184 Nehemiah

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Nehemiah”, originally shared on January 24, 2022. It was the 184^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   How do you get through when your life breaks up into 1,000 little pieces? Today an Old Testament prophet is going to show us how.

   We had some wind last week. The TV weather reporters said that we had gusts at around 60-70 mph. I went outside Saturday morning and saw thousands of pieces of foliage scattered in our yard and around our home. Our son James came over to help me clean it up. We removed large chunks of our Yucca tree from our roof.

   I wonder what Nehemiah, the Biblical prophet, thought when he returned to Jerusalem and saw the city walls in a thousand thousand little pieces.

   I preached at Trinity Lutheran Church in Hawthorne yesterday. When Pastor Bergeson asked me to preach on Nehemiah as part of a series I wondered, “Why does he want me to preach about Nehemiah?”

   I mean, do I look like the prophet Nehemiah? Well, OK maybe I do. But no one knows what Nehemiah looked like. Except that he was the shortest man in the Bible. You know, knee-high-miah. OK that’s pretty bad.

   Someone told me once that I looked like the prophet Zechariah. How did he know what the prophet Zechariah looked like?

   We did a video a few months ago on what Jesus looked like. We don’t know, except he probably looked like everyone else. That was what Isaiah’s prophecy said. His clothes were probably a little substandard. Black hair, brown eyes, olive skinned darkened by the sun, thin muscular build, about 5’ 5” tall. That’s kind of a mind-blower, isn’t it? We think of Jesus as being larger than life, but he probably looked like everyone else. And he probably cut his hair with a knife. That’s the way men did it then. Or, did one of the disciples cut everyone’s hair? Maybe. Probably not. Jesus’ hair probably looked like the result when one of your older children plays “barber” with a younger one.

   I saw a CSI -type of reconstruction of a man’s face based on a 1^st-century skull found in Israel a few years ago. That’s pretty much what it looked like.

   Nehemiah probably looked a little more put together. He had had an important job. He was the cup bearer to King Artaxerxes I, the king of Persia, which meant that he was a close advisor and confidant to the king and got paid.

   Did the Persians have barbershops? Maybe. Did they charge Nehemiah more because he was a Jew? Or less because he worked for the king? In any case, he probably looked good. Until he didn’t. His standard of living had taken a serious hit, and yet he could say to the people of God, “the joy of the Lord is our strength.

   To see how that happened, let’s put Nehemiah into his historical context.

   Let’s go back about 600 years to King David. King David died around 1,000 years before the birth of Jesus Christ.

   King David was the ideal King and an imperfect man. He led Israel to its greatest size and influence in its history. He was a poet, he wrote most of the Psalms, and he loved God.

   The next king was David’s son Solomon. He was wise, but not very smart; he was a disappointment.

   The next king was Solomon’s son Rehoboam, and he was a disaster. The nation rebelled against him and split into two kingdoms

   After many warnings from the prophets about the people’s behavior, and their lack of interest in keeping their covenant with God, the Assyrians came in 722 BC and wiped out the Northern 10-tribe kingdom of Israel and assimilated them, then in 586 B.C., the Babylonians displaced the Assyrians and took the remaining two-tribe Kingdom of Judah into captivity in Babylon for 50 years. Then the Persians came and wiped out the Assyrians and let those who wanted to go back to Jerusalem. Not all of them did. They had been there for more than two generations.

   Nehemiah had been born in Babylon and now worked in a high-ranking job for the King Artaxerxes I of Persia as his cup-bearer. Until he didn’t.

   He had heard that the walls of Jerusalem had been broken into a thousand little pieces, and he asked the king if he could go back and rebuild them. The king agreed and made him governor.

   As governor, he fought a constant rear-guard battle. The surrounding nations all wanted Jerusalem to stay gone. Nehemiah had to keep half his men on guard duty as the other half worked on rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. The workers often had to build with one hand and keep a sword in the other.

   But they finished the job in 52 weeks!

   And when they finished, Nehemiah declared that the Torah (Genesis through Deuteronomy) should be read aloud to all the people. Then this happened in Nehemiah, chapter 8,

8 ¹ all the people gathered together into the square before the Water Gate. They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had given to Israel. ² Accordingly, the priest Ezra brought the law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could hear with understanding. This was on the first day of the seventh month. ³ He read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law.

⁵ And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people; and when he opened it, all the people stood up. ⁶ Then Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. Then they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground.

⁸ So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.

