The Mayberry Preacher

YOU DON'T NEED A SIX-HOUR SERMON

Nehemiah 7:73b-8:12
Steve Lindsley
October 23, 2011

It can best be described as a preacher’s dream!  11:00 on a Sunday morning.  And the sanctuary is packed and folks are still pouring in; so many that the ushers have to grab extra chairs and line them in the aisles and the hallway in back.  The place is filled to capacity.  But more than that: it’s filled with energetic people of all ages who are elated to be there.  They’ve been anticipating Sunday worship all week long.

The service begins with a rousing Call to Worship, and everyone joins in the first hymn with great fervor.  And then the highlight of the service - the reading of scripture!  A hush falls over the gathering as the people wait in anticipation to hear the Word of God.  Then the sermon follows.  Now in many churches this is where the minister talks for 15 minutes, 20 max, and does his or her best to just keep the congregation awake.  But not in this church!  The preacher expounds on the reading, and God’s spirit brings understanding and meaning to the whole congregation.  Folks become more spirit-filled with every word.  And even an occasional “Amen!” is uttered! 

And no one seems to notice or care when the sermon goes on for six hours, well into afternoon tee times and football games.  As a matter of fact, the more the preacher preaches, the more the people want it to keep going!  When the service finally ends around suppertime, everyone leaves, filled with God’s spirit and ready to face the week ahead.  And, of course, ready for next week’s service!

Okay, so perhaps it’s a bit of a stretch to call this a “preacher’s dream.”  I mean, the excited and spirit-filled congregation part is great, but I’m not up for preparing a six hour sermon.  As you probably aren’t up for listening to one!   Besides, this is all just a pipe dream, isn’t it?  Something like this would never actually happen, right?

Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across our scripture reading this past week; a few obscure verses from the book of Nehemiah.  It’s not often that Nehemiah gets quoted in religious conversations. We don’t typically see Nehemiah verses emblazoned on end zone signs during football games.  And yet, this is where our day-long worship service takes place.

Flash back to the Hebrews’ exile in Babylon.  On the surface it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been – they held good jobs there and made a good life for themselves.  But underneath the surface lurked the pain of what they had lost – their homeland, their beloved city Jerusalem, their temple.  They longed to return to the land God had given them before.  Which is exactly what happened when the Persians came to power and allowed the conquered nations to return to their native soil.  God’s people were going home!

That excitement and enthusiasm was totally deflated, though, when they returned.  Nothing but piles of rock and dashed hopes.  Perhaps this felt like a greater loss: it had been the memories of their proud city that sustained them in captivity.  And now, finally home, that city was no more.But God’s people, led by Nehemiah the governor, and Ezra the Priest, worked hard to rebuild Jerusalem.  First, the temple – so the people could worship God.  Next the city walls, to protect against intruders.  With those two done, the nation Israel was on its way to renewal.  History’s cruel past had been replaced with God’s future promise. 

So maybe, then, we can understand their enthusiasm for this glorious service of worship and for Ezra’s sermon.  Even though that sermon, we are told, lasted (and this is a quote) “from early morning until midday.”  Now you can calculate that however you want, but that sounds pretty much like a six hour sermon to me!  We Presbyterians get antsy when the minister pushes worship past the one-hour mark.  How do you think we’d handle something like this?

Don’t worry, I’m not going to try and find out!  But what I’m curious about, and I hope you are too, is what in the world Ezra could’ve possibly said that would’ve captured their attention and enthusiasm for all that time. I mean, seriously, right?  What in the world did he tell them for six hours that had them hanging on every word?

Our inclination is to surmise that this must’ve been a brand new message; something they never heard before.  But see, that wasn’t the case.  In fact, the scripture he used – the Book of Law of Moses, as the NRSV calls it – had been with them for centuries.  They’d heard it countless times.  And yet there was something different about it now.  It was as if the spirit and exuberance of Ezra’s message took those old familiar words and fashioned them into something new, something to assure the Hebrews that Yahweh was their God then and now. 

Perhaps this is what’s meant by the expression, “Hearing it again for the first time.”  And that’s what makes the Bible so amazing.  The “words” of God stay the same, fixed in the black and white of our Bible’s pages.  But the “Word” it proclaims, the message, speaks directly to our lives; lives that are constantly changing.  The Hebrews returned to their home on foot and camel back; today we cruise around in cars and can fly to the other side of the world in a day.  But the Gospel is as relevant now as it was 4000 years ago; as it will be 4000 years from now.

