Rejoicing in the Word (Nehemiah 8:1-12)

          On October 10 of last year, I began reading through the Bible.  I read The Message, an English version translated by Eugene Peterson.  He said his intent was to translate the Bible into “American English.”  Read The Message and you will realize how quickly language shifts.  What he calls “American English” is very much 20^th century “American.” A few phrases and idioms are out of vogue.  Even so it is a delightful translation and I read all the way through by the end of the year. 

          Not everyone would want to do that.  Not everyone has the freedom.  That’s a lot of scripture in a short time, but not as short a period when author Margaret Feinberg read through the entire Bible during the 40 days of Lent last year.

          Why would she or I or anyone try to digest the entirety of scripture this way?  In such large chunks, it is hard to narrow in and meditate on specific ideas in the Bible.  What is the benefit of this approach to reading?

          It helped me condition my thinking according to the world of the Bible.  I felt the story.  The journey through 1^st and 2^nd Kings alone is exhausting and painful.  Over and over the kings of Judah and Israel worship false gods, ignore the prophets of the one true God, exploit the people, and find themselves at the mercy of foreign monarchs who abuse without restraint.  By the end of 2^nd Kings, the reader is depressed. 

          But then, exile comes as the last King, Zedekiah, is blinded and led off to slavery in Babylon.  And then, we see God’s people in Babylon and Persia and we realize God is there too.  Even as the layers of disobedience pile up, God never leaves.  Esther, Nehemiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel show God’s faithfulness and grace as second chances are given over and over.  Reading through it all gives the reader the arc of the story, a sense of God as God moves with humanity through the eras of history. 

          Another book I read in 2013 is The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel.  Wangerin is extremely creative in his telling of the stories of scripture.  Max Lucado too is an author who brings passion to his depictions of the Bible narratives. 

          I am recommending as a pathway into the Bible that we read it as a great story.  Ignore chapter and verse and simply get into the story.  A translation like The Message may facilitate this.  So too might a novelization like the writings of Wangerin or Lucado, to name just two of many outstanding writers who reflect on scripture.  This year I am going to go through the Contemporary English Version.  Like The Message it is in language patterns similar to our every day speech.  I won’t cram it in in less than 3 months like in 2013.  I’ll read a chunk, leave it, then go back to it.  For me, the exercise is a way to live in the story world. 

          This approach to the Bible as story helped me tremendously in reading Nehemiah.  Nehemiah is situated in the time of exile.  Israel has fallen to Babylon.  Then Babylon falls to Persia and the Israelite slaves go from one master to another.  Yet all is not lost.

          We see in the Bible the Jewish people cling fiercely to their role as God’s chosen even when they appear utterly defeated.  Other ancients assumed when they were defeated that the gods of their conquerors were superior to their own gods.  Not Israel.  No matter what happened, Israel claimed the uniqueness and superiority of Yahweh as the only God. 

          In the book of Genesis, Israelite Joseph, son of Jacob is a slave who rises from death row to become governor.  He runs the empire and through his divinely inspired wisdom the Egyptians survive the famine.  Similarly, Daniel rises in Persia to great authority, a slave ruling over the nation.  Nehemiah, also in Persia, becomes the cupbearer to the King.

          This slave from Jerusalem is so important that the Persian emperor a man with enormous responsibilities pays attention to Nehemiah’s emotions.  Nehemiah receives reports that Jerusalem, the city of David, lies in ruins.  He is overcome with depression and the king takes note of his sadness.  The king grants Nehemiah permission to leave his service as cupbearer, travel to Jerusalem, and rebuild the city. 

          By the time we arrive at the book of Nehemiah, chapters 8 and 9, the priest, Ezra, has come from Persia, to join the rebuilding effort.  Israel will not be the people of God without worship and not just any offering to the Lord, but proper worship.  This is crucial to know in the story world of Bible.  Worship matters.  The identity of the great “I AM,” Yahweh, the God of Abraham, demands that worship be at the core of who Israel is.   

          With this sense of story, we realize what is happening when we open Nehemiah 8 and see Ezra addressing the nation as they gather.  They are starting over.  After slavery, after the destruction of the temple and the city, they once again gather, turn their hearts to God, and worship.  We would not get all the undertones of the story by just opening up Nehemiah and beginning our reading at chapter 8, verse 1. 

          British preacher Peter Mead says, “I often ponder the fact that the Bible men and women whom I most aspire to be like are not those with a ready quiver full of pithy proof-texts, but those who know the God of the Bible because they are washed in the Bible as a whole, book by book.”[i]  Are we so washed in the Bible so that we get a sense of what God is doing both in the Bible story we are reading and in our lives as we read?  Or do we just whip a verse or there with no connection to all God is doing in history.  Dangling Bible verses quoted out of context do a disservice to God.  When we quote without a sense of story, we deceive ourselves into thinking we are being Biblical when in fact we’re just self-righteously drawing to our own abilities to memorize.  Quoting is fine and is good, but only when it is connected to story – God’s and ours.

