1/8/56

Scripture: Jeremiah 32: 1-15

Text: Jeremiah 32: 15: “For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”

Churches, through their missionary programs, have long been interested in China. Gifts and prayers have flowed into the mission stations for several generations until the present government there literally kicked the missionaries out and slammed the door.

Schools have been interested there, too. Yale University had its Yale-In-China, and Oberlin College its Oberlin-In-China established in the province of Shansi. Chinese teachers and short-term College graduates of these American schools taught there, side by side, and learned mutual understanding in the process.

One of the projects sponsored by a certain church represented 50 years of effective effort, well conceived and intelligently executed. For instance, a part of that mission work was a farm that, by research, added millions of dollars in crop values to the surrounding area of Chinese farms. Schools and hospitals, built in the style of Chinese architecture, gave friendly expression to the faith taught in the mission church.

Now these ventures are completely overrun by communism. And it didn’t happen by chance, in a single day, either. More than 35 years ago, numbers of Chinese youth were invited to come to the Soviet Union, with all-expense scholarships available, to study communism, at first hand. Some of those same students now sit in places of national and international importance on the Red China scene.

Without making any blind or wholesale castigation of communism in China, nor making any uncritical or wholesale commendation of everything the churches did in China, one can still observe that it seems tragic that brain washing has replaced mutual trust there; and that the trust that man is a child of God is replaced by the notion that man and what he is merely results from operations of the economic process.

What are we to say when obvious good is overwhelmed by apparent evil? Consider a different kind of tragedy; one of the devastating eastern floods wipes out an orphanage in the Pennsylvania hills. What are we to say?

We are easily prone to say: “Well, it was wasted effort. All of that attempt to establish something good is gone, never to return. Why should we ever have put the thought and effort into something that appears to be a failure?”

Of course that is one answer. It is a counsel of frustration and despair. And it is enervating to that whole side of our nature which is concerned with ethical well being.

The Bible story which was read this morning has another answer that is applicable to our purpose. It has its touch of brave and absurd humor. The Chaldean invader was sweeping down over Israel and that little nation was about to be engulfed by a mightier, and a ruthless, power. One Hanamel saw that his farm would soon be overrun. And then what would it be worth to him, with its crops destroyed or commandeered and perhaps its very title denied him? He reflected: “Perhaps I can sell it.” So he went to his cousin, Jeremiah, with the offer to let him exercise the right possessed by next of kin, to buy the land.

Jeremiah was unmarried; he was in prison or at least under house arrest for expressing views which the king of Judah considered to be not in the public interest; the enemy was almost at the gates and Jeremiah himself expected that people were going to be carried off wholesale into captivity; probably all parties to this proposed land deal would be prisoners or slaves of the Chaldeans. Why buy a farm?

Well, Jeremiah did buy the land, not because Hanamel was a super-salesman, nor because it was a panic bargain, but because he had faith that it was a good thing to do. He was living out a sermon of faith. He was not paying any panic pittance for the place, either. But he laid down the fair market price, had the coinage weighed up and delivered, got the deeds signed and witnessed as a matter of public record, had them sealed and deposited in a Dead Sea Cave kind of jar. (Recent discovery of documents kept for many centuries in earthen jars, deposited in caves near the Dead Sea, bears testimony of the permanence of that sort of record.) Jeremiah wasn’t fooling. Despite the impending events, he held to a faith that there is no lost good. And he told everybody why: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: ‘Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.’”

Jeremiah believed that the Chaldean invasion from Babylon was being used of God for a scourge on his Jewish people, because they had breached the Lord’s covenant with them. He said so, and that was why he had been put under arrest. It may also be why he never married. He was an awfully blunt man in what he said and so might be accounted a failure at “How to win friends and influence people.”

Besides, land was of incomparably deeper significance to him and his people than it usually is to us. Land was the sign and seal of the covenant. Jeremiah may have had little hope that he himself would ever live on his newly-purchased farm. That was not his point. He was preaching a sermon in his deed (and that is the most striking way to preach!) And his text wrapped up the whole faith that the Lord God Omnipotent reigns. In the long run, goodness is not to be denied or lost. “Thus says the Lord,” he proclaimed. “Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”

Was there not, only a few years ago, a newspaper account of the draining of an Irish lake, there disclosing a village believed to have been in existence some 4,500 years ago? Jeremiah may have had such a long view ahead, when he said, “This flood shall pass, and the covenant land shall reappear washed clean of disobedience.” It is the kind of story that restores bravery to the heart. And it has its justification, not in wishful thinking, but in Judeo-Christian faith.

Christian faith is not to be demonstrated by the proof of logic. If God were to be proved alone by the end term of a reasoned syllogism, he would not be God, but rather a product of our own minds. God is not so much in logic as in the axiom by which logic lives. Says George Buttrick, “God is the axiom, the reason and ground by which we go on living.” This is the kind of axiom which enables a poet to say:

For right is right, since God is God,

And right the day must win;

To doubt would be disloyalty,

To falter would be sin.

25 years or more ago, when the Japanese imperial troops invaded China, a New York columnist, Haywood Brown, who was not then a religious man and who was something of a sophisticate, wrote indignantly, “It Shall Come Back!” How did he know? He just knew it must be so, or else the whole scheme of things is a mockery. Even if one knew that life were a mockery, that something other than mockery within us would be evidence that there is somewhat else in our natures that has to be reckoned with. And it is the very ground of our nature.

