Tuesday, January 26, 2010

EPIPHANY 3-C

GOD WITH US

What is the story of your life?

Where does it start? What was the context?

As you look back over your life what are the highlights? What are the moments of tragedy and loss that helped to define you? Who did you share your time with? What did you learn?

A colleague of mine was telling me a story about her father. It seems that this man had lost his mother, who died giving birth to twins, when he was two and a half years old. Now, he grew up on a farm in PEI with lots of friends and family and extended family, he lacked for nothing.

When he was older he would talk about his life, he would say “When I was two and a half...” and then explain about his mother’s death and what had happened to him.

The unfortunate thing was that if you asked him, why do you use a pitch fork that way – he would begin the answer, “when I was two and a half...” and go on from there.

He was stuck.

I am stuck. I am stuck in a number of places... when I was 15 I ran away from home. That’s a big one for me. When I left high school I joined the military. That is another place I got stuck for a while.

What about you? Where are you stuck?

The people of Israel lived in what has come to be possibly the most contested piece of real estate in history. That was so for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that it is the place where the camel route east meets the Mediterranean sea; and so was the perfect place to ship things by boat or camel to get them to someone else’s empire.

From the days of Alexander the Greek through to the problems between Palestine and Israel today someone has been fighting over that piece of land. There have also been times of exile.

The greatest of these was when, for forty years, the people were carted off as strangers in a strange land – to live under Persian law in the city of Babylon. Remember, 40 years in the Bible simply means a whole generation.

Then they are told to go home to Jerusalem. Their dreams have come true at last. There is celebration, and joy. Until they get back to the abandoned and destroyed capital of their homeland.

I know I am telling you a story you have heard before – and you know why? This is what constantly happened to these people.

You see, they were also exiled in Egypt for a while... they were exiled to Assyria for a while... Along the way they were conquered by Alexander the Great, by Caesar Augustus, and even by the Byzantium Empire.... then the Persians, then the Crusaders, until the 1500’s when the Ottoman Empire conquered it and divided the country into four separate regions in their fiefdom.

Believe it or not 400 years of conquest was ended when the British conquered Israel in 1917. In 1948 it once more became Israel, ruled by Israelis.

If your homeland was destroyed; if you were forced into exile; or let’s look at it from a smaller scale, our own human scale: if you lose your job, if your spouse dies, if your marriage ends... how easy is it to get stuck?

How easy is it to just start defining yourself from that moment – nobody loves me, nobody wants me, God hates me... whatever it would be that would creep its way deep down inside you and make it impossible to move beyond that event?

So why is that not true for the people of Israel? What happened? How did they keep going again and again? For that, we need to go back to the book of Nehemiah.

The Israelite’s return was a crushing disappointment. The walls of Jerusalem were in ruins. The great temple was a mound of rubble. The countryside was a wasteland. A hard-nosed administrator named Nehemiah and a scribe named Ezra stepped up and organized a series of urban renewal projects that included building a new temple and new city walls.

When the work was finished, everyone in Jerusalem, including the children who were old enough to understand, gathered in the town square. The Israelites were safer now, and they had a place to worship.

They asked Ezra to fetch a scroll he'd brought with him from Babylonia. The scroll contained the first five books of the Bible as we know it. Ezra opened his scroll and began to read its stories--stories of creation, of Noah and the ark, of Abraham and Sara, of Joseph and the coat of many colors, of God releasing the Children of Israel from Egyptian captivity, of Miriam and Moses, of the Ten Commandments and God's other instructions for creating a community.

The stories were written in Hebrew, but by then the Israelites were speaking Aramaic, the language of the Persian Empire. So Ezra translated the stories into the people's everyday language. Meanwhile, thirteen priests circulated among the people to "give instruction in what was read," Nehemiah says, and to "explain the meaning."

That's the point of reading scripture, you know, to get the meaning it has for you. On the way out of church one Sunday a worshiper said, "That was a powerful sermon you preached this morning, pastor. Everything you said applies to somebody I know."

The people in Jerusalem hoped there were connections between Ezra's scroll and their circumstances that would apply to everybody. That's why they asked Ezra to fetch it. That's why he translated it. That's why the priests explained the meaning of it.

And then hundreds of years flaked away and the crowd experienced it. By which, I mean, those former exiles discovered where they were in the story God was writing. They had wandered so far from God and had forgotten so much about their faith that there was a huge gap now between the way God wanted them to live and the way they were living.

A sense of loss and shame overwhelmed them and they broke into tears. Ezra said, "Don't grieve, and don’t cry. This is a day of remembering who we are and who God is. Go home, prepare a feast, and share it with those who don't have anything. Because this day is holy to God and the joy of the Lord is your strength."

Nehemiah's account ends with the people celebrating and sharing gifts of food and wine, because their long season of amnesia was over. Their sacred memories were alive again. They could face the hard work that lay ahead assured of God's presence, God's love, God's guidance, and God's strength.

And don’t think the story ends there. Each and every time the people of Israel, the people who follow God, have found themselves in the face of trouble, a prophet has arisen and reminded them about where they fit in God’s plan – about what God’s hope for the future is.

All of that is preamble. All of that was known by the people living in Nazareth. Jesus grew up in a town that was part of an area ravaged by Roman troops the year before he was born because of an insurrection... the people knew all about losing everything...

And Jesus stood up in the Synagogue and said:

"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour."

God is with you; God will raise you up, God will set you free... That is the Good news. That will bring us through whatever present crisis we face. That will give us the strength to move on.

Let us pray:

“As we reach for your Spirit, God, you reach for us. You bring us courage and hope, comfort and peace. Help us to remember that. Help us to act out of a place of faith in your goodness; grant us a vision of the future that will help us to deal with our past. For we are free in your love. Amen.”

No comments: