Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15
Jeremiah was not, in fact, a bullfrog. That is a generational jokes for us old folks…
He was far more cranky than he was croaky. He was so cranky that his name has become synonymous with a long mournful complaint, known as a jeremiad.
He had a lot to complain about. Modern folks tend to focus on the personal piety stuff, and he did rant and rave about that. We even see evidence in his writing that the practice of child sacrifice had not been completely abolished among the Jewish people, despite the ancient story of Abraham and Isaac. Like other prophets, Jeremiah believed that personal infidelity and collective injustice together would result in divine punishment.
But a significant portion of his prophetic activity was focused on politics and diplomacy as Judah tried to maneuver around the powerful forces to the southwest and northeast. The particulars may seem of limited use to us, as we are not caught between Egypt and Babylon, though frankly we are caught between Israel and Palestine, and should be mindful that the hard line between private values and public policy is a fiction that was no more true in the past than it is in the present. There are no parts of your life that do not utterly depend on God, so there are no parts of your life or our lives collectively that are exempt from the law of love.
In today’s reading, Jeremiah purchases a piece of property. Those who were here last week may remember that the family land, a farming plot known as a small-hold, was economically and culturally important, passed from generation to generation. There were strict rules about the transfer of this land, rules meant to keep it in the family. We are not told why Jeremiah’s cousin Hanamel is selling his plot, though the nation is in crisis and the enemy is at the proverbial gates. Custom says that Jeremiah has the right of first refusal, and he exercises it, purchasing the field at Anathoth, and insuring copies of the deed are safeguarded.
At first glance, this looks like a mundane transaction. Of course, it isn’t. It is recorded in scripture because it is far more than it seems.
First of all, Jeremiah was incarcerated at the time of the purchase. Like Donald Trump, King Zedekiah wanted to silence anyone who dared to point out the obvious failures of his despotic regime and idiotic diplomacy. Just a few chapters after today’s reading, the king allowed a lynch mob of his supporters to throw Jeremiah into a cistern in hopes that he would sink into the mud quickly or starve slowly, murder without bloodshed to avoid Torah prohibitions. It was a minority court official from the Horn of Africa, a Cushite, who appealed to the king and rescued Jeremiah, though the prophet remained in custody.
Second, Jeremiah’s entire message was that the nation would be destroyed. Zedekiah was only on the throne because Babylon had conquered the nation, pillaged Jerusalem and the Temple, and taken Zedekiah’s brother, the rightful king, hostage. Zedekiah, who was on the throne because Babylon allowed it, had a knack for picking the wrong side, so he stopped paying tribute to the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, and aligned with Egypt. The Babylonians responded by once again laying siege to Jerusalem, and once victorious, destroyed the city and the Temple completely. The remaining elite and craftsmen of the Jewish people were taken to Babylon, where they would remain for half a century.
The basic facts of the story are well supported in the archaeological record. Not only are the destruction and captivity fact, there are ancient tablets, seals, and pottery shards naming key characters in the story dated to that era.
Given this, it seems foolish of Jeremiah to buy land. He will never enjoy it.
But this is precisely why this story found its way into scripture. Jeremiah had predicted the continuing collapse of the Kingdom of Judah. But he had also predicted restoration. This mundane transaction was a prophetic action, a bit of optimism, an affirmation of hope. It was planning for what came next.
And this, I believe, is a word we need to hear today, because quite frankly, things are looking pretty grim. There has always been change, sometimes dramatic, along with conflict, but there were always guardrails, at least in the United States. The system started to collapse, the guardrails to come off, in 1993 with the total warfare approach of Newt Gingrich in Congress, but we really developed a sort of national sepsis with the Internet Age, which went into overdrive with the development of social media. Anonymous and fake social media accounts are often the Klan hoods of our modern age.
We have a resurgence in open racism and other forms of hate, rising to a degree we have not seen in fifty years, with the constant threat of violence, and often the actual violence that is necessary to maintain racist privilege.
We have a secret police, an American Gestapo that disappears people based on the color of their skin or their political beliefs.
We have a man who accused his predecessors of weaponizing the government and censoring speech who is now weaponizing the government and censoring speech.
The imperfect democracy that was established in 1789 is no more.
And it is not just politics, or even the intersection of politics and predatory wealth.
One family’s insane greed created the initial explosion in opioid addiction, and the fires are not extinguished, despite the slowly declining number of overdose deaths as we get better at saving lives, but fail to fund recovery.
The Covid-19 pandemic, the worst health crisis in a century, exacerbated a mental health crisis that was already devastating America’s families. This mental health crisis intersects with the cult of the gun, the religion of cowards, resulting in the slaughter of children.
We started the century terrified of jihadists. Now we find we must fear our neighbor.
Then there is Citizens United, a Supreme Court decision that declared corporations have the rights of citizen without any of the responsibilities. The human race is in for decades if not centuries of climate disaster of our own making, but petro-traffickers have protected their profit.
It is a daunting list, and far from complete. The reptilian part of our brain is always looking for danger, prepared for fight or flight, and so we complain more than we celebrate, punch more than we embrace, catalog all that is bad in history and document our personal grievances in TL:DR posts online.
And yet, I still believe in the essential goodness of creation. I still believe in the possibility of human-kind.
I can’t help it. Maybe it is a sort of grit, that immeasurable personality trait that has always been so essential. Maybe it is stupidity or insanity.
It isn’t going to be easy. We need courageous prophets and folks who are willing to risk their lives for love, preferably through non-violence, though history has taught us that sometimes direct action is required to save lives, a gruesome calculus that weighs on our collective conscience, at least for those of us who have a conscience.
Still, I would buy the land. And I dream of what comes after, what comes next.
I dream of the next economy, after end-stage Neo-liberal capitalism collapses under its own weight, dream of a social democracy where the necessary economic Darwinism of the free market meets the just distribution of Democratic Socialism, or Social Democracy, whichever you want to call it. Where talent and effort are rewarded but the criminal speculators of hedge funds and private equity are a memory from the nightmarish past. I dream of a next when the heresy of the prosperity gospel is known as exactly that, a historic heresy, a long-con or Ponzi scheme that never delivered what it promised and never could, that tarnished the real gospel.
I dream of the next government, one that is not designed to preserve the institution of slavery and that has effectively preserved the power of one narrow segment of the population since it was founded. We are already seeing some hopeful signs as states like Maine and cities like New York experiment with ranked-choice voting. It is only a matter of time before some city audaciously proposes proportional representation, where a party with support from a quarter of the population gets a quarter of the seats, not the zero seats in our first-past-the-post system.
I dream of the next church, and try to live into it, where no one has the hubris to think they speak for God or dares to suggest that God is some dead unchanging thing, but where we tell the stories, and open our hearts to one another, to this creation in which we live, where our love is grounded in awe and compassion.
Next starts with this last, with holy humility and wonder, with personal piety and faithful community.
Next is a system of government where all have a voice and not a dictatorship of a privileged plurality.
Next is a system of labor and distribution that allows for specialization and innovation, so essential for civilization, but also a system that is just and that protects the vulnerable and the planet, that leaves people with their dignity and sees them as the holy miracle that they are.
Next is what I work for, why I get up in the morning, so that the people just feet away from us who are trapped in aimlessness and sin, trapped in despair and poverty and addiction and disease, can have shelter and purpose and love. So that some in this very room can escape the chains that bind them, and can know comfort and peace as our lives, so finite and fickle, draw to a close.
Next… a field of saplings, a new grandbaby, that roof with a 20-year guarantee, and the song of each new day. Amen.