“A Field, a Faith, and a Future” (Jeremiah 32:1-15)

 I wonder if any of you have ever spent money on something and later regretted doing it. I know I have on more than one occasion. And I suspect I’m not the only one here this morning who’s guilty of it.

We call them impulse purchases. And just for fun, I thought I’d share a few examples that I came across recently on the internet:

•  I bought $50 worth of Beanie Babies because I thought they’d be worth something.

•  My partner went out to buy vegetables for dinner and came home with a kayak. He forgot the vegetables and the kayak has never been used.

•  I bought a onesie for my Great Dane. I don’t know why I bought it but I think he liked it.

•  I’ve bought a lot of “how to” kits and books, like how to knit, how to do calligraphy, how to paint, how to write poetry, etc. Have I learned how to do a single one of those things? No, I have not.

And here’s the one that I think should win the prize:

•  I bought a rare exotic cucumber from a guy who said it would give me good luck.

When we look at this morning’s passage, it might seem that Jeremiah was guilty of the same thing when he bought that field from his cousin Hanamel. Just take a moment to try to fix the scene in your mind. The city of Jerusalem was within days of total destruction. The seemingly invincible armies of the King of Babylon had rolled through the towns and villages of Israel and were now in the process of raising their siegeworks against the walls of Jerusalem. Their battering rams were pounding against the gates. The methodical, slow thump…, thump…, thump… could be heard resounding through the city, as soldiers from within vainly twanged their bows and hurled their spears in defence, and while women and children cowered in their homes in terror.

In the midst of all this, Jeremiah was himself being held under arrest for refusing to stop prophesying the ruin of Jerusalem. Jerusalem’s real problem, as Jeremiah saw it, however, was not the armies that were attacking it from without, but the moral rot that had long been causing it to decay from within. The armies of Babylon that were now pounding at Jerusalem’s gates were God’s punishment for its leaders’ and its people’s long abandonment of him and of his righteous laws.

If that weren’t enough, along comes Jeremiah’s cousin Hanamel. Hanamel had not come to comfort Jeremiah or give him company. Quite the opposite, he had come to pressure Jeremiah to purchase a piece of land—a field in Jeremiah’s home town of Anathoth, just a few miles away. I can only imagine that, with the occupation of the Babylonian troops, property values in the area had taken something of a nosedive! But Hanamel hadn’t come to offer Jeremiah a deal. He was insisting that Jeremiah had an obligation to his ancestors to purchase the property. So apparently without any negotiation or haggling, Jeremiah bought the field for seventeen shekels of silver—a weight of around two hundred grams or a little less than half a pound by today’s measure.

Now I can’t tell you whether seventeen shekels of silver was a bargain for a field or not. And besides, Jeremiah never reveals its. But whatever the case, that was not what it was all about.

It wasn’t that Jeremiah’s cousin Hanamel was some fast-talking huckster. Nor was it that Jeremiah was a fool for a good deal or even that he felt an obligation to his ancestors. No, Jeremiah was acting in obedience to a direct command from the Lord himself. God had told him in advance, “Hanamel son of Shallum your uncle is going to come to you and say, ‘Buy my field at Anathoth, because as nearest relative and it is not only your right, it is your duty to buy it.’”

“I knew that this was the word of the Lord,” Jeremiah reflected, “so I bought the field at Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel and weighed out for him seventeen shekels  of silver.”

Jeremiah’s Parables

So what was this property deal all about? What was Jeremiah doing when he knew that it was probably only a matter of a few days before Jerusalem’s walls would be breached, the city would lie in ruins, and its people? Well, I suppose you could think of it as a kind of object lesson.

Back when I was pastoring congregations, one of the features of the Sunday morning service every week was the children’s talk. It usually took the form of an object lesson, something from everyday life that the children could relate to and hopefully would stick in their minds. One of the great disappointments of my ministry, however, was the number of adults on the way out of the service who would remark on the children’s talk but would never mention the sermon that I had spent hours preparing!

Object lessons can be memorable. (Think of Jesus’ parables.) And Jeremiah was a master of them. There was the almond tree—which in Hebrew sounds very much like watching. And so Jeremiah used it as a reminder that the Lord was always watching over his people Israel (1:11-12). In alarming contrast to that, there was the boiling pot, tilting over and about to spill—a warning that God would be pouring out his judgement over his people (1:12-16).