So here’s the question: how do we, the people of God right now, how do we “hear it again for the first time?”  Is it six-hour sermons?  I mean, that’d only be another five hours and fifty minutes!  Thankfully, for you and me both, I don’t think it’s the length of the sermon that matters.  What I think is more important is the “who” of the sermon.  You know, I’ve always felt that sermons are really three-way conversations: between the preacher, the congregation, and God.  Which is a big relief for us minister-types, because that means a “good sermon” isn’t just about what’s said from the pulpit, but very much about what’s experienced in the pews and what’s spoken in all our hearts by the God who brings us together.  So maybe that “sermon-as-a-three-way-conversation” thing plays some part in us “hearing it again for the first time.”

But it’s also about what we do after that conversation. The need to find different, creative ways of living out the timeless Gospel message.  Someone once said this:

If it is our real concern to pass on a knowledge of the Christian faith that goes beyond a meager minimum, we will refuse to make a “sacred cow” of any inherited method and tap all the expertise of the day in order that we might know more of our God.

What he’s saying, I think, is that we can’t afford to let old habits keep us from realizing today’s potential.  Notice I said habits and not traditions.  We need traditions!  We need to respect and hold in high regard the traditions of the church that have defined us for over 150 years.  What we don’t need is to let our past hold us back from what God may be trying to do with our present.  In other words, the church needs to sing the same tune to a new and more relevant rhythm.

The wonderful thing about our church is that, in some ways, we’re already doing this.  You have heard Lee Daniels, our Mission Ministry Team moderator, use the phrase “mission partners.”  He’s speaking about every one of you – the members and friends of this church – and the ways you live out your faith in this community.  Helping build a Habitat For Humanity House.  Serving food at Friends Feeding Friends.  Helping a second-grade kid learn to read.  In the months ahead, you’re going to hear about “mission partner alerts;” and you can answer the call to take that timeless message of the gospel and put flesh and bone on it today. 

Here’s another way we’re hearing it again for the first time: our new Stewardship ministry that Bruce talked about this morning, and Pete last week.  And it’s kind of funny, actually, because there’s nothing really “new” about the different way we’re doing Stewardship this year.  Lots of churches are in the habit of making their focus less on supporting an institution and more about simply giving to God.  I want to join with the Discipleship Ministry Team in asking each and every one of you to be present here in worship on November 13^th for Consecration Sunday, and make your reservation for the celebration lunch afterwards, because I’m convinced there will be great reason for us to celebrate that day!

Because if there’s one thing Ezra made clear in his six-hour sermon, if there’s one thing we in this church do well, it is this: we do things well together.  For the Hebrew people, and for us, there is no such thing as “individualized worship” or “individualized fellowship.”  It’s an oxymoron of the highest level.  We must always find ways, as congregations of God’s people, to not only hear God’s word, but know that we hear it together.      

This is rarely easy, because the society we live in places a lot of emphasis on the individual.  You know the expression, “There is no ‘I’ in “Team’”?   I once heard someone counter, “Well, there’s a ‘Me’ in there, and I’m it!”  That may be the way some things operate in our world, but it can’t be the way we do things in the church.  It can’t!  We have to grow in community with one another.  We laugh together.  We mourn together.  We celebrate together.  We struggle together.  And we rejoice in the unchanging Word of God heard in the midst of changing circumstances – together.  

Many summers ago, when I was at summer camp, I remember very vividly one of our evening devotions.  I remember it because it took place in the midst of tumultuous times for our cabin of ten 12-year old boys.  We weren’t getting along very well, and the tension was starting to get the best of us.  And so in our devotion that night, one of our counselors took out a single Popsicle stick and asked one of us to break it in half – which he easily did.  Then he reached behind him and pulled out ten Popsicle sticks; and he bound them together with a rubber band, and asked another boy to try.  He couldn’t break them.  We passed those ten sticks around the circle and none of us could. 

You probably know where this is going.  Our counselor told us that those popsicle sticks represented our cabin – ten sticks for ten boys.  Standing alone we would break easily.  But together, and bound by a common purpose, we formed a group that could take on pretty much anything.  Nothing could tear us down.  The bottom line is that we were much better off together than trying to get by on our own.

You know, I thought for a bit about going out and buying a hundred or so popsicles so we could do the same thing here today, but I was pretty sure my family wouldn’t be able to eat them all in time for Sunday morning worship.  Now my boys might say that I’ve underestimated their popsicle-eating skills, and they may be right.

But let me tell you one thing I haven’t underestimated: I haven’t underestimated the fact that we in this church are a formidable and powerful group when we are together, bound together tightly by the unchanging gospel of Jesus Christ.  I’ve seen this now for nearly nine years.  And together, we can take on anything that comes our way – and not only survive it, but flourish through it. 

