Warren Buffett is one of the world’s richest people. He owns 38% of Berkshire
Hathaway, a conglomerate holding company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska,
United States, that oversees and manages a number of subsidiary companies.
The company averaged an annual growth in book value of 20.3% to its shareholders
for the last 44 years, while employing large amounts of capital, and minimal
debt. Berkshire Hathaway stock produced a total return of 76% from 2000-2010
versus a negative 11.3% return for the S&P 500
One of the strategies he’s employed over the years, above all else, is patience.
He doesn’t dumpy all his stocks when the market has rough seas. In fact, when
everyone has griped about the losses they’ve taken in the stock market during
this recession, Buffett has been commenting very publicly about what a good time
it is to invest.
He says, “Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time
to get interested is when no one else is. You can't buy what is popular and do
well. Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality
merchandise when it is marked down.”
What sets him aside from so many other investors who try, often vainly, to buy
low and sell high, is his unwavering faith in the stock market. He always thinks
it’s a good investment. And even when it tanks, he never loses faith that it
will come back.
Most people take a very different approach to valuing things and people in this
life. We like what’s hot. We like what other people like at the time. And when
people pan something, we tend to pan it along with everyone else.
When people are optimistic, others join their optimism. When people are wary and
pessimistic, those around them are apt to take on that pessimism. Sometimes the
reality of a situation is less important than the way a situation is perceived.
Those situations tend to show us who we really are, what’s important in life,
and how we look at life. We are such social creatures that we often don’t ask
ourselves what we like or what we think is important in life.
This is especially so during times of tragedy or distress. When something
horrible happens, we tend to look for someone who will help us make sense of it.
And sometimes it’s easier to believe the people who make us think the worst
about something rather than the ones who give us reason for hope.
The situation faced by the prophet Jeremiah was that kind of a tragedy. The
people of Judah in the early 6th century BC were faced with what looked like
impending doom. Their neighbors, the Babylonians, had built up a horrific army
and had been making raids in Judah.
They had allowed Judah to rule itself as long as Judah paid lots of taxes to
them. But there were question about Judah’s loyalty to the Babylonians, and
whether or not the Jews would try to rebel. So by 588 BC the Babylonians were
preparing to invade the capital city of Jerusalem and destroy everything,
including the palace, the temple, and the Jewish king Zedekiah.
Zedekiah was in a situation where there were no easy choices. On the one hand he
had to keep the Babylonians happy by paying severe amounts of money to them and
making sure no one tries to start a revolt. On the other hand he ruled a proud
nation who believed that their God would always protect them, even from the
Babylonians.
Their God had promised an earlier king, King David, that one of his descendants
would always rule in Jerusalem. And there were people in the religious
establishment, priests and others, who swore up and down to Zedekiah that God
would eventually save them from this invasion.
But there was another prophet who said otherwise. Jeremiah was the most highly
respected prophet in Judah, even though Zedekiah didn’t like what he had to say.
Instead of saying that everything would be alright, Jeremiah told the king that
God was angry about the fact that so many people in Judah were adopting other
religious practices and following other gods.
They set up altars to other gods in the temple in Jerusalem. They set up hilltop
shrines so that people could offer sacrifices to other gods. Sometimes they even
practiced child sacrifice, offering their children up to another god named
Molech.
For the longest time Jeremiah told people that if they stopped these practices,
God would indeed save them. But they never did. And by the time the Babylonians
were setting up ramps around the city so that they could climb over the walls of
Jerusalem and invade, Jeremiah told them it was too late.
Now as you might imagine, Zedekiah was unhappy about what Jeremiah had to say.
He thought Jeremiah just had it in for him. So he arrested Jeremiah and held him
prisoner in the palace. That way Jeremiah couldn’t go around town telling people
that they were doomed. It was bad for morale, I guess, even if it was true.
While Jeremiah was being held he received a word from God that he should get
involved in a real estate deal. As you can imagine, people who owned land in
Judah were wondering what would happen to them if they were invaded.
Would the Babylonians confiscate all their land? Some folks tried to hedge their
bets by selling their land. Some tried to pay off their debts before the
invasion because they might end up forfeiting the land as collateral.
Jeremiah was approached by his uncle Hanamel, who asked Jeremiah to buy some
family land because Hanamel thought, for whatever reason, that he was going to
lose it. Jewish law was designed so that a family’s land would stay in the
family forever.
If a lender took land as collateral, after a certain number of years the lender
would have to give the land back. If someone had to forfeit land because of
debt, they could have one of their relatives buy the land ahead of time so the
land would stay in the family.
Leviticus 25:25 requires people to buy land from their relatives in order to
keep the land in the family. So Jeremiah used this situation to illustrate the
message he had received from God.
Jeremiah describes in detail the process of a real estate purchase during that
time. He paid seventeen shekels of silver for the land. Since not every coin
weighed the same, a shekel was a weight in silver, not a number of coins.
Seventeen shekels was about 7 ounces of silver.
Jeremiah’s lawyer wrote up two copies of the purchase agreement. One was rolled
up and sealed with wax to prove that it was the original agreement, and not
later forged by someone else. The other copy was Jeremiah’s to keep for his own
reference.
Jeremiah signed both copies in front of a bunch of witnesses, much the way one
of us would sign the papers for a mortgage. The witnesses also signed the
contracts so that if there were ever a question about whether or not Jeremiah
had actually bought the property, they could come to court and testify that he
had.
Jeremiah took the official copy and had his lawyer place it in a clay jar for
safe keeping. Now you might wonder why God would tell him to invest in real
estate at this time. This was actually a pretty bad time to invest in real
estate. If you were about to be invaded by someone else and the future was
completely up in the air, that wouldn’t be the time to be buying land.
