Proper techniques can allow you to take the difficulty out of buying low and selling high: The hardest thing about getting rich in real estate is finding the good deals and negotiating low, low purchase prices. If we all could buy houses for $3,000 and sell them for $40,000, we would all be rich, right? The information you have in your hands takes all the guesswork out of the process. You will know how to buy houses and other real estate for pennies on the dollar month after month until you are in control of your financial decisions.

And being in control of our financial decisions is to us the earthly equivalent of eternal security, is it not? Who wouldn’t want that? Well, this is the spam e-mail pitch I received this week. NO RISK INVESTMENT, the subject line read. But what if someone had a business plan for you that offered you a piece of property for $40,000 that was currently worth $3,000, but might be worth $40,000 again in maybe 100 years? Wouldn’t you judge that a bad deal and a doubtful deed? Try that on The Apprentice, and The Donald will stare you down and say, You’re fired!

That’s just the kind of doubtful deed Jeremiah performed and acquired in our text this morning. Jeremiah would never trump Trump with his real estate savvy.

The year was 588 B.C. Jeremiah had been pronouncing woe on the southern kingdom of Israel for over a decade. He'd been telling the king and the people to wise up: no matter how good things seemed at the time, the time was coming when they would be swept away by a neighboring nation because they had lost touch with the God that made them a people to begin with. If they wanted to play the diplomatic game of protecting themselves by paying tribute to stronger kings in order to secure their land, sooner or later their faith in political power rather than spiritual power would come home to roost. King Zedekiah had heard enough. He put Jeremiah under house arrest in Jerusalem in order to shut him up. Kings don’t like critics of their policies upsetting the people. The same is true of presidents and pastors, don’t you know?! We like good news. We like to control the news, in fact. But that never works. Only the truth works in the end.

The truth was that Judah was getting just what Jeremiah had predicted. The troops of Nebuchadnezzar were stationed at the doorstep of Jerusalem. The siege of the city would be complete in less than a year. Homeland security had failed. The insurgents would have the city of God. Soon they would blind King Zedekiah and lead him off to Babylon along with all the important leaders of Judah, leaving behind only those they thought were no threat to them.

Into the midst of these anxious times Jeremiah’s cousin Hanamel came with a ridiculous offer. He wanted to unload a piece of family property in nearby Anathoth. He saw the handwriting on the wall. Nebuchadnezzar had a garrison camped out on the family land. Their would be no sheep herding there and no vineyards planted for the rest of his lifetime. So cousin Hanamel figured he would try to get something for nothing. He knew Hebrew law and went to Jeremiah as the next of kin to propose the privilege of possession, also known as the right of redemption. Hebrew law says that no one can own the property except God, but the privilege of use can pass from one to another. In order to keep the land in the family, Jeremiah could buy it from Hanamel. And, as if people didn't think him loony enough, that was just what he did.

Now think of this: Jeremiah has finally been proven sound-minded about his bear-market predictions in Judah. And just when he began to get his reputation back, he did something economically dumb and dumbfounding. He bought this land, got the doubtful deed on it, and declared it a good deal in front of everyone. He paid way over market price for it. He even got them to bring out scales into the courtyard so he could weigh the shekels in public view. He signed two copies of the deed and had his secretary seal them up in an earthenware jar so that they could be buried and preserved as if in a time capsule for generations to come.

To Jeremiah’s mind this doubtful deed becomes a hopeful seed. God will bring the people back one day, he declares. Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land. In other words, Jeremiah, the prophet of doom, the warbler of woe, will not let Israel go through judgment without hope. He buys this land as a sign of his confidence in God’s promised mercy. God has the privilege of possession over the people. God has the right of redemption and fully intends to exercise it.

People of faith must not only read the signs of the present times; they must also act on their confidence of future times. When everyone around is pulling their hair out, people of faith keep their heads. They act upon a vision of the future that only faith can bring into view.

