Welcome
Good morning, church. I’m Reverend Ashley Dargai.
A couple of announcements before we begin:
This Wednesday is our monthly board meeting. All are welcome to attend via Zoom.
We finish our Thankful Thursday this week at noon in the courtyard with Pastor Sarah Boyette, who is the Director of Senior Adult Ministries at First UMC Hurst.
We have a congregational meeting December 6 on Zoom after worship, so please make plans to be there as you will vote on the budget for 2021.
And speaking of the budget for 2021, we are in the midst of our stewardship campaign, where we look ahead to the coming year and make financial commitments of giving to the church in order to prepare our budget and ministries. If you have not already, I encourage you to either send your commitment card to the church that you received the mail or fill it out online on our website.
We’ve been working our way through this worship series entitled How to Make Faith Grow Legs: an exploration of how our spirituality translates into the physical, material world. Our devotion to God extends from a love in our heart to love on the ground, and today, we look at a piece of land in ancient Jerusalem as the starting place of hope.
Pastoral Prayer
We celebrate with Cassie Sellers and Kale Sweet who were married last night.
We hold in prayer the families who have experienced loss this week. Beverly Robinson’s cousin’s son died in Kansas City, and so many who have died because of the pandemic.
We lift up our veterans as we celebrated veterans’ day this week.
The Lord be with you, and also with you, let us pray.
Lord, at times it feels like we are living in a desolate land.
The pandemic ravages family and friends, whole communities are enveloped, medical professionals are stressed to their limits. And if it’s not that, there are hurricanes, and wild fires that devastate the homes of our sisters and our brothers. While these events around us cause such damage, the emotions we feel, at times, overwhelm us. There is a hopelessness, and a discouragement that many feel, which draws us to this place and this moment. We ache for your embrace, we thirst for the living water of your grace poured out. We long to feel the fresh wind of your spirit moving among us.
We know we are not alone. Your people, our ancestors, through the ages have cried out in desperation, and you, you have responded. You have restored hope, you have brought relief. In Jesus the Christ you have shown us an undying love and compassion that rekindles our hope.
So we pray today that those who face illness will find relief, that those who live on the edge, economically, and emotionally, will find peace. And when we pray these things, we pray to be useful in the efforts to meet these needs. Food to the hungry, shelter for the homeless, support and compassion, even companionship for those who cannot shake the depression which envelopes them.
You have called us your children. Jesus called us sisters and brothers. Paul called us ambassadors. Help us take on these roles in the new realm of your presence. Let us plant the spiritual and emotional seeds that will bring a new harvest of love in the coming seasons.
And we pray quietly, the words Jesus taught his disciples:
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 forever. Amen
Children’s Moment
Lelio Salgado, and her husband Sebastiao, lived on the family farm in Brazil, in the middle of the tropical rain forest. It was beautiful, flowers, all kinds of plants growing beside the river doce, which means sweet sriver. But were forced to move because of the political unrest just before the turn of the century, when they returned, almost all of the trees had been harvested, and with the trees, the wildlife had gone away, remember the story of the Lorax?
But when they returned Lelio said they would bring the forest back. Sebastiao said it was 1,700 acres, how could they ever do that? And she said, “One seed at a time. One tree a day.” It would take them five years just to plant one tree per acre, but they persisted. They kept going, and today, the rainforest is back, along with the wildlife and the stream that runs through it.
Our scripture today is about buying land right before the people will be forced to leave. It’s a sign that they will come back, it’s a moment of hope and trust. For every bad thing that is about to happen, there are more good things that will come after.
It thing that’s important to know. While we are in the middle of a pandemic, wearing masks, having to do school from home, this won’t last forever, The love of God will walk with us through this difficulty and any other difficulty we face, and we will find our way to the other side of it.
Sermon
Our scripture today is from Jeremiah 32.
32:1 The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD in the tenth year of King Zedekiah of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadrezzar.
At that time the army of the king of Babylon was besieging Jerusalem, and the prophet Jeremiah was confined in the court of the guard that was in the palace of the king of Judah, where King Zedekiah of Judah had confined him.
Jeremiah said, The word of the LORD came to me:
Hanamel son of your uncle Shallum is going to come to you and say, "Buy my field that is at Anathoth, for the right of redemption by purchase is yours."
Then my cousin Hanamel came to me in the court of the guard, in accordance with the word of the LORD, and said to me, "Buy my field that is at Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, for the right of possession and redemption is yours; buy it for yourself."
Then I knew that this was indeed the word of the LORD.
And I bought the field at Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel, and weighed out the money to him, seventeen shekels of silver.
I signed the deed, sealed it, got witnesses, and weighed the money on scales.
Then I took the sealed deed of purchase, containing the terms and conditions, and the open copy; and I gave the deed of purchase to Baruch son of Neriah son of Mahseiah, in the presence of my cousin Hanamel, in the presence of the witnesses who signed the deed of purchase, and in the presence of all the Judeans who were sitting in the court of the guard.
In their presence I charged Baruch, saying,
Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: 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.
