Jeremiah 32:1-17
19th Sunday after Pentecost Year C
September 29, 2013
First Presbyterian Church, Clarksville
And
Harmony Presbyterian Church
Dr. Robert Wm Lowry
French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard said,
“We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less
meaning.” Put another way, there is some
degree to which we are living, culturally, in an extended episode of Seinfeld;
the television show that proudly declared itself a show about nothing.
Part of being a believer in the God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob-the God of history; the God who would come in the person of Jesus Christ-
is to see the something in the midst of the nothing.
Just consider our story today. Jeremiah, in jail at the order of Zedekiah
the king of Judah, has been prophesying about the pending fall of Jerusalem to
the Babylonians. There is no grey area
in Jeremiah’s words. Jerusalem will
fall. The nation will be overrun and all
that belongs to the Judeans will belong to the Babylonians.
While
Jeremiah is in prison, two things happen.
The first is a vision from God that his cousin would come to visit him
and demand that Jeremiah purchase a piece of property out of familial
obligation. He was next in line to buy
and his cousin wanted to sell. Although
he is a prisoner, Jeremiah trusts God, purchases the property and in front of
witnesses gives it to Baruch with instructions to have a deed drawn up and
sealed in a clay jar to preserve it.
The second thing that happens is even odder than a
prisoner with no likely chance for freedom who knows that the land is about to
be overrun buying a piece of land.
Jeremiah sees in this less than ideal land deal the hand of God at
work.
After purchasing the land and instructing Baruch in its
use, Jeremiah says, “LORD God, you created heaven and earth by your great power
and outstretched arm; nothing is too hard for you!”
Now, I have to admit.
When I bought my first house and signed the loan papers and realized I
owed more money than I ever had in my life, my first thought was not to say a
word about God’s awesome power as the creator of heaven and earth! And unlike Jeremiah, I wasn’t in prison at
the time either!
As someone whose life’s work is rooted in the church, I
am tempted to shake my head and scowl with some combination of sadness and
contempt at the cultural tendencies that Baudrillard criticizes and Seinfeld
embodied. For those of us who find our
home in the church, this historical community built on stories and truths whose
age is measured not in decades or centuries but in millennia. The text for my sermon this morning is from
a story more than 2500 years old and is built on theology that extends
centuries earlier. Being part of the
church is by definition to be part of something and not nothing. Still, there is something striking about the
difference between Jeremiah’s response to a banal moment and ours.
What about this moment was so different? What about this moment when Jeremiah did something
as innocuous as buy land from his cousin was so special- so different- that his
response was to give praise and express awe for God?
Perhaps a better question is, what is so different about
us?
14 years ago Jedediah Purdy gave an answer to a version
of that question in his wonderful book, For
Common Things. In the book, Purdy
argues that modern culture has been seduced by irony and its accompanying
avoidance of naïve devotion, belief or hope.
The ironic individual, he says, practices a kind of self-protection
against disappointment by simply not believing in much of anything in the first
place.
The net result is a loss of imagination. Generally speaking, we have, as a people,
lost our sense of imagination for things that are beyond our expectations and
experiences. We have lost the vocabulary
of awe that transcends our daily lives.
If there is a single spiritual illness underlying the
state of our culture, I think that is it.
If there is a single spiritual illness underlying the
state of the church, I think that is it.
A loss
of imagination;
a loss of our ability to see
something beyond the nothing.
we have been seduced
by the ease and perceived comfort of living ironic lives insulated from disappointment
by our persistent refusal to dream too big.
That is, to varying degrees, the diagnosis for our age,
but I have trouble indicting myself or our collective self in the church too
much for making this a self-inflicted illness.
Like the person who gets a cold after being out in the rain, there are
plenty of reasons why we suffer from this collective malady.
Our political culture has become trifling, wearisome and
parochial; the great human rights movements that sparked the passion of
previous generations have become excuses for fundraising more than motivators
for social change; appliances and relationships that used to be worth repairing
have become disposable and easily replaced.
We have spent the last quarter century standing in a
chilly cultural rain and it is no wonder we have caught a spiritual cold.
The net result of so much of this cultural sickness is the
loss our imaginations; we’ve lost our ability or our willingness to risk seeing
beyond our own lives and perspectives.
Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News commentator, has written a
book on the life and death of Jesus. The
book has been roundly criticized by reviewers for many reasons, some deserved
some not. It is not terribly accurate
and relies on lots of assumptions and not much scholarship, but O’Reilly does
not make a claim to be a biblical theologian so it may not be fair to judge his
book against the likes of Luke Timothy Johnson or Reza Aslan.
One critique of
O’Reilly’s book is well deserved but not very new. If you read O’Reilly’s account of the life of
Jesus, you find that the Son of God seems, in his theological and political
outlook, a lot like, well, Bill O’Reilly.
