Sermons

“Hearing the Word – Part One”

Luke 4:14-21; Nehemiah 8:1-12 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – January 24, 2016

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that we might welcome your Word into our hearts and our lives and come to understand it more deeply. We pray in the name of Jesus, Amen.

To get us started here this morning, I’d like to invite you to pull out your hymnals. Turn to #249, the song “Spirit”. Now, I know some of you think you know this song really well, but go ahead and get out the book, because I want you to look carefully at something. I first came across this song when I was in college, worshiping in a United Church of Christ congregation with the New Century Hymnal, which came out right around the same time as the Chalice Hymnal. Okay, are you there? Take a look at the second verse. “You swept through the desert, you stung with the sand, and you gifted your people with a law and a land.” Does that sound right? The hymn writer is describing the whole Israelite history in one verse, so of course we can expect broad strokes. When you’re trying to cover so much in just four lines, you want to choose your words carefully.

So here’s what’s interesting. In the UCC hymnal, there is a different word in that line. According to the UCCs, God didn’t “gift” the people with “a law and a land”. Instead the line says “and you goaded your people with a law and a land.” Sure, it still starts with “g”, but that’s a pretty different word. In case you’re not all that familiar with the word “goad,” let me clarify that it usually means provoke or annoy, so as to motivate response. So let’s take a poll: Gifted or goaded? Which word do you think makes more sense? Think about it for a second. Now, if you think “gifted” makes more sense, raise your hand. Okay. And now, if you would have used “goaded” instead, raise your hand. Regardless of your choice, you’ll never be able to sing this song the same way again, right? You’re welcome.

That distinction, between whether we are gifted or goaded by scripture, is at the heart of our lessons today and next week. Over the course of this Sunday and next, we will be looking at stories of people hearing scripture, having it interpreted for them and responding to it. And, as we will see, there are some contradictions and paradoxes there that can help us understand our own responses to scripture better. (You may put your hymnals away now.)

So with these two stories we have heard, I want to look at some similarities and differences between them that can help us ask important questions. The first aspect we will explore is understanding. The passage we heard from Nehemiah is very interested in understanding. It comes up in the description of who was present. Two different times the author tells us that there were men and women there, along with “all who could hear with understanding.” Honestly, it’s not entirely clear whom that is a reference to. Given our common American English parlance, we might think it is including children, since men and women have already been covered. Perhaps it’s referring to children who are old enough to pay attention and know what’s going on. But another option is that it’s a redundant reference to the men and women that is getting at the fact that there is some bi-lingual education going on here. The people gathered in the square likely spoke Aramaic in their everyday lives. But the law of God was being read in Hebrew. So is this phrase added in to emphasize that some could understand better than others? As I said, we don’t really have a clear answer to this question.

But Nehemiah is even more interested in stressing the importance of understanding. Much of the focus in this passage is on the Levites interpreting for the gathered people what they are hearing from Ezra’s reading. “They gave the sense,” it says in verse 8, “so that the people understood the reading.” In the end, what we have here is a paradigmatic example of what became the tradition of Jewish worship and carried on into our own worship traditions: One of the primary things we do when we gather for worship is read scripture and have someone talk about its meaning. (Let me just note here, for any of you who think sermons are always too long, that Ezra’s reading apparently went on for the whole morning, and even just a couple hundred years ago, these sorts of things last well over an hour.)

We see the pattern repeated in the passage we heard from Luke. Jesus gets up to read the scripture, and then he sits down, which is the traditional position for teaching or interpreting in the synagogue. “The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him,” Luke writes. And what he says next throws in a whole new wrinkle for this conversation. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

What? What does that even mean? For the Jews in the room with him, it was a provocative and mysterious statement. For us as Christians, it opens up a whole new way of thinking about scripture, God’s Word, and interpretation. Thinking of Jesus as the fulfillment of scripture leads us to remember that, as Christians, we call Jesus the Living Word. We consider Christ the most complete revelation of God’s Word, over anything written in the Bible. This is both freeing and problematic. Not to be bound to words on a page, which have traveled through the minds of countless translators and scholars, can open up access to everyone more widely. But experiences of the Living Christ from beyond the pages of scripture are, by definition, subjective and highly personal. How can we be sure the word we’re hearing is really Jesus?

For Disciples of Christ, the authority to interpret scripture for ourselves, rather than having doctrine handed down from an ecclesial hierarchy, is one of our highest values. But this doesn’t mean we’ve been given license to insist that scripture means whatever we want it to mean. If we want to be faithful, responsible followers of Jesus, we will spend time with the scriptures, learning about the context of their creation and how the differences between those cultures and ours affect our reading. We will consider passages in light of other passages, rather than pulling verses from here and there, willy-nilly, to suit our purposes. And we will develop our understanding in community, listening for God’s voice in the thoughts and perspectives of our neighbors and friends, both those near and around us, and those from other parts of the world. Biblical interpretation is both more accessible and more complicated in our day than it was in Ezra or Nehemiah’s. But the need to think deeply and be in conversation with others within the faith about the meaning of scripture has been consistent through all that time. A biblical faith lived only at face-value level is not a faith that is going to do much beyond help us put a good face on things. That is not what Jesus came to fulfill.

There are two other similarities between these two stories that I just want to touch on today, and then we’ll get into their significance more deeply next week. I’m going to focus more on the Nehemiah story now, because we won’t be hearing it again next Sunday. So put your thinking cap on, so that you’ll remember these details seven days from now. The two things I want to look at are the people’s reactions to hearing the scripture and the call within both stories to share God’s blessing widely.

The people’s reactions in Nehemiah are kind of mysterious. Ezra and the Levites appear to feel as though they must cheer everyone up, because, for some unexplained reason, their immediate response to hearing the law of God was to weep. The writer doesn’t explain why they’re weeping, just that they are. Is it because it’s been so long since they’ve heard the story of their people and their God? Is it because the law seems harsh and rigid and demanding, and they don’t think they can live up to it? Unlike in our Luke passage, we are given no hint of what portions of scripture Ezra read to them, though it must have been plenty to have taken all morning. Were they mourning because they weren’t interpreting the law correctly at first? Once the Levites explain “the sense” to them, they don’t seem to have much trouble pulling themselves together and getting with the program. Suddenly, they’re drinking sweet wine and eating fatty meat and rejoicing greatly. But it’s hard to forget that initial reaction and to keep from wondering what prompted it. Next week, we will get into the similarly dramatic change of mood that takes place in Luke, which sadly, moves in the opposite direction.

The final comparison between the two stories is the shared sense of inclusivity. When Ezra and the Levites are trying to cheer up the Israelites, they tell them to go home and feast: “Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine.” But that’s not all. They are also instructed to “send portions … to those for whom nothing is prepared.” No one is to be left out of this festival. Some had prepared and some hadn’t – either because they didn’t plan ahead or because they didn’t have the resources or the opportunity to do so. But unlike the virgins waiting for the bridegroom, everyone is going to get what they need here, in order to join in the rejoicing. This seems to please the people, or at least, we don’t hear about any grumbling or further weeping. They accept that sharing their bounty with their neighbors is part of how you have a party.

As we will see next week, a similar sense of inclusivity that is reflected in what Jesus does and says at Nazareth will not be as well received. But the message is clear: One of the most important things we have to recognize about scripture is that the blessings contained there are for everyone. No one has elite access or exclusive rights of interpretation. How open we are to sharing God’s blessings may end up determining whether scripture is a gift or a goad for us. And if previous experience tells us anything, we may end up discovering that it’s both! May God grant us the grace to receive his goading gifts with humble joy and thanksgiving. Alleluia and Amen.