Well, something did come back in the case of invaded China. The violence reacted quickly. Not everything that is overcome by evil comes back so soon. For we are in the mystery of time as well as of the event. God does not balance his books each month, nor even every year, except in ways often hidden to our perception. He brings insecurities to the proud, even in the hour of their victory. He draws the lowly to the light, even in the hour of their calamity. But outwardly, His books never seem to get balanced even in a generation. Perhaps they are never in balance on this planet. But they are always being balanced.

Men worked on long-term buildings in Europe which they never expected to see finished. A wood carver labored earnestly, and in great detail, on a few inches of screen, hoping that some other, in a different age, would take up the job and finish it. So it was with the stone masons, as well. And what was the building of these great Cathedrals for? Nothing more substantial than a prayer.

Most men cast their dice and drank. But now when you or your neighbor visit Europe, do you look for the place where men diced and drank, or do you look for those “impractical” cathedrals? Maybe the “proof” of Christian faith is never anything more solid than a painting such as “Madonna of the Choir” or a piece of music such as Bach’s “Mass in B Minor.”

Yet there is evidence that God will restore the waste places -- enough evidence for courage and some trust. Goodness is not a sure thing in time or place. It may be the young mother who is taken from her little ones by fatal accident. It may be Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, or Medgar Evers who falls with the assassin’s bullet. And yet goodness is still a shrewd bet.

During the anxious early stages of American involvement in World War II, a group of people sat about tables at dinner here in Wisconsin Rapids. A man who has since died, remarked with confident conviction, “We are going to win this war.” He was asked why he though so; was it certain that we had the strength, after the crippling Pearl Harbor attack, and with so much of training and production yet in the future? He replied emphatically: “We are going to win because we are right.” I considered the man a shrewd business man, and a fellow with ambition and vision for the community. He was the kind of person with whom you could quarrel because of the very positiveness of his views. But his implicit faith that our cause was right, and that right was bound to win, revealed something in his soul akin to that of all those who bet their lives on goodness as a sure thing.

In the case of Jeremiah, he was right. For in due time the Jewish exiles did return. They did reclaim their farms. Jeremiah’s real estate was not lost, at least not in the long vision sense. The Scriptures record it; and you and I say one to another: “He bet his soul against his people’s history.”

It is a foregleam of the cross of Christ. And that cross reminds us that the land comes back not as it once was, but in new and changed form. Israel returned from Babylon, and again broke the covenant! Then the covenant was renewed in Jesus, saying “This is the new covenant in my blood.” And the church of Christ emerged -- new people under the new covenant.

As for Jesus himself, how much would you have bet on him on the first Good Friday? The religious community expected to be rid of him. The Roman Empire set its heel upon him as it might on a locust. The crowds gawked and gaped as they could at a dog fight or a street brawl. Had Jeremiah been there he might at least have bought the ground where the cross had stood. But would you or I have bought it? I wonder.

Most folk would have said: “The place is accursed.” If any one owned the spot he would probably have signed it over quickly to any one foolish enough to make him an offer. But Jeremiah, had he been around, would probably have said: “No panic price! A good round fair exchange for it! Let it never be said that the place where the Nazarene died was cheaply bought. And let the title be legally transferred, the deeds signed, sealed, recorded and safely stored.” For “Thus says the Lord -- houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.” The good shall return. Yea it shall be even better!

Would Jeremiah, preaching today, proclaim that communism is a scourge used of God? Would we clap him into jail for subversion? The overrunning of the mission projects in China leaves us not only dismayed, but with uneasy conscience. For we fail to inquire why communism comes. It comes out of the lonely and fierce minds of Marx and Engels; out of the arbitrary transfer of a philosophical dialectic to economics. But it also comes from man’s insensate pride, and from the indignant sufferings of masses of people in Russia. It sprang up in the desolation that followed a war; and it thrived in the desolation following another war.

There was a church in Russia, but may it have been more proud of its ritual than courageous in love? If so have we learned its painfully acquired lesson? When was communism most rife in America? Was it not in the suffering and distress of the depression? And where? Was it not in Harlem, the most concentrated spot of unrelieved poverty in the nation? And western nations were spending their substance in armaments and the search for comfort.

This is too simple to be a whole explanation, of course. There were fuzzy-minded students, with poor grounding, or no grounding in faith, who turned to communism only to be again disillusioned. And the whole picture leaves us uneasy. Would Jeremiah, if he should preach to us today, speak comfort to our culture? Or would he flag our selfishness and pour prophetic salt in the wounds? These may be uneasy thoughts. For ours is an uneasy time.

But the central word in Jeremiah is this: there is no lost good! Evil does not forever sit on the throne. The good shall return and live as before. What was good continues, and shall be good. To that faith we are summoned in our day.

You and I may not see the “farm” recovered in our little day. We had better be honestly warned against our own impatience. But “Love never fails.” God’s love in Jesus never lets go. Loving seed sown in Chinese hearts and in a Pennsylvania orphanage will sprout up in a new springtime, for “Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”

Anybody care to invest in a Jeremiah real estate bond? There is one available at fair market price. It is the Christian faith. It would be hard to find a sounder investment.

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, January 8, 1956

Wisconsin Rapids, July 21, 1963