So, yeah, we don’t need six-hour sermons.  All we need is an unquenchable desire to hear God’s word, hear it as if it’s the very first time, and then let it change our lives together from the inside out.  Because that’s the kind of God-with-us moment that is worthy of our celebration.  Thanks be to God.  AMEN.

MAKES SENSE

Nehemiah 7:73b – 8:3, 5-6, 8-10
Steve Lindsley
January 24, 2010


The sermons begins today with a tale of two high school Latin teachers.  The first, a recent summa cum laude graduate of a storied institution of higher learning; the latter, a fellow teacher with more modest academic achievements.  Both had passed all the exams and jumped through all the hoops necessary to teach the “dead language” to eager high school students, including me. Don't ask me why I chose to take Latin; years later I am still asking myself that question.  I think I heard that it helped you on your SATs.  I wish they had been right.

The first teacher had no problems demonstrating her vast knowledge and  command of the Latin language to her students.  With great efficiency she would conjugate verbs, parse sentences and whiz through vocabulary.  It was obvious she earned every bit of her summa cum laude.  The problem, though, was that she left everyone else in the dust.  In the universe of romance languages she was on a different planet than the rest of us; her freakish fluency in the subject contributing to an ever-increasing gap between teacher and student.  She simply could not comprehend our inability to comprehend.

The latter teacher was different.  It's not that she didn't know the subject; it's just that she had to work hard to acquire it.  Just like us.  Just like us, she earned her skills through hard work and perseverance.  Just like us she encountered trouble spots along the way and had to work through those.  I may have appreciated Latin more with the first teacher, but I understood it a lot better with the second. 

You know what makes a good teacher?  It's not how much they know, or how many degrees they have hanging on their office wall, or how much tenure they've accrued or what books they've written.  What makes a good teacher is how well they can take what is already in their head and successfully work to get it in yours.  Someone who thinks outside the box to find new ways to not only relay information but instill passion in the process.  It is someone who, quite literally, makes sense.

Like Ezra in our scripture today.  Talk about a steep learning curve.  Ezra was a priest living in post-exile Jerusalem, and he had a tough job ahead of him.  Not long before, God's people had returned from their generation in Babylonian exile, only to find their beloved home in rubble.  And as they labored to rebuild the city, they also worked to rebuild their culture, their identity.  All those years in a foreign land had led them to forget who they were as God's people and the source of what bound them together.  It was going to take a lot of work to make things right.  Some serious schooling.

So they gathered in the square in front of their newly rebuilt temple, and Ezra pulled out one of the large scrolls of the Torah and started reading.  Now there are a number of things about the way scripture tells us this that kind of jump out at us.  For one thing, it was a big deal because everyone who was someone was there.  Men, women and children.  Specific individuals mentioned by name.  This is church worship on Easter Sunday; a new academic year on Convocation Day, the annual board meeting.  Everyone was there.

Of course, the other thing that catches our attention is that it says Ezra read out of these scrolls from early morning until midday.  Now let's think about that for a second, shall we?  Let's assume “early morning” – in Biblical terms, at least – is around 6am.  “Midday,” on the other hand, puts us somewhere at three in the afternoon.  Which means that Ezra made the entire nation of people endure what amounted to a nine-hour sermon.   Nine hours!  And you thought your pastor got long-winded!

There's one other thing scripture mentions that we can't help but notice; something that sheds a lot of light on why this event was so important:

They read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation.
They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

On one level this highlights an important logistical move Ezra had to make.  See, the scriptures were written in Hebrew, the Israelites' native tongue.  But after living for over a generation in Babylon, God's people had adopted the language of their captors, which was Aramaic.  And it was nothing like Hebrew.  So as he's reading these scrolls to the people for nine hours, Ezra's having to do some pretty nifty real-time translation – nifty and necessary.  After all, reading those scrolls in original Hebrew, even though that's what they were written in, would not have helped all those people in the least.  They wouldn't have understood a thing.

Actually, I think I know what this might have been like.  Back in the months between college and my first job, I served as a missionary in Hiroshima, Japan.  We held our Sunday morning worship services in the house of a Japanese pastor.  And, as you'd expect, everything was in Japanese.  Scripture was read in Japanese.  Hymns were sung in Japanese.  Prayers were spoken in Japanese.  I didn't know Japanese!  I knew a few words and phrases, but I was lost.  I was getting very little out of the worship service.  And that's when the missionary sitting next to me – a fellow American who'd been there for two years and was fluent in Japanese – that's when he'd lean over and interpret the important parts.  He helped give some of that worship service meaning, by doing nothing more than speaking the language and helping it make sense.

