forest hill 
September 28, 2025
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
"Hope Beyond Hope"
If you didn’t understand the context for this passage from the prophet Jeremiah, you could imagine it was simply describing a real estate deal. Jeremiah learns he has an option to buy a piece of family-owned land from a relative, and he decides to act on it. The deed is duly executed in all the normal ways, and stored away in a vault for safe-keeping.
What's the big deal?
The hitch is that the land in question is outside the city gates, and the city is being besieged by Babylonian invaders. It’s pretty clear to everyone that it’s only a matter of days before the city will fall and the whole region is going to be under new overlords. And that’s exactly what happened: Jerusalem fell to Babylon in the year 587 BCE, and all of its leaders were carried off into Exile. It would be a hundred years or more before any of the descendants of those exiles returned to Jerusalem. The Bible never tells us what happened to Jeremiah’s farm, or the deed to the land that he so carefully squirrelled away. Presumably it was buried under the rubble when the Temple was levelled by the invaders.
Why would anyone in their right mind pay good money for a piece of land like that? In what possible world does this make sense? This would be akin to a Ukrainian in Kiev buying or selling a piece of land currently under occupation by the Russian army. Jeremiah must have known that he had a zero chance of ever being able to raise a crop on his new farm!
What do you hope for, when all is lost? What’s reasonable to trust in, when every thing you’ve ever cared about is crashing down around you? When even the strongest symbols of national power and Divine presence (like the enormous Temple in the centre of the city) can’t withstand the ravages of war, injustice, and domination? It’s hard to overestimate the severity of the crisis that Jeremiah and his nation faced – this was the end of everything they held dear, and everything that set them apart as a nation, as a people, as a culture. Gone, within days of this real estate deal.
Thank God we are not facing that kind of impending devastation, they way they are in Gaza, or Kiev, or the Sudan! The “rupture” to our international relationships that we are currently living through is unsettling enough, and I think it’s still anybody’s guess how that will turn out – for us, for our neighbours, for our nation. Even so, is there a message about hope for us in this real estate deal gone awry?
The hitch is that the land in question is outside the city gates, and the city is being besieged by Babylonian invaders. It’s pretty clear to everyone that it’s only a matter of days before the city will fall and the whole region is going to be under new overlords. And that’s exactly what happened: Jerusalem fell to Babylon in the year 587 BCE, and all of its leaders were carried off into Exile. It would be a hundred years or more before any of the descendants of those exiles returned to Jerusalem. The Bible never tells us what happened to Jeremiah’s farm, or the deed to the land that he so carefully squirrelled away. Presumably it was buried under the rubble when the Temple was levelled by the invaders.
Why would anyone in their right mind pay good money for a piece of land like that? In what possible world does this make sense? This would be akin to a Ukrainian in Kiev buying or selling a piece of land currently under occupation by the Russian army. Jeremiah must have known that he had a zero chance of ever being able to raise a crop on his new farm!
What do you hope for, when all is lost? What’s reasonable to trust in, when every thing you’ve ever cared about is crashing down around you? When even the strongest symbols of national power and Divine presence (like the enormous Temple in the centre of the city) can’t withstand the ravages of war, injustice, and domination? It’s hard to overestimate the severity of the crisis that Jeremiah and his nation faced – this was the end of everything they held dear, and everything that set them apart as a nation, as a people, as a culture. Gone, within days of this real estate deal.
Thank God we are not facing that kind of impending devastation, they way they are in Gaza, or Kiev, or the Sudan! The “rupture” to our international relationships that we are currently living through is unsettling enough, and I think it’s still anybody’s guess how that will turn out – for us, for our neighbours, for our nation. Even so, is there a message about hope for us in this real estate deal gone awry?
And ruptures can be personal, as well as national in scope, of course. A cancer diagnosis or a bankruptcy are just as devastating on a personal level.
Where is God when the centre doesn’t hold? Where is God when chaos is stronger than order? What is strong enough to hope in, when all we’ve depended upon is under threat?
Jeremiah’s land purchase was a symbolic way to say to his compatriots that he trusted there would be some sort of future, after the forces of devastation had done their worst. And a way to remind anyone who cared to listen that ultimately, we need to find things to trust in that are more eternal than the ups and downs of human-built institutions. Like any symbolic action, it was intended to provoke thought, rather than prescribe a single way forward. And it still does.
Can we look devastation in the face, and still hope for anything possible? Or does Jeremiah’s gesture just seem empty and misguided?
Can we come eye to eye with the destruction of all we hold dear, and still act as though future could be life-giving? What leads someone to that level of trust? Of hope? And if you do find that kind of trust, what changes?
Join us to plumb our traditions for ways to live into hope when everything that we have relied on is fraying.
Jeremiah’s land purchase was a symbolic way to say to his compatriots that he trusted there would be some sort of future, after the forces of devastation had done their worst. And a way to remind anyone who cared to listen that ultimately, we need to find things to trust in that are more eternal than the ups and downs of human-built institutions. Like any symbolic action, it was intended to provoke thought, rather than prescribe a single way forward. And it still does.
Can we look devastation in the face, and still hope for anything possible? Or does Jeremiah’s gesture just seem empty and misguided?
Can we come eye to eye with the destruction of all we hold dear, and still act as though future could be life-giving? What leads someone to that level of trust? Of hope? And if you do find that kind of trust, what changes?
Join us to plumb our traditions for ways to live into hope when everything that we have relied on is fraying.