18^th After Pentecost Year C

Investing in Hope

Jeremiah 32: 6-15

30^th September, 2007 

     For many people, especially baseball fans, the movie Field of Dreams, is a classic. In this film, a farmer hears a voice saying, “If you build it, they will come.” He is frightened by the voice, and he is unsure of what this means. Gradually, through a series of amazing events, the farmer begins to understand this cryptic message. He is to plow under his cornfield and build a baseball field.

     His family and neighbors think he is crazy. But through his determined pursuit of what he feels he is literally called to do, he comes to realize that this field is a way of making dreams come true. The farmer completes his “field of dreams” and finds his peace. He builds the ball field and the final scene shows a line of hundreds of cars driving through the corn coming to this special place to see a game featuring stars from the early period of the game.

    The prophet Jeremiah's field of dreams was near a place called Anathoth. His family and neighbors surely thought he was crazy for investing in this field. But, the truth is, most people probably already thought Jeremiah was crazy even before he bought his field of dreams.

    As a real estate and financial analyst, the prophet Jeremiah would have to be considered a contrarian. He swam against the tide. Just as things seemed to be going perfectly for his home country, Judah, Jeremiah was preaching gloom and doom. Just as the tiny nation of Judah seemed to be reaching economic independence, Jeremiah was preaching gloom and doom. Judah had pretended that nothing could stop their prosperity. God was on the throne in the temple of Jerusalem and nothing could go wrong. Except that God doesn't pay much attention to property values.

   The people had turned from their faithful dependence upon God for their daily bread.

They had presumed upon God's goodness and turned God's promises into entitlements.

They took God for granted. Again and again, the bible tells us that is one thing God cannot stand. So right in the middle of these prosperous times Jeremiah brings word that the economy will fail and property values will crater. And worse, Judah will be overrun by a foreign power. They will lose everything. Jeremiah brings bad news in good times.

    Jeremiah was good at bringing bad news. Do you know the word jeremiad? It means a doleful and thunderous denunciation. That word was created from the name Jeremiah.

You get the idea that Jeremiah never had a smile on his face. Even in prosperous times for Judah, he was not your everyday cheerful, friendly, local preacher. He was always launching into a jeremiad.

     There was nothing in need of denouncing that Jeremiah didn't denounce. He denounced the king and the clergy. He denounced recreational sex and extramarital affairs. He denounced the rich for exploiting the poor, and he denounced the poor for their laziness. He denounced his people's faithlessness; every time a new god came around they all followed after it like the latest fashion fads. Right at the very gates of the Temple he told them that if they thought God was impressed with all the mumbo-jumbo that went on in there they were crazy. When some of them took to indulging in a little human sacrifice on the side, he showed up with a clay pot which he smashed into smithereens to show them what God planned to do to them as soon as he got around to it.

He even denounced God himself for saddling him with the job of trying to reform such a pack of hyenas, degenerates, and weaklings. “You have deceived me, he said to God, shaking his fist, “You are like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail.” Jeremiah did not believe in the power of positive thinking.

    Needless to say, he wasn't the most popular person in Jerusalem. When he told the people that the Babylonians were going to come in and rip them to shreds just as they deserved, they beat him up and threw him into jail. When the Babylonians did come and not only rip them to shreds but tear down their precious Temple and make off with all the valuables in it, Jeremiah told them that since it was God's judgment, they better submit to it or else.

    That's the kind of guy he was. The people finally got so sick of him they threw him into an open well that happened to be handy. Luckily, the cistern didn't have any water in it, but Jeremiah sank down into the mud up to his armpits and stayed stuck there until an foreigner came along and pulled him out with a rope.

   The people got so tired of listening to Jeremiah railing against the king and the nation, they just threw him in the king's jail to keep him quiet. He was destroying the morale of the city; the citizens were depressed.

    In our text this morning the armies of Babylon were at the city gates of Jerusalem. Babylon was the United States of its day. There was no chance for the city. Soon, within a year, the best and the brightest of Judah would be carted off to Babylon to live in exile. They would lose all their houses, fields and vineyards. There would be nothing left.

    In the middle of this hopeless situation, with the hate Babylonians about to bridge the cities meager fortifications, Jeremiah buys a field near a place called Anathoth just outside the city gates. When everything seemed to be coming apart, the crusty prophet of doom buys a cottage property in the middle of a war zone. It was act of desperate hope.