Move along a few chapters and there is the linen belt that the Lord instructed Jeremiah to purchase and bind around his waist, only to tell him to hide it among the rocks, where it quickly began to mildew and disintegrate—a visible reminder that God had once bound his people to himself but they had turned from him and strayed (13:1-11). The parable of the belt was followed by the wine jars, which spoke of a people drunk on excess and decadent behaviour and warning that God would soon smash them in his anger (13:12-14). Proceeding to chapter 18, there was what is perhaps Jeremiah’s most memorable parable of the potter’s wheel. If the potter wasn’t satisfied with his work, it was a simple matter for him to reshape it. So it was that the Lord spoke through Jeremiah, “Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does? Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand.” (18:1-6)

And the list goes on, with the two baskets of figs, one with good figs, the other with figs that had gone rotten (24:1-10). The bad figs were a warning to King Zedekiah and his officials, who had all become corrupt, that God would banish and destroy them. The good figs stood as a word of comfort to the exiled citizens of Israel: “My eyes will watch over them for their good, and I will bring them back to this land. I will build them up and not tear them down; I will plant them and not uproot them. I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart.”

Move along to the next chapter and there is the dark parable of the cup of the wine of God’s wrath, which he would force all the nations to drink—including Judah (25:15-29). And two chapters later the Lord instructs Jeremiah to make a yoke and put it over his neck (27:1-11). It was to serve as a warning that Israel and the surrounding nations would soon be made to bow their necks under the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon.

Now move along to our chapter this morning, and you can see how Jeremiah was able to use this incident in his life as another parable, another object lesson on the Lord’s dealings with his people. This time Jeremiah was literally putting his money where his mouth was, giving substance to his conviction that God was calling him to stay in Jerusalem.

Yes, the city was doomed to destruction. And Jeremiah could easily have said, “I’m outta here.” But God still had a purpose for him there. Jeremiah was acting out of a deep trust in God’s unfailing promise—a promise made more than a millennium in the past to Abraham:

I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God. (Genesis 17:7-8)

Jeremiah’s purchase of the field, in the midst of a world that was falling apart, was a demonstration of his faith in the unchanging purposes of God. With the Babylonian armies pounding at the gates, Jeremiah was well aware that in all likelihood he would never set foot on that field. Yet rather than disengaging from the realities around him, he chose to do something that from a purely worldly perspective didn’t make any sense at all. His purchase of the field was a witness to his commitment his people and to his unshakeable belief that God, who had shown his faithfulness to them again and again in the past, would continue faithful in the years ahead.

Engagement

Flash forward now to the twentieth century. When I gave my life to Christ as a teenager, I was encouraged to start memorizing verses from the Bible. And one of the verses I remember committing to memory early in that process was 2 Corinthians 6:17, which in the old King James Version runs thus: “Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord…”

Around the same time I became active in a church youth group where we often sang a song that ran like this. (Perhaps some of you are familiar with it.)

This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.

The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

Now put these influences together, and I found that there was a constant tug on me not to get too involved in “the world” or to allow myself to be influenced by worldly thinking and attitudes. And I can’t argue that there isn’t a certain wisdom in that. We live in perilous times, when the truth is being bent and twisted and outright denied all around us, to the point where it’s hard to know whom to believe.

Looking back, however, I am grateful to God that he put other believers around me who encouraged me not to insulate myself from the world, but to be engaged in it, to wrestle with secular thinking, to have deep friendships and to work alongside people who didn’t necessarily share my Christian presuppositions. And I found that my trust in God was only deepened and strengthened as a result.

Like Jeremiah, it was vital that I seek, not to insulate myself from the world, but instead, to influence it, even if only in a small way, and to make a positive impact.

Surely that was what Jesus meant when he told his followers, “You are the salt of the earth…” “You are the light of the world…” Salt doesn’t do a lot of good when you store it in its box or in leave it in a shaker. It needs to be sprinkled out and mixed in with the food.

We use salt as a flavour enhancer and we also use it as a preservative. Right now is pickling season. It’s hard to imagine pickling without salt. It’s salt that helps to preserve the pickles, to keep them fresh. And it’s salt that gives them flavour. And that is what Jesus was challenging his disciples to do—and by extension, you and me today.

Years ago there was a popular book called Out of the Saltshaker by a woman named Rebecca Manley Pippert. One little quote from that book that stands out for me runs like this:

What do you do with a man who is supposed to be the holiest man who has ever lived and yet goes around talking with prostitutes and hugging lepers? What do you do with a man who not only mingles with the most unsavory people but actually seems to enjoy them? The religious accused him of being a drunkard, a glutton and having tacky taste in friends. It is a profound irony that the Son of God visited this planet and one of the chief complaints against him was that he was not religious enough.

