Rev’d Mark B. Stirdivant, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Yucaipa, California
✝ sdg ✝

Imagine for a moment you were suddenly told that it’s time to pack up and move back to the ancestral homeland of your family. Now, most of your lifetime you have been away from there, living your own life, but instantly you are faced with a complete about-face and back you go to an exotic place full of history like Germany, Greece, the Philippines, Nebraska, or Brooklyn. That’s the situation that the Israelite exiles faced after living in Babylonia, which then suddenly changed management and became Persia. Since it was over a hundred years since Nebuchadnezzar marched the forefathers out of the Promised Land, none of the people who returned to Jerusalem with Nehemiah had ever before set foot west of the Jordan River. This homecoming would seem strange to them, since it was all going to be so unfamiliar.

Now there had been an earlier group that had gone ahead, and they started reconstructing and re-settling Jerusalem. Think about what they must have seen as they came up the summit and had their first view of the city they had dreamed about, the location of the former temple toward which they faced as they prayed. It was in utter ruins. The protective city wall was broken down. The temple itself was utterly desecrated and demolished. Nobody would have a home to call their own until they had rebuilt it with their own hands from the ground up. And don’t forget, the whole time there are some nasty neighbors who are constantly looking for an opportunity to attack and prevent them from rebuilding the Holy City, the land of their forefathers.

Yet despite all that could go against them, these Jewish pilgrims, along with the encouragement of prophets like Haggai and Zechariah, managed to rebuild the temple and resume a new life in their ancient family homeland. Ezra the Scribe was an expert in preserving and explaining God’s Word, and he was sent to Jerusalem with the blessing and generous finances of the Persian king in order to teach the Lord’s chosen nation and train them in the ways of righteousness. The Biblical book that bears Ezra’s name details what he said and did at that important time.

Another few years go by, and another leader brings over another group of people who knew that their family was from Israel, but they themselves had never seen Palestine before. This man was no prophet, nor a priest or Levite, nor a Scribe—he’s a layman, a dedicated hearer of the Word who served God through another vocation. This man is Nehemiah, and he made it his act of selfless love for the Lord and His Holy City to rebuild the wall around Jerusalem.

This project was going to be every bit as difficult as it had been to rebuild the temple, because they had to start from the ruins of utter destruction and do their best to get it back to at least something like it was before. And those enemies were going to keep attacking. Wall builders had to hold their work tool in one hand, and their weapon in the other, just to ensure their own protection as they were working. With swords constantly strapped to their sides, they had organized a plan to form an instantly ready militia at the sound of the trumpet blast if there was the threat of any attack while the wall project was going on.

Finally, the wall was completely rebuilt. Nehemiah was appointed governor of Jerusalem and the whole surrounding region. The solemn gathering that you read about just a few moments ago in the Old Testament reading from Nehemiah chapter 8 was their first opportunity to gather on a holy day in an ancient Jerusalem that this new generation of immigrants could finally call home. An aging Ezra unrolled the scroll at dawn on the first day after a new moon in early fall. The gathered crowd fought against a slight chill in the air as they awaited the first rays of the sunrise to peek over the Mount of Olives in the distance. The Scribe stood up higher on a wooden platform so that his voice could carry from this pulpit to all the hearers. He and all the Levite helpers with him needed to preach and explain the words the people were hearing, since most of this new generation did not learn the ancient language that their forefathers spoke, the language in which the words of Moses were written.

It should have been a time to celebrate, but the people mourned and wept instead. They had been through so much, was it in response to their long, protracted ordeal finally being resolved? Did they suffer separation anxiety from the home they knew before, since it could never be the same for them in the land that they had to re-inhabit? No, their source of collective grief lay in what they heard in God’s Word. They began to take stock of how they had lived in light of the Law, and they could not avoid the chilling truth that the Lord’s own people had failed Him with their sins of thought, word, and deed. There was no more excuse left to use. They had to come clean before the Lord and His chosen spokesman. If you were there, you could hear people all around you wailing out loud and crying at the top of their lungs. Ezra and Nehemiah, along with their assistants, actually had to calm the multitude down and get them to concentrate on the Jewish festival that they had gathered to celebrate. Later that month, they would devote the entire day to repentance and confession of sin. Now, however, they needed to be assured of something even greater than the magnitude of their sins. This newly formed congregation of pilgrims in their new home, which was their old home, needed to be edified by those Gospel words: The joy of the Lord is your strength.

