Nehemiah 8 (selected verses)
1 all the people came together as one in the square before the Water Gate. They told Ezra the teacher of the Law to bring out the Book of the Law of Moses, which the Lord had commanded for Israel. 2 So on the first day of the seventh month Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly, which was made up of men and women and all who were able to understand. 3 He read it aloud from daybreak till noon as he faced the square before the Water Gate in the presence of the men, women and others who could understand. And all the people listened attentively to the Book of the Law.
5 Ezra opened the book. All the people could see him because he was standing above them; and as he opened it, the people all stood up. 6 Ezra praised the Lord, the great God; and all the people lifted their hands and responded, “Amen! Amen!” Then they bowed down and worshipped the Lord with their faces to the ground.
8 They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people understood what was being read.
9 Then Nehemiah the governor, Ezra the priest and teacher of the Law, and the Levites who were instructing the people said to them all, “This day is holy to the Lord your God. Do not mourn or weep.” For all the people had been weeping as they listened to the words of the Law.
Luke 4; 14 – 21
14Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. 15He taught in their synagogues, and everyone praised him. 16He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. 17The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
18"The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
19to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour."
20Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, 21and he began by saying to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."
Today I speak to you from the Church Porch.
I often look in church porches, when Jacqui and I are out walking we will call in to the local church, if there is one to be seen, and if we have not been before.
I look in the porch to see what the church is about. Who is the Vicar? What services do they have? Are they part of a Benefice, and what Diocese are they in? In our corner of the world, where Peterborough, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, and Ely Diocese all converge, it is not always obvious which Bishop hath jurisdiction.
I think more important than all this, I look to see if there are words of welcome, and if there is a statement explaining what the church is for, that is – the church building and the church community, what are they for? Explained in words that those not yet initiated into the life of the Church will understand.
More often than not I am disappointed.
Most often in Church Porches I find a Health and Safety notice, and a Safeguarding notice, and not much else. The not much else may variously include a Flower or Cleaning Rota, a notice about the Annual Parochial Church Meeting, a notice about changes to the Benefice, adverts about events to come and events long past, there may be a potted history of the building, often there are still notices about Covid regulations, and sometimes there are posters about events from other local organisations who have erroneously imagined that pinning a poster up in the local church porch is an effective way to get people to come along. These notices are usually in various states of decay, from the recently damp, to the long ago cobwebbed, to the quaintly antique.
Entering a Church Porch one might assume the church was primarily about Safeguarding and Health and Safety, this despite there often being no sign of life to safeguard or protect. Otherwise, the church would seem to be about rotas of quiet decay, and obscure labyrinthine bureaucratic procedures.
There was a time in Christendom when there may have been common assumptions about what the local church was for, but those times have gone. People get their ideas about the Church from headlines in the news media, or from misleading social media memes, or from an atheist podcast, or from Vicars in murder mystery dramas, or from the vocal and globally amplified American Conservative Evangelical movement. All of whom do a poor job of explaining who we are, and what we are about.
The most tragi-comic Notice Boards I come across are the ones at the Church Gate that display a note explaining service times are in the porch. So you walk to the porch wondering why the information couldn't be on the Church Gate, only to find the Porch gate locked, and the notice board therein just beyond squinting distance. I think if I were an Archdeacon I would carry a flame thrower to resolve such matters.
When I arrived in the Welland Foss Benefice I was pleased to see the churches had notice boards that did not wholly appal, but there is always room for improvement when time and effort allow.
So why am I in the Church Porch this morning?
Our first reading was from Nehemiah 8, it tells the story of Ezra the Priest reading the Book of the Law, that is the first five books of the Old Testament, to the assembled people of Israel. When it says, 'all the people came together as one in the square,' it means the men and women who had returned from exile in Babylon to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, and who began to re-establish that ruin as a viable city.
The returning exiles held that in the years before the Babylonian invasion Israel had not followed the ways of God, and this was the reason the nation suffered an existential defeat. They had a point, Israel, that had been united under King David, had become fractured into separate kingdoms, and separate religious and tribal identities, and this meant they were picked of piece by piece by foreign powers.