Jeremiah recognized that, in spite of all the mayhem that was happening around him, in spite of the doom that was surrounding the city, God was calling him to stay. Even more, God was calling him to invest himself in it. And, as I said, I don’t know what seventeen shekels of silver was worth, but it served to signify Jeremiah’s commitment to staying put.

So as we listen to Jeremiah, let me ask you, How is God calling you to invest in your world today—in your neighbourhood? —in your workplace? —in your school? Like Jeremiah, you may never be privileged to see the fruits, but I guarantee you won’t regret it when you hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

 

“How to Lead a Double Life” (Luke 12:32-40)

A couple of weeks ago I took my grandchildren to see The Secret Life of Pets. If you find yourself in need of a good, rollicking laugh at some innocent fun (and you have some pre-teen children to take along with you) this movie is worth the price of admission. If you haven’t seen the trailers, the basic idea is that our pets—our dogs and cats, our guinea pigs and our budgies—live quite a different life when we’re not at home to see them and they get up to hijinks that we would never dream of. If you haven’t seen the movie, I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

The Bible makes it very clear that as followers of Jesus you and I also, like those pets in the movie, live in two different worlds. At the Last Supper Jesus told his disciples that they do not belong to this world (John 15:19). A generation later the apostle Paul wrote to the believers in Philippi that our true citizenship is in heaven and that we are not to conform to the pattern of this world (Philippians 3:20; Romans 12:2). And St John counsels, “Do not love the world or anything in the world …” (1 John 2:15).

What does all of this mean? Many Christian people have interpreted these and other passages as though we need to withdraw as much as possible from any involvement in the affairs of the world. That has led to the formation of monastic communities in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions and groups such as the Amish and the Hutterites on the Protestant side. Yet I think that the more perceptive among them would readily admit that even they have not managed to escape the world completely, both from a social and an economic perspective, and more significantly from a spiritual one. They face the same issues and fight the same struggles as you and I do.

Well, if we cannot entirely escape the world, does that mean that we are forced to give into it? A clear answer to that can be found in the words of Peter: “Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us” (1 Peter 2:11-12). So how does this work out in day-to-day life? I believe that that is exactly what Jesus was talking about to his followers in this morning’s reading from Luke’s gospel. The passage divides into three sections, so let’s take a few moments to look at each.

The Shepherd: Be fearless (32-34)

Jesus’ first words to his followers in this morning’s reading are, “Do not be afraid.” As the events in the months that followed would prove, those disciples would have plenty to fear. Jesus had already warned them at least twice that he would be rejected and suffer and die at the hands of the religious authorities and that they too would be called upon to take up their cross. Besides that, in recent days his words had begun to take on a darker, more sombre tone—about a wicked generation that refuses to repent, about people who killed the prophets and then erected their tombs, about those who have power to destroy the body but not the soul…

Admittedly we do not live under the looming shadow of the cross as the disciples did. Nor do we live beneath the menacing eye of Roman oppressors. Nevertheless, it seems to me that one of the dominant motifs of our current age is fear. You have only to look at some of the most popular films over the past few years—Mad Max, Extinction, Hunger Games, Oblivion, Resident Evil, and The Maze Runner, to name just a few—all of them depicting the future world in grim, dystopian terms. You and I may not have gone to see them, but somebody did. These titles alone grossed over $225 billion at the box office. Think of how long it takes to board an airline flight since 9/11. Think of the climate of fear that has engulfed many European countries after the recent ISIS attacks, not to mention the fear which I believe is the overriding theme in the U.S. election right now, no matter which side you may happen to be on. It’s all over Facebook and the media, in the news columns and the op-ed articles, combined with positively frightening images of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton with headlines to match.

In the midst of this Jesus says to us, as he said to his disciples, “Do not be afraid.” And notice how he refers to them. In spite of their being grown men, accustomed to the rough and tumble of the world, Jesus addresses his followers as lambs—“little flock”. Can you think of anything more vulnerable and defenseless than a little wooly lamb? At the same time we recognize that God has not placed us in a fierce and hostile world without any protection. That is precisely why Jesus speaks to his disciples as his “little flock”. He wants them to know that he is their Good Shepherd, and ours too. “Uncertainties are no cause for alarm or anxiety,” wrote New Testament scholar Fred Craddock.[1] We do not need to join in the prevailing paranoia that surrounds us because we know that we are in the hands of one who loves us more than we can ever possibly imagine, whose purposes for us and for his creation are only good, who will lead us even through the valley of death, and whose goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our life. Immersed in an environment of anxiety and paranoia, Jesus says to us, “Do not fear.”

