Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 26, 2004
Scripture:
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
In my sermon about money last week I told you that I would be talking about money again this week. Well, I’m not. As I studied the lectionary readings for this week, I couldn’t get away from that story about Jeremiah buying a field during the siege of Jerusalem. More about that in a moment. I know I’ve preached about hope before, but it is something with which I struggle so hard these days that I decided I needed to preach on it again. Maybe you don’t need to hear a word about how hope is possible in our world, but I do; and since I don’t get very often to hear anyone else preach a word I need to hear, I’m left to do it myself.
The prophet Jeremiah lived in what must have seemed like a hopeless time. He lived in Jerusalem during the last couple of decades of the 7th century BCE and the first couple of decades of the 6th century BCE. That was a time of conflict between the Kingdom of Judah, with its capitol at Jerusalem, and the Babylonian Empire, the dominant Imperial power of the age. In 587 BCE Babylon conquered Judah, burned Jerusalem, and razed Solomon’s great Temple, the center of Hebrew religion. The elite of Judean society was sent into exile in Babylon. Our passage from Jeremiah this morning is set during that final siege of Jerusalem by Babylon, led by the infamous Nebuchadnezzar. The city’s situation during that siege was indeed hopeless.
To many of us the situation of our country and of the world as a whole today seems pretty hopeless too. I could give you a litany of the things that deprive me of hope, like the quagmire we’re in in Iraq and the fact that no one in either political party knows what to do about it. Certainly no one in either political party has to courage to stop fighting, break the cycle of violence, and take a risk for peace. However, in order not to sound too partisan when my despair is in fact very bipartisan, let me instead give you some statistics that I got from the web site globalissues.org, a site that does some very good social, political, and economic analysis using, for the most part, United Nations statistics. These figures come from 1998, but I’m sure they haven’t changed much. That year the total expenditure in the world for basic education, for everyone, was 6 billion US dollars. That same year in the US we spent 8 billion dollars on cosmetics. The expenditure for water and sanitation for everyone in the world was $9 billion. Europe spent $11 billion on ice cream. The expenditure for basic health and nutrition for everyone in the world was $13 billion. Europe and the US spend $17 billion on pet food. Europe spent $105 billion on alcoholic drinks. The world spent $400 billion on narcotic drugs, and world-wide military spending came to a whopping $780 billion. Remember what I said last week about show me your checkbook and I’ll tell you what you believe in? It works for the world perhaps even better than for individuals. These statistics can lead to only one conclusion: The world is a hopelessly unjust place with horribly misplaced priorities that is addicted to weapons and to seeking security not through justice but through violence. People in our country have some intuitive sense that something is wrong. The polls show that a substantial majority believes our country is headed in the wrong direction; but no political leader has emerged to convince us that he or she could lead us in the right direction, or even to present a clear vision of what that right direction might be. That, my friends, is a picture of a hopeless situation.
Jeremiah too was faced with a hopeless situation, yet in his day Jeremiah somehow managed to maintain hope. He did not give in to despair. Hope, I think, is what that funny little story about his buying a plot of land is all about. The story gives us a lot of legal details and assumes that we know a lot more. The story speaks of rights of redemption, open and closed deeds, and so on. It would be easy to get lost in the details. Sometimes in Bible stories the details are important, but I don’t think they are here. What is important is the context of the story and what Jeremiah did in that context.
The context is this: Jeremiah was under arrest. My sources tell me that he was charged with treason and insurrection because he had left Jerusalem during an earlier, temporary lifting of the Babylonian siege. Actually, he had provoked the king because he had prophesied the fall of Jerusalem and the victory of the Babylonians. He had opposed the king’s policy of violent resistance to the Babylonians and had urged a policy of acquiescence and cooperation instead. It is ever thus. Those in power are wont to accuse those who disagree with them of treason, or, in our time, if not of outright treason then at least of a lack of patriotism, with the unspoken and unexamined assumption that a lack of patriotism is the one unforgivable political sin. Jeremiah was under arrest in a city under siege that anyone with eyes to see could tell could not hold out very long. Defeat was inevitable.
So what did he do? He bought a piece of land in the countryside outside Jerusalem. He engaged in what in other times would have been a routine and utterly un-noteworthy business transaction. He must have known that he would never live on or get any other use out of that land. The Babylonians were coming, the barbarians were literally at the gate. It seemed that life would never be normal again. Buying that piece of land in those conditions made absolutely no sense.
Yet that’s what he did. Why? He bought it, I am convinced he did not do it because he wanted to own the land but because he wanted to make a statement to the people living in that hopeless situation. He said it indirectly in words when he said, at the end of the story, "houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land." He said it more powerfully in his deeds when he in fact bought a field in that land. He enacted his words. He performed a prophetic, symbolic act. He actually bought land as a symbol of the promise that normal life would one day return to his beleaguered people. How are we to understand that symbolic act? In other words, how are we to understand hope, the virtue that Jeremiah was symbolically enacting? Well, let’s ask what Jeremiah was really doing here. He was, I think, living as if. He was living as if the future for which he hoped were really possible. He was looking all of the factual evidence to the contrary straight in the eye and saying: Nevertheless.
That, I think, is a very good way to understand hope. Hope is not optimism. Jeremiah could not have been very optimistic. Hope is not a naïve disregard of reality. Jeremiah knew full well what his reality looked like. Neither is hope simply sitting back and leaving it all up to God. Jeremiah acted. He lived his hopeless situation in a hopeful way. He lived as if, as if peace and prosperity were possible. Hope is living as if. Hope is looking a hopeless situation squarely in the eye and saying: Nevertheless. Nevertheless, I will not let you have the last word. I will live as if the world and its hopelessness were not the ultimate reality.
How can we do that? After all, the world’s hopeless reality seems pretty ultimate most of the time. Yet we can do it. We can do it because as people of faith we know that the world’s hopeless reality is not ultimate. We can do it because we know that God is ultimate and the world with its demonic powers is not. That’s how Jeremiah could do it. He could live as if, he could live in hope because he trusted not in the world but in God, and we can do the same. What looks hopeless to us is not hopeless to God. We can hope because we lives our lives not only in the hopeless reality of the world but in the hopeful reality of God. We can live as if peace and justice were possible because we know they are God’s will for the world, and our call is to live in that reality.
What does that mean in practical terms. Well, I think we have to discern that every day in every specific situation we face and in every concrete decision we make. In general, I think, it means at least this: Speak up. Speak up for peace and justice. Call the world to account. Name sin and evil and call the world to repentance. Make the decisions in our own lives--decisions on who to vote for, what to buy, what to drive, where to live, etc.--with an eye to the impact of those decisions on peace and justice around the world.
Will it make a difference in the world? I don’t know, but then hope is not optimism. I do know this. Living as if peace and justice were possible is living in hope, and living in hope is contagious. It inspires us and it inspires others. It becomes its own motivation for continuing to live as if. Hope reinforces hope. Hope leads to action, and action is the only thing that will ever change the world. Despair leads to inaction, and if the righteous do not act, the powers of the world win. So let us have hope. Let us live as if. And may God richly bless our hopeful living, our living as if. Amen.