September 07, 2025
• Rev. Dr. Rob Fuquay
St. Luke’s UMC
September 7, 2025
Heroes of Hope
Investing in Hope
Jeremiah 32: 6-9, 13-15
Football season is finally here! Or as we call this day in Indianapolis, it is “New Quarterback Sunday!”
Given the Colts’ quarterback carousel, I thought it would be relevant to start the sermon by asking if you know when the quarterback position became a big deal in football? There is actually an exact date. It’s Sept. 5, 1906. (pic) That’s when St. Louis University played Carroll College and the first forward pass was thrown legally in game, and football has not been the same since. Up to that point there was speculation that football should be banned. The only way the game was played was running full steam into opponents who spared no mercy in tackling. The previous season, 1905, 18 players were killed playing the game.
But then, Bradbury Robinson (pic) threw a touchdown pass to Jack Schneider and the game was reinvented. Suddenly there was new excitement about football. Teams quickly started pivoting to finding great quarterbacks who could throw the ball long and accurate. And the search continues in some places more than a century later.
Not only were quarterbacks crucial, but also receivers. The teams that began to excel were ones in which a quarterback and receiver timed their intersections. Quarterbacks had to develop the ability to throw where the receiver was not yet present, but would be by the time the ball reached that spot. For us modern football fans, we don’t think anything of this watching the game. But when the forward pass started, receivers would run to a spot and stop. The quarterback threw to a stationary target. So imagine the first time the quarterback threw where no one was. You would have thought it was absolutely ridiculous, until out of nowhere a receiver who never stopped, emerges and catches the ball.
In other words, what appears hopeless is really about trusting in the right timing.
This is a good thought to begin a series on hope. Hope is not wishful thinking. It is not baseless optimism. Hope is calculated action based on the evidence of faith. Now I know those last words, evidence and faith, seem diametrically opposed. We often hear that faith is about not having evidence, but that’s not exactly true. Faith just lives in a different a realm of evidence. And this series will tease out what the evidence of faith looks like, but then, more importantly, consider what it means to act on that evidence. This is what hope means. Clear, calculated, decisive action in the direction of faith. Hope is something we do.
So to get started in this series let’s look at a quarterback of hope named Jeremiah. Jeremiah lived in the 6th century BCE and had the unpleasant assignment of being God’s voice to Israel during its last stand against Babylon. Jeremiah, like Isaiah and many other prophets, was clear that their eventual defeat would be because of their unfaithfulness to God and God’s ways. Because they didn’t practice justice for all people, because they had been greedy, because of many of the same things we talked about last month as challenges in our world today, they would be conquered by the Babylonians and taken away as prisoners of war. So Jeremiah preached that the best thing they could do is accept this fate, embrace this reality, and in humble contrition trust that God would rebuild them again.
But this was not what the king was saying. The king told the people that Israel was too great to fall. They needed to resist Babylon. And king’s tend not to like someone going against their orders. So Jeremiah was often imprisoned and punished by the king.
But then, one day, not long before the Babylonians captured Jerusalem, Jeremiah performed one of his greatest signs of hope. His cousin, Hanamel, offered to sell the family homestead, probably wanting to get out while the getting was good. As we heard a moment ago,
“Jeremiah said, “The word of the Lord came to me: Hanamel 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.’ Then my cousin Hanamel came to me…and said, ‘Buy my field…’ Then I knew that this was the word of the Lord. So I bought the field…” (32:6-9)
When you read a story like that in the Bible do you feel like, “Well, sure, I would know too if God told me something was going to happen, and it did! But God doesn’t speak to me like that.” I admit, it would be nice to have a little more information as to just how Jeremiah experienced the word of the Lord coming to him.
But, I must say, I have heard too many stories of people today experiencing the word of the Lord coming to them to just dismiss the idea. Several years ago an Indian woman named, Mandeep, came into our building one night to pray. She needed a life-saving kidney transplant but doctors did not have a matching donor for her and the window was closing fast. I put something in my Friday email about this. A woman in our church mentioned it to her adult daughter, not knowing that her daughter had just had a dream a few nights before telling her that she would have a chance to donate her kidney to save a life. Feeling that this was a clear sign from God, she responded and a few days before Christmas that year, that’s what happened. (pic)
I think the more time we spend listening to God, developing ways we experience God, the more we come to understand how God is speaking all the time. Maybe it comes through a dream or a nudge or an idea. In fact, starting this Wednesday at the Pastor’s Book Study at 10am in the Community Room, I’ll begin a 5-week study of Ruth Haley Barton’s Pursuing God’s Will Together. It looks at how we develop spiritual discernment with others. If you are able I invite you to attend.
But going back to Jeremiah, the key to this story, is not just that Jeremiah was given a crazy idea, that his cousin would come offering to sell him land. The crazy idea is that Jeremiah bought the land! Pause for a moment. Think of how ridiculous that was. Jeremiah had been preaching that Babylon would come and take over their land. Jews would be led away in bondage. And now, Jeremiah buys land at ground zero! How ridiculous was that?
Yet this may be the most significant hope-sign Jeremiah ever gave. He was saying by this action that as bad as things are about to become, it won’t be the end of the world. It will not be the end of their story. Future generations of their people will live in that land one day. They will build homes there and plant vineyards there. Jeremiah was investing in hope. He did so even though he would never get to return and live in the land he bought. He was investing in what God would do for future generations.
Where did we get the idea that our story ends when we die? That our story lasts only as long as we draw breath. Where did we get that idea? Because the truth is what we do right now, the way we live, the decisions we make, can tell a story for long after we are gone.
This is what Jeremiah shows us, the power of investing in hope; investing in actions that may seem ridiculous, but we believe God will be there, and we will keep telling a story. Sometimes that’s the way we find hope, by investing in hope.
Alan Paton's novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, is set in South Africa at the beginning of Apartheid in 1948. It’s about a black South African pastor, Stephen Kumalo, who searches for his son who went to Johannesburg to find employment. While there he got involved with the wrong crowd and ended up in jail for killing a white lawyer named Arthur Jarvis who, interestingly, had been a leading advocate for the rights of black Africans and had just finished a book about the need for justice in the country.
In his grief the pastor goes to the father of Arthur Jarvis, to apologize for his son's crime. The father had not agreed with his son's passion for working against the evils of apartheid. But in the aftermath of his son’s death, the father tries to understand his son's perspective that had set him in such a different direction in life. The father reads and rereads his son's manuscript. And that keeps him from rejecting Pastor Kumalo. In fact, the father promises to erect a new church building for the congregation Pastor Kumalo serves. And even further, the elder Jarvis offers to build a dam so that the people in the black township where the pastor serves might have year-round access to fresh water.
This news sends a shock wave of hope throughout the village. There will now be water for irrigation. The people will be able to raise cattle. And because there will be abundant food and milk for their families, the young people of the village will no longer have to drift off to the cities to find work. There will be laughter and singing and dancing once again. Nothing had yet happened, and yet the village is transformed, as if the changes have already occurred. In his novel Alan Paton writes this statement that just freezes me, "Although nothing has come yet, something is here already."