A Very Long Time
Emily Jarrett
Imagine a group of men, and maybe a couple of women, are gathered in a dusty room, their heads bowed down over their reading. Wide windows are left uncovered, the curtains drawn back to let in the light so they can work. There is the sound of pages turning, and the shuffling of feet along the floor, when suddenly, someone looks up at the man they are sitting opposite, and they start to speak. They start to argue a point, and this other man, this partner of their’s starts to argue back. Soon enough they might even be shouting, all the others in the room turned to watch and listen as they struggle to convince each other of their points, and then, the audience starts piping in with their own points. “Well have you considered this passage in Exodus?” “How about the interpretation of the great Rabbi this.. or that?”
The early Jewish Study Houses were not quiet, staid places where people just leaned over their books and wrote their interpretations. They were loud, and boisterous, and contentious, and let me tell you, so are our seminaries.
We have been doing this for a very long time.
And we have been doing this, not just with for ourselves, but with the entirety of our communities.
You see, in this story that you just heard Nehemiah and Ezra are called to a beautiful, but broken community – fractured by politics and by war. They have just led a group of exiles back from Babylon to their homeland of Judah, to the city of Jerusalem to restore and to rebuild. You see not only had this community been fractured by military conquest, and the tearing town of their places of worship, but by the forced deportation and exile of their political and religious leaders – their cultural elite.
And now, generations later, just out of the blue, their descendents just show up back in Judah.
All of these other people who have been in Judah all along, who have never lived in a pre-exile community, suddenly have a group of strangers on their doorstep saying, “Hi, we’re back. We are here to lead you, and by the way, since we’ve been doing things our own way over there in Babylon, we are going to be doing things a little differently from what you are used to. We know the right way.” Implied of course, your way is wrong. You haven’t been worshipping appropriately in our absence.
I can’t imagine it went over that well.
And here now are Ezra and Nehemiah, called by God to minister to this beautiful, broken people, having just made the arduous journey back themselves. Here they are faced with exile and inhabitant alike, needing to find common ground.
The way the lectionary cuts this up, it sounds like a 2 man job, or rather, a job for two men and a Torah. The pair of them show up, pull out the scrolls, and bang, together we read Torah and worship. Well, the problem is, it cuts out two verses, 4 and 7. One of the advantages of studying in a seminary where one of the people who worked on the Revised Lectionary works is that sometimes you get to ask why they made the choices that they did. In this case, because these two verses, two lists of Hebrew names, are difficult to pronounce. I am certain that Sunday morning readers the English-speaking world over are grateful for the choice, but it makes it sound like a two man job, and even then, a one man job.
Which is why we sometimes call this passage the calling of Ezra. But the reading leaves out all of the people who call him. This isn’t a one, or a two man job.
“The scribe Ezra stood on a wooden platform that had been made for the purpose; and beside him stood Mattithiah, Shema, Anaiah, Uriah, Hilkiah, and Maaseiah on his right hand; and Pedaiah, Mishael, Malchijah, Hashum, Hash-baddanah, Zechariah, and Meshullam on his left hand. … Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, the Levites,[a] helped the people to understand the law, while the people remained in their places.”
Together, all of them, found their common ground in the Torah. Together, this fractured community, and all of its leaders, agreed to celebrate, and worship God through that which they still had in common – the Torah.
Well here I am, a seminary student, called to stand before you on what call Theology Sunday, and to proclaim the Word of God. But I can’t do it alone. It requires Kathy, and John, Mae and Arliss, Ray, Winfield, Tom. It requires you. All of you. And all of us to agree to come together, as a community, and celebrate God through what we have in common. This (Bible). And this (church.) And for all of us to agree that through this text, and through this church, we are open to the experience of a loving God.
From Ezra and Exiles, to all of us here in St. Andrew’s Wesley today – we have been doing this for a very long time.
You see the Psalmist knew this – knew that we are better together, and that a love of the Bible and creation brings us together. Jewish poet and Hebrew scholar Jessica Greenberg translates it like this:
“Day after day overflows with speech;
night after night breathes out knowledge.
There is no word or phrase
in which the voice of your creation is not heard
Throughout all the earth, rope
of their hopefulness goes forth
and their words reach the end
of the world’s long stretch of land.”
It has been said that “the book of Psalms is the Bible's book of the soul." The psalms are at the beating heart of faith, mere words strung together but which evoke longing, laments, joyful praise and simple, abundant love. Here in Psalm 19 it is love, a deep abiding love for the God who loves us so deeply, and the gifts of words, of learning and of knowledge that She gives to us.
So the beating heart of this community includes a song of praise and love for the Torah, which brought Ezra, Nehemiah and the exiles and inhabitants back together. And a song of praise and love for the beating heart of this community, the love told of in the Bible that holds us all now. Each with our own purpose, and role, supporting one another through our agreement to stand in these stories, and in this place with these people.
From Ezra and Nehemiah, from the earliest Jewish study halls, to this congregation here, and the halls of VST, it brings us together to engage with the text, and the God known through it who has created us all.
Throughout the ages, all of us, praying together, that the words of our moths, and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, Oh Lord our Rock, and our Redeemer.
We have been doing this for a very long time.
The thing is, God’s been doing it even longer.
For as long as our history records, we have been coming together as communities of faith, and struggling with these questions of theology and life. Whether around a fireside, a ring of standing stones, a study hall, a church, or a temple.
Since before our history books began, God has loved us, and this world we live in. Since before our ancestors came to this land. Since before dinosaurs walked the single continent of Pangea. Since before the Big Bang brought the universe to life. God has loved us.
We have been doing this such a very long time. May we keep doing this for a very long time to come. May we know that God is here, and always has been, in our words, in Creation, in this body of the church that we are called to be.
And may we all answer our call, whatever it may be, whether to ministry and seminary – to medicine and science – to parenting – to justice, and always, always in all of it to love, to love God, to love this beautiful, fractured world that God loves so deeply.
And may we always come together, standing here on holy ground, finding those things we can agree upon, and debating those things we don’t.
May we reach back to God knowing, always, that God is reaching for us. Knowing that God loves us.
Knowing that God loves you. And He has for such a very long time.
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