Wait: Jeremiah buys a field
July 14, 2024
Wait: waiting and praying
Lighting the Christ Candle
Welcome and Announcements
Call to Worship
The word has come for us from God:
who promises to shelter us under the wings of hope and grace.
The word has come to us from Jesus:
who encourages us to remember the good news we have received.
The word flows to us from the Spirit:
who reminds us to place our hope and trust in God.
Hymn: 765 We’ve a story to tell to the nations
Prayer of Adoration
Ever-calling God, We give thanks that you have gathered us into your church and graced us with your faithful presence. We ponder our history, ancient and still developing, and marvel at the many expressions of your church.
Grant us the vision to be a part of a new reformation for the Church that will bring ever more joy and justice to the world.
Continue to gather us into Jesus’ vision and dream that your faithful people may be one in you. Amen
Prayer of Confession:
God, in our distress we go round in circles, and our mouths feel bitter with bile. We can’t get our worries out of our heads, and our souls feel as heavy as lead.
Now is the time for us to focus on you, to have hope and be positive. Yet we fail to believe that your love is never in debit and that your grace knows no limit.
Have mercy on us and hear our prayer. Amen
Assurance of Pardon
God is good to those who wait patiently, and blesses the soul who seeks sincerely. There is nothing better than to wait quietly and bask in the salvation of God, faithfully. Thanks be to God, in Jesus we are forgiven and our future is secure.
Passing the Peace
Hymn: 689 Simply Trusting
Scripture:
Jeremiah 32: 1-12, 42-44 p 1228
Jeremiah 37: 11-21 p 1238
Sermon Wait: Jeremiah buys a field
There is a joke about a minister who only had one sermon and preached it week after week, after week. When confronted about this repetition and the congregation’s desire for another sermon, the minister responded, “When you start living up to what I am saying in this sermon, I will write another one.”
What is it like to have to say the same thing over and over again, and no one listens?
That is the situation that Jeremiah finds himself in. The army of the king of Babylon had besieged the city of Jerusalem. As a warning to King Zedekiah Jeremiah has been saying the same thing repeatedly.
“I am about to give this city into the hands of the king of Babylon, and he will capture it. 4 Zedekiah king of Judah will not escape the Babylonians[a] but will certainly be given into the hands of the king of Babylon, and will speak with him face to face and see him with his own eyes. 5 He will take Zedekiah to Babylon, where he will remain until I deal with him, declares the Lord. If you fight against the Babylonians, you will not succeed.’” Jeremiah 32: 3-5 NIV
Zedekiah was more than a little tired of listening to the same message again and again. In fact, a long while back he had put Jeremiah in prison, hoping that it would persuade him to change his message. Get with the program. Agree with all those other prophets.
Jeremiah did not change his message. In fact, he repeated the message again, but this time he also bought a field.
We have to wonder, why would a prisoner, living in a besieged city, who regularly preached the word of God saying, “the city will be given into the hands of the King of Babylon, buy a field? What does this field mean?
Buying this field was a sign of Jeremiah’s confidence in God. Buying the field also was a way of sending a message to the people, that buying and selling fields and living with hope for the future God would bring, was possible and necessary.
Yes, we are under siege. Yes, we will be occupied. Yes, the people and the King will be taken into exile. But the day will come when everyone would be able to return to their ancestral homes and reclaim their land, plant crops and prosper.
Land ownership was a very important thing for the people of Israel. Each family had been given its allotment of land, and that land remained in the family. There was a provision made in the Law that if the land was lost, then in the Year of the Jubilee, that land would revert to the family that owned it.
When Jeremiah bought the field from his cousin, Hanamel, he was placing his trust in God and in God’s Laws. According to the Law, Hanamel came to him saying, “Buy my field at Anathoth, because as nearest relative it is your right and duty to buy it.’ 32: 7 NIV
In this way they both declared their faith that God would restore the land when the King of Babylon would retreat. The only thing in question was, “when will the coming occupation be over?”
We have spoken many times during this waiting series that when we wait, it is an act of faith. Jeremiah is declaring his faith that the coming occupation would end, and that those taken into exile would come home and everyone would return to their own fields. God’s promises prevail, even when the evidence seemed to say that all was permanently lost.
Root and Bertrand write that a symptom of a church not waiting and listening for God to speak, is that they feel as if God has changed. That belief can grow so strong that individuals and congregations are not able to believe in God or what God says.
When this happens to individuals in the Church, it is akin to what is happening with Zedekiah, who is caught in his own sin, angry with the message that Jeremiah is speaking for God, and angry with God. As a result, he not only refused to hear the word of God, he jailed the person who spoke it.
Jeremiah spoke a word of warning. With a warning, there is hope for the person to repent and have a change of heart.
Last week we saw how that happened when Jonah went to Nineveh. They repented and God was merciful, they were spared from the coming destruction.
