Hebrew Scripture Reading—Nehemiah 8: 1-3, 5-6, 8-10
A few summers ago I visited Fort Collins, Colorado, for the first time as an adult. We stayed at the home of a friend who lives outside the town near various hiking trials, and I was so excited by the natural beauty that I saw that I decided to wake up early and go for a run just so I could experience some of that beauty close at hand. I ran on a somewhat rugged trail up a hill, and I found the wildflowers to be extraordinarily beautiful. I had brought my camera along with me, so along the way, I stopped to take some pictures. On the cover of your bulletin is a picture of one of the flowers that I saw. Out of the pictures I have taken, I would have to say that this is one of my favorites. Partially because of the memory I associate with it and partly because I like any flower that has that sunflower look.
When I later got home, I uploaded the picture and began to trim and crop the photo in a way that I thought would accentuate the beauty of the flower and the setting. I may not have done a perfect job, but I think we could agree there are some ways in which the picture could have turned out worse. To choose an extreme example, what if I had decided that the only important part of the flower that is worth one’s focus is the brown part at its very center? I could have trimmed away everything but that very center and blown that part into a much larger size. If I had done that, I think one could rightly say that to an unreasonable extent I had chopped off a lot of the beauty of not only the flower but also the surrounding environs. One would no longer be able to appreciate the petals and appreciate how exquisite a flower can look against the backdrop of a rolling meadow and a blue sky with a ripple of clouds.
I mention all of this because I think it serves as a metaphor for how Christians can view the theological significance of the Bible. One can look at the Bible as somehow containing all that is vitally important about God and the revelation of God. If one wants to come to know God, then the Bible is all you need. You can cut out everything else. From this point of view, the Bible is the Word of God. It is the complete and final revelation of God. Within it, you will find the answer to every significant question about life and about God. Nothing else is important. So long as you have got your eye on the Bible, you shall know the Truth with a capital “T.” You shall know all that you need to know about the very reality and existence of God.
The view I am describing, of course, would be typically associated with fundamentalist Christianity. It is a view of the Bible that prizes it as a divine product devoid of human finger prints. As such, it is the only true and authoritative revelation of God. From this perspective, it makes sense if you want to crop one’s picture to a pure and simple snapshot of just the Bible. Yet, the book of Nehemiah suggests a different, more expansive view in its snapshot. At the very center of this picture is the ancient Jewish equivalent of the Christian Bible. Nehemiah refers to it as the book of the law of Moses. What Nehemiah is speaking of is not a book with simply a bunch of laws. Rather, it is what is also known as the Torah, the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. There are, of course, laws in those books, especially Leviticus, but there are also lots and lots of stories, including some of the stories that are central to both the Jewish and Christian faith.
So at the center of Nehemiah’s snapshot is the Torah. It is of central significance in this passage, but Nehemiah also includes a lot more in this picture. The picture we have encompasses the town square of Jerusalem. As our scripture partially indicates, this is a place where everyone could gather. Both men and women are present. Both the pure and impure are there. What we have is a snapshot of an inclusive community that is gathering to hear the scriptures being read by the scribe Ezra. There are a couple of interesting aspects of this picture to observe. The first is that the reading of the scripture was truly a communal event in the sense that not only is the whole community present, but the community interprets the scripture together in an interactive way. Time is taken to pause and allow the Levite priests to walk among the people and discuss the meaning of what has just been read. There is this sense that if you want to know the sacred scripture you really have to work at it and wrestle with it in conversation with others. The scripture doesn’t necessarily have a meaning that is readily apparent at first blush. To interpret it, one needs a community that is in conversation about it. Meaning and revelation arise from this ever-changing dynamic interaction.
Another interesting aspect is that Nehemiah portrays the scripture as being read from dawn to midday. That’s a six-hour reading. A local writer in the Northwest named Bill Long has reflected on the significance of this. He asks, “What things do people listen to or watch for long durations in our culture?” He responds, “Well, students may listen to a professor for ONE hour. A movie lasts around TWO hours. Football games may last THREE hours. A good rock concert, with warm up bands, may even go FOUR hours.” But what involves standing and listening for six hours straight? Long describes the occasion in Nehemiah as a “Torah concert.” I think Long is directing us to an important point: in this ancient Jewish community, reading the scripture was hugely significant.
