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“Anyone Want to Buy a Lot?”

Wilton Presbyterian Church

September 30, 2007

Maurice Sendak wrote decades ago to children of a world as Where the Wild Things Are. He was right then. And he still is.

A significant portion of the Biblical landscape appears to be up for sale these days. The American landscape, too? Those in the know say that the real estate market headed to the dumps and housing prices are falling fast. It is a buyer’s market anywhere you go. Anyone want to buy a lot? Word has it that, all appearances to the contrary, it might turn out to be a good investment.

“For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: ‘Houses and fields and vineyards

shall again be bought in this land.’” (Jeremiah 32.15)

“(Abram) went out from Ur of the Chaldees…and when they reached Harran, they settled there…The Lord said to Abram, ‘Leave your own country, your kinsmen, and your father’s house, and go to a country that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you and make your name so great that it shall be used in blessings. And so Abram set out as the Lord had bidden him, and Let went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he left Harran...(and) started his journey to Canaan. When they arrived, Abram passed through Shechem. Thence he went on (and) pitched his tent between Bethel on the west and Ai on the east.” (Genesis 11.31-12.9)

Obviously a lot has happened since then.

The area around Abram’s birthplace of Ur has become a bustling burg of some 275,000 people. Actually, 275,000 was while ago. Now it’s got to be much, much less. Its name? Nasiriya. Its country? Iraq.

The birthplace of all of Abram’s and Sarah’s children (except Benjamin) is still called Harran. Its location? Eastern Turkey. Its population? About 2,300 Kurds whose zeal to reunite with their kinsmen across the Turkish border in northern Iraq the Turkish government is trying to restrain.

And Abram’s first “home” in the Promised Land was between Bethel and Ai (just two miles apart). Its location? the West Bank. Its people? That depends. Palestinians live in the present-day village Bethel they call Beitin near Ramallah. But less than a mile away, on the outskirts of Ramallah is the Jewish settlement of Beit El. Who knows!?

A lot has happened since the time of Abram in the lands of Abram. Question is: Anyone want to buy a lot within this history of Abram? Word has it that it may be worth more than it appears.

“For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: ‘Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”

Now the story of Jeremiah’s real estate transaction at the time of the Chaldean invasion of Jerusalem some 2,600 years ago has little or nothing to do with the promise of tribes, peoples, nations or anyone else that is currently involved in world events swirling out of control and that frustrate us so much. The Bible would agree with those who map this Middle East terrain today that the whole area is under siege and may even fall.

But the question that need be asked is not: What is the promise of all those peoples and nations involved in this area? It is rather: What is the promise to these peoples? In other words, the question before the peoples and nations and religions today is the one put to Abram, namely, the question of God.

Is there really, and in reality, a God who corresponds to the Biblical witness?

Is there a covenant-cutting, promise-making God who is not only able but determined to keep covenant and honor promises?

Was Jesus of Nazareth the One who was to come, or shall we look for another?

Or as Jesus himself put it to Simon Peter: “Who do you say that I am?”

Has a promise been made to the world by One who intends to keep it?

Is the Gospel true?

And the question that question forces upon us is: Anyone want to buy a lot?

The story of Jeremiah and his decision to buy a lot at Anathoth is so relevant to the world now it might have been written this morning. It has about it all of the irony of a good Middle Eastern table, a touch of the absurd, a mixture of the unrealistic, the impractical, and the impossible, with a pinch of brave humor known best to one who decides to bet his or her soul against history.

As the Chaldean invader is sweeping down on Israel, the story tells us, one Hanamel concludes that his real estate investment is in jeopardy. So he tries to pawn it off on his cousin, Jeremiah, since the right of redemption by purchase is his as the next of kin. Now, Jeremiah is no farmer. What’s more, he is in prison for his unconventional views and actions.

Nonetheless, Jeremiah plays the contrarian. He buys a lot, and at a fair market price…that is to say, at the price one might pay if the Chaldeans were not coming, if housing prices were not tanking…not because Hanamel is a slick real estate salesman, but because he wanted to renew his people’s hope. Not in the world that going you know where in a hand basket, but in God. In the face of impending disaster, in spite of the number of Chaldeans standing over against the city, Jeremiah buys a lot in this unpromising land of promises. He bets his soul against all predictions on the basis of a lively, reckless confidence in this covenant-making, promise-keeping God. He buys a lot.

So, what hope do we good Christians exercise in our time as Jeremiah did in his? How dare we talk of promise in so unpromising a world?

First, it occurs to me that we are warned by Jeremiah’s parable of trust to take seriously the fact that the Chaldeans are coming. Few prophets more realistically or vividly described the greed, the ostentation, the self-indulgence of the rich and the powerful. Not that he sentimentalized the poor either. Poverty produces lives stingy with hope, dreary with self-hatred, and on edge for revenge against almost anyone else. The truth is that threats to the world are very much alive and real in the world—not just to real estate but to people of this world from civil wars to global warming .If nothing else, the God of Jeremiah—our God—is a God of reality. And the reality of the world is wild and bleeding and broken.

