Weeping at the Word of the Lord

Homily for Sunday, January 26, 2025
The Third Sunday After the Epiphany
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10

This morning is the only time in the Church’s three-year lectionary cycle that we hear from the book of Nehemiah.  Nehemiah and its partner book, Ezra, were written probably around the year 400BCE. They chronicle the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s Temple and the city’s walls after the exiles’ return from Babylon.  They also tell of the establishment of the recently-completed Torah as the authority for Jews in Judah.  And I want to get back to Nehemiah, but first, St. Augustine…

From the so-called notarii– who were like our modern-day court stenographers – [from the notarii] that took down his every word, we know St. Augustine to have been a dazzling public speaker.  In a culture that prized rhetoricians as much as we prize athletes, Augustine was the 4^th-centuryequivalent of Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky or – for you rugby fans – of Jonah Lomu.  Even Augustine’s opponents, upon hearing the cadence and power of Augustine’s speech, had to admit that he was“a veritable god of eloquence,” as one put it (the Manichee Secundius).  Augustine never worked from notes or memorized a previously-written text, but prepared rather by prayer and study and then spoke off the cuff.  By his on-the-spot improvisations he could hold audiences spellbound for an hour or more, one minute sweeping the crowd into an ecstatic fervor of applause, cheers and shouts, and the next have them weeping and beating their breasts in contrition (Sermo 332.4).  Augustine was so engaging that often the audience could not help but jump in and participate.  If he started to quote a scripture verse, they might begin to blurt out the rest of it, racing to see who could finish first (Sermo52.13).  If Augustine happened to refer to a man “coming to marry a foreign-born wife,” meeting a “roaring lion,” and “strangling”it, even before he could get to the name, the crowd would shout out “Samson!”  (Ennarationes in psalmos 88.1.10).  And sometimes Augustine made such compelling points that the congregation couldn’t wait to discuss and would chit-chat in small groups even while Augustine continued to preach (e.g., Tractatus inevangelium Ioannis 37.7; 19.5).

Getting back to Nehemiah…  We may wonder in this morning’s reading how “Ezra read from [the Torah] facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until mid-day” – for about six hours!  We may wonder how “the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law” as Ezra read for those six hours.  And not only were the people attentive, but the words Ezra read caused the people to answer “’Amen, Amen,’ lifting up their hands.”  And then, hearing Ezra read from the Torah, “they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground.”  And if shouts of “Amen!”and falling to the ground in worship weren’t enough, Nehemiah reports also that“all the people wept when they heard the words of the Lord.”

We all have access to the Torah.  We could easily pick up the Bible in front of us in the pews and flip through the opening 150 pages or so and see more or less the very words that Ezra read to the people for six hours on that day in the late fifth century BCE in the square before the Water Gate in Jerusalem.  And if we did so, my hunch is that we would not say “Amen, Amen” and bow our heads and worship the Lord with our faces to the ground.  Much less would we weep as we read, say, Leviticus and Numbers.  

I wonder, what accounts for the people’s strong reaction to the proclamation of God’s word as told in this morning’s reading from Nehemiah?  Perhaps Ezra was a well-trained orator like Augustine, and there was something about his person and delivery whereby he could hold people’s attention.  Maybe Ezra was, like Saint Augustine, a recognized holy man, and people were drawn to the “beauty of holiness”radiating through him.   Or perhaps – as one commentator wryly remarked about Augustine – it was true also for Ezra’s time that, “This age of interminable speeches seems to have been blessed also with a gift of interminable listening” (Van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop).

I wonder, though, if the reason the people in Nehemiah were as moved as they were by hearing Ezra read is because, though now they were back in Jerusalem with a rebuilt Temple and city walls, for many years they had known not home but exile.  Exile had changed them.  Exile had prepared the soil of their hearts to hear the Torah, not as interminable speech but as life-giving words from God.  As Deuteronomy puts it (in a passage the people would have heard that day), “[God] humbled you by letting you hunger… in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Deut 8:3).  Our experiences of exile, hunger, absence,illness and death, prepare us to appreciate the life that comes from God.  “We have to have bad news before we can hear good news,” I’ve heard it said.  God lets us yearn and hunger so that we might know that it is God who feeds and satisfies; God lets us experience exile so that we might know that our home is in God; God lets us experience absence so that our souls can better recognize God’s presence; God lets us experience illness and to see death, so that we might look to him for health and life.

If we would have God’s words come alive and cause us to say “Amen, Amen,” or cause us to lift up our hands and in worship to the Lord; or if we would be so moved as to weep when we hear the words of the Lord, perhaps we might allow ourselves to get in touch with the ways in which we might be in exile.

I will share a story…   Though I have been a life-long fan of classical music, and though I studied music in college, the large, late nineteenth-century symphonic works usually didn’t do anything for me.  Sitting through a full-length symphony used to feel interminable.  (I would rather have stood through a reading of Leviticus and Numbers!)  But ten years ago, after my mother died, when I was feeling very much in “exile,” I turned on the radio and heard the opening movement of Schumann’s Symphony #3, the “Rhennish” Symphony.  Normally when I turn on the radio and hear a major symphonic work, I endure it and wait for something else to come on that I actually like.  But that day I was seized by the music’s beauty.  “What’s different?” I wondered.   And I realized, “I have been in exile.. The soil of my heart has been prepared to hear this.”  Or so, too, for years the Virgin Mary held no interest to me.  I was happy to sing hymns about Mary on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, but that’s where my interest ended.  But after my mother died, everything changed.  Now, I understand the devotion that some have for her.  The “exile” of my mother’s death prepared the soil of my heart to hear music and to see Mary in a new light.

And so for us – as we listen to passages such as this morning’s reading from Nehemiah and hear the people shout, “Amen, Amen” and lift up their hands and bow their heads and weep as they hear the word of the Lord – if we would have the scriptures come alive for us in a similarly meaningful and life-giving way, perhaps we might allow ourselves to know and more fully experience our own places of “exile.”  Our places of exile are not merely wounds to be healed or past experiences to be forgotten; rather, God lets us “hunger” in order that we may come to know how that it is God alone who can truly “feed”and satisfy us.

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