A Sermon Delivered on September 28, 2025, by the Rev. Dr. Patrick H. Wrisley.

The first thing I have to say about this morning’s lectionary reading is that to hear it, it sounds as though it does not make any sense. Turn with me to Jeremiah 32:1–3, 6–15. As you find it, let me set the scene.

Jeremiah is known as the “weeping prophet” because most of his words were hard to hear; he was full of warnings of God’s judgment and lamented over the people’s unfaithfulness. The southern kingdom of Judah had chased after foreign gods and lived lives that proved they had fully broken the covenant with Moses, and now the Babylonian army was building ramparts up against Jerusalem’s walls. The king at the time, Zedekiah, is totally worn out with all of Jeremiah’s unwelcome news. Think of a street preacher with a sign that says, “The end is near!” This is how people perceived him. Finally, the king had Jeremiah confined in the palace court to keep him from stirring up more trouble.

The time is around 588 B.C.E. Babylonian siege ramps are getting constructed up along Jerusalem’s walls. And while Jeremiah sits under arrest, God tells him a vision: “Your cousin Hanamel is going to offer to sell you his field at Anathoth. Buy it.” Anathoth, by the way, is Jeremiah’s hometown just to the north. Listen to this strange Story from the Word of God.

Jeremiah 32:1-3,6-15

^32.1The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord in the tenth year of King Zedekiah of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of Nebuchadrezzar.  ²At 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, ³where King Zedekiah of Judah had confined him. Zedekiah had said, “Why do you prophesy and say: Thus says the Lord: I am going to give this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall take it…

 ⁶Jeremiah said, The word of the Lord came to me: ⁷Hanamel 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.” 

⁸Then 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 the word of the Lord.  ⁹And I bought the field at Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel, and weighed out the money to him, seventeen shekels of silver. ¹⁰I signed the deed, sealed it, got witnesses, and weighed the money on scales. ¹¹Then I took the sealed deed of purchase, containing the terms and conditions, and the open copy; ¹²and 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. ¹³In their presence I charged Baruch, saying, ¹⁴Thus 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. ¹⁵For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land (NRSV)

So, here in the middle of battle and war, Jeremiah weighs out seventeen shekels of silver, signs a deed, seals it with a notary and witnesses, and gives it to his secretary Baruch to store in a clay jar “so it will last a long time.” Why? Why is he doing this? It’s because, God speaks a word of hope and declares, “Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”

Huh?

To bring it closer to home and make it real: imagine you’re living in Kyiv today with missiles landing nearby, and you decide to buy a piece of farmland already under Russian occupation. You gather cash, a notary, a few witnesses, and you put the deed in a friend’s safe. People around you would ask, “What on earth are you doing?” Well, this is exactly what Jeremiah did.

Today’s Story shows us how a person of faith responds in chaotic times. It’s a Story that God is aware of the swirly times we are in and still sees a hopeful future we can’t because we are too close to the craziness about us. It is a Story that calls us to look for God’s presence right in the current chaos of uncertainty and to invest in a future we may never see. Unlike our current government which has cut funding in science exploration and climate and environmental initiatives which will benefit our children and grandchildren, Jeremiah thought it wise to give hope to a future generation.

Psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl wrote about this in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Surrounded by brutality, he concluded that people find meaning through purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of despair. Even when everything else is stripped away, one freedom remains: Our personal ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances.^[1]

I think of what my late wife Kelly taught me and our girls: “I can let cancer and heart failure define me, or I can choose to define what they are to me.” She chose courage, love, and meaning.

Jeremiah did the same. Even while imprisoned, he consciously chose to act out hope. God wanted him to buy that field because God wanted to provide a prophetic sign that God is not finished with God’s people and remembers the covenant that was made with the people of Israel.

Friends, we too live in anxious times; we live in a time when fear runs high. For some, it’s fear that our present Executive branch is running amuck over civil liberties and our Constitution; for others, it’s fear of voices being silenced on our campuses, in our newsrooms, or even in our pews. We fear losing our freedoms, our security, our way of life. These fears are real. But as people of faith, our ultimate hope isn’t anchored to an administration but is grounded in the hope of living God. There is a description for what many in our country are feeling right now. This collective feeling is often described as dystopian anxiety, a mix of moral panic and the mean world syndrome; it is where people are under constant exposure to political violence, chaos, and negative media coverage which makes society feel more dangerous and unstable than it may objectively be.^[2] Our fearful projections about the world around us begin to pile up on themselves in a snowball effect. These fears are real.

But our ultimate hope isn’t anchored in presidents or policies. Our hope is grounded in the sovereign, gracious heart of God. We don’t have to manufacture it; the Spirit births it in us. As British scholar Ronald Clements wrote of this passage, “Hope was no longer the short-lived possibility of averting disaster, but rather a discovery that there was no disaster that could take away a hope founded on God.”^[3]

This hope lives in the spiritually real but all-too-elusive “already” and the “not yet.” Scripture reminds us that even in the flood, even in the fire, “I am with you and will hold you by my victorious right hand.”^[4] But Jeremiah didn’t just personally feel hope; he proactively projected it onto the next generation. He gave Baruch the deed so that when restoration of Jerusalem came, people in the future would have the evidence. Beloved, the fact of the matter is that it is our calling, too; it’s the Church who is called to pass on a living witness of God’s faithfulness. We choose whether we succumb to dystopian anxiety and the mean world syndrome. We choose whether we try to do something about it.

So, I leave you with two questions:

Where is God calling you to look for hope in the swirl of today? What is that hope calling you to do?

Second, who is your Baruch? To whom are you entrusting a deeded word of hope for the next generation to know God’s faithfulness (or are you too wrapped up and immobilized by the mean world syndrome)?

Beloved, we may not live to see the whole restoration God is working on but like Jeremiah, we can plant signs of God’s future in the here-and-now. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

© 2025 Patrick H. Wrisley, Pastor, First Presbyterian Church of Glens Falls, NY 12801. Sermon manuscripts are available for the edification of members and friends of First Presbyterian Church of Glens Falls, New York and may not be altered, re-purposed, published or preached without permission. All rights reserved.

^[1]  See https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/03/26/viktor-frankl-mans-search-for-meaning/. Accessed on 9/23/2022.

^[2] Bonnie Evie Gifford, “What is mean world syndrome?”, September 18, 2020, Happiful. See https://happiful.com/what-is-mean-world-syndrome.

^[3] R.E. Clements, Jeremiah, Interpretation (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988), 195. 

^[4] See Isaiah 41:8-10.