Jack McKinney

Pullen Memorial Baptist Church

September 30, 2007 – Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Text: Jeremiah 32:1-15

Real Estate Faith

            Are you a person with a reputation? What I mean is do your friends and family associate certain tendencies or peculiarities with your behavior? Maybe you are the person who always picks up the check, or maybe you are the person who is always in the bathroom when the check comes. Perhaps you are especially kind to small children or deathly afraid of small bugs. Reputations are interesting things. Sometimes deserved and sometimes not, they are terribly difficult to change once they are established.

            My childhood friend, Tim Kilgore, had a reputation. He was that kid every parent didn’t want their child to hang around with. In the third grade Tim claimed to have set the school record for getting the most spankings from the Principal in a single year. While there was no way to verify this inglorious feat, no one doubted for a minute that Tim was correct. I’ll never forget the last day of school that year. I was riding my bike home and Tim’s mother roared by in her gold Cadillac with Tim hanging out the passenger-side window screaming, “I passed, I passed.” The look of shock on his face that he had actually passed the third grade was probably matched by my own astonished expression.

            Of all the prophets in the Bible the one who had the toughest reputation to live with must have been Jeremiah. He has been tagged by religious scholars with the nickname the “weeping prophet.” How would you like to be known as the weeping something or other? I mean if you are a professional mourner maybe you wouldn’t mind, but otherwise such a name suggests you are not going to be put in charge of planning the office Christmas party.

            To be fair to Jeremiah, however, the poor guy had a lot to weep about. He was called by God to be a prophet at a young age, but as part of his call he was told that his message would be ignored. Friends, that is tough duty. Can you imagine being handed a job and your boss saying, “Now, no one is going to like you for doing this and ultimately you are not going to succeed, but I need someone to take on this tough assignment.” That is the gig that Jeremiah drew.

            Jeremiah’s job as a prophet started during a time when things were good in Jerusalem, but the message he was called to deliver was of coming judgment. You can just imagine how popular he was with that kind of pessimistic pronouncement. And then, when things did start to go bad in Jerusalem, and the Babylonians showed up and started taking people into exile, Jeremiah wasn’t exactly vindicated. People assumed he was a traitor and was happy about the demise of the nation. He was arrested and subjected to all manner of public scorn. Like I said, the poor guy had a lot to weep about.

            Thinking about Jeremiah’s prophetic calling and mission has caused me to contemplate the tension between being too cynical and the need to speak hard truths. Throughout our country right now Americans are wrestling with this tension. If we protest and denounce the way the endless War on Terror is being prosecuted are we pessimistic and unpatriotic, or are we trying to speak a hard truth? If we decry the coming financial crisis if health care costs are not brought into check and social security is not revamped are we negative thinkers, or are we trying to speak a truth few want to hear? And maybe this tension is being played out in your own family. Perhaps someone you love is caught in a self-destructive spiral. Do you risk saying something knowing that you will likely be brushed off as a nag, or do you intervene anyway? It’s hard to know sometimes when to keep naming something that people don’t want to hear.

            And as a preacher here is the point in the sermon where I say something like, “I really respect Jeremiah for his willingness to speak truths no one wanted to hear. We should all be so brave and faithful.” But if I’m honest, I’ll admit I grow weary of being the proclaimer of bad news. And I also get tired of listening to others trumpet coming doom. We all prefer to hear things that make us feel better. And we all want to be liked. But if we never speak up and name the hard truths then before we know it we are living in a country where torture is justified by our leaders and endless war to keep us safe is official policy. The fastest way for us to lose something we love, like the great republic that is this country, is to shut up and do nothing.

            But here’s the thing. If Jeremiah’s reputation was justified, and all he ever did was name truths no one wanted to hear, I would have a problem with that. Because there comes a tipping point when being prophetic can turn into anxiety-riddled cynicism. It is possible to play one note so consistently that no matter how pure and true it is the repetitious sound of that one note makes people deaf to our message. But even though that was Jeremiah’s reputation, there was a lot more to this guy than simply being the weeping prophet. And that other part of the story is contained in this morning’s strange scripture reading.