Perhaps that’s what you’ve come into this house of the Lord to hear today. You want some strength. You’ve undergone an ordeal of one sort or another and you’ve heeded Christ’s call to come to Him and find rest. Every time you think you have one fire put out, there’s another one that blazes even brighter and hotter than the last. These events that you’ve experienced, as they are interpreted by God’s perfect Law, drive home the point to you that you are a sinner. You can’t avoid it. The more you reflect on what the Lord desires for you in connection with your calling of service to Him and to your neighbor, the more you see just how far you have disobeyed the Commandments, especially the first one, You shall have no other gods. Your situation in life often appears worse than if you were to come to a ruined ancient city and you were expected to make a new home out of it. If you are fully honest with yourself, you would realize that it is much too easy to let despair take over and suffer the attacks of the Devil, who wants you to deceive yourself into thinking that your heavenly Father wants nothing to do with you, which is nothing at all like the truth.

You hear today about those who rejected Jesus at Nazareth, His own hometown. But before you jump to the conclusion that, I wouldn’t reject my Savior, I would love to have Him pay me a visit; take notice that you’re not too far away from that misstep yourself. Your eagerness to pray has a frequent tendency to grow cold and possibly even die out altogether. You have reacted in anger toward those who have sinned against you, and assume the worst out of one too many misunderstandings. Your sinful nature has within you an innate resentment of familiarity against Jesus, just like His neighbors in Nazareth had. It loves to make demands of our Lord, and presume to lecture Him with the words, “Physician, heal thyself.” You may not ever form a mob and threaten to push Christ over the cliff, like they tried to do, but you certainly would have rather had Him make His proofs a little more convincing to your tastes.

Yet Jesus is most certainly that Physician that your soul needs. He came not to heal Himself, but to heal and forgive you. As you hear the words of Law that bring your sin to light and crush you down with condemnation, listen also for the Gospel liberty that Jesus earned for you once on the cross and constantly hands out to you right here in the Sacrament of the Altar. Do not dwell on the sins and faults of your past, like those people did who were listening to Ezra read from the scroll of God’s Word. For you have the same assurance that calmed their troubled hearts: the Joy of the Lord is your strength, too. It was the joy that was set before Jesus that led Him to the cross, despising its shame, and once He accomplished your ultimate rescue, He ascended into heaven and sat down at the right hand of the Father, claiming the same authority as at the time when He sat down in Nazareth’s synagogue to preach and proclaim: Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

Be an attentive and diligent hearer of the preaching and teaching of the Word of God—not to glean some helpful hints for making your life better or more successful in this life, but rather to receive the good news that your Jesus has intended for the poor in spirit. If you honestly acknowledge that without your Savior you have nothing in you that is pleasing to God, then in His Name the certain absolution of the Lord’s favor is yours forever. You don’t have to make your works into something holy, or churchly and pleasing to God—since you have Jesus, your works of your particular God-given calling are already that way. As impossible as it may seem, with the aid and comfort of the Holy Spirit, you can build up a wall of spiritual defense against all who would try to harm your faith. You may feel at times that you are far away from what is familiar and comfortable as you face the trials and crosses of life, but even in a spiritually distant culture like we have these days, it’s still true: you belong to the Church, the holy people of God, who by faith in Christ, inhabit already now the real Promised Land of His eternal kingdom.

In the Name of the Father and of the ✝ Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Readings:
Neh. 8:1–3, 5–6, 8–10 And Ezra opened the book
Psalm 19:1–14 The heavens declare the glory of God
1 Cor. 12:12–31a by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body
Luke 4:16–30 proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD…Today this Scripture is fulfilled