Restoration and Rejuvenation

Sermon manuscript by Gregory Kaurin, pastor

for Messiah Lutheran Church, Auburn WA

1/24/2010, 3^rd Sunday after the Epiphany

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 & Luke 4:14-21

“Restoration and Rejuvenation”

Today, we’re looking at “Restoration and Rejuvenation” starting with restoration, putting something back in place, or where it belongs. In life, whether you’ve been knocked down, or you find yourself in a rut, dragging, what do you need to get going again? Eh? a bit of restoration, right. Every person, and I would dare say, every church needs a bit of restoration.

To put it in sacramental terms, Jesus once told Peter, “One who has already bathed” [been baptized] “does not need to bathe again… except for the? …feet.” We are the baptized children of God, but as we walk through life, do our feet get dirty? We need refreshment. We need to take off and lay down our burdens, hike up our robes a little, humble ourselves, and confess our sins, and let them go, in order to receive refreshment: remember God’s faithfulness and our forgiveness, remember that Christ gave himself for this, for us, take in the refreshment of his Presence, and his Holy Meal. That’s restoration.

In the first lesson from Nehemiah, the 70-year exile had come to an end. The Israelites were being allowed to return to the Holy Land. You would think, after all that time and longing that they would’ve rushed back, rebuilt the Temple, reestablished their worship…but it’s not that easy. Ask anyone who’s been stuck, in a hard life, or in captivity, how easy is it to jump back into life? What if, like most of the exiles, you’ve never known anything else?

But they did come back, and slowly the Temple and Jerusalem’s walls were rebuilt. The structures were being put in place. It was starting to have the look. But something deep and important was still missing: the feel, the realness, the relationship between God and his people. They had the things, but were missing and longing for a sense that they had really come back…and that God was still there.

So at the start of the seventh month, what they would have considered the beginning of a new year, Nehemiah their religious governor, and Ezra the chief scribe gathered the people at the Water Gate, southeast of the Temple grounds. That’s worth knowing, because the Water Gate (this was long before it was the name of some scandal) the Water Gate led into a non-sacred place outside and surrounding the Temple walls where anyone could go. Men, women and children could come and take part, foreigners and ritually unclean people. It was neutral space.

And it was here at the peoples’ request that Ezra and Nehemiah gathered them together to simply listen to Ezra read from the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, from early in the morning into the afternoon, but it was more than just reading. Verse 8 tells us he read passages, translated them, and gave the sense, the meaning and application. What would that be? Preaching. But he had help, verse 7 which we jumped over, lists 13 other Levitical priests who helped him explain the text and meanings to the people around them.

And finally as they neared the end of the day, the people were in tears. You might think that they were just tired and sore from such a long service, but it was more. This wasn’t a preacher forcing or shoving God’s teaching down on them. Remember, all this was at the peoples’ request. They wanted to be taught by God; they knew their longing, that they needed some kind of restatement, restoration of the Laws and the Covenant. And there were priests among them, even breaking up into small groups to understand better, hearing and wrestling with the scriptures and their meaning together.

As it sunk in deeply, the people sensed their distance from God that longing and began to weep, but Ezra immediately turned it around at the close of the day. This was a new beginning, a time of renewed intimacy with God. God's Torah was a wedding band. It gave them God’s commitment to them, and a way forward for them to re-grow that relationship. Ezra tells them to go home and feast in celebration with God, to leave their tears of separation there at the Water Gate knowing that the day was sacred, meaning that God had come, the Spirit of God had come and moved them through the reading of God’s word, the translation, the message, and the sharing. And the story goes on to tell that this pattern continued in the large and smaller groups for seven straight days. Family groups started camping nearby, and each night finished with celebration. The Feast of Shelters had returned. You can hear them singing, “We have been restored.”

