Richard Davenport

January 26, 2025 – Third Sunday after Epiphany

Nehemiah 8:1-10

            The books of Ezra and Nehemiah are interesting because they tell of the same period in Israelite history from different perspectives.  Each is concerned with the life of the Israelite people as they come back from exile in Babylon.  Even though each has a slightly different focus, the stories overlap in many places. There is much to do as the people start trickling back from Babylon.  There is rebuilding to do.  There is the worship life of the people to restore.  The people need a reminder what it means to actually be the people of God. 

            You might think they should know all of that already, but they’ve spent quite a long time actively forgetting all about what God has to say about most everything.  Much like people who regularly use God’s name in vain without any thought to who the God they are calling on actually is, most of the society in those days knew very little about God, despite their status as God’s people.  They had the temple.  They had priests.  They had the various festivals and holy days.  They had the sacrifices.  They had their inheritances, each according to tribe.  They had the promises of blessing for faithful life and service. They had the promise of a savior. They had everything they needed and much, much more.  But, over the generations, they chose to go the way everyone around them went and everything gradually fell apart.

            At this point, even the priests and the Levites, the ones who should know better than anyone else what was expected, weren’t any better than anyone else.  In fact, they were often the ones doing the most harm by leading people in the worship of false gods.  They no longer even had a starting point. 

            This is why Ezra the priest has everyone gather together in the square so he can read the book of the Law for the whole assembly. Everyone needed a refresher on what God had said and what was expected of them as God’s people.  It’s not a small list.  All of the various rules and regulations were part of the Law, as well as the big, universal rules and regulations. 

            What sort of response would you expect from this lengthy affair?  Well, that would probably depend on what you thought of God and his laws to begin with. We know what they thought of God’s laws before all of this.  That’s what landed them in this situation in the first place.

            Our country hasn’t had to deal with this kind of situation.  Sure there have been wars and such, but not even the Civil War affected us the way the Babylonian conquest affected Israel.  The World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, the various smaller wars, and even the Revolutionary War didn’t come close.  To approximate it, it would more like China rolling through the country, slaughtering our military men, scooping up anyone of value and leaving only the most destitute behind.  Those hauled off to China may never live to see home again.  After several decades, those who are still around in China are allowed to return, though not as an independent nation.

            Upon getting home, there’s probably a lot of soul searching.  I’m sure there’s a lot of discussion and debate as to how we all ended up in China to begin with and what we’re going to do now that we’re back home.  What does that discussion look like?  It’s a sure bet there will be a lot of finger pointing. Someone or other was responsible for getting everyone into that situation to begin with. 

            Israel is a bit different, in that all of the promises I mentioned before are still in effect.  God had still claimed them as his people, even though they had opted not to act like it.  Whether or not you’d have a widespread return to Christianity if America ran into this kind of situation, it certainly did for the Israelites.              

            But, what everyone else does isn’t something you have a whole lot of control over.  What is your response to someone who tells you you’ve broken the law?  I would guess it might depend somewhat on the law in question.  Speeding because you’re late to work may not be much of an excuse.  Speeding because you have someone in your car who is about to have a baby and you’re trying to get to the hospital may be a little different. After all, laws like that aren’t meant to cover every possible circumstance.  There’s always a little wiggle room.

            Maybe that’s different when you’re talking about God and not civil authorities, but perhaps not.  God’s laws might be bendable in certain situations too. Obviously there are people who have to work on Sundays, like pastors, but sometimes that work even makes it so they can’t go to church.  Sure it’s not great, but what are you going to do?  It’s not like criminals will stop being criminals so you can have a Sunday off. It’s not like there won’t be fires that need dousing or medical emergencies that need tending to.  It’s not like cows can forego getting milked. There are all sorts of things in this life that don’t take a day off.  That means there needs to be people who can tend to them.  That doesn’t even account for things like being sick and needing to take care of yourself and not get other people sick.

            I’d even go so far as to say God’s laws may not carry as much weight with you as civil laws do.  After all, if you break the 4th commandment, it isn’t likely that the cops will come knocking on your door.  There won’t be any tickets.  No jail time. You might not even feel any adverse effects.  You do…whatever it is…and nothing happens.  If something bad happens later, you could just as easily chalk it up to coincidence or just about anything else. 

