First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS
Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
Jeremiah 32: 1-3a, 6-15
PRAYER OF ILLUMINATION
The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah in the tenth year of King Zedekiah of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar. Two thousand six hundred and four years later, we, too, wait for the word of God. And so today we pray for illumination, new light to break in to our own time. Will you pray with me?
Holy one, we come to you this morning as your people. Eager to hear your word resonating across the centuries.
This morning, many of us are weary. Exhausted by the seemingly unending violence in our own midst. Wars that never cease. Violence at home and abroad. Human beings turned into hashtags. Each name painstakingly chosen by parents with love. Each person a unique being - fully known and fully beloved.
These days, it seems there is hardly a break in the violence. Name after name. Story after story. We are under siege. Images of violence, hatred, fear that masquerades as power.
Some of us in this room leave our homes each day wondering if we will be able to keep our bodies safe. Some of are physically ill from the stress of wondering how to protect those we love. Some of us have the privilege of checking out, pretending the horror that comes to us through our screens each day can't touch us.
Holy Spirit whose name is love, descend upon us now. We, your people, come with hearts open, souls longing for a word of good news. As a people besieged by fear, violence, confusion, helplessness, anger - we need you. Send now your love to us. Fill us with hope, compassion, peace. Besiege our hearts with love and a thirst for justice. We are here. We are waiting. Amen.
HYMN OF PREPARATION - "Spirit of the Living God"
We are here. We are waiting. Jeremiah was waiting, too.
It was the year 588 BCE, just one year before the fall of Jerusalem to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and the absolute exile of all the Israelites and Judeans from their homes. The Babylonians, had been steadily advancing towards Jerusalem for some time and in January of 588 their troops finally reached the exterior of the city and placed in under blockade. Jerusalem was under siege.
Siege comes from the latin verb “sedare” – to sit – because that’s exactly what you do under siege.
You sit.
And you worry. And you starve. And you sit. And you fear. And you thirst. And you sit. And you get sick. And you basically just wait for your captors or murderers to finally arrive.
That’s about all you can do. Because if you get to the point where your city is under siege, it’s pretty much just a matter of time until it’s all over. Especially if the folks that are surrounding your city are Babylonian. By this point, the Babylonian army had conquered all of the surrounding areas. There was no place to run, no place to hide. And they weren’t backing down anytime soon.
So the folks in Jerusalem sat. And waited. And wondered if the Babylonian army would simply carry them away, or kill them, or if they would simply die first, while sitting there.
Jeremiah did his sitting at court. He was imprisoned in the palace of King Zedekiah, which, as prisons go, wasn’t too shabby. It was certainly better than the dungeon he had been sitting in before being transferred to the palace.
Jeremiah was, as most prophets are, a bit of a trouble-maker. He had been counseling King Zedekiah and the other leaders for some time to just give it up already. “Give in. Turn yourselves over to Babylon and maybe they’ll go easy on you,” he said. But King Zedekiah wasn’t hearing it. He refused to surrender.
But all of that was later.
At this moment, in 588, Zedekiah was just a scared, proud king who didn’t want to believe anything Jeremiah had to say but kept him close anyway because he wasn’t quite sure who to listen to.
Now, how did Jeremiah get stuck in jail? At one point, perhaps a few months earlier, there had been a brief break in the siege and Jeremiah had tried to leave Jerusalem to go to his hometown, Anathoth, but had been stopped at the city gate. Since he already had a reputation as a trouble-maker, the guards arrested him on the suspicion that he was attempting to desert to the Babylonians. They beat him and threw him in a dungeon, where he sat until King Zedekiah transferred him to sit at the court.
At court he was at least able to eat and drink and be safe. And he was able to bend the ear of the king from time to time – even if the king didn’t listen. And he was still able to put on his prophet variety shows – acting out strange signs for anyone who would watch, attempting to give them a word from the Lord in a creative fashion.
Jeremiah was not the only prophet to do this charades-as-prophecy kind of thing, but he certainly comes to mind as one of the prophets that used it quite often. In this style, prophets acted things out as a symbolic way of delivering God’s word to the people. And Jeremiah did it well. Even in prison, he found a way to use his actions to give a word from the Lord. While the city was under siege, while the people were starving, while time was running out, Jeremiah did a bold and – most would say, utterly stupid – thing. He bought some property in his hometown of Anathoth.
