Returning

Propers: The Third Sunday after Epiphany, AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Here’s the thing about Ezra. He’s trying to rebuild his community after a catastrophe.

A century or so earlier, his nation, the Kingdom of Judah, had been conquered by the Neo-Babylonian Empire. And the Chaldeans of Babylon were no fools. They took anyone with any status, any influence, any coin, out of the land and back to Babylon as exiles. The poor they left behind. The meek inherited the earth.

Now by rights the Judean people should have disappeared from history, just as had their Northern Israelite brethren when they themselves had been conquered a few generations earlier. The heart of national identity had been the cult of Yahweh: that is, the Temple in Jerusalem, the Davidic royal family, and the land promised to Abraham and to his children forever. Now, in the time of our reading, all of those were gone: no more king, no more Temple, no more Promised Land.

It was Egypt all over again. They were Exiles once more. The Covenant, it seemed, had been broken at long last.

Yet something bound them together: bound the Judeans together for 70 years as strangers in a strange land. It wasn’t their language. They forgot their language; they all learned Aramaic instead of ancestral Hebrew. And it wasn’t because they cut themselves off from their neighbors. Indeed, the people of Judah, encouraged by the Prophets of Exile, settled and married and made their living in Babylonia, often as valued, educated businessmen and administrators.

What really did it was the Book: the Hebrew Bible, or at least the beginnings of it. With no more royals, no more priests, no more temples, Judeans truly became People of the Book. Fidelity to God was now practiced as fidelity to God’s Word. It was the story, the promise, the relationship between God and His people that held the Judeans together, that kept them from disappearing or assimilating into the crowd.

With no temple, they gathered in synagogues, which were public meeting spaces, not unlike our church buildings. Here they took care of communal business, both secular and sacred. Here they studied the Scriptures together as the people of God. The Torah would often be wheeled in on a little portable lectern, and someone schooled in Hebrew, as well as in the interpretation of God’s Law, would read and preach the Bible. And that person wasn’t a priest by birth or a royal by right, but a plain educated man from whatever walk of life: in other words, a teacher: a rabbi.

Twice a week they gathered to read the Book of God. Twice a week they shared and studied and expounded upon the story of their forebears, the people of Israel. The community of faith kept them whole, gave them identity, imparted to them hope.

And that hope was not in vain. After 70 years—about two biblical generations—Babylon would get a taste of her own medicine. For there’s always a bigger fish, is there not? A new emperor with a new empire would arise from the east: Cyrus the Great, of the Persians and Medes. And he conquered Babylon as Babylon had Judah. And to get the goodwill of the people, he let all the Exiles go back home.

To the Judeans he said, “Return to your land. Rebuild your Temple. Pray to your God for Cyrus, for is it not God who sends him to liberate the peoples?” And this sounds great, right? This is what everybody had hoped for, prayed for, for decades! But going home wasn’t so easy as perhaps they might have thought. The elders returned to a devastated land, to a ruined Temple that caused them to weep. And the young—well, the young had never known Israel save for what they read in books. It was never really home to them, was it? They didn’t feel like Exiles living in Persia.

Ezra and Nehemiah are two Jewish leaders—a priest and a bureaucrat respectively—who are trying to rebuild a people who honestly don’t seem all that sure that they want to be rebuilt. Why leave prosperous Babylonia for impoverished Judea? And so the Return from Exile occurs only gradually, in waves, some of them quite reluctant and pathetic. The returnees have enough trouble just eking out a living. Their efforts to rebuild the Temple are half-hearted and frankly rather sad.

Nehemiah knows they need a real shot in the arm. So the first thing he does is to shore up the walls, put guards at the gate, make sure that the people are safe. And the next thing he does is get the priest Ezra to read the Book of the Law to the people. It is their faith that has seen them through the upheavals of war, conquest, Exile, and Return. Is it their faith that has given them life in the face of certain cultural death. And it is their faith now, he is sure, that shall inspire them to new heights, now that they at last are home.

God has seen them through hell and back! How can they possibly lose heart now?

Unfortunately, the people don’t speak Hebrew anymore, like I said. But that’s okay, because Ezra does. And as he reads to them the Book of the Law, he offers interpretation—which is to say, a sermon. He gives them the sense of the Scripture, its context and meaning, just as I am attempting to do by the grace of the Spirit here today. The Book of Nehemiah witnesses the first biblical sermon. And here we are, some two and a half millennia later, following the same pattern: gathering, reading, explaining, praying, repenting, forgiving, all in the Name and the Word of God. Here we hear the story of God and His people, so that it becomes our story.

And the people of Judah lament! They regret their neglect of the faith of their fathers, of putting selfish gain above communal flourishing, of valuing the material to the exclusion of the spiritual. But Ezra says, “No! Do not mourn; do not weep. Rejoice! For this is a holy day!” And the festival of the Lord is proclaimed, and joy overcomes all their fears, and the people are given new life, new hope, a new and abundant future for themselves and their descendants, forever.

You and I have spent the last couple years in Exile. No, we haven’t been conquered and dragged from our homes. Quite the opposite: we’ve been shut up in them. And now, God willing, we seem to be coming out on the other side. Covid hasn’t gone anywhere, of course, but with vaccines and treatments and time, we have learned to live in the new normal. We have adapted to a pandemic the likes of which our country has not seen since the Spanish Flu a century back.

And I will say this: when we first shut down, I had honest fears that St Peter’s couldn’t survive more than two weeks without worship, without gathering. I worried that when people don’t come they don’t give, and that missing Holy Week, not being able to gather on Easter of 2020, would punch a hole in our finances from which we would not be able to recover. That was a long time ago now. And we’re still here. In fact, a lot of good things have happened in the last two years.

We have beautiful new music. We have worship twice a week, and Communion every Sunday. We live-stream each service in order to stay in touch with those who are sick or homebound or otherwise kept apart. We finished the year in the black, thanks to a government grant. And our ministry has had some surprising effects on people out there in cyberspace. We’ve had folks tune in everywhere from the UK through Sweden to India. Go figure.

Yet I can’t help feeling like Ezra. Like we’ve come through all this, and we’re tired, and we’re burnt out, and we’re traumatized. And a lot of the people with whom we went into Exile have not yet returned from Babylon, for all sorts of reasons. We’ve tried to shore up the walls, to protect our people. To date I do not know of any person who has caught Covid-19 through coming to worship at St Peter’s. And I know that could change tomorrow, but I am dang proud of us for that. We have shown our love for God by showing our love for each other.

So now we will do what we have always done. We will proclaim the Word of God to Exiles, both at home and abroad. We will preach Christ Crucified and Risen, the God who goes to hell and back to bring all the wayward home. We will proclaim the Absolution of all our sins, and the destruction of every barrier betwixt ourselves and our Creator, from the Font of our Baptism in the midst of the congregation. And we will faithfully administer the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ our Lord from this Altar, from this Table, and out to all the world.

We will live the story that makes us whole. We will continue to be the people of God in this community, in this place, forever calling our Exiles home. We will rejoice when every bit of worldly wisdom tells us we should mourn. And we will have faith in the impossible, unbreakable promises of God, which liberate all the enslaved of this earth, and bring the life of Heaven even unto hell.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.