We started a new weekly Bible study on Wednesday afternoon, one that is similar to studies I have held in previous congregations, onae that is, maybe selfishly, a huge help to me. If you have a chance to stop by and check it out, all you have to do is bring yourself. Lunches are welcome since we meet at noon. You can bring your own Bible or we have some here. But I should warn you, occasionally the things you say end up in sermons. That’s the selfish part.
The text we study each week is the text that we will hear in worship the coming Sunday. This Bible study is a place where I get to hear how the scripture hits at least some people in the congregation. It’s a place where I get to try speaking some of the ideas I’m having out loud to see if they make any sense at all. It’s a place where I get to see how the Spirit is moving through the word and the world as we lovingly wrestle with the text and try to uncover what it means for us today. When I have had this Bible study in the past it has consistently been one of my favorite hours of the week. I hope you’ll pop in sometime when you’re able!
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This week as we were getting settled and finding chairs for everyone, one participant said, “You’re not really using the real estate story, are you?”
You see, he had looked up the lectionary, a ecumenical calendar of readings for worship that I often follow, and as a member of the 8:45 band had access to the worship planning software we use (Phil Henderson). So he had peeked to see where we might be going in Bible study. Indeed, I am really using the real estate story. You’ll see what we mean in just a moment, but this story is obscure enough and picked out of the middle of a longer story that it just doesn’t make much sense without some introduction.
We are again in Jeremiah, as we were last week, only we’re farther along that before. Last week we read from chapter 8, which contained a lament over the city and people of Jerusalem that was beginning to be slain by its enemies. The prophet and God through the prophet lamented both the actions of the people that made them susceptible to this attack and the attack itself. I promised that while there weren’t a whole lot of words of hope in that beautiful passage, there would be eventually in Jeremiah’s prophecy. Eventually.
Jeremiah has a rough time of it through much of the rest of his story. He prophesies from Jerusalem as the nation of Judah is being conquered by the Babylonian Empire through the fall of Jerusalem and the exile of many Israelites into that empire. He attributes this besiegement to the people’s idolatry and they way they turned to other gods. While a few of his early words carry a hope that they will change their ways, as the prophecy continues and the people are carried away into exile, he shifts to explain what they are experiencing as an inevitable punishment, or “natural consequences,” modern parents might say, for their disobedience to God’s covenant.
He had a hard message to deliver. It can feel very “doom and gloom,” and Jeremiah goes to great lengths to tell people what they need to hear, trying to get their attention in dramatic ways. He smashes pots. He resists getting married and having children, he says, because they’d all be carried away into exile, or have the plague and die anyway. He famously walked through the city in nothing a ruined loincloth to represent the people’s ruined pride, their faulty understanding of their own invincibility. He liked a dramatic prophetic sign, to say the least.
For forty years he’s been telling the people what is going to happen, and his experience as a prophet telling the truth to people who don’t really want to hear it went about as well as one might expect. That is, not great. There was a lot of opposition to Jeremiah’s words from throughout the land, even from his own hometown, Anathoth. And here in chapter 32 we find him basically in jail, held captive in what seems to be the last building standing, the palace, as the city and the nation are crumbling around him. He’s at the end of his life with no spouse and no descendants, but he does have a cousin, Hanamel, who comes to see him. Hanamel wants to sell his land (in the family hometown!), and the real estate law of the land is that he has to offer it to family first. Family, Jeremiah, does not have to take it, but it has to be offered to family first.
So begins the real estate story.
If the introduction did not make it clear enough, this was no time to buy a house. If Jeremiah had turned on any television news station or read any online newspaper – no matter the political slant – not one talking head would be saying, “Now is a great time to buy property.” In fact, it’s understandable why Hanamel wants to sell! All the old neighbors are gone (dead or in exile), and the new folks coming in, Babylonians, don’t seem understand how things are supposed to be around here. I kid. Sort of. Hanamel wants out as the nation is falling to pieces; he wants any money he can get out of his property before it’s all snatched away from him anyway.
