Jeremiah
32:1-3, 6-15
I’ve heard about land being
available pretty cheaply these days. You
just have to know where to buy it and to be willing to hold onto it for a
little while. One spot would be the
northeastern corner of Japan, near the town of Fukushima. In 2011, the Japanese government announced
that the area would be off-limits for the next several decades.[1] You might want to give it a little more time
than that, to be safe, but if you buy now your
great-great-great-great-grandchildren may be able to make a few yen on the
deal. Along those same lines, there are
some bargains to be had in the Ukraine.
Advance planning is required, because
“Those who want to [go]
to the exclusion zone of Chernobyl have to file documents for a permit two
weeks before their visit. Then they are
instructed at the checkpoint: visitors are not allowed to smoke, eat in the
open air, take any plants or items away from the zone, drink water from the
wells, rivers, or any other ground sources.
Bodies should be covered with clothes leaving as few exposed areas as
possible.” [2]
Again,
you may need to keep the deed to the land carefully and make arrangements to
have it translated and reconfirmed every so often because the land is not
expected to be safe for human habitation for the next 20,000 years.[3]
All that makes Jeremiah’s decision
to exercise his option on the family farm, buying it from his cousin while it
was in occupied territory, [Jeremiah 32:6] seem like a sure thing. Jeremiah did feel certain that the time would
come when the Babylonians would no longer control the land, and he spoke in the
Lord’s name when he said,
“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]
On
the other hand, he also made sure that there were multiple witnesses to the
sale, and multiple copies of the deed, and ordered his assistant to
“Take these deeds, both this sealed deed of
purchase and this open deed, and put them in an earthenware jar, in order that
they may last for a long time.” [Jeremiah 32:14]
He trusted that there would be a bright future,
even while recognizing that the restoration would take place beyond his own
lifetime.
We’re
at one of those weird junctures of history where enormous changes are taking
place, and the Church, kind of like Jeremiah, gets caught in the middle of
it. Phyllis Tickle, who is both a
journalist and a scholar of religion, has compared Christianity to a
lobster. She writes,
“…about
every 500 years the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity,
whatever they may be at that time, become an intolerable carapace, or hard
shell, that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur.”
In her book The
Great Emergence, she points out that it is a difficult and even painful
time for the people who live through it, however that the ultimate future
depends on the Jeremiahs of those days and their willingness to invest in a
future that they may only glimpse.
It
occurs to me that it isn’t always the great, visionary leaders who see things
through. It may be the stubborn people
like Jeremiah who simply refuse to give up, who insist that God is at work and
that the rest of us may have to get over ourselves and our demands to know
everything he plans to do and when he plans to do it.
There’s
this myth we deal with that renewal has always come easily or quickly. The martyrs go to the lions and – presto! –
the Roman Empire is converted or Martin Luther nails his challenges to medieval
superstition and – bam! – the Reformation restores the faith of millions. In fact, if you look at the Reformation at
the level of parish life, it often meant trouble for the church building and
the church budget. A BBC documentary on
that subject said that
“Only 19 churches were built or
restored in Elizabeth's reign and 'damp green walls, rotting earth floors, and
gaping windows' were sometimes reported. Allowing for inflation, religious
benefactions dropped from a total of over £80,000 in 1501-10 to under £2,000 in
1591-1600.”[4]
It may be that the solid and eternal core of faith
is carried through the years mostly by people who don’t get to wrestle with
major theological issues because they’re busy with stewardship campaigns, but
who trust that God cares as much about their grandchildren as God cared about
their grandparents.
It takes someone like
Jeremiah to give an example of that kind of trust, buying a field that he would
never plant, but adamant that it would one day be farmed in peace. It takes someone with the optimism and the
long view of a Phyllis Tickle to remind us in times when the Church is living
with the same turbulent change as the world around us, that in the end it will
be for the best.
“When that mighty upheaval happens, history shows
us, there are always at least three consistent results or corollary events.
First, a new, more vital form of Christianity does
indeed emerge. Second, the organized expression of Christianity that up until
then had been the dominant one is reconstituted into a more pure and less
ossified expression of its former self. …[and]
The third result is of equal, if not greater,
significance. Every time the incrustations of an overly established
Christianity have been broken open, the faith has spread—and been
spread—dramatically into new geographic and demographic areas, thereby
increasing exponentially the range and depth of Christianity’s reach as a
result of its time of unease and distress. Thus, for example, the birth of
Protestantism not only established a new, powerful way of being Christian, but
it also forced Roman Catholicism to make changes in its own structures and
praxis. As a result of both those changes, Christianity was spread over far
more of the earth’s territories than had ever been true in the past.”[5]
I believe she’s onto something in all of this. When I look at the way we do church I have to
admit that it isn’t conveying the gospel to the world the way that it used to
do. If it were, the pews would be
full.
On the other hand, I
believe wholeheartedly that the Spirit of the Lord will find a way, that Jesus’
news of God’s kingdom is just too good not
to get through. I believe that the
message of what Jesus has done to transform human life is just too wonderful not to change the world.
So
here are you and I, being asked to live like our mothers and fathers in the
faith, to live by faith, to buy into a future that may be a generation or two
away,
“For thus says the Lord of
hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought
in this land.”
[3] Time: Disasters that Shook the World (New
York City: Time Home Entertainment, 2012) cited at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#cite_note-TimeDisaster-58
[4]
Bruce Robinson, The Human Reformation,
Feb. 17, 2011 http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/tudors/human_reformation_01.shtml
[5]
The quotations here are from the author’s summary of her own book in Sojourner’s Magazine found at http://sojo.net/magazine/2008/08/great-emergence
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