"Redemption"
- FirstPres Abq
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read

Any realtor worth their license will tell you that the three key things to know when buying real estate are location, location, location. Of course, that may mean different things to different people. The last two times that our family moved we researched the area schools and looked for houses near the schools we hoped would be the best fit for our kids’ education. We once had a family friend who lived in San Diego and wanted to open a store there, selling an assortment of funky clothes and hats. He knew it needed to be near the beach. So, he scouted several locations. He would spend a whole day at each potential spot with a clicker in hand to measure the foot traffic that passed. When he finally opened his store, it was just 100 feet down the street from the main drag along the beach. Business wasn’t what he had hoped for. Then a storefront opened 100 feet closer to all those beachgoers. He snapped it up, moved his business and watched it boom.
When we lived in Iowa there was a big stir when an unknown investor started buying up huge chunks of land just across the state line in South Dakota. Then word got out that the plan was to build one of the first new oil refineries in the US in 30 years. It seemed like a random place for something like that. Except that would have been the perfect location to take advantage of a proposed crude oil pipeline out of Canada. Where to live, where to work, where to build, the locations that we choose say a lot about what it is that we hope for. We hoped our kids would get a good education. Our friend hoped his business would thrive. The people buying that land hoped for a close and friendly source of oil to refine. Location. Location. Location. The location of this morning’s reading from the prophet Jeremiah is the courtyard of the guard within the King’s Palace in Jerusalem. Which is just a fancy way of saying that the prophet was under arrest, confined by the King’s guard behind the palace walls. You might say that Jeremiah has been cancelled. He’s been sequestered away so no one can hear his prophetic cries urging the people of Jerusalem to surrender to the Babylonians to save their lives. You see, the great Babylonian superpower had laid siege upon Jerusalem in retaliation for Jerusalem’s revolt against Babylonian control. A city under siege is paralyzed. Nothing goes in and no one comes out. The conditions inside deteriorate rapidly. Food goes quick and water even quicker. As the siege wears on people become desperate, in some cases even resorting to cannibalism. Disease sweeps easily through the weakened and crowed population. And Jeremiah has seen all of this coming. He had warned the people, wept when the word that came to him from God spoke of Judah’s destruction. Through Jeremiah God spoke devastating words of judgement against a people who had abandoned God. All of it was coming to fruition. Jerusalem, the nation’s stronghold, home to the temple where the presence of God was believed to reside; the once mighty city had become a kind of hell on earth as the people suffered the terrible consequences of what it meant to be besieged. In the midst of this dire situation- a city and its people held captive, a leader who denies how bad things are and how much worse they are going to get, and the despair of a prophet who had been silenced for raising the alarm and called a traitor- in the midst of all that comes what might sound to our ears like a fairly mundane and inconsequential real estate transaction between the prophet Jeremiah and his cousin Hanamel. There are a couple of verses missing between the setup, Jeremiah’s location, and what follows that I think are important, because what follows is a response to those missing verses. The king who has locked Jeremiah away to silence him wants to know why he would say such terrible things, why he’s telling people that the king is about to fall to the Babylonians to be carried away. Then we get the prediction and the execution of this real estate transaction. It’s reminiscent of what Jesus would do when asked a direct question. Jeremiah doesn’t just tell a parable, what follows is a parable of sorts, in real time. Jeremiah’s cousin wants him to buy a piece of property. On the surface is looks like the desperate action of someone who has given up, someone who is looking for a way out. Hanamel offers Jeremiah the right of redemption, to keep the land from falling out of the family name and securing the deed. It wasn’t unheard of, in fact the whole process is detailed in Levitical law as a way of keeping property in the family. Let’s say for one reason or another you need to sell, but you know that this land has belonged in your family for generations. Rather than have some stranger acquire that land, you gave your extended family the right of first refusal in selling to keep that from happening. Because land ownership wasn’t an individual asset, it was something that you held in trust for the sake of you extended tribe or clan. Or say you have no heirs to inherit your property, your nearest relative could take it to keep it in the family. It was an ordinary enough occurrence, but this is no ordinary situation. The field in question, the field at Anathoth lay beyond the city walls which meant that, unlike the King, it was already in Babylonian hands. Location, location, location. Even if it didn’t belong to the family, who is going to pay good money-seventeen pieces of silver- in desperate times for a worthless plot of land overrun with enemy invaders? The answer is no one. No one in their right mind, on the brink of almost certain annihilation, would spend the time or money to do what Jeremiah is being asked to do. The conventional wisdom would be to cut one’s losses. When we’re under siege, whether it’s a foreign army barricading the front door, or the oppressive forces of racism, misogyny, or nativism that hold us down; the regressive forces of nationalism or nostalgia that hold us back and threaten to destroy life as we know it, simply surviving can be hard enough. Who goes looking to invest in something that is already lost and hopeless. Like real estate, when it comes to hope, the most important thing to consider is location, location, location. Because where we find our hope can make all the difference when we are under siege. For the King of Judah, his hope was in Egypt. Judah may have been a small nation, but it lay between Babylon and Egypt. The Egyptian empire was unsettled by Babylon’s act of aggression against its neighbor. The last time Babylon had threatened Judah all it took was the threat of Egyptian retaliation to get them to back down. The king was hoping if he could bide his time and hold the city long enough, Egypt would once again come to the rescue. He was an optimist. Admiral James Stockdale was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for eight years. When asked who had the hardest time in that desolate place he replied, “Oh, that’s easy. The optimists. They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.” Stockdale survived, he said, because “I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.” The prophet knows what the King refuses to see, which is the end of the story. Jerusalem will fall; the king will be carried away to Babylon. Keeping a positive attitude in the face of that reality or pretending that it isn’t so will not save him from it. But that is not the end of the story. Hope lies not in what Jeremiah will redeem by completing this transaction, but in what God has promised to redeem even as it is occupied by the enemy. That is where Jeremiah finds his hope. Kingdoms rise and fall. Empires come and go. Armies and kings and rulers of every kind are but a breath in the grand sweep of God’s creation. God and God’s promise to recover what might otherwise be lost, that is eternal. Judgement is never God’s final word on the matter, neither is destruction. God’s final word is redemption, restoration- you might even say resurrection. The field at Anathoth is a parable to show us what is so easy to forget in the panic and despair that grips us when we’re under siege. Our hope, our redemption, is found in the things that God gives us as a sign of God’s promise. They’re simple things like a plot of land, or a font filled with water, a loaf of bread and a cup that is overflowing with grace. In even the darkest of times, in times when we may feel under siege by all principalities and powers that assail us, when we are facing the loss of everything we have known, such things remind us where to find our hope. Such things point us to the end of the story, always. Our true hope is found in the one whose promise is more steadfast than any army, nation, leader, destruction, or even judgement itself. In that hop we come to see that what looks for all the world like the end is only the beginning of what God can and will do.