            That still assumes you consider the Law, any law, as really being a law at all.  Some time back, a book came out called, “The Choices We Made.”  It’s all about how a number of people justified the need for abortions in their lives.  One of the people contributing to the book is TV personality, Whoopi Goldberg, who said, "I talk about God because God and I are very close. God gives you freedom of choice. That's in the Bible. God says, 'Here are 10 rules: Don't lie -- you'll never remember what you said before. Don't cheat, because you're going to be mad if you're cheated on. Honor your parents, because they brought you into the world, and you're going to need child care. If you choose to live by them, your life will be better, and even if you don't, I will forgive you.' "

            I don’t know what she thinks of the first three commandments, the ones that deal specifically with God, but the point made is pretty clear.  The laws aren’t so much laws as they are suggestions.  They’re generally good advice, but they are no more restrictive than that.  If you have compelling reasons to ignore them, well, it’s your life and you know best how to live it.

            Whoopi Goldberg obviously isn’t the only person out there who thinks this way.  She’s just expressing the tendency we all have.  This is what it means to be your own god, to be the ultimate authority over your own life.  People can make suggestions.  They can offer advice, but only you get to decide whether to follow them or not, because only you get to decide what is good and right for your life. 

            Hearing the Law and accepting it as law is an admission that you are not a god and certainly not the God.  There is someone, potentially many people, who have authority over you in various ways and the laws they enact are binding.  There is no clearer evidence of the power of the law than to see it in action.  You may break the civil laws in all sorts of minor ways and never see any consequence, but every so often you will.  At some point the car will pull up behind you with the lights flashing and the police officer will inform you why you were pulled over.  You can make whatever kind of argument or excuse you want, but the law says what it says and it has clearly and definitively decided the punishment for whatever transgression you have made. 

            The Israelites found this out the hard way too. They denied God’s authority and his law for far too long and finally the consequences came.  God made certain they knew exactly why they were being sent into exile.  It wasn’t truly over when they came home either.  They got to see what remained of their beloved homeland, how much of Jerusalem lay in ruins.  They looked at it all and they were told this was because they had broken the law. Some of them probably still denied it, there are always those who will never admit their own culpability, but they were all told.  There were none who could argue they didn’t know.

            In our justice system, you pay for the crimes you commit.  Barring really, really big crimes, that generally means paying fines or doing some jail time.  Once the fines are paid or the time is done, you go back to your life with the debt being paid.  Generally speaking, the government considers the matter done with.

            It’s tempting to treat God’s laws the same way, but the reality is that every time we break God’s laws, we’re actually committing one of those really, really big crimes, because each time we sin, we are bringing death into the world.  The only sentence for what we’ve done is death.  For all of the greed, idolatry, and pure, unadulterated selfishness of the Israelites in those days, God had no requirement to bring them back. 

            Here, as they gather together in the square and listen to the law once again, they learn the nature of both law and gospel, sin and forgiveness.  For as bad as things had gotten, they could have been much, much worse.  God didn’t let them come back because their punishment was done.  He let them come back because he withheld the full punishment they deserved.  He disciplined them, that they might learn from the consequences of their actions and learn not to continue down that path again. 

            We get complacent, thinking that because there are no apparent consequences to our actions, that we have managed to avoid them. But, that’s never the case.  It is only because God has chosen not to deal them out to us that we continue on as we have.  He allows some consequences to strike us, in order to dissuade us from making the same dangerous mistakes.

            We gather here, like the Israelites of old, to hear the law, to hear what we deserve and how we occasionally get a little piece of it.  In acknowledging and repenting of our sins, as they did, we also hear the gospel, and how the price still needed to be paid, but it was paid by another.  It was paid by Christ, so that we would be set free. 

            The message is the same.  Sin and forgiveness.  Life and death.  God and his boundless love for his wayward children, doing what must be done to bring them back and restore them.  There is sorrow, and there should be.  Discipline is never fun, but the true punishment we deserve would be far worse. Still, as Ezra and Nehemiah direct, the time for sorrow is past.  The sin is forgiven.  The punishment has been taken away.  Christ hung there on the cross to ensure there was nothing to keep us out of his presence anymore.  We return and we are restored by his grace, our loving Father brings us home again where we belong.