⁹ And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people said to all the people, “This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.” For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law. ¹⁰ Then he said to them, “Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy to our Lord; and do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

   And when they heard the Torah read, they wept because they knew that they had not been keeping the law that God had commanded.

   But Nehemiah spoke again and, with the religious leaders of the people, told them not to weep, but to have a feast, and to share with everyone who could not put a feast together because it was a holy day.

   And, he said, “do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” And revival came to Jerusalem.

   The people of God had lost their city and their country, but they had not lost their identity. Nehemiah reminded them of that.  

   He didn’t say, “Don’t worry. Be happy.” He said, “do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

   Our identity hasn’t been lost. It’s been broken into a thousand little pieces, like the branches of the pine and Yucca trees, and like the walls of Jerusalem.

   We’re still finding our way through a global coronavirus pandemic, and its most recent variant, the very contagious Omicron variant.

   We’ve lost friends and family to COVID-19, we’ve lost time, we’ve lost education, we’ve lost work, we’ve lost experience, health care, and we’ve lost jobs and a sense of material security.

   We’ve lost a sense of connection to other people and, sometimes, we fear them.

   We’re out of practice in reading body language, interpreting facial expressions without masks, and the many consciouses and particularly unconscious signs that tell us how to understand our community, who we can trust, who will be our friends and where we belong, how to travel and how to shop. 

   The world seems to have devolved into even smaller cliques than we remember, groups who shared our values seem to have gotten smaller, and our national dialogue seems to have become even more adversarial.

   But we have also gained. We’ve gained new skills and new friends, we’ve gained new hobbies and developed our old ones, we’ve rediscovered family and friends through Zoom and other apps, we’ve gained a new tool to share our faith with digital media, we’ve gained new ways to work collaboratively, we’ve met our neighbors and learned how to live with them, we’ve gained insight into ourselves and what we really want to do with our lives, we’ve gained time and gas money by not commuting. Oh, and some of us have gained some weight. 😊

   But are we happy? Maybe, but I think that happiness is overrated. Selfishness can make us happy; in our culture it’s almost a virtue. Joy, however, is something different.

   Joy is a baseline condition for Christians that nothing can take away from us. We can be happy and feel joy. We can be unhappy and feel joy. We can be worried or secure, in despair or on top of the world and still know that down deep, that there is a baseline of joy within us.

   It’s there because it is the love of God that God gives, and nothing can take it away, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

   God doesn’t promise us happiness.

   God promises us joy, the abiding presence of God revealed to us in the Holy Spirit.

   Pastor Rick Warren once advised that we should not ask God to bless what we are doing, but rather to do what God is blessing. Why? Because, “the joy of the Lord is your strength”.

   You sometimes hear people say, “I just want my children to be happy.”, but I think that is too low a bar. Why? Because, “the joy of the Lord is your strength”.

   People can be immoral, self-indulgent, self-righteous, bigoted, etc., and still be happy. Doing good can make us happy, but is that enough? One my college philosophy professors observed that, “Most of the world’s evil, and probably all of its very worst evil, is done by people who sincerely believe that they are doing good.”

   Christians, however, are defined by something outside of ourselves. The Holy Spirit reveals it to us through the Bible. We encounter it in the Bible. We know it when we are serving others in response to and in the name of God. Because, “the joy of the Lord is your strength”.

   One day, when I was a young teenager, I thought about the people who I really admired, and I realized that they all had something in common. They had experienced things in life, they had experienced hardships and sorrow. Their relationship with God, their faith, had carried them through it all and defined them. They had a kind of radiant, luminous faith. Do you know why? The joy of the Lord was their strength.

   And I decided that that’s what I wanted, and I prayed that I would experience the suffering in my life that would produce such a faith. Until I found out what that suffering was, and then I stopped praying for that. 😊 

   We cannot escape challenges and hardships in our lives, but we can choose whether we are going to let them define us. Let God’s love define you. Open your heart to receive the gifts of God in the Holy Spirit to open your eyes to see the love of God. When people around you are threatening you as you rebuild the walls of God’s reign around you, the City of God, and your identity, in the love of God in Jesus Christ, be different. Go the other way. Because, “the joy of the Lord is your strength”.

   I saw a meme several years ago that showed an old timey black and white photograph of a farm couple. They looked like they had been together a long time and had experienced some things. The guy had a long white beard, and the caption said, “Love is like a beard. If you let it grow, it becomes the first thing people notice about you.”

   Live as people who have been made a new Creation in faith and in baptism. Why? Because “the joy of the Lord is our strength.”