Jeremiah warns Zedekiah that the siege would not end, that the city would fall and that Zedekiah would be taken into exile in Babylon. When we read to the end of the book, we learn that Zedekiah did indeed go into exile in Babylon. But his travelling companion carried a scroll in which Jeremiah prophesied the end of Babylon and the destruction that would come to it, for what it had done to God’s people.
But that would be a long wait. It would be 70 years before the people came back from exile. They would return to find the city and the temple completely destroyed.
In all of this, from prison and under threat to his life, Jeremiah displayed the path of someone who waited on God and continued to trust in God through decades of turmoil, occupation, and destruction. Meanwhile, the people in Jerusalem and the people in exile lost hope.
In regard, Jeremiah continues to prophesy to the people, telling them that even though the city and the land are a desolate waste, fields will continue to be bought and sold throughout the whole land. Jeremiah speaks the word of the Lord, “ Fields will be bought for silver, and deeds will be signed, sealed and witnessed in the territory of Benjamin, in the villages around Jerusalem, in the towns of Judah and in the towns of the hill country, of the western foothills and of the Negev, because I will restore their fortunes,[a] declares the Lord.” 32: 44 NIV
Next week we will look at the words of encouragement and hope that he sent to the people who felt hopeless in exile.
After the occupation, Jeremiah encourages those who feel that they can no longer worship because the temple has been destroyed, and who feel that they can no longer buy land because the land is desolate. But to believe that God will restore the land is to keep buying and selling and more importantly to keep planting and harvesting.
Sometimes in the waiting we need to just keep going forward, until the day of the Lord arrives.
I am reminded of the farmer that I was privileged to talk with one day. He had farmed through the Dust Bowl years of the 30’s. He told me that they planted in hope and counted it a good year if they got enough seed off the land to plant again next year.
Hope.
Faith.
Trust.
Those are the things that help us to keep going on.
When in a time of God’s seeming silence, or when the word that comes from God is difficult to hear and very unwelcome, we need to continue in hope, faith and trust.
When we look to the future, and have no clear idea of what that is, then we need to continue to believe that God is still active in the world, and that it is possible for the church to flourish.
The problems in Jerusalem in those days were many.
Hezekiah refused to believe the word of God.
The people were in fear because of the Babylonians on their doorstep.
Ultimately, they became discouraged because of the destruction of the land. And after the occupation they lost faith because the Temple had been destroyed.
The problem in the Church today, and the local congregations, is that we have bought into the message from the secular world who say that God is dead and that the Church is irrelevant. We point to all the things that seem to uphold that message… no more prayer in school, lack of people at worship, and the lack of respect that we encounter when people find out that we are people of faith and they disparage the way we practice our faith.
We complain about the loss of Christendom, where the Church was the dominant social and religious centre of life. But if we look at it from the point of view that Christendom led to our complacency, we can have a different perspective. Maybe it is better for us to have to stand up for our faith, to be persecuted for our faith and to have to take steps to show other believers and the world, that we still have hope, faith and trust.
We show that when we come Sunday after Sunday to worship with the other people of the church. We demonstrate that when we live our faith in front of our families and neighbours. And sometimes God will ask the incredible and impossible of us; and we will buy a field, or whatever it is that God is asking for.
In the oppression and chaos around him, Jeremiah did not join the voices of the false prophets, but only spoke what God asked him to speak.
He, like us, had 2 choices. Buy the message the world is sending, or wait on God with hope, faith and trust.
That means waiting on God for as long as it takes. That means listening to God’s voice when he speaks. That means doing what God asks us to do.
Along the way, when we live our faith in the desolation, we learn that listening for God’s voice brings us into those moments when we know a sense of purpose despite the difficult events.
When we have those moments, we KNOW on a different level. We know in our minds, our hearts and even our bodies as we sense the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit. The message we receive will be consistent with everything that we already know about God.
Jeremiah was told to buy a field. It was a duty prescribed in God’s law, so it was consistent with who God had always been for his people. But even having bought that field, Jeremiah was not able to farm it. Not yet. Not for decades. Actually not ever. It became land that remained in his family for his closest relative to claim. And thus, God’s plans for the people of Israel continued.
We need to remember that waiting is not a passive activity. It is something that we choose to do as a sign of our trust in God. Waiting is a response to Gods’ actions, whether we see them or not.
Waiting is about hope and faith and trust.
When the Babylonian army temporarily retreated because of a threat from Pharoah’s army, Jeremiah continued to act on that faith.
Released from prison, he left Jerusalem and continued to the land of Benjamin to get his share of the property. On arriving at the Benjamin gate he was promptly arrested for deserting to join the Babylonians.
He was again imprisoned and interred in a dungeon. He stayed there for a long time.
King Hezekiah had Jeremiah brought to the palace demanding to know if there was a new word from the Lord.
“Yes,” Jeremiah replied, “you will be delivered into the hands of the king of Babylon.”
So not a new word.