What we have to remember is that, at this point, no one but NO ONE was buying or selling anything. The war and the siege had rendered money virtually useless. You didn’t go out in the morning to buy a macchiato at Starbucks and you most certainly didn’t go buying a house in the countryside. There was just no point. All that land in the countryside was already taken over by the Babylonians anyway, so what would be the point?
But Jeremiah said, “The word of the Lord came to me….”
His cousin, Hanamel, was going to come to Jerusalem and offer to sell him a field at Anathoth. And Jeremiah was to buy that field. That’s what God told him to do, so that’s what he did. And he did it in a very public way. He took that little free pen that they give you when you close on a house and he signed those hundreds of pages out in the open where everyone could see. And when he was done he photocopied the paperwork and put it in a safe where it would last forever.
He bought the filed as a sign of the word he had received from God: “Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”
In the midst of crisis, God promised that it wouldn’t last forever. And in the midst of crisis, God promises that it won’t last forever.
In the midst of violence and fear and racism and war and economic uncertainties and presidential elections that may keep us up at night, the Word of the Lord comes to us from 2600 years ago. And the Prophet Jeremiah speaks to us of resurrection.
Not the Resurrection of Christ. But Resurrection as a way of understanding the world. Resurrection as a total concept.
Resurrection, to me, is so much more than the way the earliest followers of Christ experienced the ongoing presence of Jesus after his death. Resurrection is a whole way of being, a way of seeing the world.
Resurrection is the understanding that there is always something more. Something beyond the way the current situation appears at a first glance.
Resurrection is believing that things may get worse first, but they will also get better.
It is that aphorism: “Everything will be okay in the end. If it isn’t okay, it’s not the end.”
Resurrection is understanding that the end may seem near, but a new beginning is always around the corner. Winter may be on its way, but spring will come. My brain and heart may be telling me things seem hopeless, but there is always hope to be found.
Resurrection calls to us in the midst of whatever sieges may come our way. As we sit and wait and worry and wonder and weep, we are not alone. God sits alongside us. When we look at the problems facing our world today and we start to feel hopeless and helpless and very, very small, we have to remember this:
Resurrection means that we worship a God who is too big to fail.
I don’t mean that God is some sort of really muscular, all-powerful dude floating around in the sky that throws around lightning bolts and zaps people to get them to do what he wants.
What I do mean is that God is too big to fail because God is a force of love and justice and hope and peace that cannot be stopped.
God is somehow within and beyond everything that exists. God is the More that we sense is behind all of the day-to-day worries. God has always been and will always be. God is, in all these ways and more, too big to fail.
And if we will but live our lives in such a way that recognizes our part in God’s existence, we, too can go beyond.
We can cease being pesky little prophets locked up in jail and become, instead, voices that echoes through the millennia. We can go beyond being “just a teacher,” “just a dad,” “just a secretary,” “just a doctor,” “just a farmer,” “just a daughter.”
We are already so much more than what we think we are. And it’s by tapping into the reality that we belong to this great-big-God that we become voices for hope in a hurting world. We can remind people that things may not always go the way we had hoped, but they will go on. Jeremiah didn’t get a return on his investment, but he did get to point the way to a day when things would make their way back to a “new normal.” Jeremiah became a voice of resurrection – and, 2,604 years later – his witness invites us to do the same.
“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul…”
I believe the one we call Holy – this too-big-to-fail-God, this God of Resurrection – also goes by the name Hope. Hope perches in our souls and beckons us to listen to her sweet song. Hope sings out in the chillest land and on the strangest sea.
Emily Dickinson wrote that hope has never asked a crumb of her. Hope is somehow magically free for the taking. And although I believe Hope does pour herself out freely, I also believe Hope does one more thing.
Hope invites us to be involved. Hope invites us to buy a field at Anathoth. Hope beckons us to be a symbol of Resurrection to the world around us.
Hope is too big to fail and we are invited to tell that good news to the world.
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