          In Nehemiah 8, worship stands as the highpoint marking the moment the nation re-forms as God’s people.  In the center of the worship is the Torah, the law, the word.  Torah is the content of the first five books of the Old Testament.  It is what God gave Moses on Mt. Sinai as God called his people out of Egypt in the Exodus.  Before they could go to the Promised Land, they had to understand God.  The Torah is creation, 10 commandments, the story of deliverance, and the review in Deuteronomy, the entire law revisited to prepare the nation to enter the land. 

          Nehemiah 8:3 reports that the people, men, women, and children, stood at the Water Gate in Jerusalem while the priest Ezra read.  I thought about having us all stand throughout the sermon this morning.  They stood there from early morning to midday, maybe as long as 4 hours without sitting.  They stood and listened as Ezra read and explained the Torah. 

It had been so long since the people of Israel lived in the land and live in the word that many had even forgotten the language.  They needed priests to translate Ezra’s teaching from Hebrew into Aramaic (8:7-8).  But they patiently endured the lengthy session because they could not think of anything that mattered as much as being in the word.  Their return to God would be founded upon the word.  The Torah was how God communicated and on it they would stand. 

          Walter Brueggemann comments that “remapping and reconstruction becomes the ongoing work of Judaism.  It is clear,” he writes, “the work of Judaism is always postexilic [after fall in sin and restoration by grace] and is always on the horizon of Yahweh’s gathering, healing, forgiving, loving propensity.”[ii]  In our lives as followers of Jesus, we remember that he is the Jewish Messiah and that in Him, as we read in Romans; we are grafted into the people of God.  But this is only so because of what Jesus accomplished on the cross.  Our story cannot be told without the cross and the resurrection.  Israel had to begin with Torah and continuously return to Torah.  We have to begin with the Gospel and continuously return to it.  This ongoing work of reconstruction is ours as we commit ourselves to repentance (turning from our sins), receiving forgiveness, and giving it.  As the New Testament puts it, the Gospel is new wine and we are new creations.

          In Nehemiah 8, when the law was being read during that four-hour stretch, people began weeping.  They were overcome by their own guilt.  However, the governor, Nehemiah, and the priest, Ezra, stopped the lamentations.  The people felt their sin, the weight of it, the filth of it, but Ezra and Nehemiah wanted to introduce a new emotion – joy.  We weep in sin because we are cut off from God.  We grieve our sins because sin rips us away from the good that God created us to be.  We become something less than fully human.  At the cross, Jesus took it all on himself.  In Him, in the waters of baptism, the sins are washed away.  Isaiah 61:3 – He gives beauty for Ashes, gladness instead of mourning.

          Nehemiah 8:10: “This is a special day for the Lord your God.  So don’t be sad and don’t cry.  Enjoy your good food and wine and share some with those who don’t have anything.  … This is a special day for the Lord, and he will make you happy and strong.  This is a sacred day, so don’t worry or mourn” (8:10b-12).

         

          A few weeks ago, we talked about the sin cycle that is so prevalent in the book of Judges.  The people worship other gods and fall away from the Lord.  The Lord gets angry.  The people fall into domination at the hands of cruel invaders.  The people cry out and the Lord responds by sending a hero, a judge.  Through the judges, the Lord brings salvation.  After the salvation, the people live in peace, joy, and faithfulness.  This is bliss until they forget and in disobedience, they abandon the Lord and it starts all over.

          Nehemiah lies within the story of this cycle of sin, fall, and deliverance.  Chapter 8, verse 1, the deliverance has come.  Ezra stands and reads the word because the story is important and nothing can happen between God and the people until they locate themselves within it.  They hear and they realize their place and they weep. 

          Sin.  Restoration.

          And then, as Ezra and Nehemiah insist, not weeping, but rejoicing.  God has given the word, which speaks who He is and it – the word – is able to hold us up and make us new. 

          To be human is to live with our own failures.  Dreams die.

          It does not mean we die with them.  It may feel that way.  But no.  We can’t wallow in sorrow because a story is beneath us and around us and the God of that story lifts us. Fallen, we rise because he raises us.          When we start again, after the fall-out and deep pain has infected our souls, we stand on the Gospel.  We stand on the truth that God spoke to the world through Israel, and then again through His son our Savior Jesus.  The Bible draws us to Jesus and Jesus lifts us to our feet.  Failure is not the end of our story.  We belong to Jesus, risen one.  Because of Him, the sin cycle is broken and in all circumstances, we have joy.   

