From the Pulpit:

It may seem odd that I begin preaching about a movie I have not seen and that I do not intend to see. I’m not much into post apocalyptic shoot-em-ups, and when I read that a whole lot of the characters are referred to as henchmen, well, that sort of clinched the deal. But yesterday morning as I drove to church my car radio was tuned to Weekend Edition and they were interviewing the Hughes brothers who are the producers of the film The Book of Eli. The title certainly has biblical implications, though the Eli referred to is Denzel Washington’s character rather than the priest of the temple at Shiloh when God came calling on the prophet Samuel. What intrigued me about this movie, though, is that central to the plot is that this Eli is risking life and limb after the nuclear holocaust to get to the west coast with the last existing copy of the Bible. The movie has to be at least  rated R for violence, and it’s a sure bet that the language matches it blow for blow, but it’s unusual for filmmakers who come right out and declare that they are not true  believers to actually acknowledge the need for spiritual tradition in order for civilization to survive. The first brother to read the script, Alan I believe, said it grabbed him on page 45 when the character Eli says, You don’t understand. It’s not a book. It’s a weapon. 

You all know that I’ve cautioned in the past against ever using the Bible as a weapon, and I imagine that’s only one of many things that I would disagree with in the movie, not that I will ever see it to find out. But the image of possession of Holy Scripture as essential to human survival fits right into our reading from the Book of Nehemiah this morning. I had already decided to preach on this passage when I heard about the Book of Eli in the radio interview. We’ll read the second half of the Luke passage next week and will have plenty of opportunity to look at it closely. But this is one of only three times that Nehemiah shows up in our three year lectionary and to the best of my knowledge I’ve never preached on it before.  

I wonder how much we know about Nehemiah. Probably not all that much except possibly among EFM graduates and seminarians. We’ll have to set him in his historical context to begin to understand what’s going on and to grasp the meaning of this passage for our times. Let’s start with Old Testament 101. It’s not going to hurt any of us to review a bit. After the children of Israel finally got to the promised land and they settled in, they realized that all the other nations had kings but they did not have a king because God was their king. Whenever an issue rose up that created strife in their midst God would raise up a judge to take care of things. Well, actually it was a little more complicated than that. In addition to kings, all their neighbors had other gods, and the children of Israel would think, well, it won’t hurt to have just one little extra idol on the altar, or it won’t hurt to pray a little bitty prayer to the baal as a safety net, but actually it did hurt, and so God would send the children of Israel into time out for a while --  the Edomites would come and occupy them until they came to their senses and said, OK, God we won’t worship anybody but you, but then they’d forget again and it would be the Midianites who would conquer them, and this cycle went on for years until God said, you’re right. This isn’t working.  You can have a king. So the first king was Saul, which God realized immediately was a poor choice, and that’s when David became king. David was not a perfect man by a long shot, but the Kingdom of David is the golden age of Israel.  Under David all the tribes were brought together as one nation with Jerusalem as the capital city and he started the plans to build the temple. His son Solomon actually built the temple, but remember the part about all of Solomon’s wives? They were not all sweet well-brought-up Jewish girls, and it was those exotic wives and concubines who brought with them, you guessed it, their gods. That’s where it all started going down hill. Fast forward a few generations with a bunch of really bad kings and foreign idols being worshipped all over the place and God puts God’s foot down  and sends in first the Assyrian Empire and then the Babylonians under King Nebudchadnezzar and the temple is torn down, the treasures are stolen, and all the important people of Judah are shipped off into exile in Babylon.  Oh, farmers are left behind, and peasants, and probably some fishermen, but nobody with any education. Nobody who could read holy scripture if they had it. Nobody to hold liturgies or to preside over sacrifice. And so it goes for fifty years. All the refined and educated people, all the scribes and priests and teachers far away in Babylon, trying to hang onto their culture with no books or scripture except what they can pull up from memory, only the psalms they remember singing as children, the prayers their parents had taught them, clinging to their culture but living in a foreign land that felt more and more like home over the fifty years they were there. Finally it was when the Persians conquered Babylon that King Cyrus told the children of Israel they could go home.  Nehemiah learned that the city of Jerusalem had been destroyed and was so visibly sad that his master, Ataxerxes, gave him leave. So he went home to Jerusalem. 

Let’s think about what he found when he got there. There were all the people who had never left, well the ones who had been young at the time of the exile and were now old, and their children, who had never known the temple except as a pile of rubble or the walls of the city to be intact. They had practiced their religion as best they could given that they were illiterate and had no access to any of the deeper traditions. And then there were the people who had come home bringing with them their sense of superiority – after all they were the privileged and educated –  so they tried to set things straight, and they tried to get some sort of rebuilding projects going, but it wasn’t working. They were disconnected, and nobody was getting along.  And that’s where our scene takes place, in the midst of wreckage and strife. Nehemiah the governor and Ezra the priest call the people to gather at the water gate. Everybody. Men and women. Farmers and scholars. And Ezra stands up on a platform over the crowd just as Moses had stood up on the  mountainside so that everybody could see him, and Ezra has what has been missing for fifty years. He has the scroll of the Torah, the law given by Moses, the holy gift of God for God’s own people. The people are silent as they stand and listen for hour upon hour. The words they hear are life giving. They are the words that make them a people. They are the words that make this wreckage of a place their home again and that fill them with hope that they can rebuild it and worship God as he should be worshiped and that they can be forgiven their sins and that they can raise their children in the tradition of their ancestors and be the light to the world that God called them to be. And when the reading was finished they celebrated with a feast of fat food and sweet wine.  It was a pivotal day in their history. It was a day of restoration and delight. Nothing could have tasted sweeter to them than the words of their God. 

It was a really big deal. And it is a really big deal that every Sunday we read four passages from our Holy Scripture when we gather in worship. For our Gospel reading we even take the cross and the torches when we have them and we process this elaborate gold-covered book from its honored place on the altar right into the midst of the congregation just as Ezra stood in the midst of the gathered people. We read our sacred stories over and over repeating them every three years, and as we hear them again and again and hear them interpreted again and again they become woven into the fabric of our lives. Most of us feel as if we don’t know as much about the Bible as we think we ought to, and there are lots of opportunities to learn more. I don’t want anybody ever to feel ashamed of not knowing the Bible, because if you don’t, it’s not your fault but mine, and I’d like the opportunity to change that. But if we leave church with nothing more today than the image of a desperate man clinging to a Bible as if it were the life raft of all civilization, and nothing more than the image of thousands of people standing  in rapt attention listening for six long hours listening to words they had believed to have been  lost forever, that is enough. At the end of our Old and New Testament readings the reader says, The word of the Lord, and we say Thanks be to God. What could be more awesome. The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Amen.