Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Luke 4:14-21

The Reverend Paul D. Allick, St. George’s Episcopal Church, January 24, 2010

I wonder how many of you have ever had to rebuild your lives. I know I’ve rebuilt mine a few times. There are all kinds of things that happen to us that cause us to start over: death, divorce, illness, job loss. Its all around us. What happens when we rebuild is that we go back to the core. We review what is essential to our identity. These are very difficult times but when we arise out of them we are stronger and more alive than we have been in a long time.

This is the whole narrative of Holy Scripture: we go into an exile or place of death and then return renewed. This is the story of Israel in the Hebrew Scriptures. We can see this story in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ: the suffering, the tomb, the resurrection, the ascension.

In the Book of Nehemiah we hear the story of the exiles returning home from Babylon. They find their homeland in ruins. Slowly they begin to rebuild the physical structures. But more importantly they begin to rebuild their relationship with the Lord. They begin, through the teaching of their clergy, to re-learn their religious customs.

Nehemiah the Governor gathers the people. He asks the priest Ezra to teach them the Law of Moses. The priests go into the crowd to help people understand the reading. They had been in exile and many of them had never even heard of their traditions. The people wept as they heard the words of the law. They wept because they realized how far they had strayed from their foundation.

But then their leaders do something amazing: they tell the people not to weep but to celebrate. They remind them of the religious feast day that is approaching. They are to go and celebrate Sukkoth or the Feast of Booths. This was the holiday wherein the people remembered that their ancestors were once in the wilderness. The Lord delivered them and they also came home after living in tents for a long while.

In our Gospel today Jesus has just returned from His own exile. He has been in the wilderness for forty days being ruthlessly tempted by the devil. He has been tempted to do what all of us are tempted by: to test God and to exercise power over others. Jesus makes it through the testing perfectly; He is the one who shows us how to follow the will of God. Then He is filled with the Holy Spirit. He returns to human society to proclaim what He has learned. Just like each of us who go through immense suffering and come out of it to serve others.

Jesus volunteers to be the reader for the service. He is handed the scripture of the day. (Like our lectionary it is assigned. No one is selecting it for their own purposes.) He stands and reads from the prophet Isaiah. This prophecy was the charge given to the people Israel after they returned from their exile. They will be anointed by God to serve the world. They are to bring good news to the poor, release to captives, sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Out of His own exile in the wilderness Jesus proclaims a time of rebuilding.

Each of us who has gone through our own wilderness and rebuilding can teach others how to do the same. We can do this, not only for other individual disciples, but also for the whole communion of disciples.

Our beloved Episcopal Church is entering a time of rebuilding. For decades now we have seen our Church shrink. We have been distracted from our core. We have been fighting over how we pray instead of why we pray. We have been fighting over who is worthy to be ordained based on gender and human sexuality instead of the theological nature of the diaconate, priesthood and episcopacy. We have been fighting over secular politics instead of joining together to critique secular politics with the mind of Christ.

I hear it out in the wider Church this call for rebuilding. I hear the laity asking that we get back to the basics. We can learn about social and environmental problems at our local political caucuses. At Church we want to learn about our traditions. Like the people returning from exile we don’t even know what our traditions are anymore. I hear the clergy pleading to be allowed to be clergy. We don’t want to be non-profit managers or pseudo-social workers.

I am utterly bored by the controversies over money and sex in our Church. What I am concerned about is the core. Do our people know how to reflect on Holy Scripture well enough to make it part of their every day lives? I am concerned with the state of our sacramental theology. Do we still believe that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist or that baptism confers upon us a regeneration of life? Do we still believe that confirmation is an anointing in the Holy Spirit? I am concerned with our adherence to the Creeds of the Church. Are we going to throw them out because they are hard to believe?

In a recent article in the Living Church, Neil Michell, the Canon to the Ordinary in the Diocese of Dallas wrote, “The problems facing our Church are not financial or cultural. Our decline is not the result of not having the right programs in place…the problems facing our Church are spiritual in nature.” (The Living Church, January 24, 2010, p.6)

We are coming home from our self-imposed exile. Each of us who have had to rebuild our lives, who have suffered and then come home to ourselves can show the Church how do go about this. Suffering and exile come into our lives so that we can prove our reliance on God and show others how to make it back home.