On Wednesday night, at the same time as a small church in Oronoco gathered to pray for their pastor Lisa, who is dying, and the church Lisa grew up in in LeSuer did the same, the Sues and I opened this space for prayer. Lisa and her husband Peter attended here for a couple of years 2010-2012 or so while she prepared for ordination. Like a weather system on a radar map, I imagined a web of prayer spanning across the miles, connecting us to them and to God. 15-20 people from various parts of Lisa's life, including her first-grade deskmate, came and went, wrote notes and lit candles, walked the labyrinth, and sat for a long time. I don’t think many of us were praying for her to be cured. Her body is ravaged and weary. I think mostly we were praying for what comes next for her kids and her husband, praying out our sorrow and anger that moms can be taken young, that death is capricious and cruel, and also, just letting ourselves be in what is, as terrible as it is, in the presence of God.
We pick up our Old Testament story after 70 years in exile. The people of Judah are finally allowed to go home. And it is not because they have some great new king like Solomon or David to rebuild their kingdom and bring them all together. It is because another foreign power defeated the power that had defeated them, and this one has a ruler who gives permission for conquered peoples to return to their lands and rebuild their cities. So, in circumstances far different than they’d probably dreamed of, they’re nevertheless coming home.
But not all of them; some are staying where they’ve built new lives Babylon. When the Babylonians conquered Judah, they completely decimated the city, destroyed the temple, forcibly took the warriors and the wealthy, the skilled workers and the young nobility of Jerusalem, and left behind the poor. In captivity in Babylon, many suffered greatly. Others prospered. But for 70 years they built a life where they were. Archeologists estimate that after the various mass deportations, executions, epidemics and battles, perhaps just 10% of the original population remained in Judah. Now some what’s left of them are coming home.
I have to be honest, you guys, I had trouble staying gripped by these scriptures. There is a reason nobody preaches from Ezra and Nehemiah. (In fact, besides a handful of verses in Nehemiah, neither one is even in the lectionary!). I am sure they make meaty material for history professors, but this preacher struggled to find something to hang onto.
I will say, as an aside, I was fascinated by the explanation in Chronicles (2 Chronicles 36:21, Jeremiah 25:11) that their 70 years in exile, expelled from the land, was to make up for the sabbaths they owed to the land. For 490 years, since King Saul, they had been disobeying God’s command to rest the land every 7 years, and God repeatedly warned them through the prophet Jeremiah that this would happen. SO, there’s that. Imagining the vacant land resting for 70 years, after having been worked without end.
But mostly, I had trouble following it all. Because – like all history – it’s not a clear-cut story. It’s messy and it’s confusing, one step forward, two steps back and a shuffle sideways, this person and that person, and one thing leads to another, and things don’t just happen, they happen gradually and haphazardly and then you look back and say, Oh, that happened, and try to make some sense out of it.
So, imagining them, wherever they ended up, struggling to make a life, and follow God and raise their families, and deal with what came their way, and then finally, finally, being told you can go home. What was that like? Hardly anyone who went back would have remembered home. And it didn’t matter anyway, because Jerusalem was utterly gone, and even all the natural changes that had happened in their absence, like trees growing and streams shifting, would’ve been astonishing.
After 70 years away, what was it like to go back to the place you knew and loved, in all its glory, but which your last glimpse of was utter devastation? Or, for most of them, to come finally to the place you’ve heard about all your life, and see only desolate ruins? Because when something or someone dies, we don’t just lose all that was, we lose all that could have been if things were not severed by an ending.
So working together, those who stayed away sent money and support, and those who returned began rebuilding the destroyed temple of Solomon- the symbol of their identity as God’s people, the place where God and humans met. But of course, when the temple was destroyed, they had discovered Yahweh was not contained in stone or geographical boundary lines, God met them anyway, and the prophets guided them, and their prayers and practices upheld them and they were God’s people anyway, and Yahweh took care of them wherever they were. But now they here, ready to rebuild what was.
When the temple foundation is laid, they hold a big celebration. And, the text tells us, intermingled with the shouts of joy is the weeping of sorrow for the few who remembered the temple as it had been, but the noise was so loud nobody could distinguish one from the other. And here is where my attention awakens. Because that is an amazing line to be plopped right there in the middle of all that historical record-keeping.
My grandma died this week. And I am really sad she is gone. She was quite a person, and her reign in the world, as it were, is hard to overstate in the lives of my cousins, sisters and me, and our children. And yet, she was 95, and so ready to go, and what was could never be again. Her home was gone, she’d buried two husbands and a son and all her friends and dogs and passions, and her final days were misery as her body betrayed her and her mind stayed sharp, so that when she finally died, I mostly felt gratitude and relief for her. And it’s weird to feel glad about a death that takes someone so wonderful out of the world.