That’s important. Once God puts his word out there, he doesn’t change it.
God does not change. He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.
God will do as he has promised. God who started the work will complete it.
This truth is the source of comfort to those who wait, even when, maybe especially when we get frustrated with how long it takes God to act.
Jeremiah knew that God had not yet finished. He knew the Babylonian army would be back. Yet he still ventured out in faith to claim his field.
When the King brough him back to Jerusalem his message did not change. As a result, Jeremiah was again imprisoned in the courtyard of the guards. How frustrating.
Sometimes when people get frustrated with how long God asks us to wait, we start to make choices based on what we want. We rationalize those choices, saying that they seem to be sound and wise in our circumstances. But they are not necessarily in God’s plan.
We recall that the first command Jesus gives to the church is to wait. Obedience is important. Regardless of the voices that say, “Where is your God now?” “Your God has abandoned you?”
There is a story told about D. Bonhoeffer who when in a concentration camp was among the prisoners who witnessed the hanging of some young men. Some one asked him, “Where is your God now?” His answer, “hanging there with these young men.”
What is our response?
Jeremiah’s response was to simply say what God had already said.
What Jeremiah knew, and what we need to fully understand, is that God will act and is already acting. That also means that God is already speaking and guiding. Jeremiah trusted that God would eventually make good all that he had said about Hezekiah being taken to Jerusalem.
Jeremiah was never blinded by his circumstances. He never doubted what God had told him. He didn’t trust the voices around him. He didn’t trust the Kings voice. He didn’t trust the voices of the false prophets. He didn’t trust any doubts he may have had.
Jeremiah simply trusted God.
In the midst of the worst that his city and people were enduring, Jeremiah held onto God’s word and trusted in God’s promise. He spoke the truth. He bought a field. He spoke the truth again, and again.
He even prophesied the ultimate downfall of Babylon for what they were currently doing. He didn’t just see the BIG picture, he saw GOD’S picture. He trusted God’s word. Then, at the end of the prophecy to the Babylonian’s, Jeremiah’s words ended.
To the very end, he spoke God’s word.
He never saw it fulfilled, but he trusted it, and he spoke it.
We live in a world where we don’t know what is going to happen. The world and its events are so interrelated that the chaos in one location can affect the relative peace of another.
It was like that for Jeremiah too, who did not just prophesy against Jerusalem and Babylon; but also against Egypt, the Philistines, Moab and Ammon.
We, like Jeremiah can face the growing chaos and its challenges only by relying on God’s word. By trusting God’s word. By listening for God’s word. And most importantly waiting for God’s word to come among us.
Amen
Affirmation of Faith:
Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint. Isaiah 40: 31 NRSV
Hymn: 749 Be still my soul
Offering and Doxology 830
Offertory Prayer
For the simple pleasures of life: for garden harvests,
coffee conversation, and familiar surroundings,
For health and strength to appreciate the wonder of life,
For needs met and desires fulfilled,
we give you our thanks and bring you our offerings.
With creative pursuits which contribute our God-given talents,
With words which honor you as Creator, Redeemer, and Holy Spirit,
With time volunteered and dedicated to service in church and community,
With years committed to extending the love of Jesus Christ,
We worship you with joy.
With gifts of money which reach farther than we can manage ourselves, With deeds done in service of neighbor and stranger,
With holy days set apart to celebrate your goodness and grace,
With family and friends distant and nearby,
We worship you, God, with grateful hearts and joyful spirit, thanking that all we bring to you, you will multiply and gift to those in need. Amen.
Gathering Prayer Requests
Prayer of Thanksgiving and Intercession
Loving God, we thank you that when we fall into the traps of groundless fears, you deliver us.
When an epidemic of worry threatens to overcome us, you protect us.
Gracious God, we worship you.
Loving God, we thank you that when our lives crumble, you urge us to buy hope's fields. When we are eager to grasp senseless lies,
you wrap our hands around your promises. You caution us to wait.
We thank you that you came to serve the poor and we vow to follow you.
We thank you that when the world silences our hope, you give us the words to make the good confession of faith. When we stumble along the way you satisfy us from the abundance of your mercy, grace and joy.
Sheltering God, we seek your peace.
God we thank you that you walk with us in every part of our journey: you are our Refuge, our Trust, our Hope, therefore
we lift our prayers to you trusting you with our hope, with those whom we love and the world that sustains our lives.
JOYS
CONCERNS
WORLD
We thank you for speaking to us and ask that you help us to listen for your voice every day. With thanksgiving, we pray together as Jesus has taught us, saying,
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever. Amen
Hymn: 763 To show by touch and word
Benediction
Blessing Song: 500 Open my eyes v.1 & chorus
Open my eyes that I may see glimpses of truth thou hast for me place in my hands the wonderful key
that shall unclasp and set me free Silently now, I wait for thee ready my Lord, thy will to see open my eyes, illumine me Spirit Divine
Public Domain