The Master: Be faithful (35-38)

In the second section of this morning’s passage Jesus gives us a picture. It is of a large household whose master has gone off to join in the celebration of a marriage. In our society that might mean an absence of a few hours—or if the wedding happened to be at some distance, perhaps a weekend or a few days. But in the context of ancient Near East you need to think big—bigger than an Italian wedding or even “my big fat Greek wedding”. We are thinking of festivities that could last for a week or longer, and so if the wedding were at any distance the master could be absent from his household for a considerable span of time. At best it would be a temptation for the servants to take a little time off. At worst it might provide an opportunity for an extended party time as long as the master was away.

It seems that that was exactly what Jesus had in mind. When Peter asked him about this parable, Jesus explained, “Suppose the servant says to himself, ‘My master is taking a long time in coming,’ and he then begins to beat the other servants, both men and women, and to eat and drink and get drunk” (Luke 12:45). Obviously the parable is about the time between Jesus’ ascension and his coming again and the call to us to remain faithful during that time. Yet the pressure is always on us not to. We live in a society that less and less has any sense of moral responsibility to any power beyond ourselves. In that sense, the twenty-first century is not markedly different from the first, when the apostle Paul urged his fellow believers in Rome not to “let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but [to] let God re-mould your minds from within. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect” (Romans 12:2). Listen to How Eugene Petersen puts this in The Message:

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

Much along the same lines, Paul wrote these words to his fellow believers in Ephesus:

Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit…(Ephesians 5:15-18)

A few sentences later he reminds Christian masters that they have a Master in heaven—and both they and we are called to be faithful to him as we await his return. What shape that faithfulness takes will vary according to the gifts and responsibilities that God has entrusted to each of us. But the call remains the same, in the power of the Holy Spirit seeking to make God’s love and God’s good purposes realities in this world.

The Coming Son of Man: Be focused (39-40)

In the final couple of verses of this morning’s reading, Jesus shifts to a third image. This time it involves the owner of a house and a gang of thieves. You never know when thieves might try to break in, says Jesus, but you can make yourself ready in case they ever do. In the same way, he warns us, “You also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.” And so, if you will pardon the alliterations (but as a preacher I find myself powerless to resist them!) in the course of this morning’s reading Jesus has told us to be fearless, knowing that he is our Good Shepherd whose purposes for us are only good. He has encouraged us to be faithful to him as our Master, seeking to carry out his will in the world. And now he cautions us to be focused, as we know neither the day nor the hour of the coming of the Son of Man.

Back in biblical times protecting your belongings from a thief probably meant putting a bolt on your door. Nowadays it seems that most theft takes the form of white-collar crime and protection means using adequate security codes on your credit cards and computer. Not long ago that involved 56-bit encryption, which employs codes using more than 72 quadrillion (15 zeroes) permutations. However, nearly twenty years ago it was shown that a little desktop computer could hack it, and so the standard had to be increased to 128-bit. Yet even that hasn’t prevented the major security ruptures that we have witnessed in the last few years.

So what about the coming of the Son of Man? Jesus is going to come again and you and I need to be prepared. And what does that involve? Certainly not abandoning the world, as some might suggest, but quite the opposite: plunging into it, seeking to make God’s new creation a reality in the here and now. It could be through the beauty of art, literature or music. It could be in the social or political realm. It could be through such seemingly mundane occupations as farming, driving a bus, managing finances, teaching a class, raising children, caring for the elderly or any other of a million and more activities that human beings are engaged in. We speak of all of these pursuits as “secular”. Yet as they are offered up to Christ and his kingdom they take on a worth and a significance that are eternal. And it goes without saying that by necessity it will also mean praying, seriously seeking God’s will and cultivating our relationship with him, loving our neighbours, striving to know the mind of Christ and to reflect the heart of Christ in all we are and do.

As we seek to be people of God’s kingdom in the midst of the kingdoms of this world, may we be fearless, faithful and focused, as we rely on “him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us. To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.” (Ephesians 3:20-21)

---

[1]        Luke (Interpretation Commentaries) 165