Things to Do When the World Ends: Plant a Tree. A Homily on Jeremiah 32
September 26 - 18th Sunday after Pentecost
Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15
I hope you won’t think that by preaching on our Old Testament lesson instead of the story of Lazarus and the rich man I’m trying to avoid something, though perhaps I am! It’s just that the Gospel parable is sort of self-interpreting, whereas our Jeremiah passage is not. And, in fact, what I especially like about our Old Testament reading is that, on the surface, it seems like nothing but a boring land transaction; but within its context, it’s actually one of the most beautiful and important passages in the book of Jeremiah.
By way of some brief background, the prophet Jeremiah lived and wrote in the 6th century BC and was especially known for the dour content of his prophecies (the word “jeremiad,” which we use as a generic term for a screed or rant, comes from Jeremiah). He was one of the major prophets of Israel – there are “major” and “minor” prophets, mostly distinguished by the length of their books and the importance of the subjects they address - and what ranks Jeremiah among the major prophets is that he predicted the capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.
In my Old Testament class in divinity school there were only two dates we had to memorize: 722, the fall of the northern part of Israel to the Assyrians, and 586, the final fall of the southern part, or Jerusalem, to the Babylonians. And Jeremiah preached about this second, very catastrophic event in which the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem and carried off its wealthy and intellectual classes (including Jeremiah) to Babylon for a prolonged exile.
You can’t really overstate the importance of this event for Jews. It’s been referred to famously as the “saddest day in Jewish history.” Now granted, they’ve seen a lot of sad days, but this one really shaped their identity in some important ways - perhaps like we would say, more recently, of the holocaust and the way it has shaped modern Jewish consciousness.
All of which is not to bore you, I hope, but to set the context for our odd but lovely passage for today. Like all the prophets, Jeremiah did a lot of sign-acts to make some sort of point about God’s relationship to Israel. And this was one of them: he purchased a plot of land at one of the lowest point in Jerusalem’s history, just when it couldn’t have seemed more worthless, in order to express his (and God’s) belief that life would most past even this calamity.
There’s a little story that’s been attributed to St. Francis, to Martin Luther, probably to the Buddha, Ghandi, and who knows who else. But according to it, someone asked (we’ll say Luther) what he would do today if someone told him the world were ending tomorrow, and he replied, “I’d go plant a tree.” Which is how I think of Jeremiah’s purchase of this now worthless land: it’s a tangible and brave investment in hope, even as the world he knew was coming to an end.
I was also reminded here of something I recently read in a memoir by the writer Gail Caldwell. Her memoir was about her friendship with a fellow writer, Caroline Knapp, who died at 42 of a really vicious lung cancer. In the summer of 2001, a few years before Knapp was diagnosed, Caldwell bought her dream home in Cambridge Mass, and thus unfortunately found herself in the absurd position of considering paint samples on the week after 9/11.
So she called her friend Caroline to confess her guilt over this, and here’s part of the paragraph describing this conversation: “One day I told her I felt ashamed for thinking about my house with the world in tatters, and she put her hand on my shoulder and gave a small shrug: ‘Paint chips … Osama bin Laden,’ she said, using her hands to plot the entire range of human experience. ‘This is what life turns out to be.’”
Jeremiah’s gesture of investing in worthless land seems much grander, perhaps, than choosing paint for one’s walls or planting a tree. But in a way they’re all just ordinary acts that, when faithfully carried out in the face of tragedies (large and small), can be the most profound things we do in life.
So … I haven’t heard that the world is falling apart tomorrow, but if you do, or if it does for you, just remember to do something heroic – like go plant a tree.
