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BACK TO THE BEGINNING

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A Sermon preached by Robert B. Shaw

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


When I was getting my thoughts in order about this morning’s scripture  lessons, I found myself working with two topic headings, each of which gave me a twinge of uneasiness.  One of them was “Public Speaking.”  The other was  “January.”  I want to talk about the content of these two scenes of a speaker  addressing a crowd, about what we find in them; but I want first to talk about where they are finding us, in the first month of the year.  Today is the Third Sunday after the Epiphany, and it is the last Sunday in January.


January is commonly regarded as the month of beginnings.  So it is, according to our calendars and according to the IRS.  We are conditioned early on to go along with this.  We say to each other “Happy New Year.”  We don’t say “Merry More of the Same.”  And yet . . . by this time, entering the last week of the month, the new year’s resolutions may well be showing their age.  Time always  seems ready to leave us behind.  I read recently that the medals awarded to athletes at the Paris Olympics just a few months ago have started to tarnish.  We are creatures of habit, prone to settle into a comfortable groove, slow to realize that the groove has become a spiritual rut.  January is not simply a wide-open door into the future.  It is more like a door swinging back and forth on its hinges, between what has been and what is to come.


In fact, the month of January was named for the Roman god Janus, the god of beginnings, whose idols commonly stood at doorways.  The most striking thing about such a figure is the head, which has a face in the usual place looking forward but also one on the back of the head looking behind.  In a more literal sense than with some of our politicians, Janus was two-faced.


The Romans were on to something. The symbolism suggests that we cannot move forward without keeping the past fully in view.  This is true psychologically: people have trouble achieving emotional growth if they are not able to make peace with the past.  And it is true spiritually, as signaled in the Eucharistic liturgy: confession and absolution come first and are followed by Communion and  thanksgiving.  If we want to see better what is ahead of us, we might do well to take a good look back to begin with.


Today’s lessons illustrate this pattern: in each one we find the idea of a beginning mingled with the idea of a return to the past.  In the passage from Nehemiah, the people of Israel are ceremoniously engaging in a fresh start as a community dedicated to God.  The historical background is one of military  upheavals in the Middle East (sadly, not enough has changed in that part of the  world).  In the year 587 before Christ the Kingdom of Judah was overwhelmed by Babylon; the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and many of the inhabitants were exiled to Babylon in the so-called Babylonian Captivity.  After some decades it was Babylon’s turn to fall, defeated by the rising power of Persia.  The Persian  King, Cyrus the Great, allowed the Judean captives to return home, beginning in 538 BC.  The return actually occurred in a number of waves, several years apart;  this was a fragmented community hoping to regain cohesion.  Decades of being dispersed had weakened their grasp on religious duties and practices.  The  ceremony we read of here was aimed at bringing unity to those who had been exiled and those who had stayed behind, by re-instructing them in what was Israel’s distinguishing identity as a nation, their adherence to the Law of Moses.


So here we see the people assembled at “the Water Gate” (not the one  famous for a break-in; that’s in another country); and we see Ezra the Priest reading the Law to the gathered community.  He does this with the assistance of a  number of Levites.  When it says the Levites interpreted what was being read for the people, it really means that they translated it.  The common language by this time was Aramaic, not the Hebrew of the time of Moses.  So “they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.”  We might think of this as being like Father Bullock’s Sunday morning Lectionary study sessions, except that in this case it went on for half the day in two languages.  And it was not on Zoom. Perhaps the term “revival meeting” is appropriate here, for this is a description of a people coming back to life, a divided population reunited.  Now they could set about  rebuilding the Temple and raising once again the walls of Jerusalem.


Turning to today’s reading from Luke’s Gospel, we see again the overlap of a beginning with a return.  This episode comes from the first phase of Jesus’s ministry, before he has called the twelve Apostles from the growing crowd of disciples drawn to his teachings in the synagogues of Galilee.  When he comes to the synagogue of his hometown, Nazareth, he reads a passage from the prophet Isaiah, promising “release to the captives.”  Scholarship dates this part of the Book of Isaiah to the last days of the Babylonian empire and to those after its defeat by Cyrus of Persia.  The people we just read about in the lesson from Nehemiah had proven the truth of Isaiah’s words by their return to Jerusalem.  Or had they?  Jesus, several centuries after the prophecy was written, startles his audience by applying its words to himself and his ministry: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”


Sometimes the compilers of the Lectionary excerpt or edit passages in ways that raise questions. You may have noticed that two verses were cut out of the reading from Nehemiah.  In that case, the editors were just giving us a break.  The omitted verses are lists of the names of the Levites who stood beside Ezra to translate for the people: polysyllabic tongue-twisting names that I would not attempt to pronounce this early in the morning.  In the case of this morning’s reading from Luke, however, they chose to leave out the end of the story.  In the passage not included for us this week, Jesus has more to say.  He tells his hearers that “no prophet is acceptable in his own country,” and he suggests that foreigners may be more open to God’s help than Israel.  The solid citizens of Nazareth are enraged, to the point of taking him out of town in order to throw him off a cliff.  “But,” Luke says matter-of-factly, “passing through the midst of them he went his way.” Ahead of him there were more crowds to hear him, some to be inspired, some to be scandalized.  There would be many crowds as eager and receptive as the one we have read about in Nehemiah; and there would be some as baffled and hostile as the one we have read about in Luke.  Jesus’s return to Nazareth was the beginning of his earthly journey of three years, climaxing in Jerusalem, with its Temple rebuilt but still under the thumb of an alien empire,  This time the Roman one whose functionaries would display the power and efficiency for which they were noted by nailing him to a cross.


Perhaps the Lectionary is going easy on us, preferring that we not, at this point, look too far ahead.  Certainly, this latest January finds us with a lot to ponder, whether we are looking back or looking forward.  In contemporary society we manage to form an audience for a wide array of speeches, absorbing them electronically for the most part rather than in person.  Facing our screens, we are  part of a virtual crowd.  Having lived through the latest Presidential campaign, we may be looking forward to this latest new year with something less than confidence. In a time of no easy answers, it may help to remind ourselves that in Christ we have a basis for hope that can stand fast against all the noise and newsprint directed at us. This Collect, which I will read to end with, says it well:


Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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The Right Rev. Douglas Fisher
Bishop of Western Massachusetts

The Rev. Michael Anderson Bullock, Priest-in-Charge

Karen Banta, Organist & Choir Director

Lesa Sweigart, Parish Administrator

 

David Brown, Sexton

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