AMEN

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[i] Peter Mead (2014), Sermon Central website - http://www.sermoncentral.com/pastors-preaching-articles/peter-mead-why-bible-reading-is-down-at-your-church-1801.asp?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=scnewsletter&utm_content=SC+Update+20140130

[ii] Brueggemann (1997) Theology of the Old Testament, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, p.444.

Palm Sunday – Story and Significance (Heb. 9:11-14; Mark 11:1-17)

Sunday, April 1, 2012 - Palm Sunday

This day, Palm Sunday, marks a key moment in the Jesus drama as we read it in the Bible. Each of the four gospels has a different slant, but each includes the ride of Jesus into Jerusalem on a Sunday a few days before Passover.

At Passover the people remembered their slavery in Egypt and they remembered how the angel of death, sent from God, killed the first born of all living things in Egypt, human and animal. But, Moses told the people to sacrifice a lamb and put the lamb’s blood on their doorposts. If they did, and the angel of death came, he would “pass over” that home, and not take the first born. After this tragedy imposed on Egypt by God, the Pharaoh released the Jewish slaves. God’s people were free to go.

Since that time, at the Passover meal Jews have annually celebrated their freedom and their unique calling as God’s chosen people. At the end of the first century BC, those celebrations were filled with irony and thoughts of revolution. This is because the people were not free, but enslaved once again, this time in their own land under the heavy-handed rule of Rome. Jesus intentionally came to Jerusalem at this politically heated time, Passover. He came with the purpose of announcing the arrival of the new age, the kingdom of God, founded on his lordship. The people expected the Messiah to usher in a new age and that’s exactly what Jesus was doing.

That’s the background of Palm Sunday.

Here is how Mark describes what took place.

7 And they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it, and he sat on it. 8 And many spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut from the fields. 9 And those who went before and those who followed were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! 10 Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David! Hosanna in the highest!”
11 And he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple. And when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.
12 On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. 13 And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. 14 And he said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it.
15 And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. 16 And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. 17 And he was teaching them and saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” 18 And the chief priests and the scribes heard it and were seeking a way to destroy him, for they feared him, because all the crowd was astonished at his teaching. 19 And when evening came they went out of the city.

Once again freedom was being declared in Jerusalem as Jesus rode in like a reigning king, but his kingdom was so different than the political machine the Jews had come to imagine and hope for that few recognized him as the Messiah and as the Lord and as the right King. He fulfilled the prophecies. He just didn’t fulfill them the way most thought the Messiah would.

As we think about Jesus and the scriptures we have for Palm Sunday, the verses we read from Hebrews give us a way of understanding what took place when Jesus came, rode in as the King, cleared out the money changing tables, and in doing so claimed authority over the temple. Hebrews 9:11 says, Jesus entered the holy place and came before God “through the greater and perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation).”

The temple was thought of as the point at which human and divine would come into contact. The priests, and once a year the high priest, would sacrifice on behalf of the people so that sins were covered. Worship was probably bloodier than we can really imagine. Our church services are musical. And there’s a teaching/preaching element. We respond with prayer and giving. We greet one another. Our time of worship is social. The ancient worship included some of the elements we have, but the big event was the slaughter of the animal and then the burning of the animal so that it was a burnt offering.

It was such a massive operation, and so valued by people, that the temple leaders made a nice prophet changing currency. They of course would not accept Roman coins in the temple treasury. So if people wanted to make a monetary offering, they needed temple coins. They had to do the exchange. Again, many people, maybe most, who came to worship in the Jerusalem temple wanted to offer an animal as a burnt offering. And they especially wanted to do so at the time of Passover. They couldn’t travel 100’s of miles with a dove or a goat in tow. So they would buy one at the temple. And to do so, they had to change out their money.

In a rush of anger, Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers. Then, throughout the week, before he was arrested on Thursday, Jesus had verbal sparring matches with the scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees. Finally, as he talked about the work of God and the new beginning in Mark 13 and in other places, he declared the temple finished. One of his disciples was thrilled with the architecture, but Jesus said, “Do you see these great buildings [of the temple]? Not one stone will be left upon another. All will be thrown down” (Mark 13:2). John records Jesus as facing off with temple leaders when he said, “Destroy this temple and in three days, I will raise it up” (John 2:19).

