Grace and peace to you in the name of Lord Jesus Christ.
Hear the Word of God, from Nehemiah 8.1-8:
8 And all the people gathered as one man into the square before the Water Gate. And they told Ezra the scribe to bring the Book of the Law of Moses that the Lord had commanded Israel. 2 So Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could understand what they heard, on the first day of the seventh month. 3 And he read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand. And the ears of all the people were attentive to the Book of the Law. 4 And Ezra the scribe stood on a wooden platform that they had made for the purpose. And beside him stood Mattithiah, Shema, Anaiah, Uriah, Hilkiah, and Maaseiah on his right hand, and Pedaiah, Mishael, Malchijah, Hashum, Hashbaddanah, Zechariah, and Meshullam on his left hand. 5 And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was above all the people, and as he opened it all the people stood. 6 And Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. And they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. 7 Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, the Levites, helped the people to understand the Law, while the people remained in their places. 8 They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.
I have a confession to make:
I tend to overuse exclamation points when I write! (See, I just did it again.)
I think it is because I read and collected superhero comics when I was a child. After all, you couldn’t escape them in the pages of the Avengers when the bad guys show up to battle the heroes: “Bam! Pow! Zap!” They were used constantly by the writers to make the stories more vivid and exciting.
However, exclamation marks are meant to be used only when necessary; they are not meant for ordinary emphasis, but rather are meant for extraordinary proclamation and communication. After all, life is not a series of continual exclamation points. Life is often a series of commas, apparent when the pauses in our journey seem to last forever; it is often characterized by semi-colons, used when we seek to bridge the disjointed passages of life; it is often punctuated by question marks, populating the seasons of frustration, pain, and confusion. When the exclamation points appear in life, they enable us to celebrate and communicate the extraordinary in the ordinary. However, honesty forces us to acknowledge that life leads to far more usage of the other “punctuation marks.”
Dr. Timothy Tennent, the President of Asbury Theological Seminary (of which I am I long-ago graduate) writes the following about the “punctuation of life”:
“We love to live in the exclamation marks of life, but sometimes we’re called to be faithful in the question marks of life. The exclamation mark is sure and straight, and the message is clear. A question mark is crooked and twisted, and sometimes it’s hard to see around it. Sometimes we don’t know how to interpret the times we are in. We all know what it is like to look out on what we think are the promises of God, even as we hear some declare, ‘Wow, milk and honey!’ and others, ‘Oh no, look at those giants!’ My brothers and sisters, we must learn to recognize the times we live in. We are living in one of the great seams of history -- the seam between modernity and post-modernity, the seam between Christendom and post-Christendom, the seam between a predominately Western Christianity and the emergence of a post-Western Christianity. We live in a post-communist, post-Christendom, post-denominational, post-Western, post-Enlightenment and post-modern world. We don’t even know what to call this new epoch we are entering; we just know we are ‘post’ everything we have known.”
In the Old Testament we meet Nehemiah, a man who knew what it meant to live in a “post-everything he had known” time. He faced the challenge of being faithful to God’s call in a post-Jewish land, a post-Jerusalem political landscape, a post-Temple religious structure, and a post-Mosaic Law popular perspective. He lived in a “great seam of history,” when the long night of exile in Babylon was over, the return of the Jews to their homeland was occurring, but the long-awaited Messiah was still nowhere to be seen. Jerusalem’s walls were in disrepair, its gates were no more, and its very appearance seemed to communicate the message that the Jews’ best days were behind them. Life was characterized by the hyphen perpetually attached to the term “post.” Hope must have seemed no more than the opportunity to remember a better time during the “commas” of life’s daily struggles.
Nehemiah would surely understand the world we currently inhabit as a people of faith. We have our Sanballats and Tobiahs (Nehemiah's opponents and enemies); they are simply known by different names. We live in a culture in which political, societal, and economic structures – not to mention the media/entertainment complex – seem to work at cross-purposes with the Church and stand against the Christian Gospel itself. Also, as regrettable as it is to acknowledge this reality, Nehemiah also lived in a time when even God’s people did not know their own Scriptures. They had forgotten the truth: the truth about God, the truth about God’s calling, and the truth about God’s promise. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann once noted that a prophet’s chief function is to call people to remember. They needed the prophetic “exclamation points” of calls to remembrance and renewal. As a leader of the returning Jews, Nehemiah addressed the immediate need of rebuilding Jerusalem’s walls in order to address “the trouble we are in” (Nehemiah 2.17). Chapters 1-7 of the book that bears his name tell of the difficult but ultimately successful effort to restore the walls, but that was not the only restoration needed to address the people’s trouble. In Nehemiah 8.1-8 we read that Ezra the scribe was called upon to read the Book of the Law to the people “on a wooden platform that they had made for this purpose,” for bringing the Law before “both men and women and all who could understand what they heard.” In other words, Nehemiah restored the centrality of the Word of God.
Dr. Tennent writes:
“We don’t find a list of megastars, or any 5th-century B.C. version of Christian celebrities. These are not household names, then or now. We find a list of Levites whose names you have never heard of: Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan and Pelaiah. These are Levites you’ve never heard of, but God put their names in the Bible. Listen to verse 8: ‘They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people could understand what was being read.’ This is what we need today...this is the need of the hour: men and women called to faithfully teach people the word of God in the midst of the rubble. They rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other. They understood the times they lived in.”
There can be no doubt of this: We live in a great seam of history. The Church must confront this reality. As a people of faith, we cannot turn back the forces of post-Christendom. Our walls have been torn down; our gates have been burned. Where do Christian leaders begin to rebuild? The answer is clear: we start with a return to the Bible.
We must prophetically call the Church to remembrance and renewal; the first step is to faithfully teach the people of God the Word of God once again, in the very midst of the rubble. We must address the question marks of a confused and unfocused faith community with the exclamation points of God’s emphatic Word, which always begins with remembrance of the brokenness and rubble of Calvary and the healing, hope-restoring power of an empty tomb. The Church must once again be a people of God’s Word…a people, in the words of John Wesley, “of one book.”
For far too long, Christians individually and the Church as a whole have thought that the world needed to hear what we have to say. That is simply not true: what the world needs to hear is what WE need to hear, constantly, consistently, and courageously…THE BIBLE! Thanks to social media, the world is flooded with an immense ocean of opinions; we’ve become enamored of ours, while the world has become immune to their impact. The last thing for which today’s world is looking is another opinion from a preacher, and teacher, or the Church…what will draw the attention of the world is the Spirit-driven power of the proclaimed and exclaimed Word of God. “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4.12).
If the Church is to be God’s Kingdom outpost in a post-Christendom world, its walls must be rebuilt through the pure proclamation of God’s Word. The attacks on such proclamation are as likely to come from within the Church as from outside of it; without a doubt, preachers and teachers who commit themselves to this reconstruction effort must do so with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other. But we simply must become once again “a people of one Book”…the world desperately needs us to do so, and, more importantly, Jesus emphatically calls us to do so. “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1.8).
Life does indeed have its commas, its semi-colons, and its question marks, particularly in the seams of history. The Good News is that all these punctuation marks can be understood, addressed, and transformed through the person and work of God’s ultimate exclamation point, the Word made flesh: Jesus. Preaching and teaching that is based exclusively and ultimately on the Bible in order to reveal Jesus as the ultimate Exclamation is preaching and teaching that will rebuild the walls, repair the Church, and restore the Gospel’s place in the world. The hour is late, and the world is waiting. “Let us rise up and build!”
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you always.
Amen.
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