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Larry R. Hayward
January 25, 2004
Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
The Economist and the Chaplain
Nehemiah 8:1-12
A friend of mine, who is chaplain at Williams College in Massachusetts, tells of the time a world-renowned economist came to campus to speak. At a dinner the night before, the chaplain sat at the head table next to the economist. When the host introduced him to the economist, the economist — without shaking hands, without saying "hello," without smiling — looked the chaplain in the eye and said: "I despise organized religion."
The two of them sat side by side throughout the dinner, trying — but failing — to make small talk. Because the economist's statement had been so definite, so vitriolic, the chaplain felt — perhaps rightly — that he could not even ask the economist about the source of his animosity toward religion.
*
It has been my experience that when people reject organized religion, it is often because of a gap they see between the way we religious people speak and act in worship and the way we live once the glow of worship has subsided. People often reject what we say we stand for when what they really reject is the difference between what we say and do, what we preach and practice, what we believe and how we act.
I.
We see this gap in today's passage from the Old Testament book of Nehemiah, a book on which you may very well have never heard a sermon in your extensive life of sermon listening.
The year is 458 B.C., the month, September. [1]
The people of Israel have returned from exile in Babylon and settled once again in the towns they consider home.
They yearn to worship as a community.
Men, women and children gather in the town square, called the Water Gate.
They ask their spiritual leader Ezra to bring the book of the Law of Moses — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy — into the square and to read aloud from it.
Ezra responds to the call of the people, processes into the Water Gate, mounts a platform erected for the occasion.
Thirteen leaders stand next to him; six on his right, seven on his left.
He opens the book.
The people stand en masse.
Ezra blesses God, the people say, "Amen, Amen."
He reads aloud.
The ears of all the people are attentive to the Word Ezra reads.
They bow their heads, faces to the ground, and worship.
Leaders circulate among the people; helping everyone — especially children — understand the words Ezra reads.
Some people weep. Some sit quietly. Some say, "Aha!" when Ezra reads the Word.
The reading lasts for six hours.
When the reading is over, the worship drawn to its holy conclusion, the people join together in a feast: eating, drinking, sending portions of their plenty to those in their community who have nothing. [2]
Ezra's reading of the Word and the peoples' response provides a beautiful description of what worship should be, what worship can be, what worship sometimes is.
*
The beat poet Charles Bukowski — as far as I know, neither a Christian nor student of Nehemiah — describes the power of the human word — spoken, written, read:
the word has no legs or eyes,
has no mouth, has no arms,
has no intestines and
often no heart, or very
little.you can't ask the word to
light your cigarette
although it will help you
enjoy your wine.and you can't force the word
to do anything it doesn't
want to do.
you can't overwork it.
and you can't awaken it
when it decides to
sleep.…the word will treat you well
at times,
depending on what you
ask it to
do.
other times, it will treat
you badly
no matter what you ask
it do
do.the word comes and
goes.
sometimes you must
wait a very long time
for it.
sometimes it never
comes back.the word is not for
everybody.
and for most,
it's there
just for a very short
time.he word is one of
the most
powerful miracles
in
existence,
it can enlighten or
destroy
minds,
nations,
cultures.the word is dangerous
and beautiful.if it arrives for you,
you will know
it
and you will be the
luckiest of
humans.
nothing else will
matter and
everything else will
matter.you will be the
center of the
sun,
you will be laughing
through the
centuries,
you will have
it,
your fingers
your guts will have
it,
you will be,
for as long as it
lasts…
doing the impossible,
getting it down,
getting it down,
getting it
down. [3]
When the people of Israel hear Ezra read the divine Word found in the scriptures of their faith - the Word of God - they are "the center of the sun," they "[laugh] through the centuries," "[their] fingers have it," they "[get] it down, [get] it down, [get] it down."
II.
Yet, by December [4], a few months after Ezra's powerful reading of the Word, the glow of worship subsides, the people change. Those who so reverently gathered at the Water Gate morph into a community that believes only they have the Word, only they are true in the eyes of God, only they are worthy of being called God's children. Ezra, their priest, and Nehemiah, their governor, lead them
- To do all they can to create a distinctive religious and cultural identity [5]
- To enclose their primary city, Jerusalem, with a wall [6]
- To purge their community of all things foreign [7]
Responding to a cry from the assembly, many of whom are not affected by the demands they make of others, Ezra sets up a commission that, within three months, orders 113 men who are married to foreign women to divorce their wives. [8]
The people moved from the beauty of hearing the Word of God to the ugliness of believing that Word belongs only to them.
*
I imagine that all of you have been around Christians who seek to exclude you. It is not a pretty site. It is not a positive experience.
