread that we are going to be following most weeks this fall, bouncing between the Old and the New Testaments. I think that hope is something that our world desperately needs to hear at this moment in time, and not the airy-fairy wishful-thinking sort of hope, but the living, active sort of hope that Jeremiah demonstrates for us this week.
Because when I look around the world, I see so many reasons to fall into despair. I listen to CBC radio a lot, and on Wednesday I heard part of The Current in the morning. The focus was on the war in Ukraine, and they played a clip from the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres speaking to the General Assembly. Guterres said:
“Let’s have no illusions. We are in rough seas. A winter of global discontent is on the horizon. A cost of living crisis is raging. Trust is crumbling. Inequalities are exploding. And our planet is burning. People are hurting, with the most vulnerable suffering the most.”
It's not a siege and exile, but between a war in Europe, 2 ½ years of global pandemic, out-of-control inflation, our country struggling to come to terms with our colonial past, and now a devastating hurricane on top of it all… the pain of the present moment, to me, has a lot of resonance with the pain of Jeremiah’s time and place.
Which means that the question I have to ask is – what is going to be our equivalent of buying a field?
Can we trust God when God promises us that even if things get worse before they get better, they will eventually get better? Can we trust the Easter message that says that Good Friday doesn’t last forever but is always followed by resurrection?
And if so, how are we going to live out this hope? What can we do right now to show to the world that we trust with every part of our being that things will turn around, even if, as it did for Jeremiah, it takes a couple of generations to do so? What field are we going to buy?
“Meadow”
Ed Suominen on flickr
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