For the writer of a pseudo-biography of Jesus to write himself into the
profile of Christ is not a new thing.
Since the whole notion of writing a biographical account of the
historical Jesus became popular in the early 19th century, the
picture of Christ that comes from the words on the page more often than not
looks a lot like the one who put the words on the page in the first place. Over the years Jesus has resembled variously
a German academic, Anglican bishop, protestant clergyman and, now, conservative
television commentator.
There is something about thinking about the divine that so
often keeps us from looking beyond the limits of our imaginations; that
persuades us that all there is to be in this world is within sight of our own
lives so whatever God or Christ or the Spirit may be or do is bound on each
side by what our imaginations declare to be the boundaries of the possible. We imagine a God who is big, but not too big;
a Christ who is forgiving, but not too forgiving; a Spirit that inspires, but
not too much.
We just seem to have lost our appetite and our
imagination for a God who is greater than our greatest and wildest dreams.
Jeremiah bought a share in the Promised Land that was
about to be claimed by Nebuchadnezzar.
Knowing that the land was about to be overrun and that deeds of transfer
would likely not carry much weight with ole Nebuchadnezzar, what does Jeremiah
do? Doe he lament in being forced into a
deal with his cousin? Does he shake his
fist at the sky and ask God why? He
turns to God and says, “LORD God, you
created the heaven and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm;
nothing is too hard for you!”
Imagine
buying land in a nation that you know is about to be overrun and occupied. It isn’t as if the Babylonians were going to
honor land ownership! What did he
imagine that he had to be thankful about?!
Jeremiah buys a share of something that is about to be taken over by
outsiders.
In a way, I suppose we do that every time we gather in
this place. When we give our time and
our energy and our resources to the church, we buy shares of God’s promise even
while the barbarians are at the city gates.
To say that the church is about to be overrun by the Babylonians might
be a bit of a stretch, but we do live in uncertain times. There is a whole cottage industry in
publishing books and holding conferences on the inevitable sea change that is
happening in the church. We are in the
midst of what has variously been called a new Reformation, a fourth Great
Awakening and the emergence of a whole new Christian era. Whatever it is called, it is certain that we
are living in uncertain times in the household of God much like Jeremiah lived
in uncertain times in the Promised Land of God.
So why did Jeremiah, facing invasion and occupation,
respond with words of praise and we, faced with an uncertain future in the
church, so often respond with anxiety or, look around at those empty pews, we just
walking away?
What are we missing?
What did Jeremiah see in his moment of uncertainty that we do not see in
our own?
Perhaps a better question is asking, what did Jeremiah
see BEYOND that moment?
If we read this text clearly, it is really what he sees
beyond the moment that inspires Jeremiah rather than what happens in that
innocuous moment itself. He does not
praise God because his cousin forced him into this land deal or because Nebuchadnezzar
is at the city gates and about to sack Jerusalem, he praises God because he
knows that this land in which he now owns a share is God’s and what is truly
God’s can never belong to Nebuchadnezzar.
What is truly God’s can never be taken away. God promised the land to the children of
Abraham and God’s promise, ultimately, cannot and will not be broken.
Jeremiah buys a share in the Promised Land not because he
sees promise in the moment but because he sees beyond the nothing of the right
now to the something of God’s promised tomorrow.
This prophet of God lets his imagination take him, like
Willy Wonka’s Great Glass Elevator, beyond the boundaries of experience and
reason and rationality and excuses to a place of pure imagination; a place in
his spirit where the only words he can find are words of praise for God.
Jeremiah did that sitting in Zedekiah’s jail.
He dared to imagine that God was bigger and greater than
the present moment. He dared to dream in
what one preacher called the God of the big shoulders- big enough to hold us
all.
Imagine what we could do right here and right now if we
dare to put our imaginations to work.
What kind of church would we build if we were willing to
unleash our imaginations and let them take us beyond the reality of the moment
to the limitless possibilities of God’s promise?!
What kind of world would we build if we were willing to
open our hearts and our minds and our lives to a God who can still surprise us
with hope, a Christ who can still astonish us with grace and a Spirit that can
still overwhelm us with promise?
It would, I am certain, be like nothing we have ever seen
before.
It would, I am certain, be beyond our wildest
imaginations.
It would, I am ab-so-lute-ly certain, be a
bigger, brighter, greater, more wondrous future than any of us dare hope and
because we trust our imaginations to God there will be no need for us to wear
the armor of our ironic age, because the God of promise never disappoints.
Like the hymn says,
If you but trust in God to guide you
And place your confidence in Him,
You'll find God always there beside you,
To give you hope and strength within.
For those who trust God's changeless love
Build on the rock that will not move.
LORD God, you created the heaven and the earth by your
great power and outstretched arm; nothing is too hard for you! Or for us, with you.
Amen and amen.
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