People of the Book




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.

We read this morning, in Nehemiah, the story of the first homily. The purpose of a homily is to interpret a sacred text. And the purpose of the text is solely to give us Christ.

We begin, as ever, in Exile. Some 600 years before Christ, the land of Judah—that is, the remaining southern half of the Kingdom of Israel—was conquered by the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Everyone who was anyone got deported. They lived thereafter as strangers in a strange land, in Babylonia, desperately clinging to their language, their stories, their faith, trying to survive where so many other nations had been assimilated and forgotten.

Here they became truly Jewish: compiling the Torah, the Five Books of Moses; welcoming the Prophets, who preached of a messianic age; focusing on study and morality rather than ritual and institution; for indeed, all of their institutions had been stolen. Then, after 70 years, a miracle, the answer to their prayers: a bigger empire crushed Babylon; a kinder one too, who reversed the decrees of the Chaldeans and proclaimed to the people that they could now go home. This was the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great.

Getting back, however, was no mean feat. Generations had passed. Many families had it good in Persia and didn’t care to leave. Those who did return found other peoples in the land: some distant relatives left behind, others displaced foreigners settled in their stead. Ezra was a great scholar and priest of the old order. The emperor sent him to rechatechize Judea, to teach his fellow Jews how to live Jewish lives. He brought with him the faith reforged in Exile, back to the place of its birth, where to many it remained utterly alien.

The first thing that Ezra did was to read from the Book of the Law, publicly, at length, to the people of Jerusalem. This would have been the Torah in the form we know today: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Just one problem: it was in Hebrew, and many of the returnees did not speak that language. They spoke Aramaic, the common tongue of Babylon, which at a later date would become the mother tongue of Christ.

So Ezra brings the big old scroll before the whole assembly—up upon a podium, in order for all to see—and the people stand out of respect for the sacred Word of God. Yet as he’s reading, he has to interpret the text, to translate it, so that they understand. This remains the model for synagogues and churches to this day. We stand for the Gospel. We hear the sacred text. And then we preach a homily to drive the meaning home. The homily gives the sense of the text, bringing it to life for those who do not speak the language, who stand far removed from the biblical world in culture, space, and time.

It is, in effect, an attempt at incarnation. The eternal timeless truth of God, preserved in Holy Writ, is given flesh and blood and bone for our own day and age. That’s why we send certain people off to seminary, so that there they may receive the education, the preparation, the practical experience necessary to then bring that knowledge back to the people, to bring God’s Word to life.

We can’t all study all the time, so we ordain a few. But the purpose of that ordination is to give God’s Word to God’s people, that the congregation know the living Lord—not just academically, but liturgically, spiritually, sacramentally. We see and hear and taste and touch. Where the Word is rightly preached, and the Sacraments rightly kept, there is the Church of God. There is the Body of Christ. There is the temple of the Spirit of the Lord.

This incidentally is the difference between a sermon and a homily. I know we tend to use those terms interchangeably, but in the formal sense a sermon is an exhortation on a religious topic, whereas a homily brings a text to life within a liturgical setting. It’s an act of worship, of prayer, of giving Jesus to His people. Granted, it can get a little meta when one’s homily is on homilies, but whatcha gonna do? That’s what’s in the text today.

But none of this would mean anything without the Word of God. There is no point in translation or interpretation or education if this is just a lecture, if the pastor simply pontificates dead letters upon the page. No, the purpose of the text is Christ! He is the only reason why Christians read the Bible. And people get this backward all the time.

We tend to think—especially in Protestant circles, especially in American circles—that the Bible is holy in and of itself, that the Bible is the complete revelation of God, infallible and unified in ways it never claims. And when we think like this, Christ becomes an add-on. We believe in this book; and this book includes many things; and one of the things that this book includes happens to be the Christ. Thus we end up believing in Jesus as an addendum. We believe in Him because we trust the book. And so if the book is wrong about anything at all, we then assume that we can’t believe in Christ.

That, dear Christians, is not Christianity. It is biblioidolatry. I don’t believe in Jesus because He happens to be in a book. I believe in Jesus because He is alive! He is Risen! He is alive in this community, this Body of sainted sinners. He is alive in the waters of baptismal resurrection. He’s alive at the Altar where we find His Flesh and Blood. He’s alive in the Spirit who gives life to all Creation. He’s alive in the promises that He will never break.

I love the Bible. I have studied it for my entire career, my entire adult life. The Office of Daily Prayer takes us through the whole of the Scriptures every other year, the whole of the Psalter every month, and certain Gospel texts every morning, noon, and night. It has gotten into my bones. And I love the Bible because it gives us Jesus: Jesus who is Himself the Word of God, the Word made flesh: Emmanuel, God-With-Us.

The Bible has poetry and history, mythology and prophecy, letters and apocalypses, songs and flights of fancy, wisdom literature of every stripe—and all of it gives Jesus Christ to us. Without Christ, this book is dead. With Him, it is the Resurrection and the Life. The text serves Christ, not Christ this text. He is both our lodestone and our lens, our alpha and omega. When He is the one through whom we read the Scriptures, then the Scriptures tell us who and what He is. They teach us about His family, His people, His culture, His stories.

The Scriptures are the manger into which the Christ is born. They are the necessary ethnic, historical, and cultural specifics of His Incarnation. For indeed, God did not become human merely in the abstract, but in this one man Jesus who draws all unto Himself. Everything that we do here is biblical: the prayers, the hymns, the liturgy, the vestments, the architecture. If you know the Bible, then you know that it has steeped into every aspect of our worship, our language, our life together.

We are People of the Book. Read it, for the love of God, for Jesus is within it! But do not think for a moment that He must bow to Scripture; Scripture bows to Him.

The purpose of the homily is to bring the text to life. And the purpose of the text is to give the living Christ. The moment I do not do that, go find a preacher who does.

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






Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA
Twitter: https://x.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064841583987
Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/
Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026






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