The German Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, became engaged to a woman named Maria von Wedemeyer in January 1943. About three months later Nazi officers arrested him on the rightful charge that he was party to a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. With the world bleak as that, his engagement was itself an act of faith in the power of God to bring a new future beyond the terror of Hitler. From prison he wrote to Maria: When Jeremiah said, in his people’s direst need, that ‘houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land,’ it was a token of confidence in the future. That requires faith, and may God grant us it daily. I don’t mean faith that flees the world, but the faith that endures in the world it loves and remains true to the world in spite of all the hardships it brings us. Our marriage must be a ‘yes’ to God’s earth. It must strengthen our resolve to do and accomplish something on earth. I fear that Christians who venture to stand on earth on only one leg will stand in heaven on only one leg. [Cited by Terence E. Fretheim, Jeremiah (Smyth & Helwys, 2002), p. 459. From Love Letters from Cell 92: 1943-45.]

Bonheoffer was hanged in prison two years later. But he is standing on two legs in heaven now, because he was willing to stand on two legs on earth through the faith that God gave him. And today, after Nazism and Communism have faded, the German church is being revived at last. Bonhoeffer’s doubtful deed became a hopeful seed from which God has grown a vineyard of sweet Communion wine for the people of God in Germany.

What got the church in Germany in trouble during Hitler’s years is what tempts the people of God in every age. We trust in princes instead of prophets. German Christians gave themselves over to Hitler’s ideas of Aryan superiority. They could not be defeated, because they were God’s elect, God’s chosen ones. Bonhoeffer was part of what was know as the “confessing church.” These Christians looked to the last reich, the final rule of God, and what they saw did not match the lie that was the Third Reich.

Faithful Christians think backward from the future, not forward from the present. We do not engage in improvement programs for the world. We contradict the world as it is by acts of faith in the world that will be.

Jeremiah’s doubtful deed of signing a doubtful deed for a worthless piece of property is just such an example. But so was William Wilberforce's anti-slavery campaign in England. As a member of Parliament two centuries ago, Wilberforce came to believe that slavery was a sin against God. He imagined the new creation God promises and could not see in it such a thing as one human being owning another. It was an uphill battle that took years to see the victory of. He began with a 12-point motion against the slave trade in May 1788. Rejected. He tried again in 1791. Defeated. 1792, 1793, 1797, 1798, 1799, and then 1804 and 1805. Every time he was defeated. But with each new effort the public began to see what Wilberforce could see: that the future was with the abolitionists, because the future belonged to God. In 1806 Parliament abolished the slave trade in the British Empire. Wilberforce wept for joy that at last the dignity of every human being was acknowledged among people who claimed faith in the God of Jesus Christ.

Have you ever done something that seemed completely contrary to human wisdom because you believed it was divinely inspired? Have you ever acted, knowing that you were only planting a seed that God would bring to harvest way beyond our lifetime?

My friend and colleague at Duke Divinity School, Curtis Freeman, grew up in Denton. He was telling me this week about his grandfather, who planted small pecan trees on the family property. His friends and neighbors told him he would never live to see those saplings grow into anything. Curtis says his mother remembers watching him carry buckets of water all over the land to water those tender trees. She lived to play under their shade. And so did the old man’s grandchildren.

After World War I, a French general named Louis Lyautey requested that his gardener plant a particular kind of tree on his property. The gardener protested that it would take that kind of tree nearly a century to come to full maturity, because it grew so slowly. In that case there is not time to lose! declared the general. Plant it this afternoon!

With the exception of Chicago Cubs fans, we don't think in terms of centuries very often in our hurry-up give-it-to-me-now culture, do we? We are not very patient, whether in love or war. We want what we want right now, or we give up acting on our hope. We think it’s all just wishful thinking. But as Frederick Buechner has said, Sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes true on. [Wishful Thinking (Harper & Row, 1972),  p. 96.] When we act on faith in God’s promises, we plant hopeful seeds God can grow to harvest in due season.

Earnest Campbell once preached a sermon at Riverside Church in New York, in which he said: To be young is to study in schools that you did not build. To be mature is to build schools in which you will not study. To be young is to swim in pools that you did not dig. To be mature is to dig pools in which you will not swim. To be young is to sit under trees that you did not plant. To be mature is to plant trees under which you will not sit. To be young is to dance to music you did not write. To be mature is to write music to which you will not dance. To be young is to benefit from a church that you did not make. To be mature is to make a church from which you might not benefit.

A mature church will think and act like that if it is filled with mature Christians who execute doubtable deeds that God can turn into hopeful seeds for generations to come. What about us, Wilshire? Are we thinking in centuries yet? There’s no time to lose. We’d better get started this afternoon!