For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
This seems like a simple business transaction, not a story. Real estate has always been a hot investment if you pick the right place at the right time, even in the Bible. And Jeremiah’s family had an in with some land in Jerusalem, and it’s cheap because the economy was not doing great due to global uncertainty, so with the help of his cousin Hanamel, Jeremiah purchased it and put the deed in a safe place.
But as you’ve probably guessed, this was a terrible business investment. Because it was not a mere economic recession, and the global uncertainty was not just a skirmish abroad—their beloved Jerusalem, home of the Temple and their entire community life, was under siege by the boogeyman of the time: Babylon. And it’s worth noting that Jeremiah conducted this entire transaction from his prison cell inside puppet King Zedekiah’s palace in the heart of Jerusalem. You see, Jeremiah was imprisoned for telling ol’ King Zed that Babylon was coming and would overtake the city, and well, the King did not like that very much. The King preferred the prophets who said, “Peace, peace,” even if there was no peace, the prophets who sided with his preferred version of reality, rather than the prophet who told the hard truth.
And Jeremiah was unflinchingly honest. Babylon was coming. You need to prepare yourselves.
And also worth noting: Jerusalem would not fall solely because the Babylonians were evil people, though some of their citizens did have bad reputations. Jerusalem would fall in large part because all their sins were coming home to roost.
Now, let me be clear, I am not in favor of biblical takes that make genocide an act of God’s judgment. That is a simplistic, dangerous human interpretation of terror and often a justification for war crimes or withholding aid. I can’t overstate enough that genocide and natural disasters do not equal God’s judgment or some grand divine plan to bring us back to God.
Rather, what Jeremiah describes later on in this chapter is that Israel would suffer the consequences of not prioritizing the poor and the marginalized. God told them over and over again, beginning in their long stint in the wilderness, that they were only as protected as the least protected among them. And they had done diddly squat to make sure the widows and the orphans and the beggars had what they needed. And those who were supposed to be leading—the priests, the kings, the government officials—they had not shown true leadership but had instead served their own interests.
And the average citizen was no better. Instead of giving their hearts and lives to the strange, set-apart ways of God, they had lived and died by the gods of Baal and Molech.
It might be easy to write off Baal and Molech as ancient gods that a primitive people worshiped long ago, irrelevant to our experiences today.
But Baal was the god of life and fertility, and he was always locked in combat with the god of death and sterility, which may seem like a god we might root for. Except that Baal was not the god of life in the sense of human flourishing, but rather he was the god of exceeding our mortal limits, living in defiance of the truest thing we can know—that we die. Baal, in big shiny letters and catchy jingles and Instagram ads, proclaimed that we are infinite and limitless, and that our goal is to strive for more and more, our excess overflowing until we break.
And Molech! Well, he was the god of war and child sacrifice. This seems like an easy one to refute. Because the lust for power and the habit of conquest, and the willingness to give up our most beloveds, our most vulnerable to this cause are not something the Western world is familiar with…right?
Perhaps Baal and Molech live today under aliases.
So when Jeremiah was listing out Israel’s offenses, it was not that God decided now would be a good time to make a point or punish Israel on a whim, slapping them with the total destruction of their city and livelihood. But rather, the people of Jerusalem were experiencing the consequence of entrusting themselves to the gods of excess and violence. They would learn as their world unraveled around them that if they served these gods, they, too, would eventually be overtaken and explained away as someone else’s collateral. If they treated people as pawns in their own struggle for power and control, they, too, would become someone else’s capital and currency. Because if they did not fortify their weakest points, the vulnerable among them, they, too, would find themselves crumbling at Babylon’s provocation.
I’ve joked along with many other people that 2020 is the year of random chaos. As if someone had opened Pandora’s box or Marty McFly kept climbing into the Dolorean and messing with the space time continuum. There’s a camaraderie in this understanding because it communicates that we’re all in this together and we’re all equally baffled by the chaos.
But I saw a tweet that challenged this understanding of 2020. And it explained that a lot of the intensity of the so-called chaos we were collectively experiencing was because we as a people, a nation, a world, had failed to address injustices, and now we were experiencing the consequences of these injustices breaking open.
Injustices such as the continued inequity and violence of racism. Injustices such as the fact that our most vulnerable students can so easily lose access to food, safe spaces, and internet accessibility when schools go online. Or that our system has been set up in such a way that we must choose between the economy and the health of our neighbors. Or that access to money equals access to safety so that while our prisoners and grandparents and indigenous populations perish due to lack of adequate healthcare and resources, the incredibly wealthy continue to have unfettered parties on islands because they can pay for personal COVID-testing and take time off work to quarantine and fly private jets to avoid interacting with the common folk who might cough on them.
And I would just like to say as a former English teacher that there’s a poignant Edgar Allan Poe story about the wealthy locking themselves in a castle and having a party while everyone on the outside is dying from the plague. And spoiler alert, the plague eventually gets inside the castle and effectively ends the party. But I digress.
