Buying Land

Buying Land

Jeremiah 32:6-15

Twenty-six years ago, when I started as the pastor of the Union Church, pretty much every trustees meeting was marked by abject fear.  “What if the boiler breaks?” “What if the organ falls apart?”  “What if the “summer slump” in giving doesn’t stop?”  The fears were not unreasonable.  However, they also could be disabling.  We lived in crisis management mode for years.  At the end of those meetings, Borge Smidt, as the moderator of the congregation, would look around the table at the church officers and say, “Well, they haven’t nailed the doors shut yet!”  Then, he would find me after the meeting, put a hand on my shoulder look me straight in the eye and say, “You know, Mark, there’s a lot of good people around here!” Then, we’d all set out to keep the doors open another month…

I only remember a couple of times when that positivity and hope disappeared from Borge.  My favorite—in retrospect—was when I preached a far too lengthy Easter sermon and was feeling good about myself only to have Borge come up and blindside me:  “You know, Mark, a bunch of people have hams in the oven and just want to get home!”  It was so out of character and…he was so right.  As long as I didn’t come between him and his Easter ham, Borge was a huge source of support and encouragement.

I mention Borge as the very opposite of Jeremiah, from whom we heard this morning.  Jeremiah was mad when God called him to be a prophet and tried to use every excuse imaginable for why someone else should get the job.  When he couldn’t pass the job to someone else, he took it on full-bore.  He blasted the people for being faithless.  He tore into the temple for being corrupt.  He mercilessly delivered the message that the jig was up, that the kingdom was going to fall, that everyone was going to be dragged into exile, that the Babylonians were going to seize their homes and drink from their vineyards and eat their crops.  Just in case people didn’t get the message, he used visual aids:  he walked around with a ox yoke on his shoulders; he took a clay pot, told everyone the pot was them, and then smashed the pot to smithereens.  When the people weren’t sure that Jeremiah fully grasped how much they hated him, they imprisoned him and later threw him into the ancient equivalent of a sceptic tank and left him to die.

Who can blame the people, right?  There’s the truth that we embrace.  Then, there’s the truth that may still be true, whether we want to hear it or not.  Then, there’s the guy who picks out the most painful truth on the list and basically grabs a bullhorn and blasts those words into our ears.  Jeremiah was so good at this relentless ranting that still today, when someone goes on a real tirade, that speech is said to be a “jeremiad.” 

So, take the person in your life who is most likely to just irritate you to no end, the one who is not necessarily wrong but who proves that you can be right in an absolutely wrong way.  Now, multiply that person’s intensity by 10.  If you’re with me, you may be ready to consider Jeremiah.

In Jeremiah’s defense, he actually was right.  Any sense of faithful living had been lost.  The temple was corrupt.  The people had become so convinced that they were God’s chosen people that they knew, even as the Babylonian army gathered at their gates, that God would never let anything bad happen to them.  They were special! With God on their side, why would they ever listen to a prophet, even a prophet who said that he was speaking on God’s behalf?  At which point, the Babylonian siege began.

As close as I can come to how this moment might have felt is when I remember what I felt on 9/11.  On 9/10, I could never have fathomed such a set of attacks in our homeland.  By 9/12, all of us were wondering how soon it would happen again.  First, it was unimaginable.  Then, it was inescapable.

The people to whom Jeremiah was speaking felt completely invulnerable until the moment that they realized that God was not going to stop the Babylonians.  Then, everything changed in an instant.  Everything that they had taken for granted was now up for grabs.  They were traumatized and horrified.  The Babylonians literally began to drag them off into exile.  A day before they knew everything and they knew it for sure.  Now, they were not sure of anything…

At this moment, Jeremiah changed, too. Having chewed the people out relentlessly for years, Jeremiah’s whole tone shifts.  First, just before our text, he announces to the people that there will be a new covenant.  The old covenant, the one written in ten commandments on stone, will give way to a new covenant which will be written on everyone’s hearts.  Everyone will know God and everyone will be forgiven.  What a vision of hope!  Except, Jeremiah was offering more words and the people had such a poor track record for listening to what Jeremiah had to say.

So, God has Jeremiah do one other thing.  God says, “Jeremiah, your nephew is going to come and offer you your right to buy your brother’s land.  Buy it!.”  Remember, the city is literally under siege.  People are being dragged from their homes.  Nearly every building is being leveled.  That’s when God tells Jeremiah to go into real estate.  Jeremiah goes through the whole formal process— drawing up deeds, having witnesses—the full nine yards.  Such formality, meticulously followed as society was coming apart at the seams!  Then, Jeremiah makes sure that the documents are stored in tightly sealed jars and buried in the ground.  That way, whenever the people finally return from exile, these documents will be waiting for him.  (Just so you know…it would take 70 years to return and Jeremiah was long gone.)