A second thing that occurs to me as I read of Jeremiah’s real estate transaction is that our anxiety in this world is not because God created the world this way but because we keep messing it up. How many of the threats to this world are of our own making? Pick a threat. Any threat! And then ask yourself to what extent we—you and I--are responsible for its making—and for its spinning out of control! If the city is so vulnerable and poorly defended it is because we bear no little responsibility for leaving it so and for our having to ask—or listen to--our children ask:

• How many Iraqi children have to die—or how many Iraqi families have to leave their homes, their livelihoods, and country—to achieve stability? Or how many Palestinian lives are worth one Israeli life? Or is it the other way around?
• How many immigrants have to die getting in—or be deported out—before we figure out immigration policy true to the vision of this country as a promised land for all who would, like our forebears, beg, borrow, and yes, sometimes steal to get here?

· How much polar ice needs to melt before we recognize global warming as a truth?

Each of us, of course, struggle with our own answers to these questions that elude national policy and haunt our individual consciences? And the answers we come to will not be the same for everyone. Nor are the answer we give today the same we was gave some yesterday. But by simply acknowledging these questions, a truth remains. The real problem is not the Chaldeans. The enemy is not the world God created. The enemy is not so much others as the enemy is us.

The third thing we must do in light of the Jeremiah story is to look over the battlements for signs of hope. As we survey the landscape from within the besieged city, are there signs which might lead us to believe that the purchase of a lot in the unpromising land of promise might not be such a bad idea after all?

One sign is the marvelous staying power of the human spiritual need. If nothing else, the revival of religion in the world—even in its wackiest and sometimes sick and dangerous forms--is a fact that none can deny.

Human beings may repress a hunger and thirst for meaning in life and for belonging to God—the who, what, and why questions of our lives—but they do not hidden and closeted for long. Even more relevant is the continued life and liveliness of people who are hungry and thirsty for the deep down deep Good News and, in our Christian case, for the church to be the church. Not a successful business. But a church. Not just a generous charitable agency. But a church. A church where people—in their worship and music, in their prayers and studies—are open and responsive to a God who is defined and revealed in the person, teachings, actions, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the carpenter’s son. The church bears witness to all kinds of good and useful things, but they are all derivatives of the living reality of this Jesus. There is for us no escape from the story of this man Jesus, and that for us is a sign that there is a good measure of wisdom in the foolishness of encouraging each other to buy a lot.

What Shakespeare once wrote is true: “Our doubts are traitors/and make us lose the good we oft might win/By fearing to attempt.” But what he wrote is not the whole truth; for the history of this world includes countless stories of people, who have feared, yes, but still attempted the good they would risk—and sacrifice—for others. People who, as written by Luke and sung by the choir this morning, at the simple command of Jesus, dare to put their nets into really deep water in hope of a catch.

I am sure each of you has one such story you can tell someone else today. And here is mine to tell you. Back in 1986 there was a Great Peace March across our entire country that, over the course of 6 months, hundreds of thousands of people participated in—some just for a day, others for months. It was an amazing grassroots movement to advocate a nuclear-free world.

And this Great Peace March was started by a man whose life could be characterized as remarkable because there was nothing especially remarkable about it. This man was an attorney in a small town in Oregon, going about his daily business of lawyering. He was not engaged in any causes of any kind. In fact, to hear him talk, he wasn’t involved in much of anything—UNTIL his wife gave birth to a baby daughter. And then, for the first time in his life, he began thinking about the future. And for the first time in his life, he absorbed what he had casually read about the future. And for the time in this life he understood what he read about the dangers of nuclear fall-out, and how it could even reach his tiny, little town. And his daughter. And he found himself imagining ways that he might put her out of her misery. But then, like a prodigal son, he came to his senses. And he said to himself. And he said to himself, “This is a crazy way of thinking! Such a thing must never happen! I must find some way to prevent it!” So, he took 6 months off from his practice (which also meant losing a lot of money ), and he hiked across the country, tell his story to every parent he met who would listen. And so many joined him that it came to be known as The Great Peace March.

Don’t you wonder what might happen if every father and mother, every grandfather and grandmother across the face of this earth rose up to work and pray and suffer and struggle for a world fit for their children and grandchildren? What if parents and grandparents engaged enough to do something simple, something small, but something daring and important and positive that each could do? Start something peaceful. Say something peaceful. Sacrifice something for peace. Walk somewhere, somehow for peace. Pray for peace. The world is not unfriendly. Nor are we!

Except when we get so knotted up in our fears and insecurities that we create walls at home and choose wars abroad. Love seeks truth because love knows the security of God’s promises to the world are not in the world—whose fear forever seeks safety—but in God. And the kind of love we know in Jesus Christ unties the knots of fear and calls us to live into God’s promise that the dark nights of the world cannot hold back the ultimate triumph of Living Light.

“For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: ‘Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.’”

Anyone want to buy a lot?