Sermon – January 24, 2010: From the Book
Sermon for Sunday, January 24, 2010 First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
From the Book
Psalm 19; Nehemiah 8: 1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Luke 4: 14-21
Tibetan Buddhism seems to have confidence in blessing being able to be
transmitted by movement. Prayer wheels and prayer flags alike have symbols and brief
traditional blessings copied onto them–sometimes the same short prayer copied multiple
times. Spinning the wheel or having the flag flutter in the wind imbue the surrounding
creation with the blessing available from the inscribed prayers, and such prayers are as
effective as if they were spoken aloud. Wheels which are set to be turned by a stream of
water, like the prayer flags themselves, generate good spiritual energy from the traditional
symbols and words being rotated by natural force. All a worshiper has to do is set the
prayers in place to be turned, and it doesn’t matter that it is wind or water which does the
work. In fact, both wind and water serve as means to carry the good emanations out to the
world around them.
This mechanizing of prayer isn’t too far from the use of a rosary, another kind of circuit
of prayer. Like the Roman Catholic aid to prayer, it puts stock in ritual repetition and
conceives of prayer not as self-expression but as participation in recognized religious
routine. Personal devotion and willing submission to the divine is implicit in offering such
prayers. Perhaps related to rote prayers and making prayer as automatic as possible is
the tendency, shared by Catholicism and Buddhism, to aspire to prayers of silent
attentiveness, and to express religion more by avoiding language than by using it.
The world has gotten smaller for the last few centuries, and cross-pollination of
customs and at least cursory acquaintance with the most remote practices accelerates all the
time. Still, prayers worked by flags or water power are foreign to us, and though
Christianity has a component of the kind of contemplative prayer which seeks to empty the
consciousness before God, and which therefore wills away words, the dominant character of
Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity, is that it is a religion of words. It is a religion,
like Judaism and Islam, of the Book. Jesus himself, in the gospel of John, is conceived as
The Word of God.
Psalm 19, attributed to David, identifies the discernible sense of the visible heavens
with the sense made by language. Days give “speech” and nights “declare knowledge.”
It both is and isn’t identical with what we know as language. There is no speech, there are
no words– yet there are. Though we don’t hear the sky telling us of order and purpose, the
message comes through just the same. Right after saying that speaking of the message of
the heavens in terms of language is a metaphor, David returns to the theme–”yet their
voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.”
This is the first half of the psalm, the psalm extolling the evident intelligence behind
the creation, which reflects so majestically the glory of God. This is setting up something
even more wonderful: that human beings have been told what God’s wisdom and will and
purpose are for us. The language intuited in the wheeling of the heavens is translated onto
tablets delivered by Moses, the laws of the cosmos have their counterpart in a law decreed
for you and me. By God’s grace, and this concession of sharing God’s mind with us, again,
through words–through writing, and our power to read– we are offered a way to make our
lives as harmonious and heaven-inspired as the alternation of night and day.
Knowing God through scripture–sacred writing– is not only part of western religion,
or the so-called historical religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but it is emphatically
part of our tradition, and especially of the branch of Christianity of which we are a part.
Before this church was remodeled in 1963, it always had had a central pulpit, the point of
which was that reading the Bible and preaching from it were the centerpiece of the faith. The
equipment for worship, convenient to every seat, are a Bible and a hymnal.
The founding of schools and colleges in this country was initially exclusively the
province of Protestant churches, preparing both their clergy and their people for the
business of knowing and serving God. Literacy was advantageous for many things but the
first advantage sought was the opportunity to meet God in scripture.
The Bible had so much to do with personal and national identity that, despite the
separation of church and state wisely engineered by Baptists, the Bible continued to be a
fixture in the courtroom, and for centuries in the classroom. Family Bibles were the place of
record for marriages, births, and deaths, elegant hands copying into pages provided by the
Bible-binders the personal genealogy of this household or that among the Bible’s own
elaborate succession of generations.
Knowing oneself by the book, coming by one’s identity through reading oneself into
scripture, always has been part of Judaism. The passage we have from Nehemiah today
is part of the restoration of Jerusalem after a period of neglect and exploitation following its
conquest by Babylon. The Persians conquer Babylon in turn, and so become the new
overlords, and sympathetic to their Jewish subjects, they permit Nehemiah to return and
rebuild Jerusalem.
Once the walls and gates have been rebuilt, and some reforms have been made to
relieve the suffering of the poor, Nehemiah and the scribe Ezra have everyone hear the
reading of the Law. It is a highly organized process, and includes interpretation offered by
various scribes, and it takes all day. The first response of the people is shame and sorrow.
They haven’t lived up to the covenant God made with their ancestors and with them. Not
being able to recognize themselves in the relationship described by scripture is a crisis for
them, but Ezra and Nehemiah assure them it is a good crisis. It is inevitable, after long
disuse, for them to have forgotten who it is God made them to be– but now they do know,
because the word of God has come to them, so it is not an occasion for tears but for
rejoicing, and for feasting.
In Luke’s gospel Jesus is announced by John the Baptist, and by his baptism, and
by a voice from heaven at his baptism. All the gospels have that. In Luke Jesus also
announces himself, and it is in the reading we have this morning. Jesus goes to the
synagogue, and the book of Isaiah is given to him, and he finds in it this passage, which in
our Bibles is Isaiah 61: 1 and 2: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has
anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the
captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to
proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” Jesus reads this, and then hands it back to the
attendant, and sits down. Everyone looks at him. The eyes of everyone are fixed on him.
And he begins to say, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
There’s resistance on the part of his fellow worshipers. This wonderful proclamation
goes sour; but that part is not in our scripture today and that’s not what I want to emphasize.
I want to talk about Jesus saying that the scripture is fulfilled that day in their hearing. One
way to hear that is to think of Isaiah’s words as a prophecy with only one true meaning,
which gets read and wondered about for generations until Jesus reads it and says it’s about
him. That’s often how fulfilled prophecy is meant to be understood in the gospels, and so I
don’t want to say that’s a wrong understanding.
But I do want to encourage a different reading. I want us to remember that Jesus
belongs to a people of the Book. Like David, he understands the word of God as the
expressed wisdom of God for rightly ordering human existence, equivalent to the way
God has wisely ordered creation. Like the residents of Jerusalem in the time of Nehemiah
and Ezra, he knows the reading of scripture is always about him, about who he should be,
about how God sees him. Perhaps he is not presuming that no other Jew ever heard that
scripture and felt called to claim the identity of God’s servant for himself or herself. Perhaps
he understood that every Jew was called by God to wrestle with the description of what it
is to work alongside God, what it is to work for God’s priorities in the world. Maybe these
words about love and encouragement and liberation and healing aren’t exclusive, aren’t to
be applied only once. They may always speak from the text of scripture to the human
heart which is willing to hear.
Jesus is willing to hear. Jesus, like his forebears in Nehemiah’s day, knows that the
project of rebuilding God’s people is a matter of persons of God hearing the word and
identifying with it. The truth of the scriptures is not in their being compared to contemporary
annals or records recovered from stone, not in their being weighed against how we now
measure what may happen. Scripture lifts its voice about the way and will of a good and
loving God, and those who desire to be true respond to it. Finding the right text, Jesus
finds himself, and sharing the right scripture, Jesus reveals himself. Luke tells us this story
not only to tell us who Jesus is. This now is scripture; reading it, and reading ourselves into
it, are offered to us as a way to approach Jesus, not only as witnesses but as disciples.
The story gives us a way to identify ourselves and respond to God’s call alongside Christ.
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