If I gave titles to my sermons, the title for today would be "Jeremiah, Part 2." Last week, I talked about Jeremiah's lament, how Jeremiah saw so clearly that his people had strayed from God's Covenant, how they'd let their religious-nationalistic ambitions cloud their real mission to be God's community of justice and peace, and how God was using the military power of Babylon to break the kingdom because the kingdom had broken the Covenant--and yet, at the same time, Jeremiah wept for his people and prayed for his people and desperately wanted to see his people saved. It was that lament we heard so clearly last week in Jeremiah, Part 1.

But I also said in my sermon last week that God led Jeremiah through his lament to discover hope--and it is that hope that we see in today's First Testament reading. The story today begins in the pits: the Babylonian army is besieging Jerusalem--they're no longer a vague threat on the horizon, they're at the gates, and the end is near. Jeremiah is in jail--his dire words about Babylon have come true, but even now King Zedekiah doesn't want to hear that his political maneuvering has blown it, so he's had Jeremiah locked up so that no one will hear his anti-Zedekiah message. It would be hard to imagine a more hopeless situation.

But it is precisely here, in this hopeless situation, this situation with no apparent future, that God speaks to Jeremiah and tells him to do something for the future. There is a field in Anathoth, Jeremiah's family's ancestral home, and that field is coming up for sale. According to traditional Jewish property laws, Jeremiah had the first right to buy that field, to keep it in the family--and God tells Jeremiah that his cousin is going to come to him, in prison, and offer him first right to buy the field, and God tells Jeremiah that he ought to do it. Now of course on the face of it, it seems like an absurd thing to do. The Babylonians are at the gates, the kingdom is about to fall, in a little while it won't matter who owns what fields according to Jewish property laws, because the invaders will take over all the lands, send the upper classes into exile, shift the population around, and give the land to anyone they want. In a little while, deeds of ownership will be about the last thing that makes any difference in the people's lives. But Jeremiah buys the field anyway; he draws up the documents, weighs out the money, seals up the deed, and in the presence of witnesses tells his secretary Baruch to put the deed in an earthenware jar--kind of the ancient equivalent of putting it in a fireproof safe--so that it will last for a long time. Even though this is a gesture with no apparent future to it, Jeremiah does it so that it will be a sign of hope, so that it will be a promise that after the invasion, after the conquest, after the fall of the kingdom, God will yet restore the people to life in the land. Jeremiah buys the field and seals up the deed, "For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land."

That is the hope God leads Jeremiah to discover even in the midst of his lament: not the hope that God will avert the disaster, but hope that after disaster God will create something new. And we will hear that hope played out over our readings for the next three Sundays. Next week we'll hear from Lamentations, a book traditionally assigned to Jeremiah, where the poet weeps for the empty ruins of Jerusalem, where we're brought face-to-face with the bitter reality of what Jeremiah has been prophesying for so long. The week after that, we will hear how Jeremiah tells the exiles in Babylon not to pine for their old city, not to weep for the ruins, but to build houses and live in them, to have families and raise children, to work for the welfare of the Babylonian communities in which they live--because God's mission for them is not simply to be their own nation, but to be a light of justice and peace for all people. And finally, three weeks from today, we will read Jeremiah's promise that God will bring the people back to their land, back to Judah and Jerusalem, and that God will make a new covenant with them--not just restore the old covenant, but make a new covenant, a covenant written in their hearts, a law dwelling in their spirits, a way of living together in justice and peace and worshiping God in righteousness that will not depend on the structures of royalty, like the old kingdom, structures of royalty that got in the way of living out the covenant--but God is sweeping away those old structures in order to create for the people a whole new covenant life.

The hope God gives to Jeremiah is a hope for transformation--not a promise that God will simply maintain the status quo, but a promise that God will lead the people through a change, and it will be a painful and terrifying change, but that God will lead the people through a change into something deeper and truer and more real and more meaningful than they ever could have imagined. And what Jeremiah realizes is that, even though it may take lamentation to get there, there will be a better place to be.

And I think that is the take-home message for us today. For us too, the hope is that God will not simply let us maintain the status quo, but that God will inspire and empower and enthuse us to change, to grow, to be transformed, so that we can participate in God's mission in new and more dynamic ways. For us too, the promise is that change may be difficult, change may be painful, change may be terrifying--but on the other side of change is new energy and new accomplishment and new joy.

I think we can see that going on with the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion right now. As many of you know, our House of Bishops was meeting in New Orleans this past week, and on Tuesday, at the close of their meeting, they issued a statement responding to demands the Primates had made back in February, demands, that the bishops solemnly promise a) not to consent to the consecration of any more partnered gay and lesbian bishops, and b) not to authorize public rites for the blessing of same-sex unions in their dioceses. Some people were hoping the Bishops would tell the Primates to mind their own business, and that we were going full speed ahead with the full inclusion of lgbt people in our church. Other people were hoping the Bishops would accept the Primates' demands, and back away from our "new" theology of inclusion, and return to more traditional teachings on sexuality. What the Bishops did was to reiterate where the Episcopal Church now stands, in effect to say "We have gone this far and won't go back," and yet also say "We won't go any farther forward for now, out of respect for the rest of the Communion." It's the kind of solution almost no one seems entirely happy with. But I see it as part of a bigger picture, part of a slow and often very painful change, part of a process of learning how traditional teachings about relationship and love and union and fidelity can be understood in wider and broader and deeper ways than our forebears in the faith thought possible. I personally think there are some very rocky days ahead for the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church--but I also hope that through that difficult change will come a new and more vibrant sense of what communion means.

I think we can see that going on with St George's. For years now we've been talking about growing our church--but I think sometimes we still fall into the trap of thinking that "growth" means adding more people so that we can maintain our current status quo. We say we need more members so we can keep on doing the same things; we say we need more pledges so we can keep on paying the same bills; we say we need more children so we can keep on teaching the same Sunday school. There's nothing particularly wrong with any of these things. But what if God wants to call us to a new engagement with mission? What if God wants St George's to rise up and overflow into some new ministry, like we did with healing ministry in the sixties or Cursillo in the seventies? What if God is calling us to sweep away the structures we know so well and feel so comfortable with, so that God can do a new thing with us, put a new law in our hearts, empower us to be a church we never thought of being before? I have to tell you, I find that question a little scary--sweeping away structures like patterns of Sunday worship or the authority of the rector--making that kind of change seems like more than I want to mess with. But what if God's promise to St George's is that on the other side of difficult change comes a kind of congregational life and vitality and growth that will be a better place for us to be?

And finally, I think we can see that going on for a lot of us personally. Many of us in this room right now are facing difficult changes: the decline or death of people we love; illness, cancer, surgery, treatments that for many of us seem almost as bad as the disease itself; changes in career, precarious job situations, realignments in our working lives that can leave us wondering what we're doing and what we're doing it for. A lot of us, in our own lives, might feel like Jeremiah, fearing disaster is waiting at the gate, and not knowing any way to get out of it. And yet the promise God gave Jeremiah comes to us too: that on the other side of change--as disastrous as the change may feel--on the other side of change there is new life.

So Jeremiah, Part 2 brings us today a message of hope. Not easy hope, perhaps, but real and live and true hope. Let us embrace that hope, let us be that hope, let us be transformed by that hope, letting God change us so that through us God can show forth new life. Amen.