“Investing In Hope"

A Sermon Preached by Rev. Bruce Sanguin
Sept 30th 2007

 Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15

Jeremiah is in prison. As a prophet, he told the King of Judah that it was going to be a rout. He recommended surrender to the invading Babylonian Empire. The court prophets were all assuring the King that God was with them, so they couldn’t lose. Jeremiah thought it was nonsense. Israel didn’t stand a chance. The King didn’t like his advice and threw him in jail. God speaks to Jeremiah in jail, telling him to buy his cousin’s field for seventeen shekels of silver. In the vernacular of today’s market economy we would say that Jeremiah bought into a bear market. The smart investor would be unloading real estate, looking for suckers. The writing was on the wall. The market was about to crash, along with Jerusalem, the holy Temple, and life as the Jews had known it. In the year, 597 BCE, Babylon destroyed the city of peace and carried off into exile the brightest and the best of the Jews. This story of exile would become a paradigmatic tale of alienation and a longing to return home for the Jews.

But Jeremiah wasn’t investing to turn a profit. His purchase was rather a symbolic act of prophecy. It was too late to be going around town shouting out to all who cared to listen: “I told you so! Didn’t I tell you?” What was called for was a gesture of hope in a hopeless situation. Jeremiah made a big deal of the purchase, doing it by the book – weighing out the silver, signing the deed, gathering witnesses, getting the deed to the property, and handing it over to Baruch, the lawyer scribe. He did all this “in the presence of all the Judeans who were sitting in the court of the Temple (Jeremiah 32:9-15). Then he makes sure they understand his reason for doing so: “Thus says the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land” (32:15).

Jeremiah was giving them hope in a hopeless situation. He was investing in a future when most people were feeling like that particular door named The Future had just been slammed shut. They were facing unrelenting misery as they were lined up to begin the long march away from their ancestral homes, their families, their gardens and the memories that constituted their very identities. The present was a prison. The future was a refugee camp.

This need for hopeful gestures, for promises that one day all shall be well again, is needed ever bit as much today as it was way back then. We’re besieged by an army of bad news; the melting of the polar ice cap and the extinction of species, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, terrorism and the counter-terrorism that strips us of our dignity and rights as citizens, regimes in Burma that have no respect for basic human rights and justice, homelessness in our own city. We think we can build Temples against this army. We build the walls higher and thicker, and place inner sentries at the watch. But the enemy gathers outside our gates and soon we realize that our defenses are not strong enough. Anytime now, they could storm us – or they could outwait us, until our supplies are depleted and our very souls waste away.

And then an unexpected burst of colour, unanticipated against this bleak backdrop of despair, brightens our view. Thousands of orange-robed Burmese monks walk into the mouth of the beast demanding justice, and ennobling citizens to take back the future. Those who know through spiritual practice that death is an illusion and bullets are powerless to stop the inexorable progress of Joy defy the armies of despair. In Burma they are calling it the Saffron Revolution.

Other gestures of hope closer to home remind me that this exile from God, the earth, and each other is a temporary madness:

• My friend, Russ, and his team right here at Canadian Memorial is organizing a daylong workshop to help churches and families come up with practical solutions that will help us to “go green”. We find out that within a period of two weeks in November no fewer that four churches are organizing similar workshops.
   
• My friend Maureen is organizing a three-day Conference and Festival called Earth Revival on a wing and a prayer because it needs to be done, because our non-human kin call to her every day, because there is so much to celebrate that has to with beauty and grace and joy.
   
• I’m sitting beside a lovely woman, sharing a ham and cheese sandwich. She radiates a gentle stress-free aura. Five years ago she decided that she didn’t want to work so hard – that she wanted to be in control of her own life and her freedom to be with friends, to wander aimlessly by the beach, to grow spiritually, was a more precious commodity than money. So she traded in financial security for freedom, and now lives in joy and a home uncluttered by what most of regard as essential. Her story of simple living strikes me as story of sanity in an over-scheduled, over-monetized culture.
   
• My friend, Vivienne, sitting here this morning, spends a good part of her days rallying the community to ask themselves and their government what exactly constitutes a sustainable way of life.
   
• Betty Krawczyk - the 79 year old Grandma, gets out of jail for civil disobedience this past week, and the next day is on CBC Radio agitating for us to wake up out of our stupor.

This morning, right here, sitting beside you there are so many Jeremiah’s who are placing hope in an earthenware jar and declaring before any who care to listen that there will be a time when “houses and fields and vineyards, shall again be bought in this land”.

There will be a time when the water is once more clean enough to scoop up in your hands and drink it. There will be a day when the B.C. rainforests will welcome home the return of Spotted Owl. There will come a time when we will measure wealth by the quality of our relationships, and the integrity of creation, and not the size of our bank accounts.

Jesus stands up in the synagogue. It’s his turn to preach. He unfurls the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and reads:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to proclaim good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and to proclaim the year of the Jubilee. He finishes the reading and his sermon is spoken in exactly one sentence: “Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

As with most of Jesus’ teaching the meaning is layered. He is saying: I am this prophetic promise in flesh and blood. The future it anticipates is present now in me. If you want a picture of what this will look like, feel free to look at my life and my actions. But, look more closely at what he is saying. “This Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” To the extent that the listeners can really hear what he is saying, they will realize that this Spirit-drenched future stands in need of each one of them.

Each one of us at some point is called to come forth and make a promise to the world and to God that can only be realized through us. Just as Jeremiah placed his sealed promise in an earthenware jar, and did so publicly, so we are called to sign and seal a deed that bears our unique imprint.

You know, when you make an offering of money to Canadian Memorial, it’s an investment in hope. God forbid that it’s nothing more than a sum of money so that the church can keep running. If this is what your financial offering represents, it should be paltry. It will not be animated by your soul, because keeping a church running is not an investment in the Spirit. It’s not worthy of your soul. Either, this congregation is making a promise to God and to the world to be part of the emergence of God’s Kindom on earth, or we’re wasting your time. Now, if that’s what we’re doing, (and if we’re not, what exactly are we doing?), then this offering plate should be weighed down with hope! It should contain the implicit promise that in and through what we are doing here, you are proclaiming with Christ that you are willing to be the future present, through the gestures of your daily life. Your offering is your way of declaring to the world, “count me in!”

There will come a day when the people of this earth will understand that there is no separation, no disconnection, anywhere, and that the evil that we enact upon this earth flows from this illusion. There will come a day when all will realize that the enemy is this narrative of alienation and separation that isolates us from God, and each other, and this precious planet. On that day, we will lay down our weapons of hate and destruction, and take each other’s hand and begin the dance of the One Cosmos, the One Spirit. That is the only future worth investing in, and yes, you may be buying into a bear market, but the promise is sure that you will be showered with a wealth far more precious than silver or gold.