“Good luck, Hanamel,” you can almost hear the folks in the palace court saying. “No one in their right mind is buying what you’re selling.”
But Jeremiah does. Having been tipped off that his cousin was coming by a word of the Lord, he immediately agreed to purchase the land. He weighed out the silver. He signed the deed in two copies. He got witnesses. He sealed one copy for a permanent record, and he left the other one open so evidence of the purchase was available for anyone to see. He followed all the legally binding “terms and conditions.” (Can I tell you how much I love that it says “terms and conditions” in the Bible? Like it’s the small print at the end of a 21st century advertisement – “Terms and conditions may apply.”)
Well, Jeremiah did all this; he followed every term and conditions to buy his cousin’s land, and he did it, not in secret, hiding his ridiculous purchase, but he did it in the presence of his cousin, Hanamel, the witnesses who signed the deed, and in the presence of all the Judeans who were sitting in the court. Everyone saw him make this really really bad real estate deal at the worse time ever. So why is this story even in here?
Last week, when we heard one of Jeremiah’s laments about this worst time ever, we thought also of the times we face in or own era that draw us into lamentations as well. I named some of those things that I believe break God’s heart, and I imagine that many of you thought of others, too. War and famine, political discord and violence, a turning away from neighbor and the fact that many of us don’t even know our own neighbors. Disasters in nature and disasters in our families. Seeing the way forward may feel difficult at best, hopeless at worst.
But what can we learn from Jeremiah about what to do when the world doesn’t make sense, when it doesn’t look like God is with God’s people, when God’s people aren’t working with God’s Spirit?
We can learn that the worst time to buy property, is actually the best time. The wrong time to invest in the future is the right time. We can learn that hope isn’t the stuff we wish for, but it’s the promises of God that we act on, not when the timing looks right and everything is falling into place and the decision makes the best financial sense. Hope is believing what God says is true even when it looks like it’s not, and not just believing with our lips, but believing with our actions.
Hope is investing in a future we can’t yet see, but believe in on the promise and presence of God is possible. Hope is buying the property, not because it makes sense now, but because we trust that houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land. We know that families will be housed, the hungry will be fed, the thirsty will have something to drink. We know that the world God desires is possible because God does not abandon God’s people, God is ever faithful to God’s covenants.
Why is this story in here?
It’s in here because Jeremiah likes the drama, remember?
It’s in here because in the face of immediate crisis, Jeremiah is playing a very long game.
It’s in here because while devastation surrounds them and God’s anger seems more palpable than God’s love, Jeremiah knows that the Lord of hosts never turns away from a divine promise to God’s people.
It’s in here so that we will see what to do when our own world feels out of sorts.
It’s in here because it is a statement of bold hope when everything around feels hopeless.
This isn’t a time to give up. It isn’t a time hold back what we have because it seems too risky to invest in the future. It isn’t a time to let the world that feels scary have the final word. Instead it is time to make investments that are hard to explain to the world. It is time to give what we have and who we are to the future we know is promised – even if we won’t be the ones to witness it. Even if it is for our children or our children’s children or, as was true for Jeremiah, other people’s children’s children.
Now is the time to put our time, our energy, our prayers, and yes, in this time of the annual financial appeal, also our money toward the investments in the future that will build the kingdom God has in store. Now is the time to show the world around us that we are playing a long game – a long game of hope in God’s promises. Now is the time to come into God’s presence with boldness to offer ourselves as a part of that presence in the world around us – the presence that loves the unloved, that frees those who are bound, that clothes the naked, that feeds the hungry, that welcomes the outcast.
Where will we invest ourselves and our gifts, and how will those investments reveal the one in whom we trust? Now is the time to live with bold hope.
Scripture:
Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15
Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Allentown on September 28, 2025 by Pastor Stephanie Anthony