Jerusalem had been under siege by the Babylonian army for months. Food and water were in short supply. Commerce had ground to a halt. Hopes rose and fell with each new day, but fear was an ever-present companion. This was the second time the city had been besieged by the Babylonians and the citizens of Jerusalem knew that this time, if the city fell, the enemy would show no mercy. In an effort to keep up morale and still public anxiety, politicians reminded the citizens of Jerusalem that negotiations were underway with Egypt, Israel’s ally against Babylonia, for military assistance, and any day now Pharaoh’s troops would arrive and roust the enemy. Religious leaders reminded them that the kingship of David’s house was divinely ordained and God would not allow the throne to be overtaken by pagan Babylonians. And even more comforting, that Jerusalem was the site of the Temple, the place of God’s earthly abode, and God would not allow God’s own house to be profaned or destroyed. The city, they argued, was safe no matter what. One fine morning the inhabitants of Jerusalem would awaken to find the camp outside their city’s gates deserted and life would be as it had been before. Some of the hopes to which we cling in life are little more than ways of running away from realities we don’t want to face. In his book Telling Secrets Frederick Buechner wrote about his own family’s flight from reality. “One November morning in 1936 when I was ten years old, my father got up early, put on a pair of gray slacks and a maroon sweater, opened the door to look in briefly on my younger brother and me, who were playing a game in our room, and then went down into the garage where he turned on the engine of the family Chevy and sat down on the running board to wait for the exhaust to kill him. Except for a memorial service for his Princeton class the next spring, by which time we had moved away to another part of the world altogether, there was no funeral because on both my mother’s side and my father’s side there was no church connection of any kind and funerals were simply not a part of the tradition. He was cremated, his ashes buried in a cemetery in Brooklyn, and I have no idea who if anybody was present. I know only that my mother, brother, and I were not. There was no funeral, to mark his death and put a period at the end of the sentence that had been his life, and as far as I can remember, once he had died my mother, brother, and I rarely talked about him much ever again, either to each other or anybody else. It made my mother too sad to talk about him, and since there was already more than enough sadness to go round, my brother and I avoided the subject with her as she avoided it for her own reasons also with us . . . . Don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel is supposed to be the unwritten law of families that for one reason or another have gone out of whack, and it certainly was our law. We never talked about what happened. We didn’t trust the world with our secret, hardly even trusted each other with it” (pp. 7,8,10). The family moved away and tried to go on with life as if nothing had happened. Some of the hopes to which we cling are little more than ways of running away from realities we don’t want to face. Some things cannot be outrun, though. They will pursue you wherever you go—rising to meet you in the dark of the night and even in the bright sunshine of the day. One friend once told me that we never get past anything in this life until we nail it down, that is, until we face its reality and come to terms with it. And sometimes when we do that it means the death of hope, at least hope as we have held to it. Bill Oglesby once wrote: “The crucial moment comes with the death of that hope which had in fact proved to be the means of sustaining us, at least for awhile, but at length is discovered to be unrealistic. In such a crisis moment there is the possibility of overwhelming despair which ultimately leads to death, or the birth of that hope which reaches beyond the agonizing longing of the moment to that which is even more satisfying than could have ever been dreamed” (p. 140, With Wings As Eagles). Jeremiah drew the people’s attention back to the reality of the moment insisting that this time there would be no last minute rescue by foreign allies and that to hope in the inviolability of Jerusalem because of the throne of David or the presence of the Temple was an exercise in self-deception. God himself had willed his people’s defeat and their enemy’s victory. His gloom and doom prophecy contradicted the official party line and exacerbated the city’s sagging morale. In an effort to silence him the powers that be had him arrested and held in the court of the guard in the palace. It was from behind the bars of the palace’s prison that he did something that seemed to contradict the message that had landed him there in the first place. In the darkest hour of the night, knowing full well what faced his people and himself, knowing that there would be no last minute reprieve, no rescue, he bought a field in Anathoth. He would never profit from it in anyway. In fact, it was already in the enemy’s hands. Yet he made sure that all the details of the transaction were carefully and publicly executed. He even had one copy of the deed sealed in an earthenware jar and buried for safekeeping. Why? Had he a change of heart? Was he hedging his bets? No, the field in Anathoth stood as a silent declaration of hope in the promise of a new day beyond the present day; a declaration of hope in God’s promise that beyond the looming conflagration the time would once again come when “houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.” I’ve watched in awe at times as people I know have surveyed the land that lay before them, faced the reality, and then purchased the field in Anathoth nonetheless. From the outside looking in what they did made no sense at all. It was an investment in the wrong neighborhood, a futile gesture. Invest in a place where you know it will make a difference, the world tells us. Invest where you have some reasonable expectation of a return. Don’t throw your time and energy and money away on a recalcitrant child, on a going nowhere marriage, on a cause that has no possibility of success, on a people who show no promise of change. Indeed, sometimes when you buy property in Anathoth all you buy for yourself is heartache and trouble. So, why do it? One reason is because that is what the Lord calls us to do. Jeremiah bought his piece of land in Anathoth in obedience to God’s command. (God’s commands don’t always make a lot of sense from the world’s perspective.) A young man I have come to admire and to respect profoundly told me recently of the difference that one man made in his life. When everyone else had given up on him, washed their hands of him, decided that he was only a loser, this man invested in him—invested his love, his trust, his time, even some of his money. “Why,” my friend asked him? “Why would you do this for me?” “Because,” he said, “the Lord told me to do it.” And so the Lord commands us. Next Sunday is World Communion Sunday, Peacemaking Sunday, and Mission Sunday here at First Church. In the peacemaking offering we are called to remember and to respond to our Lord’s blessing upon those who not merely long for peace but who will invest themselves in the pursuit of it. In the mission fair we will have the opportunity to see some of the ministries of compassion in which our church is involved both through the efforts of volunteers and the gift of our resources. Every one of these represents a field in Anathoth. The need for such ministries in pursuit of peace, compassion, and justice has been with us as Christian disciples for two millennia. The world may give the need for such efforts a nod of acknowledgment, but at the same time note that it’s just the nature of human life and community to be this way. Why bother? What difference will it make? If you haven’t solved the problem by now, do you really think you will? No, but the Lord only calls us to make the investment of ourselves and to trust by God’s grace that beyond the way things are today will come the time when the field will blossom and bear fruit. Who knows, even we may see some evidence of it ourselves in our neighbors and in ourselves. The Lord calls us to do this, but there is another reason too and that is that God has himself done this for us—bought the field in Anathoth, invested in us in order to rescue us, to save us, to make us whole—and that cost God too, cost him mightily. The hope that Jeremiah held out to the people of Jerusalem as the Babylonian army clamored at the gates was not that the disaster would be averted, but that through the disaster and in spite of the disaster, God’s purpose would be fulfilled: the land would once again be planted, homes would be rebuilt, business and commerce would flourish, and children would once again laugh and play in the city’s streets. The hope that sustains us and in which we are called to invest ourselves is the hope that proclaims the newness of God’s purpose in and beyond the shambles of a broken marriage, the pain and shame of physical and sexual abuse in the human family, the indescribable pain of tragic death, the horror of terrorism and war, the rubble and death of nature’s power, in and beyond all the exigencies and evils of human life. That hope is the hope that is born of the faith that in and through all of the events of human life—pleasant and painful—“God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year; God is working his purpose out, and the time is drawing near; nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that shall surely be, when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.” Could I interest you in a field in Anathoth? J. Dudley Weaver |