I’m preparing to send my youngest away to college shortly, and the gladness and the sadness are all swirled up, so that often I can barely distinguish one from the other. So, when I read that same description of messy human emotion all tangled up in the crowd gathered on the bare foundation of the new temple in Jerusalem some 2500 years ago, something in me says, Yes. I get that.
When I was in Christchurch, New Zealand a few weeks ago, I worshiped in the Cardboard Cathedral, a transitional building erected after the second earthquake in 2011 crumbled the Anglican Christchurch Cathedral. 14 years later the Cathedral is still encased in scaffolding and unsafe to enter, and services continue in this temporary structure. With two earthquakes, and over 11,000 aftershocks, with so many lives lost and homes, businesses and church buildings destroyed, life as they had known it ended, and the question, what does it mean to be church? took on a whole new meaning in that place. They had to rebuild a new life, and it would not be what it was or what that could have become; it would be something different.
I got to hang out in May with Church leaders who had decided back then that whatever disagreements stood between them were unimportant, what mattered was taking care of people and ministering to their city, so the various congregations across denominations teamed up and worked together. And instead of rebuilding their own church buildings, some built shared community centers with community gardens and kitchens, or started exploring different ways and places of gathering for worship. The experience reshaped how they now understand what it is to be the church, and they are still cooperating and working together, seeking to shape their lives and communities to be the meeting place between God and humanity.
What was could no longer be, and what could’ve been was gone. So why not look at what else should no longer be and leave it behind? Our Nehemiah text is a first-person account of someone who came to be governor in this time, after he makes an impassioned speech to his fellow leaders about not perpetuating the very things onto others that they had just been freed from. And they all agreed to a different way of leading, and this got him elected governor. But wait, one asks, will he govern like the governors before him, with all the rights and privileges therein? No. Instead he went on to demonstrate compassion, generosity and care, as they all figured out what kind of people they would be now, and what kind of life they would live alongside one another as those brought from death to life and being remade into the people of God.
The thing about history is that it is just stories of the people who came before us, and they were just people, like us. And as different as life and contexts are across time, human beings struggle with the same things: selfishness, fear, greed, despair, loneliness, anger. And we long for the same things: stability, love, belonging, contribution, meaning and hope.
We all have experiences of getting what we wanted, and it turns out to be bittersweet. Of letting go of what was when it was never ours to hang onto, or it was taken from us long ago anyway. Of facing an unknown future and trying to work out how to live a good life and make a good life for others amid great uncertainty. Of recognizing that some of what was normal was actually wrong and damaging, and clumsily figuring out how to do things differently and better. We’ve all had loss; death spares nobody. The grief and the joy are intermingled.
The church is the place where that should be most acceptable – that is, we are the people who make space for the messiness of this terrible-wonderful living and dying that we’re all busy with, because our life is centered on Christ who died our death and was raised to new life. Jesus is the embodied action of what God has always been up to on this planet and in the lives of human beings, bringing new life out of death.
On Wednesday night we had a table with note cards that mirrored our gratitude prayer at funerals where we say, "For...", and all respond "Thank you, God" (eg, for her quick smile and joyful laugh, thank you God. For the way she lifted up those she met and honored each person, thank you God. For the hat she knitted me, thank you God.") I got to watch people go from quietly weeping, or stiff with anger, to smiling as they recalled something they dearly love about Lisa and wrote it down. Toward the end of the evening, two childhood friends of hers whispered on a back pew, soft laughter mingling with their tears, "so that people could not distinguish one sound from the other.”
We are creatures of loss and love, horror and beauty, destruction and newness, poignancy and pain. So, it seems fitting that when the returned exiles and the left behind people stand reunited together on the freshly set foundations of the new temple, the holy ground of meeting place between God and human beings, the joy and the lament of the people intermingle and are inseparable. This temple will never be what it was. But, then, neither will they. They belong to the God who meets us in death and are learning to trust this God to bring new life.
Our lives are not a clear-cut story. They’re messy and confusing, and things happen gradually and haphazardly, and as we try to make sense of it all we get to look back from time to time and say, Oh, that’s what God was doing. So as we stumble along figuring out what kind of people we will be, and what kind of life we will live, we will embrace our holy calling as the people of God-with-us to hold space without fear for the intermingled weeping and joy of it all, and to wait on behalf of each other and this world, for the new life our God will always bring.
Amen.
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