            In Jeremiah 32 we find the city of Jerusalem under siege by the Babylonian army. The Babylonians were the big dog on the block at this point in history and it was clear it was only a matter of time before they captured the holy city. Most of the Judean countryside had already been conquered, including Jeremiah’s hometown of Anathoth. And that’s where our story picks up. Jeremiah is in Jerusalem under a form of house arrest when his cousin Hanamel arrives with an offer. He tells Jeremiah that he is prepared to sell his land in Anathoth to the prophet. Now think about this for a minute. Hanamel is offering to sell land that he no longer controls. The Babylonians have already seized Anathoth. It would be like someone offering to sell you property in downtown Krakow in 1940 after the Nazis had come to town. Even so, in a transaction that is described in painful detail, Jeremiah buys the land and makes sure the deed is put in a place it will be secure. Why? Because there was a lot more to this guy than doom and gloom.

            Purchasing real estate in a town where real estate was no longer on the market had nothing to do with property or investments. No, Jeremiah’s acquisition is not about land; it’s about the future. He is making a faith statement that no matter how bad things are in the present there will still be a future for his people. This is a symbolic act, but what a powerful symbol it was. Here was the weeping prophet, the guy who seemed to having nothing positive to say, making this very public declaration.

I love this story. I absolutely love it. A man who wasn’t afraid to say what no one wanted to hear also turns out to be the guy who refuses to lose hope. He isn’t a cynic after all. And that’s so important to me because to be honest I don’t need any more help in becoming cynical. Cynicism is cheap and easy these days. It takes almost no effort to think the painful injustices all around us are unchangeable. We look at our leadership and almost expect them to fail us. And in that kind of climate it is very hard to have faith. In that soil hope is choked off at its roots. And sometimes the best thing we can do when we feel tempted to give into cynicism is to put a stake in the future anyway. Do you think our political leaders are all disingenuous and the system is hopelessly controlled by special interests? Vote anyway. Have you lost faith in almost all societal institutions because of how intractable and pointless they seem? Get involved anyway. In the darkness of these days light a candle of hope, utter prayers of expectation, sing about tomorrow, tutor a child, or just go buy that worthless property in Anathoth. Because it’s not about the real estate; it’s about believing in a God who is always wooing us forward. Anyone can have faith on the day they win the lottery. It’s much harder to believe in the future when your world is crumbling and the Babylonians are at the gate. Believe anyway. Act anyway. Keep redeeming the future anyway. That’s what Jeremiah did, God bless him. And that’s what makes him such an important model for those of us struggling in present.

For the last few weeks I have been teaching a Sunday school class on Baptist identity. In the course of preparing for that class I was reminded of one of my favorite stories about our faith ancestors. A little over 400 years ago a group of Christians in the village of Gainsborough, England formed a Separatist Church. They were called separatists as a result of wanting to separate from the Church of England because of what they perceived to be an unholy alliance of church and state. The leaders of the renegade church in Gainsborough were William Bradford, John Smyth, and Thomas Helwys. When the church came under persecution and their lives were threatened, they escaped to Holland. Once there the church split into two groups. One group went to Amsterdam under Smyth and Helwys and formed the first Baptist church. The other group, under the leadership of Bradford, eventually got on a boat called the Mayflower and came to the new world. Those of us sitting in this Baptist church in America this morning are the inheritors of their legacies. Hounded out of their own country, having lost their homes and jobs because of their faith convictions, it would have been easy for the members of that long-ago church to lose faith and hope. Instead, they kept believing in and working for a future where religious liberty would be real. I’m not proud of all of my Baptist ancestors and relatives, but I guarantee you I’m pleased to be associated with people of that kind of faith.

Which brings me back to reputations. The thing about reputations is that they almost never tell the whole story. Yes, Jeremiah was a man willing to speak unpopular truths that few wanted to hear. That is part of his legacy we need to embrace. And he was also a person of uncommon faith and hope. We need to embrace that part of his story as well. Because regardless of how dark the present may seem, our faith calls us to keep believing in and working toward tomorrow.