What is the Word?

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
Luke 4:14-21
Epiphany 3
sermon by Carrie Eikler

Twelfth century, feudal England, and the building of a gothic cathedral in a sleepy monastic village. This is the book I’m currently reading. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. It’s just shy of one thousand pages, and even though I started it shortly before New Years Day, I still have 200 pages to read. It is, in literary language…a pageturner. It has been around for little over twenty years now and has had its fair share of glory on the bestseller lists. It is also coming out as a miniseries this year.

Aside from all the adrenaline pumping intrigue, fast-paced action, and passionate romance (all those things that make for a great page-turner) Follett creates for his readers the reality that building a cathedral--building a church—is much more than stone, and mortar, and wood. He brings to life the beauty of a vision, and the sorrow in the setbacks. The building of this cathedral—this church—reveals the talent, artistry, and the politics involved; the faith, the love, and the pride…of building a church; the wealth and the poverty that comes from such building endeavors.

Our Hebrew Scripture today has similar themes. It’s about rebuilding a place of worship, a temple. Now, Nehemiah is not one of the more familiar books in our tradition, and the prophet Ezra is like a forgotten cousin among the “big” prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah. Our scripture comes in turbulent times, and let’s face, when are there not “turbulent times” in the Bible? Not feudal England but 6th Century BCE, in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem had been sacked, the Israelites were forced to live in Babylon, and with the help of Persia, they are finally able to come home. The exiles return. But the life they knew in their spiritual home, Jerusalem, was destroyed. The temple, the center of their faith, had crumbled. So they set to the task of rebuilding their temple, their “church” and with it comes all the intrigue and action, faith and pride, wealth and poverty, politics and artistry of a real page-turner.

Now the ritual and instruction can begin again. Now the teaching of the law and temple worship could once again flourish. But as Ezra also reminded the Jewish people, this temple is not just about stone and mortar—or whatever building materials they used. It’s not even all about ritual and the law. It’s about spirit. It’s about a summons to joy. It’s about looking beyond the scroll to the God who knows our sins. And when we’re weeping because we are so ashamed, or embarrassed about what we’ve done, it’s the God we celebrate who celebrates us. It’s the God whose word sends us out to eat, drink, give to those who have none, and to not be troubled. This is the word that re-builds God’s people.

It’s hard not to think about people suffering, buildings falling down, exiles in strange lands waiting to return home, and not think about the devastation in Haiti: the massive earthquake, the terrifying aftershocks, the indiscriminate nature of such force leveling shacks as well as the presidential palace. Haiti: the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, half of its population lives on less than a dollar a day. Haiti: 98 percent of its forests destroyed, leaving it vulnerable to flooding from hurricanes, which left a million homeless in 2008. Haiti: with an infant-mortality rate worse than many frican nations, and its people plagued by diseases from hepatitis to typhoid. Haiti: with a disastrous political history, most notably the reign of Francois Duvalier, who assassinated and tortured more than 30,000 in the 1960s.

Now Haiti has as many as 100,000 people dead from last week’s earthquake.[1] I’m sure each one of us in the last week and a half have looked around the walls of our homes, looked at the faces of our children or parents, looked at the relative calm of our lives, and have felt, in some way, a frustrating mixture of gratitude…and guilt. And when our hearts feel like they can’t take anymore, when we’ve put together the hygiene kits, and hugged our children a little longer than we usually do…when we wonder if we can take the images and the tears anymore, we hear words--words from the prominent Christian evangelist, Pat Robertson, somehow try to patch it all together, connect the dots, and find a certain causal relationship.

Last week on his Christian Broadcasting Network, Robertson alluded that God had cursed Haiti because of the Haitian Revolution of 1791, one of history’s few successful slave revolts. And while 98% of Haitians are Christian he said, “ …something happened a long time ago in Haiti….They were under the heel of the French…. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, "We will serve you if you will get us free from the French." …And so, the devil said, "OK, it's a deal."… And they kicked the French out… But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other… They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to God.”

How do you hear these words?
Is this the God we worship?
Is this the Word that Christians have been entrusted with?

“Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee…he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day…and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’…Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

How do you hear these words?
Is this the God we worship?
Is this the Word that Christians have been entrusted with?

Jesus returns to Nazareth, and in this synagogue, continues doing what he has been doing throughout Galilee, teaching the Word. He stood to read from the Torah and he reads the words of the prophet Isaiah. My question was: did Jesus chose that text or was he simply reading something given to him, like our worship leaders read what we send them! Biblical scholar R. Alan Culpepper suggests that given the role of Jesus, and Jewish worship at the time, it is likely that Luke understood Jesus chose the scripture himself.

So this was the Word Jesus chose and gave to the people. According to Luke, this is what these people needed to know about their God, and about the prophet who stood before them. He could have spoken the commandments, emphasizing “Thou Shalt Have no other God before me.” He could have spoken the Shema “Love the Lord your God…” but he chose the words of the prophet. His word was one of justice and freedom…liberation. Not simply for the Jews, not only for the Gentiles…for all: poor, oppressed, captives.

But what is also significant about Luke’s account of Jesus reading the word is not only what he reads, but what he doesn’t read. The Isaiah text speaks of the one who comes to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.

Jesus spoke nothing about vengeance. I wonder why he chose to stop? Not only did he cut the verse off short, he cut an entire sentence short. Why didn’t Jesus choose to speak about vengeance?

This is the Jesus who is revealed to us in Luke: the Jesus who starts his ministry with a word of mercy, rather than a word of vengeance. The crowds received mercy from Jesus’ words, the crowds receive mercy from the word spoken from the Torah, as read by Ezra. What does it mean for us to receive that mercy, to build (or re-build) a church based on merciful compassion, rather than vengeful self-righteousness.

Both Luke and Nehemiah point to the power in the word. But the power isn’t in simply speaking or reading the word, but in the hearing and the being. Hearing that word of joy and celebration and being joyful and thankful; hearing that word of justice and liberation and being justice-bearers and partners in liberation.

And yet, I don’t know how that word can touch the people of Haiti today. As I sit in my comfortable home, hearing the words of Isaiah through the voice of Jesus—all the wonderful and powerful images of a savior who will turn tears into laughing, freeing the oppressed and the captive…I wonder when we will see it. Is it good enough for the Haitian people to hear that someday, that good word will reach them? That eventually, they will be set free of all of this? I bet they would prefer to have not suffered this unimaginable loss, rather than being the recipients of us practicing a bit of Christian charity. I’m sure they appreciate us being Christ’s hands and feet in the world, but I wonder if they’d rather have their sons and daughters back, their wives and husbands, mothers and fathers.

I guess that’s the heartbreaking work of building the church. To do what we can even when it’s not enough.

And in the midst of this wrestling, this is the scroll I rolled out this week: A New York Times op-ed piece. “On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. [Last] week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. [It is estimated that 100,000 people have died]. This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story.”[2]

There’s a lot of rebuilding that needs to happen. Our story is a page-turner: Twenty-first century. Haiti, America, the world. The rebuilding of this broken planet. And as we seek to rebuild, we would do well to ask ourselves: have we been building our future on the word that Jesus gives us? I pray we may have the strength and the confession and the faith to do so.

[1] information on Haiti from “Why God Hates Haiti: The frustrating theology of suffering” by Lisa Miller. Newsweek, January 25 2010.
[2] Brooks, David. “The Underlying Tragedy” New York Times January 14, 2010