I’d want to keep those seventeen shekels for something I might need after
everything was destroyed. But the point of this transaction is that God would,
in the end, take care of the Jews and give them back their land. Jeremiah was
like Warren Buffett investing during a recession because he was sure that
eventually things would get better.
This passage is a basic message about hope when things are in a downturn. It is
a message of confidence in God’s action in the world. To the naked eye it would
appear to be foolishness, a risk which we do not need to take.
But if we say nothing else about our faith, at its most basic level, we believe
that God is good, that the world is good, and that even when the world looks
really bad and acts really bad, that in the end, good will prevail because God
is good.
If you don’t have that kind of confidence, you will probably end up sad,
depressed, angry, and unable to hold onto any hope in your life. If you do, then
even the bleakest of situations does not seem overwhelming because you know they
will not last forever.
In January of 1943, three months before he was arrested and subsequently killed
by the Nazis, the Lutheran Pastor and Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote these
words about Christian hope and faith when times are dark. He wrote:
"...There remains for us only the very narrow way, often extremely difficult to
find, of living every day as if it were our last, and yet living in faith and
responsibility as though there were to be a great future. It is not easy to be
brave and keep that spirit alive, but it is imperative."
Jeremiah doesn't listen to the prophets of doom on talk radio. Jeremiah knows
that neither King Zedekiah, nor Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, nor corporate
executives or Pentagon officials, none of these really run the world.
Jeremiah knows that it is God who runs the world. It is God who gets the final
word and God's final word is not destruction. God's final word is never
destruction. God's final word is renewal. God's final word is always renewal.
When Dietrich Bonhoeffer was in prison, he wrote a letter to his fiancée Maria
von Wedemeyer. He wrote:
"When Jeremiah said, in his people's hour of direst need, that 'houses and
fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land', it was a token of
confidence in the future. Our marriage must be a 'yes' to God's earth. It must
strengthen our resolve to do and accomplish something on earth." [ii]
Bonhoeffer's words, inspired by the prophet Jeremiah, are as true today as they
ever were. We live in a world where the bad news of the day is both a source of
despair, and in our 24-hour news cycle, a source of entertainment. We are
tempted to react to the tragedies and social unrest of our day with either a
self-absorbed denial or a self-absorbed hedonism.
But the people who have Jeremiah as their prophet, the people who have Jesus as
their Savior, the people who have Dietrich Bonhoeffer as their martyr, the
people who know that the God of the Bible is the source of their lives, these
people do not despair. These people do not live lives of denial. These people do
not live lives of hedonism. These people live lives of radical hope. A hope,
which is not simply some sentimental feeling, but a hope and an orientation
which is a commitment to action; an orientation which allows us to see the world
differently and to bring that hope-filled vision to life.
We in the church are those people! We are the ones who have been called by our
baptism to bring hope to the world. We are the ones challenged to buy land when
all the "experts" of the world say "not now" - "The market is not good" - “You
would be foolish to buy now."
The Jesuit Priest and modern-day prophet Daniel Berrigan reminds us of the
critical importance of Jeremiah's field. Berrigan writes:
"Jeremiah's field collapses time; it symbolizes promise, and gift, and an entire
land restored. Is the land blood-ridden and desolate now? Perhaps, but it shall
be again a land flowing with milk and honey." [iii]
Jeremiah says to us today, buy the land, build up the church, build up God's
kingdom, build up God's reign of justice and righteousness and peace. Invest in
and prepare the ground for the future.
Show the world that God's spirit is alive and well here on earth. Indeed the
future of our lives, the future of our churches, the future of our world is not
pre-determined; the future hangs in the balance. And God calls the church to
make an investment in that future.
Everything we do here is an investment in the future. The programs we teach are
an investment. The Sunday School classes for our children are an investment in
their future, and ours.
Every time we walk through that door on a Sunday morning, every time someone
shows up on Thursday to fix something, every time someone writes a check to
support the ministry of the church, he or she is expressing the hope that God
will make this place great, that this congregation will be a place where lives
will be changed and people can experience grace.
Right not lots of churches are selling. They’re selling their building, they’re
selling their assets. They’re dumping inventory, they’re letting go of Sunday
School teachers because they don’t have the interest they used to. People are
pessimistic about what’s going to happen in the church.
I’m hope we can be on the other end of the deal. Instead of preparing to shut
down, I want to be ready to expand. Instead of selling inventory, I want to see
us gathering resources we need for ministry. Instead of selling our building,
we’re investing our space in the lives of the people of the community.
We do this because we have this eternal hope, the kind Jeremiah had as he
watched foreign army approach and as he heard the terror in the voices of the
people of Judah. If he can find hope and invest in the future of that situation,
surely we can do the same around here.
One of the WPR (Wisconsin Public Radio) hosts is Larry Meiller. He hosts a show
called “Garden Talk” although many of the shows aren’t about gardening itself.
In the promotional spots for his show Larry Meiller claims that the biggest
optimists in the world are gardeners.
Gardeners sow seeds in hope and confidence that someday the seeds will turn into
plants that bear fruit. You can just hear the confidence in his voice. I’d like
to think that some of the most optimistic people in the world are people of
faith.
We tend to sound pessimistic because we don’t have the kind of influence in
society that we used to. But we don’t just have faith in the rain and the wind
and the sun. We have faith that the God who is the source of all being loves us
and wants to preserve us, as God always has.
If that’s not a reason to invest, I don’t know what is. If that’s not a reason
for hope, I can’t imagine a better reason. If that realization doesn’t send us
forth in confidence, nothing else will.
No matter the cost, no matter the risk, no matter the bad news of the day, may
we, the church of Jesus Christ, have the courage and strength and faith at this
time to make that investment!