With the Law comes honest tears, but that only means that the false supports we use start to fall away. Self-preservation…doesn’t work. Lying to ourselves and others catches up. Feeding the emptiness with things, food, conquests, sex, alcohol, friends only leaves us hungry, and leaves others hurt along the way. Lots of experiences, rituals, philosophies, mountains, arts of war, business and spiritual notions can fool us for awhile, but they are all missing something. The honesty of the cross, our separation from God, our failure and betrayal to be anything resembling what that title implies: child of God. That is how it starts, real restoration. In order to stand up tall and restored, the cobwebs and rubble of our life need to be uncovered and cleared once again.

Yesterday, I stopped in at the 24-Hour Fitness place here on N Auburn Way, and finally signed myself up. Now, normally, I like to get into things like that with as little help as possible, and pretend like I know what I’m doing. Duck in, duck out, be done. But it’s not as easy as that anymore. I’m starting to learn, slowly, and my doctors and creaking knee are all teaching me, that maybe I need to do things right, with a little more humility and consultation. So, I’ll be meeting with a trainer. I expect there needs to be more honesty about my diet, and painful kinks to work out, and probably some tears. Restoration isn’t about going back to the old days; they’re gone. It is an honest look at what I bring into it, and what I have to let go of, in order to move forward from here with what I have.

As you look for restoration, God’s Spirit does his best, most lasting work—building, strengthening, and feeding us—in community. Every Sunday you can: worship, listen to preaching, but in small groups, or pairs, you can go even deeper. It’s more, much more than Biblical knowledge, that’s like the structure and buildings of the Temple grounds. What we need are relationships built on honest words, from people who are here to help each other stand or to get back up. Restoration, by confession and trusting Christ’s forgiveness, we are restored.

Jumping from that point, “rejuvenation” is easy to talk about. Here’s what Jesus said in our gospel reading from Isaiah: ¹⁸"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, ¹⁹to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Then Jesus rolled up the scroll, sat down in the preacher’s chair and said in one of the shortest sermons of all time, “Today, these words are fulfilled, even as you heard them.” In other words, whatever you sense that you’ve lost, or never had, whatever emptiness or darkness or captivity seems to hold power over you, is nothing compared to the good news of Jesus Christ’s salvation and relationship, by grace through faith. The Kingdom has come.

Jesus wasn’t just talking about the miracles he was performing on people. He was talking about a new way of living, rejuvenated, as if young again. In our case, as if filled with the eternal life of God, with a joy that cannot be contained by any real or imagined prison, with knowledge and insight that lets me see beyond the surfaces of life.

A month or so ago, I got a kick out of listening to my 70-some-year-old dad telling me about his recent adventure riding down a zip line near Glacier Park. I understand getting up there was a bit of a climb and struggle for him, but he hardly remembers that now. When I talked with him on the phone, I could hear Dad’s grin in his voice. It’s hard for Dad to tell me exactly how it felt, and makes him feel to think on it. Instead, he has told me more than once, “We’ve got to get you up there, Greg. You need to try this.”

I’ve stood by a bed-ridden woman dying of several diseases who had a joy that nearly jumped up and grabbed me every time I visited her, an easy joyful laugh in the midst of her pain. She was at the same time a very wise old lady, and a happy little girl, because she knew who she was, because she knew whose she was.

I watch my boys skipping across the carpet here at church, and it makes my heart do the same, everytime. Or, when Pauline holds my hand, and I’m taken back. But beyond these lovely sights and feelings, I am held by my God with an even greater love. And knowing that I’ve been saved and forgiven, Jesus laughs and calls me to skip with him. To be young in heart, always.

I know it’s a dance. Sometimes we’re more down than up, and our joys can feel damp from the rain and storms we go through. That’s why we’re here, together. That’s why we meet in smaller groups, in classrooms or at Trotters or in each others’ homes. That’s why we make phone calls, or send texts or emails. As members of Christ’s body, and each individually a part of it, we matter to each other and to God, and together we’ll get this ramshackle Body up the mountain, And we can already feel the joy and giddiness knowing that we walk with Christ and there is an amazing zip-line ride into eternity at the end.

So, we turn to others, and I pray they can hear the joy, and youth, and love in us, as we tell them, “We’ve got to get you up there, too! You need to come and try this!”