Why bother? Do you ever feel like that? Why invest in this world when things don't seem to go right anyway? It almost seems foolish.

   My grandfather loved to tell the story about a town that had been through months of drought; the fields were dying and the crops were parched. Finally, one day the local minister called for a prayer meeting to pray for rain. As the church bells rang and people began to gather there was not a cloud was in the sky. In hope, the people came and crowded into the little church to pray for rain. And the pastor got up and looked around the gathered congregation, and finally said, “This meeting is dismissed. This meeting is over.” The people looked at each other in consternation, “We came to pray for rain. Why are you sending us away?”

    The minister continued, “How can we dare to have a prayer meeting for rain, if not one of us thought to bring an umbrella?” True hope begins with hopeful actions.

     We don't have to look long to be convinced that the world is sort of a hopeless place. A half hour of TV news or a few pages of the newspaper just reinforce that the world is going to pot and the forces of evil are winning the day. Global warming threatens us with environmental catastrophe. Everyday someone we know seems to be sick with cancer. Our young people struggle with drugs. Just last week a 19 year old hanged himself in Notre Dame Park. Crime seems to be on the rise, politicians let us down. Things seem hopeless and dark. It is difficult to find someone optimistic about the future. So why bother to invest in the future? Why invest in this world when things don't seem to go right anyway?

      Things could not be worse for the people of Judah. Everything was falling apart in little pieces. But in the midst of this hopeless situation, God intrudes again. God told Jeremiah to do a seemingly foolish thing. Just as people would have thought he was a nut for predicting gloom when things were going well, Jeremiah says that the word of the Lord came to him and told him that it was time to start buying property in Judah. It was time to buy his field of dreams.

   Just as the armies of Babylon were at the city gates ready to destroy the city, Jeremiah buys a piece of land. It is like buying a lot in downtown Bagdad; or along the dykes of New Orleans. It doesn't make sense. It is a waste of money. But Jeremiah bought the land anyway.

    Jeremiah-he who knew better than anyone that Israel was headed for destruction-he who had been preaching that message since he was a teenager, stepped into his fragmented mess of a world and made a bold, symbolic statement of faith. In the worst of times, he bought a field. In the very worst of times, he made an investment in the future. In a time when everything seemed to be falling to pieces like some kind of a nightmare, Jeremiah bought a field of dreams. As he plunked down his cash for the lot, he proclaimed a word of hope to a desperate people, “There will be a future here. Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”

You know what this biblical story is about? It's about betting on the future. It's about putting your earnest money down right now because even in the very worst of times, it's not over--for God can redeem even the worst of times.

    When I lived in Saskatchewan, a local farmer gave me a tour of his farm. Years ago, he and his wife had let a local gravel company dig on their property. What was once flat prairie became deeply scarred and rutted by powerful machinery. Great holes were left and huge mounds of earth littered the fields.

    The farmer was thinking ahead. When the company finished excavating, he had them push the dirt back and smooth out the land. Years later, the farm property had land that gently sloped down to a couple of man made lakes, stocked with trout and other fish. People come almost year round to spend time getting away from it all out at what they now call River-lake Farms. I liked what he called the process of undoing the damage done by the digging, he said they were reclaiming. They reclaimed the land.

  Jeremiah was a prophet to a people deeply scarred and rutted by sin and suffering. In the middle of all the broken pieces of their lives, he reclaimed a piece of land.

   What Jeremiah did with that land is a symbol of what God can do for us. God reclaims us as sons and daughters. God takes the gaping holes in our lives and fills them in. God replaces the ugliness with beauty and brings peace like a river.

Even in the worst of times, at the graveside, at the hospital bed, in the middle of a marriage breakup, in addiction or financial loss God has the last word. In the midst of grinding poverty, terrible injustice, gaping ozone holes, and the horror of war, God has the last word.

     All around us lives are torn down and left in a heap, the enemy bridges the wall and hope smolders. Yet somehow, when the smoke clears, standing tall above the rubble is God.

Somehow God is present in the middle of all the fragmented mess-in our world-in our lives-God is at work reclaiming the good.

We could stand here today and beat the drums mournfully about the immorality and tragedy and cynicism and selfishness and materialism of our day. Or, we can be reminded again, this time by ol' bad news Jeremiah, that God has the last word--not the politicians of our day or the terrorists or the irresponsible or the hurricanes or the hate-filled. Almighty God has the last word. Today we are called to find our own fields of dreams and be faithful to the future God has promised, even when it is a future nobody else can see.