The Future We Cannot See

The Future We Cannot See--October 10, 2017

"And I bought the field at Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel, and weighed out the money to him, seventeen shekels of silver. ¹⁰I signed the deed, sealed it, got witnesses, and weighed the money on scales. ¹¹Then I took the sealed deed of purchase, containing the terms and conditions, and the open copy; ¹²and I gave the deed of purchase to Baruch son of Neriah son of Mahseiah, in the presence of my cousin Hanamel, in the presence of the witnesses who signed the deed of purchase, and in the presence of all the Judeans who were sitting in the court of the guard. ¹³In their presence I charged Baruch, saying, ¹⁴Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Take these deeds, both this sealed deed of purchase and this open deed, and put them in an earthenware jar, in order that they may last for a long time. ¹⁵For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land."  [Jeremiah 32:9-15]

I think this may be the most theologically-loaded public record of a real estate transaction in history.  Certainly, it makes the top of the list in the Bible itself.

Of course, reading just this paragraph out of context may not make the immensity of the moment clear enough.  Let's zoom out for a moment to understand what's going on here, and what makes it so powerful.  Who cares, after all, that a mopey Judean prophet bought a piece of property from a relative to avoid outside foreclosure, something like twenty-five centuries ago?  I mean, honestly, I don't even bother to read the public record of real estate transactions in my own town's newspaper on a regular basis--why would I care about a land purchase two and a half millennia ago on a spot of land that can only be described as a plain, non-descript empty field?

Hope.  Hope is the reason.  Hope in God's promised future makes it possible for us to step into the dark when we cannot see where we are planting our feet.

And that is what this moment from Jeremiah's life is all about.

These were bad days in the life of the nation of Judah.  The country was ruled by a reckless and dangerous provocateur of a king, Zedekiah, who had been installed into power by the occupying Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.  The Babylonians figured Zedekiah would be someone they could control and manage, but instead, he taunted and poked at the powerful Babylonian Empire, and, boy, was Babylon ever mad.  They brought the hammer down. Their army eventually destroyed the capital city of Jerusalem, burned its wall to the ground, destroyed and pillaged the Temple of the living God, carried away the best and brightest of the Judean citizens into exile, and effectively conquered all the land, leaving only wreckage and the poorest, the sickest, and the least-skilled behind to wallow in the remains of what was once their nation.  Oh--and, to boot, Zedekiah eventually got what had been coming to him, too, for poking a sleeping bear and provoking Nebuchadnezzar.  The Babylonians had refined cruelty into an art form, and they murdered Zedekiah's two sons before his own eyes, and then they poked out Zedekiah's own eyes, so that the last thing he ever saw was the death of his own children.  If there were ever a time to say that all was lost, this was it.  It sure felt like all was lost, and the whole nation suffered the consequences of its firebrand of a demagogue's foolishly provocative actions.  Hope was in short supply.  Even the huckster televangelist warm-and-fuzzy-everything-is-fine preachers (false prophets) of Jeremiah's day had thrown in the towel and gone home, so there weren't even any voices of false hope anymore.

And in that moment, in the midst of that utter hopelessness as people watched their nation crumble before their eyes--both because of their own complicity in turning from the ways of God, as well as because of the boneheaded taunting their king seemed insistent on lobbing at their threatening enemies, the Babylonians--in that moment, God told Jeremiah to do something entirely unexpected.  The voice of God told Jeremiah to go and buy a field that had come up for sale from a family member.

What?  Why?  How would this even matter?  Why would anybody care about a field?  Much less in a time when Babylonian might effectively claimed all of the land of Judah for Nebuchadnezzar?  After all, the transaction was just a piece of paper--a worthless piece of paper, claiming ownership in a worthless tract of occupied land among people who had been told they were worthless, too. Why would Jeremiah spend good money on land that was currently being overrun by foreign occupiers--and much less, why would he bother telling us the story of the real estate transaction in such... exhaustive detail?  

It was an act of hope.  It was an act of being pulled, being moved by Mercy, into God's future.  For Jeremiah, buying the field was not, not, NOT a wistful bit of nostalgia looking backward at how great things "used to be" in his childhood (they had never been so great, honestly).  But rather, it was an act of trust--a visible step of faith into a future he could not see but had been promised would come--that one day, once again, the deed would mean something.  One day, years from the moment of purchase (the exile lasted 70 years, it turns out), God's people would come back from exile, the Babylonians would be gone, and once again, people would live lives of blessed ordinariness, buying and selling, raising their kids, taking care of their neighbors and neighborhoods.  Once again, there would come a day when the people of Judah would be free--no longer dominated by the decadently cruel Babylonians, no longer paralyzed by fear of when the invading armies would come again, no longer ruled by a petulant man-child like Zedekiah who didn't seem to understand how he was instigating his own people's destruction.  There would come a day when Jeremiah's deed to the field in Anathoth would matter again.  

And so Jeremiah bought it as a sign of the promised future.  He stepped into the darkness, trusting that there would be something solid to hold him up, even if he could not see what it was.  He acted as though the future God promised was so real, so certain, that he could live differently in the present because of it.  That is what we do, we people of hope, when mercy moves us into God's promised future. We dare to trust what God says about our eventual homecoming--and we step out into the darkness and go in the direction of home.

Some days for us, dear friends, it is difficult to hope anymore.  Some days we watch the news, we listen to people in our social circles or online "friends" and all but despair.  Some days it can feel like we are living with Jeremiah and watching people all around us give up hope.  Sometimes the faces giving up hope are the ones we see reflected in the mirror.

It can feel like that watching your town shrink in size, your school district consolidate, your old job pack up and disappear.  It can feel like that when you hear talk on the news of North Korean missile tests and mass shootings like Las Vegas.  It can feel like that when you have lost friends in the last year... when you have lost relationships, when you have lost respect or love or connections with people you used to hold dear.  There are a million reasons not to hope anymore.

And yet, there is this nagging voice.  There is this voice--not at all sentimental or warm-and-fuzzy, but real and genuine--this voice that says things concrete and tangible and practical:  "Buy the field in Anathoth, Jeremiah.  Let that be your resistance to the Babylonians. Let that be your act of hope when everyone else has given up theirs."  There is this voice that tells us to live as though the promised homecoming really will happen, and to reorder our lives and priorities in light of that future.   There is this voice that deals in real estate transactions because our minds have a way of only thinking something is real if there is money exchanged and you can smell the fresh earth from the field you bought in the soil under your fingernails.  There is the voice of God that says, "Step now into a future you cannot yet see.  I will bring you home."

Today, despite all the reasons we might have not to hope, let us step out into that darkness, and find our footing there.

Lord God, speak again your promise of homecoming, and let us live today like it is coming true.