United under God they had stood, divided under gods they fell.
So Ezra reads to the returning exiles the Books of Moses to remind them who they are, and what they are about. Moses had founded the nation, he was the law giver, and the great Prophet of Israel, he had led them out of slavery in Egypt to the brink of freedom in the Promised Land, and now as they returned to that land Ezra reminded them of their history and religion. If you think identity doesn't matter in politics and religion, think again. Identity sets the compass of national life and holds us in community, without a shared identity the Babylonians of this world, the Empires of might and wealth, can capture us and send us into exile.
I wonder, what are the founding documents of our nation?
What would Ezra read to us if we had forgotten who we were?
Then from Luke 4 we heard the story of Jesus reading in the Synagogue from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. The reading is,
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour."
Luke then records just the first eight words of his sermon, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing’.
This prophecy of Isaiah addresses the returned exiles from Babylon; the return had not brought the glorious restoration they had hoped for, injustice and oppression stubbornly persisted, national liberation had been only partial, the words of Isaiah were a beacon of hope, they assured the faithful that corrupt empires eventually fall, and justice and mercy would one day be established.
Jesus applies the words of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah to himself. He is saying, this is who I am, and this is what I am about. However, it is not just that he will preach good news to the poor, proclaim freedom and recovery of sight, and release the oppressed, it is that he will do these things because he is the Lord's anointed, the long expected Christ.
Despite speaking well of him, the crowd are sceptical, they say, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”
Jesus then says, “no prophet is accepted in his home town,” and reminds them of two Old Testament stories in which Jewish prophets rejected by Israel go instead to foreigners and are accepted. This angers the crowd, Jesus is suggesting they are still making the same mistakes as their ancestors, and that God will go to the Gentiles if Israel does not listen. The crowd then turn into a mob, and attempt to throw him over a cliff. To throw someone of a cliff was usually the first stage of a stoning, it renders the victim unable to run, or to defend themselves. The religious authorities of first century Israel were not unlike the modern day Taliban. If we read on we find that Jesus walked through the crowd and away, this is not explained, it may be a miracle, the crowd may have lost heart, it may be the command and charisma of Jesus, but the whole incident does explain why Jesus did not often make such explicit claims about his mission – it would have caused violence.
Even if the Religious authorities rejected Jesus, the poor did indeed hear the good news, and fishermen, and widows, and prostitutes, and the sick, all turned to him, as did many Gentiles when the first Jewish Christians reached out to them with the good news. Out of this proclamation grew the Church; this is who we are, and what we are about, we are to continue the work of Jesus, to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour. Not that you would guess that from most church porches.
Now, the more perceptive of you will have noticed that despite what I said, I am not actually speaking to you from the Church Porch. It's not just about the porch, although that's a start. We need to be saying to the Parish who we are, and what we are about. We need to be saying this clearly, and it needs to be focused on Jesus. We should do this so that people know what we are about, and so we also have a clear idea of what we are about. I know this is not very Anglican, in the classic Anglican statement it is very hard to discern any meaning, but times have changed and we cannot expect to be understood intuitively by the wider world. We are exiles in our own land, we are prophets no longer accepted in our home town. It may even be that the expectation a Christian nation understood the identity and purpose of the Church served only to obscure the prophetic power of the good news. I hear, 'we want to get more people into church,' or, 'we want more people to help run the church,' that may draw the interest of like minded people, but is that all we are saying to the parish?
In any case, most people don't get as far as the Church porch, for most people you are the church porch, you are the place at the boundary of the sacred, the portal between the graves and this ancient house of the living God. Does your Christian life display a mass of decaying notices and cobwebbed officialdom to the passing world? What outward sign is there that you are a follower of Christ? That within the temple of our bodies dwells the Holy Spirit of God?
Knowing in Christ who you are, and what you are about, is a compass that will direct your steps to eternal life in this world and the next; and knowing who Jesus is, and who that makes us, will hold the Church together in this foreign land.
Amen.
Comments