What was the point?  The man who, on God’s behalf, had announced to everyone that they were on the road to destruction was suddenly saying that all would not be lost.  He was saying to the people that hope was still alive.  This hope was not based on the immediate evidence around them.  The war and the losses and the grief would be almost unbearable.  Being cut off from their sacred places and their sacred practices would be heart breaking.  However, this will not be the last word.  Even though all the evidence in the world pointed to despair, the darkness will not win.  This hope rested in nothing more and nothing less than the promise that God still cared, that forgiveness was real, and that perhaps, in the absence of the things which blinded them before, the people would finally see the gift of the new covenant with God.

It’s the coupling of the words—incredible words, revolutionary words—about a new covenant and the concrete act of hope—buying land—that makes this moment with Jeremiah so moving.  We still need both the vision and the concrete action.   Tell me and show me.  Lead me and guide me into this new way of being in the world and this new way of being with God.  Hasn’t “show and tell” almost always been the best way to learn?  Yes, the few who were lucky enough to survive the onslaught were dragged into exile where they wondered if it had really been all that lucky to survive after all.  Still, though, I like to imagine the moment of return from exile decades later, when Jeremiah’s descendants kneeled down in the dust, dug out that jar and blew the dust of the lid…

There is a saying that I love that has been on pretty much every Easter bulletin in my time here (except the last two Easters when we haven’t even had bulletins):  “The worst things are never the last things.”  In other words, we can’t be an Easter people and not practice the fine art of cultivating hope.  If you’ve taken the walk to Golgotha and watched Jesus suffer and die and then been to the tomb only to discover that he is not there, you have to take circumstantial evidence with a grain of salt.  With God, you just never know…

So, as I stand here today, I want to look the circumstances facing us head on and challenge us to discover a vision of hope.  Yes, the pandemic has thrown us one challenge after another as a church family.  However, the story that we need to tell is not of the fears we can imagine but the story that is ours to tell of how far we’ve come.  Remember, in case you weren’t here twenty-six years ago for the monthly horror show that a trustees meeting could be, when it comes to crises, we’ve been there and done that.  Consider a few more recent things…

First, thanks to countless hours of sacrifice on the part of a cross-section of people, we no longer worry about boilers breaking. We replaced them and saved a ton on energy expenses.  These days we don’t manage crises, we plan ahead!  God has given us minds to use.  And thank God, God has also given us members whose minds work with far more clarity than mine when it comes to spread sheets and colorful pie charts.  (I do like the colors, though!)

Second, managing the challenges in a better way has given us more time, more energy and more resources to care for people within this church and well beyond our walls.  Our growth as a giving church is exponential.  We work with PADS alongside the big churches.  When someone comes to town in need—whether they connect to the police or connect to any number of other churches—they are often referred to our church because we are known to do concrete things to help.  Come on a work trip with us.  Go along with Tracy to get glasses for a child in need.  Watch for the quiet handoff of gift cards at the school.  Contrary to all the evidence that says that the world is beyond help, we keep trying, helping one person at a time.  That’s who we are.  That’s us “buying land.”  Of course, the pandemic has transformed what we do and how we do it but it has not stopped us from finding new ways to help.  (Not that we can’t wait work trip, 2022!)

For a full year, we didn’t worship together in person.  However, more people attended worship than ever before.  We didn’t pass an offering plate for that whole time.  Yet, we are still here!  No one missed being together more than me.  Still, we grew through the challenge of how to be together and be apart.

Finally, imagine this.  Our 150th anniversary campaign gave us the courtyard that we had no idea how we much we would need.  We have a new manse whose yard has been the current home for Sunday School and will house our pastors for generations.  Finally, in the darkest hour of the pandemic, the most amazing gift came which allowed us to use the time we were out of the building to transform our church home— a gift for generations to come.  That gift allowed us to bolster our endowment for the future, too.

I believe the Union Church of Lake Bluff has quite literally never been in a better place.  However, we need to fund our budget for the next year. Really, though, this is simply our next opportunity to buy land.  Whether you attend in person or attend on line, I hope you will pledge your support. I hope that you will consider the guidance of our trustees in the next few weeks and decide, “I’m in!”

By the way,  I checked…they still haven’t nailed the doors shut and there are still a lot of good people— around here and out there in cyber space. Welcome to the end of fear and of exile.  This is the day when our future begins again.