What does he mean? Mark 13, Matthew 24-25, and Luke 21 (and other sections of Luke) each record Jesus teaching in apocalyptic language. The images he uses tempt us to think he’s referring to the end of time, but I don’t believe that is the case.
I am convinced that all the events described in apocalyptic language Mark 13 (and also in Matthew and Luke) took place in the first century with the death and resurrection of Jesus. I know the more popular reading associates Mark 13 with events imagined in the popular Left Behind series, but my thought is Jesus was talking about what happened in his coming and his rising from death. He said the temple would come down and then be raised in three days. Did that happen? In 70AD, the Romans destroyed the temple completely as Jerusalem burned. Was it rebuilt in three days? It was not.

Jesus meant that he was now accomplishing what the temple was meant to accomplish. People had thought they were to go to the temple to find God. Jesus identified himself as the place where God is found. He was the new temple. As N.T. Wright says in The Challenge of Jesus: “Jesus was deliberately acting in a way as to say that where he was and where his followers were, Israel’s God was present and active in the same he normally was in the temple.”

Furthermore, Wright asserts that much of what the first century Jews were doing – fasting at certain times and holding to particular religious austerity indicates that they considered themselves to be in exile because Rome ruled over God’s land – the city of Zion. Jesus came to say the bridegroom is here; it’s a time of feasting, not fasting. But the feast only comes with the arrival of the Messiah. On that Palm Sunday, amidst cries from many Jews for a military revolution, the prince of peace, who taught us to turn the other cheek and pray for those who persecute us, was saying the Messiah and the new age of God had arrived.

The stones of the temple were obsolete because he, as Hebrews says, went before God through a different tent. The writer of Hebrews casts a theological light on the story that Mark and the other gospel writers told. The stone and gold of the temple, so beautifully designed and artfully built, was as rubbish to Jesus who died and rose to life and rose to Heaven to go before God on our behalf. His gruesome death and then his appearance in God’s throne room where he sat at God’s right hand did what generations of sacrifice in the beautiful temple could not. This gets weighty and confusing as we consider that Jesus is God and went before God, but that is the mystery of the trinity that we cannot grasp. We accept it by faith. What’s more, by faith, we accept that Jesus is our salvation.

Mark tells this truth in story form – the drama of Jesus riding in on what we now call Palm Sunday. His disciples cheered him, religious leaders plotted to kill him, and the watching world wondered. Mark’s telling of this story – and by saying it is story, I don’t mean it isn’t true; it is absolutely true and real – Mark’s telling has inspired people to faith for the last 1900 years.

So too has the theological reflection on the events of the Jesus story that we find in the letter to the Hebrews. If the Hebrews 9:11-12 shows the difference between the way Jesus goes before God and the way the temple priests did so, then verse 14, gives us a bit of what happened when Jesus did his priestly work by sacrificing himself. We are purified of dead works so that we may do something alive – worship the living God. In the Message version it is rendered, “Christ offered himself as an unblemished sacrifice, freeing us from all those dead-end efforts to make ourselves respectable, so that we can live all out for God.”

Seeing Jesus on Palm Sunday – Jesus the King who displaced the temple not as a rejection of Old Testament religion so much as a fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament and a reaching back to God’s original intended relationship with humans, with us – see Jesus this was, we know we are freed to answer God’s call. We are called to worship. This is not a case of prematurly jumping to the resurrection before we’ve walked through the shadow of death the cross casts. We know we have to go through Friday to get to Sunday. But, we also see the story in light of the big picture because we live in an age when we have the New Testament and we have the Holy Spirit.

Jesus came and died to free us so we could follow the Holy Spirit in our lives. The Spirit leads us to worship and to tell of Jesus’ kingdom. This is the gospel and it – the narrative of the coming of Jesus – shines through both in Mark (story) and Hebrews (theological reflection).

What appeals more in your thinking? Some enjoy stories – telling and hearing them. Some enjoy slipping serious matters into casual conversation. Some are thrilled by diving in head-first into deep waters of theological dialogue. Some enjoy communicating through friendship, acts of love and then invitation – inviting a friend to church so the friend can hear the gospel in the worship setting. What’s most natural for you? How has God created you as a storyteller or gospel sharer?

The story in Mark and the reflection in Hebrews were preserved believers through the generations would know what happened and how to understand it. But it is not ours. It is Gods, a story and a reality he gives as gifts and we only truly receive the gospel when we share it. Palm Sunday – Good Friday – Easter; this is a time to share. Live in the story. Live in your salvation. And notice someone nearby who appears to be hurting or lost, confused or frustrated. Invite that person you notice to come hear the Jesus story for him or herself. In sharing, we fully realize the magnitude of grace as it flows through us.

Thursday of this week, we continue in the story, going from the cheers of Palm Sunday to the sober mood of Maundy Thursday, the Last Supper. Come back to church that night and bring a friend because this story if given to us by God and it is to be heard, understood, and shaed.

AMEN