- Indeed, in suburbs and cities all across America, Christians are banding together into enormous congregations. On the same campus of local congregations, they are building schools, theme parks, movie theatres, bowling alleys, soccer fields, dance studios. They are engaged in not-so-subtle attempts to insulate themselves and their children from people of other religions, people of little or no faith, people whose values and lifestyles differ from theirs.
- At such churches it is possible for mom to go to a sewing club, for grandma to go to a book club, for kids to complete high school, for dad to watch the Super Bowl, without ever having to associate with someone from another congregation, let alone someone from outside the Christian faith.
This tendency of contemporary Christians to construct a Christian "subculture" and to insulate themselves is not as ugly as the men who heard Ezra speak the Word, then walked into their kitchens and divorced their foreign wives. But I believe this tendency is rooted in the same sinful part of our religious nature: The part that fears the outsider, that fears the one who is different, that experiences the Word of God one way and assumes that is no other way to experience God's Word.
No wonder the economist said, "I despise organized religion."
III.
At First Presbyterian Church, we seek, at our best, not to keep the outsider out so that we may keep the insider pure. Rather, we seek to welcome both outsider and insider into one community: the church of Jesus Christ.
- We call ourselves a "magnet church" as a way of saying we want to draw all people to us and to the God we worship.
- Our Mission Statement says that we are committed to "the sacred the spiritual" not simply within the religious, but "amidst the secular." [9]
- In the spirit of the framers of our denomination, we affirm that "God alone is Lord of the conscience," and that "there are truths and forms with respect to which [people] of good characters and principles may differ." [10 ]
Our commitment to "the other" is not perfect. We often fail to grasp its full implications. There is often a yawning gap between the ways we say that we seek to include others and the ways we actually reach out to them.
But at the heart of our congregation lies an instinct to hear God's Word and share it, not hear God's Word and use it as bricks in a wall to keep others out.
IV.
Even in Ezra's day, some people quietly dissented from the harsh practices of their brothers and sisters.
- From Biblical lists and genealogies, we know that many families continued to have members whose names reflected a variety of religious and ethnic derivations. [11]
- Even though Ezra proscribed the drastic measure of divorcing foreign spouses, Nehemiah took the less harsh route of prohibiting future intermarriage rather than proscribing present divorce. [12]
Though Ezra's hearers moved from the beauty of the Word to the ugliness of keeping others away from the Word, many dissented from the human tendency to keep others out and found ways to bring others in.
We can do the same thing.
I hope and pray that at First Presbyterian Church we hear and experience the beauty of the Word of God in all its forms:
Written
Spoken
Studied
Sung
Read
Preached
Prayed
Dramatized
Expressed in art and literature.
I hope and pray that the Word of God becomes so powerful in our lives that we are able to combat our human tendency to keep others away.
I hope and pray that when we encounter the Word, it becomes so powerful in our lives that we will consider ourselves "the luckiest of humans," that we will realize that we have the Word "in our fingers and our guts," that "nothing else will matter and everything else will matter."
And I hope and pray that, among the many bright children and youth in our congregation, if one grows up to become a famous economist and is one day seated at a head table next to a chaplain, he or she will lean over to the chaplain and say:
Of all the nations to which I have traveled,
Of all the corporations with which I have consulted,
And of all the universities in which I have taught,
The one institution most open to the outsider
Was the congregation in which I was reared.
I deeply respect the best of organized religion,
And a major reason I believe in God
— Father, Son, Holy Spirit —
Is because of the Word I heard
And the way people lived the Word
At First Presbyterian Church,
Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Amen.
1 Ezra and Nehemiah were originally one book. The chronology of the two leaders (Nehemiah was governor; Ezra was priest) is confusing, but according to David J. A. Clines, in "Ezra," in The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version, edited by Wayne A. Meeks (New York: 1993), 699-701, this dating is most probable. go back
2 Nehemiah 8:1-12. go back
3 Charles Bukowski, "the word," in Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1997), 210-212. go back
4 Clines 701. go back
5 Ezra 7, Nehemiah 8, 13:23. go back
6 Nehemiah 2:17-32; 6:15; 12:27-34. go back
7 Nehemiah 13:1-3. go back
8 Ezra 9-10. go back
9 Mission Statement of First Presbyterian Church, March 1993. go back
10 "The Historic Principles of Church Order," The Book of Order, The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Part II. (Louisville: The Office of the General Assembly, 2001), G-1.0301 and G-1.0305. go back
11 The primary example Clines cites for this is Nehemiah 6:17-18. go back
12 Nehemiah 13:23-27. go back
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Phone: 319-364-6148
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