Buy That Field

Buy That Field (September 30, 2007)

“Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land” Jeremiah 32:15

In 2001 a few Sundays following 9/11 the Scripture lesson was the passage read this morning by Andres from Jeremiah. That was a bleak Sunday in 2001, we were all shaken to our souls, our city was in mourning, 3000 people who went to work that day didn’t come home or died fighting the flames and the horror, we were all brought to a standstill. And here was this marvelous passage from Jeremiah. It couldn’t have come at a better time.

The prophet Jeremiah is one of the greatest prophets in the Old Testament. He has often been compared to Jesus, who lived 600 years later. He liked simplicity in religion and he distrusted formalism. He came from the country but he was called upon to spend much of his ministry in the city. He knew rejection and disfavor even in his own family. He never married and had no one to help him when he ran into opposition. In Jesus’ time the world power was Rome, in Jeremiah’s it was Babylon, where Baghdad is today. He had a strong inner sense of God’s call and he preached that the most important thing was not the fulfillment of legalism and ritual but to have God’s law implanted on the heart. In the end, just like Jesus, he was considered a failure and he died in Egypt after much suffering.

The cross of Jesus reminds us that Jesus died for our sins. It also stands for the power of God to overcome death by raising Jesus on the third day. It is thus the world’s most powerful symbol of hope. Believers are lifted spiritually every time they come in a church and see the cross, or they see it on a church steeple. It proclaims both the love and the power of God: “Lift high the cross the love of God proclaim.” It is thus the world’s greatest symbol of hope.

In the Old Testament there is Jeremiah’s field..

There is the army of Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar come to attack Jerusalem. They are suddenly besieging Jerusalem itself. Panic has set in. Ahead is certain calamity and the captivity Jeremiah had forseen. In these absolute darkest moments, with fear all about, what does Jeremiah do? He hears that his cousin has asked him to buy his field. Sure, a great time to buy, right? The enemy is at the gates. Disaster looms. Who is going to be in the market for a field? Jeremiah hears the word and realizes it is the word of the Lord and so he buys the field in Anathoth, his home town. “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 (who was his secretary) in the presence of my cousin Hanamel, in the presence of the witnesses who signed the deed of purchase.” Then he orders Baruch to put the deed in an earthware jar “in order that they may last for a long time.”

Why? To show that “houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”

In the notes to this passage in the New English Bible it says this is an “irrational act”. That is put it mildly. It is a crazy thing to do. Of course, everyone wants to “buy low”, but this is ridiculous. The nation itself is about to disappear. The Temple about to be destroyed. The king and his sons captured and blinded and led off to captivity. The very end of the Hebrew people themselves is in sight. And this crazy prophet is buying property in Anathoth, outside Jerusalem. “Buy that field!” Hanamel said, and Jeremiah did.

Jeremiah never lived to see anything from his field grow. He spent his last days in Egypt, with a miserable collection of fellow sufferers to whom he was a shepherd, and he ended his life in sorrow over what had become of his people. But he had done one thing which absolutely no one could forget. At the darkest hour possible, he staked his claim and bought a field and by that said more clearly than words could that God would not let his people down, God would bring them back, God would redeem – buy back – his people. They would return – as indeed they did some 70 years later – and build anew, and 600 years after that another man from the countryside would preach that God was writing a new law not on tablets of stone but on the tablets of the heart, just as Jeremiah said.

Jeremiah used his money to make an unforgettable statement about God’s future. It was a statement as well of trust, extraordinary trust, in Almighty God. The New Testament lesson from Luke is also about the use of money or rather the misuse of it. In Jesus’ story the rich man feasted sumptuously and dressed beautifully and cared nothing about the poor man at his gates. But then in the next life the situation was reversed, the poor man was in heaven resting on Abraham’s bosom, and the rich man pleaded with him from Hades. The rich man, hearing he will get no help, asks that at least someone will be sent to warn his brothers, so they will not come into this place of torment. Jeremiah used his money to make a powerful statement about trusting in God; the rich man used his money only on himself. Jesus’ condemnation couldn’t be stronger.

In a few weeks the Session will begin the Stewardship campaign for the church. The absolute wrong way to think of stewardship is “raising money for the church”. Unfortunately, this is the way it is often thought of and it leads to people thinking of stewardship as a chore. Instead, from first to last in Scripture stewardship is about the right use of what has been given to us by God for the glory of God. Stewardship is a way of expressing our trust in God and our desire to be part of doing God’s work in the world. Stewardship is a way of showing where exactly our priorities are in life and where God fits in those priorities. Stewardship is a way of weaning us away from our human tendency to think first of ourselves, just as the rich man did, and instead to think of ways to make a positive statement of trust in God and God’s future. The “stewardship season”, as it is called in churches is thus really not a chore but a great opportunity. It is not about “fund raising” but about “fund spending” -- how we use the time, talents, and treasure which in the final analysis are gifts of God which we hold but for a time and to make use of for God’s glory.

Yesterday Richard and I and Rev. Ruth and Rev Lou were in Flatbush in Brooklyn to attend a meeting of the presbytery. As always it was long, too long, but it was also wonderful to be there and to see that in this church on one of the busiest street corners in the city there is a vibrant congregation led by a pastor from Ghana, Rev. Sam Atiemo, declaring the gospel message of God’s love in Jesus Christ and ministering in many ways to its community. This is what churches at their best are called to do and they are symbols of trust in God. All around us are other kinds of symbols of a hedonistic, self-absorbed, materialistic culture, but there are also these signs of people standing for something else and working for something else and hoping for something and using their money to promote something else – trust in God and hope for God’s future and saying even at the bleakest times, as Jeremiah did, “houses and fields and vineyards will again be bought in this land.”

Charles