In this instance, it might have been even more so because this is a community that has returned from exile to rebuild the walls of their spiritual home. Nehemiah tells us that the people were so strongly affected by the reading of the scripture that they wept. There are different interpretations of why they wept. One is that it caused them to feel repentant. We can think of repentance as contrition over sins, but we can also think of it as a returning to God. The scriptures were reminding the people of who God is and, at the same time, who they are. The scriptures are the historical memory of a people recalling their relationship with God. One might also say that the people wept because the scriptures struck “a deep chord” with them as they related the Torah to their present experience. After all, they are still living under the thumb of the Persians, so they could have readily identified with the slaves of Egypt and their longing for freedom. Whatever the case, the scripture struck them in a deeply personal way. In a sense, the scripture wasn’t just about the Israelites of a long time ago. It was about them. It was relevant to their own lives.
Ultimately, this passage from Nehemiah gives us a wonderful picture of the interaction of between a community and its sacred scriptures. In this picture, we see that revelation isn’t just a matter of receiving a neatly packed and delivered instruction manual from above. Revelation is this very human and very social endeavor in which an entire community wrestles with how to understand and interpret scriptures through an ongoing conversation. It’s through this process that the meaning and relevancy of the scripture is arrived at. In short, you have to see the entire town square in order to realize and appreciate the full beauty of the divine at work in touching people’s lives. While we might take this as a counterpoint to a fundamentalist reduction of revelation to a Bible-sized box that is apprehended and grasped like a readily apparent and readily applicable solution to one’s problems, the passage could also be interpreted as a counterpoint to certain “liberal” or “progressive” orientations.
If fundamentalists can be said to crop out everything but the Bible from their picture of God’s revelation, then some liberals might be said to present a wide and expansive picture of the town square with a big hole in the center at the very place where the Bible once was. To varying degrees, the liberal spiritual crowd might sometimes implicitly want to crop the Bible or at least certain parts of it out of the picture. Scholar Marcus Borg suggests a reason for the differing pictures often presented by conservatives and liberals. While conservative Christians fear the Bible losing “its status as divine authority and divine revelation” by admitting to any human agency in the writing and interpreting of the Bible, liberal Christians fear that if they speak at all of the Bible in terms of divine revelation they are opening “the door to notions of infallibility, literalism, and absolutizing.” Thus, liberal Christianity can sometimes be found not fully owning up to the basic truth that Christianity is a religion centered upon “the God of the Bible.”
Because the Bible has been used as a weapon and because parts of it may rightly offend us, it can be hard to say, “Yes, the Bible is at the center of my faith.” This is where I think it is important to remember that the Bible isn’t just one voice. It is many voices, and while some of those voices are the voices of violence and oppression, many of the voices are ones that we can say we have experienced to be sacred in that they convey to us something that powerfully informs and resonates with our sense of God. If we view the Bible not as words penned by God but as the story of how a people have understood their relationship to God over many generations, then I think this view makes sense. In such an epic story, we would expect there to be a vast variety of understandings of God and God’s relationship to humanity. The former Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong notes that the Bible does not contain “the final answer in the attempt to discern God’s will. It is rather a call to walk in the faith tradition it reflects, to be part of this ongoing story and even to write the next chapter in this ever-expanding epic so that you and I can also see ourselves as the people of God.”
In modern times, it is often tempting to try and divorce ourselves from the past and from the traditions that connect us to the past. Haven’t we evolved and gotten smarter? Why do we still need the Bible? In many ways, we have evolved, and we have gotten smarter, but the Bible isn’t like a book of scientific theories that one by one get disproved over time. Stories and metaphors can contain durable truths that withstand the test of time. People can still read the Exodus story and identify with the plight of the Israelites. People can still see profound marks of the divine in the life of Jesus. In accord with the first letter of John, people can still experience God as love. The truth is that the Bible is very much like the center of this flower. At the heart of who we are as a community, are these seeds, these voices from the past. Some of those voices never take root in our lives, but some of them do, and it is those voices that give us life and the very meaning that sustains our life. From experience, we know that we have grown spiritually not by throwing out the Bible wholesale but by being in conversation with the Bible, by wrestling with it, by discussing it, by agreeing and disagreeing with it. This truth is not only experienced in church where the stories of the Bible can strike a deep chord with us as they did for the people in Jerusalem’s town square. This truth is also experienced when we go out into the world and are different, transformed people because of our Bible-centered community and faith. In our scripture, the people in the town square go out into the world rejoicing after listening to the scripture. They go out eating the fat and drinking the sweet wine. They also go out giving food to those in need. And, finally, they go out knowing that their strength is in God. It is our encounter with the stories and contents of the Bible that changes who we are and makes us different than a do-gooder social club. It is what makes us realize that we are truly children of God. Amen.