In fact, if we fast-forwarding to the New Testament for a minute, that's really what the day of Pentecost was all about, wasn't it?  There the disciples were gathered together, Jesus noticeably absent from their midst, trying to determine what to do next.  There was a whole big world outside their Jewish one, and they knew they were called to spread the gospel – but how?  And that's when the Holy Spirit entered the scene and gave them the most practical skill to fulfill that calling: the ability to speak different languages.  Now they could go to the Greeks and tell them about Jesus.  Now they could enter the depths of northern Africa to preach the gospel.  Now they could cover the vast Middle eastern world, with all its various clans and dialects, and share the Good News. 

Language truly does make a difference when it comes to helping people understand where they've been and where they are going.  And for those Israelites on that celebrated day, it was a big deal as they returned to their homeland after an extended absence.  They needed something to ground them, something to remind them of who they were and where they came from.  And in his nine-hour sermon that's precisely what Ezra gave them.

But the thing is, Ezra was doing a lot more here than just translating some words as inscribed on the scroll in his hand.  He also had to read it to them so they knew how their story fit in with the people's story; how it all made sense.  He had to read it so those words could become active and alive in the minds and hearts of the people who heard them. 

So what takes place in the 8th chapter of Nehemiah is more than just an act of translation – it is the greatest act of faith and love.  And it's interesting how the people reacted to all of this, isn't it – with weeping?  Ezra's words spoke to both their minds and their hearts.   It brought them closer to God than returning to their homeland ever could have.

It's kind of hard for those of us in the modern world to understand the joy those Israelites were feeling.  Having access to the Bible today is as easy as pulling the hard cover off our living room bookshelf, or downloading an iphone or Blackberry app, or logging onto one of the hundreds you can find online.  There are thousands of devotion books with selected scripture readings; there are websites that will email you passages every day.  It's hard for us today to relate to the immense joy and elation those people felt when they heard scripture read in their native tongue for the very first time.

But it wasn't just hearing the words read that got Ezra's congregation that day so excited, was it?  It's one thing to have the written form of God's revelation in your presence; it's another thing to have that revelation come alive inside of you. To "understand" the Bible means, quite literally, to "stand under" it – to place yourself under its authority, to take it personally, to allow your life to be shaped by it and to give it your trust and confidence.  And that's not always an easy thing in this world of ours, especially when so many people see it different ways, see it saying different things, see it communicating all kinds of truths. 

That's why it always helps to go back to the source, doesn't it?  In theme-park saturated Florida there's a relative newcomer you may have heard about.  It's called “The Holy Land Experience,” and it bills itself as a historical and archaeological Bible come to life.  It's quite a setup – it features the great Temple of Jerusalem and the Qumram Caves on its hundred or so acres.  Which is interesting, given that in the real Israel the two are separated by a long bus ride through the desert.  As fellow Presbyterian minister Joanna Adams put it, “The admission fee is $35 for adults and $20 for children, and for that you get to enjoy all the pleasures of the sacred sites and none of the hassles of actually being there.”  No need to worry about pesky conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, you see.  Inside the temple the blonde-hair, blue-eyed actors and dancers don ancient-looking garb and sing Hebrew classics like “There is a Redeemer” and “Our God is an Awesome God.”  And if you get hungry, all you need to do is stop by the Oasis Palms Cafe and grab a Goliath burger for just $5.95. (From “Stone to Bread” by Joanna Adams, Journal For Preachers, Vol. XXXIII No. 2, Lent 2010, pg. 15)

Somehow I don't see Disney losing any business to this!  But that's the problem, isn't it?  We can tell when something is not authentic; we know when what we're presented with is just a reflection of the real thing.  It's not about being entertained at places with some loose connections – and I mean“loose” - to the actual Biblical story.  Time and time again scripture is used to support and say things that are not at all what it was intended to do.  That's not how the scriptures come alive in us; that's not how they “make sense.” 

The word of God makes sense to us when it is experienced in community – when it is read and interpreted among people of faith.  When the choir sings a stirring anthem based on the Psalms.  When a Sunday school class wrestles with the lesson for the week.  When a group of Beacons cram into the Lighthouse living room and talk to God.  When church members comfort other church members.  All of these are reflections of the word of God coming alive in us and being more than just some print on a page. 

So when we seek to understand the Bible together, we are doing more than simply trying to understand what the words mean. We are asking them to come alive in us; we are "standing under" Scripture's view of God and humanity and sacred history.  We are giving it not only the insight of our brains, but also the devotion of our hearts. 
    That is how we live and grow as people of faith – teaching each other, learning from each other, loving one another, as we listen to what God is saying to us.  And not just as individuals, but perhaps even moreso as a community – gathered together to experience God's language once again.  Just like it did with Ezra, just like it did with the people.  And sometimes it will move us to tears, too – not just when we understand it, but when it makes sense.  Thanks be to God – AMEN.