SERMON The Word, Bound and Unbound

Benjamin J. Dueholm, guest preacher

The Third Sunday after Epiphany, 2007

Neh. 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Ps. 19; I Cor. 12:12-31a; Lk. 4:21-30

Sisters and brothers, grace and peace to you all from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The story has come down to me that my Danish ancestors, like most first-generation immigrants, worried that their American children wouldn't know Danish. They had come to this land of strange speech, living among Germans, Norwegians, and even Roman Catholics. The story I heard is that they were afraid that if their children didn't know Danish, they wouldn't be able to talk to Jesus in the next life. The Scriptures, of course, were in Danish.

This is a silly story, and almost certainly untrue. But it speaks to the power of the Scriptures as we learn and know them. For the Danish immigrant community, the important thing was not so much what the Bible said -- because it said it in Greek, Danish, English, or any other language -- but what the Bible is.

So what is the Bible? What is it that the Psalmist says is perfect, revives the soul, and makes the simple to be wise? It sounds like an obvious question, but the word 'Bible' can be applied to so many things. I carry this small copy of the New Revised Standard Version around with me for prayer and study. A friend gave me this edition of the King James Version, illuminated with beautiful images of key stories. You can also get one or the other Testament in the original language -- like this Greek New Testament I have here. Yet these are all, in some sense, the Bible, different as they are.

Most Christians would say that the Bible, in all these forms, is the Word of God, but that phrase is not as straightforward as it may sound. The Word of God, after all, called the universe into existence before there was any Bible. God spoke to Abraham, calling him to leave his country and his people, without the benefit of Scripture. God called Moses and the Israelites out of Egypt by God's Word, all before anyone had put pen to paper. As our psalm today says, the created world itself tells the glory of God and the firmament declares its maker's handiwork. The days and nights that God has ordained speak even to the ends of the world.

The Word of God extends far, far beyond what we call the Bible. It's like the difference between a tree and the shade that the tree makes on a sunny day. It is a compilation of human attempts to understand and capture the dynamic reality of God's ever-speaking Word. "God: A Memoir, by those who knew him best."

If you spent any part of your life in Lutheran Sunday School, you probably had to learn all the books of the Bible in order. And if you tried to do that, you probably lost the thread somewhere around the Old Testament book of Nehemiah. It's a book that most Christians don't seem to know much about and a book that most Lutheran pastors would only preach about on a dare. But I'm going to give it a try, since it has something important to say about this book and why we revere it. It's a story not about what the Bible says, but about what the Bible is: an enduring sign of God's faithfulness to the worshipping community.

First, some history is in order. King David built the United Kingdom of the Israelites around 1000 B.C. His son, Solomon, built a temple to the Lord on the land David had set aside for that purpose. After King Solomon, however, the kingdoms divided. Wars and bad governance led to the fall of the Northern Kingdom, and Jerusalem and the Southern Kingdom fell later, in about 586 B.C. The temple was destroyed and many of the people were taken into captivity by the king of Babylon. They came to live in a land of strange speech and strange gods.

The fall of Jerusalem was not only a military and political defeat, but a real threat to Jewish faith and culture. The center of worship was gone and the teachers of the Torah, the Law of Moses, was scattered or in exile. For most nations, this would be the end of the story. But as bleak as things looked, God had not abandoned God’s chosen people. The Babylonian kings fell to the Persian Empire, and the Persians let the Jews return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. But the exiles did return, the temple was rebuilt, and the Torah, the Law, was again heard in David’s city.

That is our story today in Nehemiah. Ezra, a priest of the temple and scribe of the Law, reads the books of Moses -- Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy -- to everyone in Jerusalem who can understand. Israel, which was called into being by God's word to Abraham, had lacked the token of that word for perhaps a hundred years. All the people wept to hear it. Were these tears of joy? Or were these tears of remorse for their wrongdoing, which they heard exposed for perhaps the first time in their lives? That's what scholars seem to think is going on here. Ezra and the other leaders rebuke the people, saying that the day is holy, a day to feast and celebrate and share with those in need, not a day to mourn for sin. Yes, Israel has transgressed the Law and broken faith with the Lord, but the Lord has not broken faith with Israel. The return of the Torah to Jerusalem is the sign, the token, of God's enduring faithfulness.

Surely, in the days before and after the exile, the Israelites had found the statutes of the Torah burdensome or arbitrary. Surely their children, and even some of their adults, found the reading of the Torah in worship to be tedious. Even now, people in synagogues and churches struggle to stay awake through arcane prophecies and the chronicles of forgotten wars. But the Word of God is not a dead letter, a set of dos and don'ts bound in leather. The Word of God lives and breathes and dwells and acts among us. The Scriptures and the life they call God's people to live are the signs of this true and living Word. The remarkable return of the Torah to Jerusalem after a century of exile and occupation showed Israel that that true Word was living and working among them.

The same is true, I hope and pray, for the Church. As we enter the third millennium of the Christian era, it is easy enough to see a society and a world that has lost its way; to see a church that is wayward and divided and even irrelevant. In some of Chicago’s districts, it is easy for a Christian t feel like something of an oddity or even an exile. It is not uncommon even for those of much faith to pick up this book and look into its dusty pages with doubt. Is this book for us? Is this our story? Is it true? How is it true?

These are fair questions. When I ask them myself, I try to remember that there is no human reason that this book had to survive. It has so many sources and was written over such a long period that, in fact, the odds were probably against this particular Bible ever existing. The Torah could have been lost in the exile. The New Testament could have been lost in the early Christian era, back when the Church was just a small religious movement among scores of groups and local cults. There were arguments over versions of stories and over what should be included. It is an unlikely thing that we have it at all.

And now, if every copy of the Bible in existence were taken away, there are thousands of rabbis, pastors, and scholars, and lay people who could reconstruct it word for word, at least if they were working together. This very day, the Bible is being read in a million or more places around the world. That is a remarkable thing to consider. Whatever else you can say about Scripture, whatever arguments we Christians have with each other over what it is and what it means, this fact shows us that God has not abandoned us. The Word is still living, calling us from death into life. It can still raise tears of remorse, or relief, or joy. It reminds us that under all the confusion of the world, God's Word still drives and sustains our lives. The road home remains open. Do not mourn or weep, but eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy to our Lord. As long as we have these holy words and these holy things, we can be assured that God is still with us and still for us: rejoicing the heart, reviving the soul, making wise the simple, giving light to the eyes. Amen.

January 21, 2007

Benjamin Dueholm, guest preacher

Wicker Park Lutheran Church