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The Twenty-Fourth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Nehemiah 5:1-19
A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
on
Nehemiah 5:1-19
✛
Holy People and Holy Places
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One of the things that people frequently tell me they want in sermons is that they have contemporary relevance. We do not just want to hear about the events of the past, I have heard, or what so-and-so said about such and such. Make it contemporary, I hear. Make it about the present, they say. Make it relevant for today.
That is fair but, depending on what the readings for the day are, it isn’t always the easiest thing to do. When I first read the section of Nehemiah that we heard this afternoon, one of the immediately relevant things I first noticed—relevant to me anyway—is that I had never heard a sermon on Nehemiah before, and was not really sure where to start. I went and poked around in various scholarly resources, looking to see what I could find out about this ancient writer. I immediately identified something else of great contemporary relevance—relevant to me anyway—which was that people do not write a whole lot about Nehemiah.[1]
This is unhelpful for a preacher, because it’s not like Nehemiah is one of those great Biblical figures that live on in the popular imagination. Nehemiah was a governor of Jerusalem—a bureaucrat—in the fifth century BC, about as far away from our contemporary concerns as can be imagined. He was in charge of re-establishing the city during the time of the exile, given permission to do so by the Persian king.
So many of the Jews were back, working together on rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. And working together they were: the beginning of the book of Nehemiah shows us the great potential of teamwork. Now that is something that is very important in the present day; it is a present-day application of this ancient text and a contemporary concern. For example, I recently visited a pre-kindergarten classroom, and the teacher explained to me that the students are frequently made to work on projects together—practicing teamwork—because, she said, the new global economy values skills like collaboration, and we better get them ready. So here is a contemporary resonance, but perhaps in more than one sense: Nehemiah’s experience and what I imagine the experiences are of these four year-olds, are very similar, because, after working together for a little while, the Judeans fell into in-fighting and bullying, squabbling like a bunch of children. Clearly they did not start practicing teamwork in pre-kindergarten.
But it was worse than that. These Jerusalemites were not just four-year-olds fighting over crayons—sorry, I mean learning about the collaborative skills needed to secure their place in the new economy. They were divided by rich and poor, and the rich had the upper hand, as the rich usually do. In spite of Torah prohibition to the contrary, the wealthy were loaning money to the poor at exorbitant rates that were reducing their sisters and brothers to poverty. Even worse, they were taking these impoverished sisters and brothers and selling them as slaves, if the debts could not be repaid; again, Torah prohibitions to the contrary. All the while they were working to re-build the walls of Jerusalem, to re-invigorate the city of promise, the Holy Land.
This is where Nehemiah found them falling short. They were not only to live in the Holy Land; they were to live as holy people. You can hear Nehemiah’s frustration in the text. After all those years of bondage in Persia, of being kept as slaves by foreign powers, his comrades were replicating those same exploitative relationships among themselves. The rich were taking advantage of the poor. The family that had been in exile together was behaving worse than squabbling relatives; they were no longer a family at all. Simply being in Jerusalem just was not enough and it was Nehemiah who was there to set them straight.
So that is what he did. He gave them the harsh lecture that was today’s reading, demanding that they forgive the debts and stop selling people into slavery. Generations before, they had been promised a holy land, and now they had it. But they were also called to be a holy people, and in that they were falling short. So Nehemiah spoke to them with that refrain that has been repeated since the beginning of their lives together as the chosen people of God: repent and return to the Lord.
This all happened fifteen hundred years ago, give or take, in a time and place very much unlike our own, but the call to be a holy people is one that is given to the members of the church in the twenty-first century just as much as it was given to the people in ancient Jerusalem. And the accusations of Nehemiah, the reminders that that call has insufficiently answered, shouldn’t escape our attention either. When outsiders look at Christians, Saint Paul tells us, they should see honesty, and compassion, and charity. They should see the love that suffers long, that is kind, not envious, that “beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.”
This is what Nehemiah spent today’s rarely discussed reading doing: reminding the people of their calling to be holy. It was a sermon, let’s say, that spoke directly to the lives of the people in his community. It was addressed exactly to their circumstances; it was about their everyday lives; it was as relevant a sermon as there ever could be. And they were convinced; all the people said “Amen” when Nehemiah finished, and the text continues, “And the people did according to this promise.” They cut out the usury, they stopped the slave trade, and they built those city walls together—teamwork! There, it seems to me, is that argument for reminding people of God’s call while making it applicable to their lives.
I should also mention, however, that members of that congregation—the ones Nehemiah excoriated for their transgressions against the Torah, and the ones who said “Amen” to it—they all eventually tried to have Nehemiah killed, and they just about succeeded. It was a little too applicable to their lives, and it just about cost him his life. So it is worth noting that death is the potential downside of an effort to be of-the-moment.
But our friend Nehemiah is still of-the-moment, because we are, just as much as they were, called to be a holy people, “holy and blameless,” calling on Jesus as our lord, carrying his cross, living and dying for him. To tell the story of the Judeans as they fell away, to visualize their lives in our imaginations, is to look in the mirror and see the ways that we continue to fall short of being that holy people that Christ calls us to be—not in the past, but very much in the present, in this very house of God, in our own lives and our own so-very-modern communities. With every division between Christians; at every sin that is perpetrated in this holy place; each and every time we fall away, we should hear the frustrated and incredulous voice of Nehemiah in our ears pleading, “Shouldn’t you be walking in the fear of our God?” Shouldn’t you be the servant of the Lord?
We do not hear very much about Nehemiah. He probably would not do very well in the new economy, and there is nothing cutting-edge about him. But I hope that we can see how he is one of a long list of ever-relevant characters from a far-away place in a far-away time, whose questions should inspire us to heed his example. May you and I walk together in the fear of our God, as a holy people in a holy place.
_______________
[1] One notable exception is Matthew Levering’s commentary Ezra & Nehemiah (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2007), which inspired the theme of “holy people and holy land.”
