Restored and Re-Storied: Finding Ourselves in Scripture

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on The Third Sunday After the Epiphany by the Rev. Holly Huff, Deacon.

When we think of Scripture, the American Christian imagination often defaults to a post-Enlightenment, post-Reformation image of a lone individual reading from the Bible by themselves, perhaps by candlelight, pulling themselves up to heaven by their bootstraps. It’s a religious picture, I suppose, but one without much grace—you have to save yourself, mainly by having the right thoughts about God. 

But Scripture is not the individual’s story, it is the story of God’s people, all of us together. Scripture is the story of God’s people and so it is always to be read and understood and interpreted as a people, in community. Our readings for today offer us lessons in how to read Scripture, and just as important or moreso, lessons in how Scripture reads us: how Scripture remembers us as a people beloved of God and then sends us out to be God’s love in the world. 

The Nehemiah passage shows us particularly clearly the truth that Scripture is the story of a people. The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah which form two parts of one story take place at the end of the Babylonian exile, when the scattered people of Israel are permitted to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. And this scene we heard today follows immediately on the return of thousands of exiles returning to their home. The first thing they do is gather together to hear the book of the law. A people that was fragmented and carried off are called together to hear their story. They are re-membered, woven back together, restored as a people by being re-storied. “From early morning until mid-day, in the presence of all who could understand,” Ezra the scribe reads from Scripture, “and all the ears of the people were attentive to the book of the law.” They are listening with their whole hearts, minds, and bodies, and letting themselves be re-membered, re-storied. Shattered from the trauma of living in exile, they come to hear the story of who and whose they are, to let it wash over them and heal them. They are more than captives or slaves or strangers in a strange land—they are—we each are—children of God, members of one Body, loved with an unbreakable, indissoluble love that has called them and us into being and even now is gathering them and us up, giving them a vision, restoring our lives. “The law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul,” says Psalm 19, singing the praise of God’s restorative word.

So they gather, they attend to the Word, they hear the story and know it to be their story. The teachers interpret what is read, and they give it some sense—no member of this community is left to flounder alone wondering what this means but they are supported in hearing God’s word, because God wants to be known. Though transcendent and beyond our rational capacity, God does not hide away in darkness or confusion but reveals Godself, because God wants us to experience the healing, strengthening joy of being known by God, which of course we already are. 

And then, having heard the story and heard it interpreted, the gathered people respond. They respond in praise and worship, lifting up their hands, saying “Amen, amen.” Scripture calls a response out of us, not just a mental engagement with words on a page but a response with our whole life and our whole being. And the pattern that response takes in this passage should sound a little familiar, because it sounds a lot like the pattern we live each Sunday ourselves. Having heard the Word proclaimed and preached, the people who are exiles no more are called to a feast. They eat the fat and drink sweet wine. This should be ringing Eucharistic bells! They eat the fat and drink sweet wine, and then—just as we are fed at the table then sent out from the church to love and serve the Lord by loving and serving our neighbor—they are sent out, taking rich food and sumptuous wine with them to bring the feast to others. This is Christian life in community: we gather as a people, we listen, we hear the story, we know ourselves to be remembered around the Lord’s table, we are fed and blessed and then sent out to be that love for others. 

Scripture shows us that we are indeed meant to be a people, that we are united with each other and with all of God’s creation and called to live into that unity in love. We depend on each other, we need each other. The passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is a hymn exulting in the Body of Christ. “Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free [and here we can add black or white, Democrat or Republican, gay or straight, male female or beyond all of these binaries]—we were all baptized into one body and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” And that one Body, to which we all belong, is made up of all different kinds of members, all different people like instruments in an orchestra, each playing their part and utterly necessary. Paul identifies two main tendencies in us to habitually deny this unity in Christ, two subtle ways we undercut the body and try to go it alone. We tell ourselves we don’t belong to the Body, and then we turn on others and say they don’t belong, either. 

It’s worth spending some time seeing how these patterns come up within ourselves. Notice which way you may tend toward more frequently, and notice how that constricted habit of cutting yourself out of the body or cutting other people out of the body manifests in the day-to-day. Over and over our actions say, “I do not belong to the Body,” or “I have no need of you.” We can notice this not in the spirit of shaming or self-castigation—that’s just another way of rejecting ourselves and saying we don’t belong. Like Nehemiah says, we don’t need to weep and wail when we see the ways we’ve fallen short on our own; we all do. Guilt is after all still about us, still centered on our suffocating story of small and lonely independence. Instead, yes, noticing the ways we fall short, we can forget ourselves and find our joy in the strength of the Lord. We can get back to the holy business of bringing the banquet feast to every person we encounter, showing them the love God has for them by the way we are with them. 

And I think what we will find, what we will find is the experiential truth that we have all been baptized in one Body. There is a place here for each of us. I learn this over and over: I am needed, I belong here, God has placed me in this Body just as I am, and it is good and holy and blessed that God has made us all in a vast and various rainbow array, many members with many gifts, just as the Spirit gives them each to each. Even when it is our tendency to cast ourselves out, to self-impose an exile, rejecting ourselves before others can reject us, saying “I don’t belong because I am not fill-in-the-blank,” we are still part of the Body of Christ. And, from the other side, there is the corresponding rejection of others, when we look at those we see as weak and dishonorable part of the Body and say, “I have no need of you.” There is a man I pass walking each day. Life lays heavy on his face. He sleeps on the parking strip on 100 East and usually curses at my dog as I go by—and days when I am distracted or carried off, I find myself thinking, unfeeling, “I have no need of you.” But no, the Body has need of all its members and those whom the world has scorned and mistreated and cast aside like human refuse must be clothed in special honor. 

In adult formation right now we are looking at liberation theology texts during the season of Epiphany, recalling that God has a heart for the poor, that as Oscar Romero says God is revealed in the face of the crucified poor. Jesus takes special care with those the world has forgotten: the marginalized, the oppressed, the captives and exiles. Jesus is our embodiment of what love looks like in human form. He shows us the human face of God. The radiant light of the world shines from his face to illumine our own and give us eyes to see. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus reads from the book of Isaiah in the synagogue, and this passage along with the Beatitudes is a programmatic statement about what God in Christ is up to through the Holy Spirit:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

Jesus brings good news to the poor, and it is good to hear multiple layers in that word here. To understand that no matter how outwardly successful we may be, no matter the trappings of self-reliance we carry, we are all poor. Our baseline is dependence on God and each other. It is not good to be alone, and we were made to live in love, to live in community adorned by justice and peace, remembered and reconciled into the one Body. And so the gospel is an invitation to become poor and receive the good news, to stop defending ourselves with illusions of power, safety, and control and come to Jesus empty-handed, as a little child, without bag or staff, depending on God for our daily bread and our daily breath, living by each Word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. In that sense it is a grace to accept that we are all poor, and never as rich as when we surrender everything to God and stand in solidarity with the poor as Christ did.

And Jesus’s reading of Isaiah in the synagogue has also a specific meaning for the materially poor, the last, the lost and left behind in this world. “Those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.” We belong to each other. Jesus is drawing us to himself and therefore together, calling us out of exile and out of self-enclosure, remembering us, restoring and restorying us, knitting us together in love, feeding us. And then of course sending us out, to bring rich foods and sweet wine to all the world which is after all God’s own Beloved Body.