Third Sunday of Epiphany
Reading with Love
The Rev’d Devin McLachlan
Nehemiah 8.1-3, 5-6, 8-10
Luke 4.14-21
Do you remember your first bible? I remember mine; I still have it. A little, leather-bound King James bible, with the words of Jesus in red. It was a gift from Salina Dugger, the woman who raised me while my parents were working. She gave that bible to me when I was six, after I showed her the pile of pennies I’d won when my father and his friends taught me to play poker.
I’d always gone to church with my family, but I’d never had a bible of my own. And while I’m afraid I wasn’t completely dissuaded from five-card stud, I learned that day that there was a connection between the words I heard on a Sunday morning, and the way God wanted me to live my life.
It is an amazing scene in our first reading:For the span of an entire generation, the Jewish people have been scattered by empire and war, their religious and political leaders taken into captivity in Babylon. They have only just been allowed back to that once-beautiful city, Jerusalem, and she still bore the scars of her destruction seventy years ago – broken buildings, soot-blackened walls.
But midway through the work, Nehemiah gathers everyone together to rebuild something far more important than stone walls and gates – to rebuild the faith of a broken people. He had been tasked only with rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, but Nehemiah know that walls don’t create, preserve, or grow a society. And so the Ezrah stood at the Water Gate, reading from the scroll of the Torah —perhaps not unlike the Torah scroll many of us saw on Monday at Cong. Beth Shalom: “They read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.”[1]
Ezrah knew that there needed to be community, prayer, interpretation and sense, that just reciting the words of Torah wasn’t going to magically change the people. A collection of books, written in several languages by people of several different cultures, over a period of more than a thousand years, the Bible has always been complicated and occasionally dangerous.
The texts of the Bible itself make no claim to its own perfection. Holy Scripture teaches, corrects, trains, builds up, a joy and a delight to the heart, but it is never an object of worship, never to be confused with God. Bibliolatry is the technical word we’re looking for, for such a sin. Scripture must not be an idol. and we do. not. worship it. The purpose of the Bible isn’t as an object of devotion. The purpose of the Bible is to point us to right devotion.
And there is no devotion to God unless we love our neighbour as ourselves, showing mercy and love. The Prophet Micah puts it succinctly, the line from revelation to justice: “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”[2]
I suspect that’s something that Mr Trump, and Christian nationalists closer to home here in Britain, have oft forgotten. We may wave a bible about for a photo op, we might even quote a verse or two. But as we know from Jesus’ trials in the desert, even the Devil can quote scripture. Unless justice, mercy, and humility precede and follow our reading of Scripture, we do God’s words great disrespect and disservice.
“May God grant us all,” prayed Bishop Budde at the end of her sermon before President Trump, “May God grant us all the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, speak the truth in love, and walk humbly with one another and our God…”
The strength of the Bible isn’t in making us feel better than everyone else.The strength of the Bible is how it protects the weak and the vulnerable. The wisdom of the Bible isn’t how cleverly we can whip out aphorisms; but how it makes us fools for Christ. The truth of the Bible isn’t in shallow, literalist reading, but in how sharing and interpreting scripture can build up a people.
Nehemiah used the knowledge of Scripture to build a city, to build up a city of refugees and exiles, to forge a people from a diaspora. Jesus used the knowledge of Scripture to tear down walls, breaking down walls of shame and illness and oppression, lifting up a new people, even as he was broken and lifted up.
And that good work —that good work continues in you. Which is why this isn’t a sermon about American politics. It is about you and me. Because the Spirit of the Lord is upon you, since the moment of your baptism, when you were commissioned by God to bear that good news into the world – proclaiming the justice, the mercy, the love of God.
Love that is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude, that does not insist on its own way — and there’s a new hermeneutic for reading scripture! — Love that rejoices in the truth, to bear, believe, hope and endure all things.[3]
By your baptism, you have been anointed to bring good news to the poor.God has sent you to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind. God has sent you to set the oppressed free, To declare the year of God’s favour.
It’s a big ask. But that’s why we’re here. That’s why we come to this place to be fed by scripture and sacrament: So that we might first see Scripture fulfilled in our hearing and in our hearts. Where is the poverty in your own heart – hungry for good news? What in your mind has been taken captive by fear, by doubt, by exhaustion? From what blindness do you need to recover from, and from what do you want Jesus to set you free?
Start there, and do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.[4] Start there, knowing that the stars themselves are telling the glory of God, and that today, among exiles and refugees and outcasts and sinners, through all the tumult and the strife, today the Scripture is being filled in our hearing.[5]
[1] Nehemiah 8.8
[2] Micah 6.8, KJV translation
[3] cf 1 Corinthians 13.4-7
[4] cf. Nehemiah 8.10
[5] cf Luke 4.12