Anyway. Jeremiah was in prison for telling the truth, which is not what anyone wanted to hear. His own family ousted him because of what he was saying. But he was saying it not to be an annoying pain in the neck or doomsday troll, but because he loved Jerusalem. He loved his people and he loved his God. He had fond memories of festivals at the Temple and family shabbat. He didn’t want to see Babylon destroy it.
And in the midst of all this, Jeremiah received a word from God—to buy some land in the very place that you are leaving. Land that Jeremiah would never live on himself. No one knew when the Israelites would be back from Babylon, but we know that everyone who was not killed in Jerusalem was taken to Babylon and died there.
But God, the original romantic, was adamant: “Houses and fields and vineyards will be bought in this land again.” The sky is falling, but take heart. Unfortunately, we don’t get the beautiful love letter portion of the story in the lectionary reading, but I’ll here’s another spoiler alert: God spends just as much time describing Israel’s future as Jeremiah does describing their sins.
And God doesn’t mince words—things were going to hell in a hand basket. But one day, God tells the Israelites, just over the horizon, you’ll be back. Maybe not you. But your children and your children’s children. You will return and be a people of one heart. You will not be segmented into the caste systems of privilege and power and affluence, but rather you will fully realize your interconnectedness, how your destinies are all wrapped up in one another, knitted together like a prayer shawl. Your heart will be mine, says God. Not Baal’s or Molech’s, not the gods who would sacrifice your kids’ lives on the altar of consumption and progress.
No, I will plant you in the land in faithfulness, with all my heart and soul. Babylon is not the end of the story. Even if you die in Babylon, that is not the end of the story. Even if your children forget God’s name, that is not the end of the story. Even if it seems that all hope has died, indeed that God has died, that is not the end of the story.
Because, you see, empires and kings and philosophers declare God dead from time to time. They write the obituary, publish the moratorium, and decide it’s time for everyone to move on with their lives.
But then something funny happens on the way to the funeral. And what was declared dead lives on to bury its pallbearers.
Jeremiah really bought this land, according to the story. It wasn’t a vision or a parable. He put money down. He gave the deed to Baruch to bury in a jar so that they would have the proof of ownership should they come back. The text takes great pains to say that there was real money and real land on the line. It was a symbolic act, but it was an actual act, too.
Against all good sense and hope, Jeremiah put his money where his mouth was in a way. He was adamant about the first word from the Lord: that this whole enterprise was crumbling. Babylon would win.
But he was a prophet of the God of Israel. The God who had led them out of Egypt, provided for them in the wilderness, and led them to the place of milk and honey. A God who made a way out of no way, a people out of no people. And Jeremiah’s purchase of that land was him saying, “I’m betting on that God.”
I don’t believe the virus is going to magically disappear one day. I don’t think racism is going to be fixed quickly or without a lot of pain. And while kids are resilient, I don’t pretend that the uncertainty of school and the fragmented access to support, food, and learning is not going to have an effect on them. And I certainly don’t hold out hope that the people who have the most power and money are going to wake up one morning and decide to do the right thing from here on out. To say otherwise would be like saying, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace.”
But I am willing to place all my bets on something funny happening on the way to the funeral.
That one day, the people of God will be united in heart and mind, sharing everything with each other because they realize that nothing in this world is truly theirs to keep, selling everything they have to give to the poor not to invert the economic hierarchy but rather to make it level to make sure everyone has what they need. Mountains brought low and valleys lifted up and all that.
I do trust that we will continue to place our real money, our real finite time, our very lives on the imperishable hope that the reign of God will indeed finally come home to roost.
Our giving to local pop-ups of the kingdom like Azle Christian Church, particularly in a time like this when it seems our world is crumbling, is like a seed being planted in a community garden that we all benefit from.
It’s like a potluck supper at the Table of Christ, where the small dish we brought to share is broken and multiplied in the hands of Jesus.
It’s like a field of hope, waiting for the future generations to come and find a home waiting for them.
Amen.
Sharing Our Resources
The hallway behind the sanctuary has some bulletin boards of pictures from the mission trip to the border. These photos have been there…awhile. Some of you look a little different now than when those photos were taken. But I love this homage tucked behind our baptistry because it’s like hanging pictures of loved ones on the wall throughout the years in one’s house. That mission trip has been a cornerstone for many at ACC.
And though the pandemic has changed our plans and made decisions for us, ACC is still committed to our friends at the border and our neighbors here in town and our church family.
As we prepare our 2021 budget, which you’ll vote on as a congregation in a few weeks as I said earlier, we are collecting commitment cards, those you’ve received in the mail, and also on our website, where you can fill in the information in less than 2 minutes.
If you have not already made a commitment to help resources the ministries of Azle Christian Church, I encourage you to consider doing so. Even if your commitment right now is $5 a month, that makes a difference, especially when it is added to the communal efforts of the church.
There are several ways for you to give—your time, your gifts, and human power, and financially, online, Venmo, text-to-give, or a good ol-fashioned check. See the comments on this video for details.
Finally, if you or someone you know is in need of help during this time, please contact our church office or get in touch with us through Facebook or email.