Trust + Humility = Loving God

The Rev. Sara Warfield

Scripture: Jeremiah 32:1-15

I want to acknowledge that parts of the Bible can be…let’s say mundane. Revealing of the day-to-day experience of the people who lived thousands of years ago, but maybe not all that exciting. Like today’s real estate deal in Jeremiah. Those of you who have purchased property know that it requires signing a stack of papers as thick as your forearm. You know it’s one of the more tedious things you do in your adult life. And today’s reading from the prophet is essentially a detailed description of such a transaction. Signatures, money, deeds, witnesses, all of it.

In our Bible Reflection on Tuesday, I volunteered to read this scripture aloud to the group, and as I was reading it, I was thinking, WHY? Why did this all get written down and in such detail? Why did the very learned and faithful and intentional folks who created our lectionary include this passage when they’ve left so many other parts of the Bible out of our three-year schedule of Sunday biblical readings? I wondered what made this passage in Jeremiah compelling enough to take up several minutes of our time during Sunday worship.

Well, here’s the situation that our seemingly dry scripture lays out. When it says “in the tenth year of King Zedekiah of Judah,” it is situating us in the year 586 BCE. Now anyone who has studied the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, even just a little deeply will know that 586 is perhaps one of the most momentous years in the history of the Jewish people. It is the year that their glorious kingdom of Judah, where Jerusalem was the capital, where David was crowned, where Solomon built the temple, falls to the Babylonians and is destroyed.

We should note that a group of Judeans, including King Jehoiakim, Zedekiah’s father, has already been exiled to Babylon ten years before this moment, as punishment for that king’s rebelling against Babylonian rule. And now, in this scripture, King Zedekiah and his people are under siege in Jerusalem. They’re surrounded, trapped by the Babylonians, a far bigger and more powerful military force than that of Judah. But the Judeans are holding on inside the walls of their city. Hoping, praying.

And when the scriptures tell us that the prophet Jeremiah was confined in the court of the guard, it means that Jeremiah is in jail. Why is he in jail? Well, ironically, the lectionary leaves those verses out of this passage. Parts of verse three through verse five tell us that Jeremiah has just told King Zedekiah that Judah will lose this fight, that the city will fall and that Zedekiah will be exiled to Babylon with many of his people. “Suppose you fight against the armies of Babylon,” Jeremiah says. “If you do, you will not succeed.”

Needless to say, those weren’t words that King Zedekiah wanted to hear. They are treacherous to him, especially now. Seditious. So he does what most desperate rulers do when they get news they don’t want to hear: he shuts him out, he throws his prophet in jail.

These are the circumstances under which Jeremiah decides it would be a great time to buy some land. In Anathoth, his hometown a few miles north of Jerusalem. A town that has already been overrun by the Babylonians.

Once again, I ask: WHY? Well, first of all, because God told him to. That’s a prophet’s job: to hear God speaking and to do what God tells them to do. That’s one reason. But these scriptures give us another reason: For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.

Jerusalem does fall. King Zedekiah is taken into exile in Babylon along with much of the population of Judah. And they are held there for nearly three generations. Judeans are born and die far away from the place they call home.

But they do return to Judah and Jerusalem. Zedekiah doesn’t. Jeremiah doesn’t. But their people, their descendants, do return.

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At Bible Reflection, I asked the group, “What does it mean to love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind?” as God tells God’s people in Deuteronomy, as Jesus says in Matthew. Because I think it’s much easier to fathom what it means to love your neighbor, which is to love someone or something tangible in this world. I’m not saying that loving your neighbor is always easy, but the commandment itself is easy to understand.

But what does it mean to love God?

I asked the group this question because it’s something I’ve been wrestling with myself for a long time. You might notice that while I refer to this scripture often, I tend to lift up the neighbor part far more than the God part, and that doesn’t feel quite right to me. Integrity is important to me, and to lift up the part that feels easy while overlooking the part that feels challenging seems to lack integrity.

When I asked the group what it means to love God, there was silence for a bit. But then in quieter voices and in different ways, people kept pointing to the same two ideas: trust and humility.

To love God, they said, was to trust God. To trust that God is moving in our lives and in the world in ways we can’t possibly comprehend.

To love God, they said, was also to have humility, which is to recognize that it’s God who changes the world, not you, not me, not the president or the pope or war or technology. And not on your timeline or my timeline, but on God’s timeline.

All of this is why I’m preaching today about Jeremiah’s real estate transaction. Because I see it as such a tremendous act of trust, of humility, of loving God.

Here he is, detained by the king. The land that his cousin is offering him now for all intents and purposes belongs to the Babylonians. The town that this land is in has been destroyed. He has just told the king that Judah will lose, that Jerusalem will fall, that more Judeans will be exiled far away from their homes. And he has already prophesied just three chapters earlier that the exile will last 70 years.

So what does Jeremiah do? He buys the land, takes the deeds and puts them in an earthenware jar, in order that they may last for a long time.

In the end, Jeremiah’s trust in God and his humility bear fruit. Not on his timeline. Not on King Zedekiah’s timeline. But on God’s timeline. The Judeans do return. A few generations later, houses and fields and vineyards are again bought in that land.

Last Sunday, Shelley told us that “Hope is kept alive by doing hopeful things.” Jeremiah takes hopeful action for a future he knows he himself will never see. And that’s what loving God looks like. Amen.