1All the people [of Israel] gathered together into the square before the Water Gate. They told Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had given to Israel. 2Accordingly, Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could hear with understanding. This was on the first day of the seventh month. 3He read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand, and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law. 5And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people, and when he opened it, all the people stood up. 6Then Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. Then they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. 8So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.
9And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people said to all the people, “This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.” For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law.
10Then he said to them, “Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy to our Lord, and do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
My sermon from the 3rd Sunday after Epiphany (January 23, 2022) on Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10.
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One of the neat things, I think, about the incarnation – about God’s decision to enter the entirety of our human story by being a real human being – is how it invites us to pay attention to the physical nature of our lives and our world. We are not just a series of thoughts floating around in our heads. We are embodied, moving through a world filled with things to touch, smell, taste, see, and hear. This physicalness is a big part of our lived story and it’s also a big part of God’s story too. One way we engage deeper with our Bible is by remembering how these stories happened in places filled with dirt, buildings, trees, grass, sand, rocks, animals, and people. The words in our Bible are more than just bits of ink on a piece of paper or shaded pixels on a screen. They show us where God’s story is lived out.
And that physicalness, I think, is a big part of our first reading from the book of Nehemiah. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah were originally one story that was eventually split in two. And they give us a kind of spiritual reflection unpacking what happened in Jerusalem once the Jewish community returned. In the year 586 BCE, the Babylonian empire destroyed Jerusalem and forced most of its surviving population to live hundreds of miles away along the banks of the Euphrates river. For roughly 70 years the community lived in exile and had to learn what it meant to be Jewish without access to their promised land. During their time away, they began to give the Hebrew Bible its shape. Their story – from the book of Genesis through the Prophets – was collected, edited, and written down on scrolls. This process involved a lot of listening, reading, reflecting, prayer, and negotiations over what to include. They clung tightly to promises given to Abraham and to how God rescued them from slavery in Egypt. They celebrated every commandment, every covenant, and the glory they saw in the Davidic kingdom. And when things went wrong, they noticed their God was with them even when their hope was gone.
Now when the Persians destroyed the Babylonian Empire, they allowed the Jewish community to return to Jerusalem. Some chose to stay where they were while others packed up their belongings and headed west. When they arrived in their former capital city, what they found was a lot of work. Jerusalem was in ruins and the Temple – the place God promised to be – was a pile of rubble. The old rules about who lived where and who owned what no longer applied because those who weren’t exiled had made new lives for themselves in the place where the kings of Judea once ruled. Those who returned knew things had changed but after spending an entire lifetime listening to stories of the city’s greatness, they had a vision in their heads of what the city of Jerusalem was all about. Yet when what remained of the city first came into view, their expectations ran headfirst into their reality. Everything had changed and their hard work had just begun.
So when the community gathered at the Water Gate, they were doing two things. First, they were celebrating the holy day that would eventually become known as Rosh Hashanah. Second, they chose to also acknowledge that, roughly 65 years since their initial return from exile, the city walls were finally complete. Jerusalem was beginning to look like the city they held within their hearts and they could, in a tangible way, express their faith through an early version of the Torah in their City of David. I can’t help but think that, while standing and listening to God’s story in that physical place, some felt as if things were finally returning to normal. As they closed their eyes, it seemed as if they had gone back to that moment before all this stuff happened. But when they opened their eyes and truly saw what was all around them, they wept because they realized they couldn’t go back. Change had happened. And in the words of Rev. Katie Hines-Shah, “maybe… [they couldn’t] return to [their] normal after all.”
Now Nehemiah doesn’t tell us exactly why the people wept. But on this Sunday as we return to in-person worship after a few weeks away, I see their weeping as a response to the loss of our so-called normal. We all had our vision of what the church and our lives would be like when this pandemic was finally over. And last summer and fall, it looked like our normal might finally return. But then the uncertainty of this pandemic required us to step away from in-person worship again. And while each of us has been impacted by this current stage of the pandemic in different ways, what I saw and heard and personally experienced was a kind of exhaustion manifesting itself as sadness, tears, anger, frustration, and a desire to just pretend as if we’re already moved on. It’s hard to not be really tired right now. And it’s exhausting being a parent or a grandparent or a caregiver or a teacher or nurse or a doctor or just a plain human being in this moment. Many of our actions and in-actions have been shaped by a longing and a grief for this return to normal. Yet there are days when our weeping and mourning seem to be the entirety of what this new normal is all about. We still don’t know what the future will bring but we do know there’s no going back to the way things were. Everything has changed and it’s okay to stop pretending that it hasn’t.
Yet, as we hear in our words from Nehemiah, “this day is holy to the Lord your God.” This day – not the one that happened in the past or the one we hope for the future – is holy. And that’s because God doesn’t wait for the city to be rebuilt, repaired, and returned to its former glory before God chooses to re-enter the story. God didn’t despise the Jewish community because things had changed. God didn’t shy away from them because they were gathering and celebrating and doing things a bit differently than before. God was with them in their new ways of being in the world because God had always been with them – even when they were exiled to a place far from their physical and spiritual home. And when it came time to hear God’s story, the bits that were shared came from the Torah – the first five books of the Bible that do not focus on the community’s time in the promised land. It’s a story that’s a little incomplete because it ends before they get to the place where they are going. The story ends with the community still wandering but trusting that God was about to carry them into a new kind of future. The narrative within the Torah wraps up long before the story of the community ends. And that’s because God knew that they had a future and had way more life to live.
So that means, that even during this time which will never again look like our past, we get to celebrate the goodness of our God because God has already declared we belong. Our story is still not complete but we are completely in our God because, through baptism and faith, we are part of God’s future. That doesn’t mean that today won’t be hard. But it does invite us to trust that what’s changed won’t change the promises of our God. We can, together, use this moment to make sure that our worship, our prayers, and our lives embody the physical presence of the God who is always with us. We will move into God’s future because God’s future is already moving through us.
Amen.