The Third Sunday After the Epiphany
January 21, 2007
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Luke 4:14-21
“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.”
These words from Psalm 19 are always with me when I prepare a sermon. And especially when I preach it. Because I know if the words of my mouth reflect the meditation of my heart, and the meditation of my heart is with God, then the words of my sermon are more likely to be the words God would have me speak when I move into this pulpit. And yet, I can never know for sure that they are. All I can know is that if I have done my homework and said my prayers, that I am giving the best that I have to God and to you. And like the psalmist I always hope that this will be, at the very least, acceptable.
But what does the psalmist mean by “acceptable”? What does the psalmist wish for when he hopes that the words of his mouth and the meditation of his heart will be acceptable to God. It would seem that in modern times the word “acceptable” has come to have a somewhat different meaning than it did for the psalmist. We are inclined to think something which is acceptable to us is also agreeable to us. And what is agreeable to us is also something we approve of. But I think it is dangerous to read or hear the psalmist’s words, or any other words of scripture, with the view that they must be agreeable—to us or to God—even more that somehow we have to approve of them. It is dangerous because acceptability becomes a judgment of the words someone speaks based on whether they are agreeable to us or whether we approve of them, when, in fact, in ancient times accepting such words and meditations was a simple matter of being willing to receive them. Being able to take them into our hearing and understanding. The psalmist hopes that the words of his mouth and the meditation of his heart will be acceptable to God, because he is not God. And because he is not God, he cannot presume that his words or meditations will be worthy of God, because they are mere human attempts to communicate with God. That is why we are likely to begin the prayers we pray to God with words like “gracious God,” or “loving God” or even more common, “Dear God.” Our human attempt to communicate with our Divine Creator begins with an acknowledgment that the words we pray and the meditation of our heart will never be worthy of God. But we know that the words of our mouth and the meditation of our heart are always acceptable to a God who is dear, a God who is loving and a God who is gracious. He will hear our words as we say them and he will understand them as we mean them because God’s ultimate hope is that we will communicate with him. God wants us to tell him exactly what we are thinking and feeling. Because in the end our divine God wants his human creatures to meet him in a place where human and divine thought and feeling and knowing come together in ways which can change us, even transform us to become the people God yearns for us to be.
This relationship God wants to have with us is no different from the relationships we yearn to have in our families, in our friendships and in all the communities we belong to. We want the words of our mouth to reflect the real thoughts and feelings we have. We want people to listen to us, not just to our words; we want them to listen to our hearts. We want them to understand us. And so we try to express our thoughts and feelings in ways that we hope will be acceptable to others. In ways that they will receive them, take them into their own minds and hearts, and understand them for what they are. But this is difficult for human beings to do. It is difficult because more often than not we will only listen to another persons thoughts and feelings when they are agreeable to us; or if we approve of them; or when we can receive them and take them in the way WE want to hear and understand them. That is because unlike God, we are not good listeners. We will not even hear the words spoken by another if they challenge us or bore us, or if they simply just don’t matter to us. And when we are not willing to listen, really listen to each other’s thoughts and feelings, we will not begin to know or understand each other or to feel each other’s joy or pain. This human deficiency is a consequence of sin, I believe. Because if sin is what separates us from God and from each other, then the inability to pay attention to each other, to really hear and listen and understand and feel what another person is communicating to us is an example of the sin of separation.
The sin of separation is a costly sin, in so many ways. Our deficiencies in communicating with each other have created a market for self help books, and college courses and seminars on the art of communicating effectively. I remember taking several courses in college and attending workshops in my church and community on issues centered around communication. I remember being told that human beings need to be taught how to listen, because we have lost our ability and desire to truly hear the words which come from another person’s mouth, and to truly seek to understand the meditation of their heart. I remember one of the first exercises I encountered for becoming a good listener. It was an exercise in the discipline of paying attention. The moderator of the group set one ground rule for the lively discussion we were about to participate in. Before we could tell the group what we were thinking, we had to repeat verbatim the words said by the person who spoke before us. And if we got any of it wrong we were not allowed to take our turn to speak. For as easy as that seemed to me at the time, it was a difficult rule to follow. But how important the lesson was for us. Because when you think about it, we cannot receive the words of one’s mouth or the meditation of one’s heart, no less take them in to our own mind and heart if we are not even willing or able to hear them. If we are only thinking of our own thoughts or arguing in our own mind with what a person is saying. I have come to the opinion that our prayer life can be much the same. While we can be certain God will hear and take in the words of our prayers and the feelings of our heart, we are not so inclined to listen for God’s response to us. Because we already know what we want it to be, or we would rather argue with what God is saying to us instead of receiving and taking in what we hear.
That brings me to our lesson from Nehemiah and our Gospel lesson. Both are based on public readings of scripture; scripture which was believed to be the word of God come from the meditation of his own heart. Prophets and sages wrote the words of scripture out of the meditations of their own hearts so that God’s people might receive them and take them into their own minds and hearts. The acceptability of God’s word was not dependent on modern day terms of acceptability. All the words of scripture were acceptable not because the people hearing them agreed with them or approved of them; they were received and taken in because they were God’s way of communicating with us. And if we were to hear and understand what he had to say, we had to put aside our own thoughts and feelings and open our minds and hearts to hear what he had to say.
The public hearing of scripture read by Ezra in our Hebrew scriptures and by Jesus in our Gospel lesson serve to illustrate the importance of receiving and taking in the words of God’s mouth and the meditation of God’s heart. In both situations public readings of scripture take place to bring faith communities together for the purpose of hearing and understanding God’s word in a new way. Both accounts show us how eager and how prepared people are to hear the word of God, but only one community of faith is willing to receive that word and take it into their own heart to know God’s purpose for them. In the lesson from Nehemiah, it is clear that the people who have returned to Jerusalem from their captivity in Babylon want to hear God’s word. They know their need of it. They have returned to a city devastated by the ravages of war and by neglect. They do not have a home and they do not have a vital and viable community to live in. The people turn to the only thing they know will help them build that community and that city. They turn to Ezra, their priest, and they ask him to read the book of the Law of Moses. Nehemiah tells us that “all who could hear and have understanding” assembled in the square to hear the reading that day. And when Ezra opened the book he saw that “the ears of all were attentive to the book of the law.” When he began to read, the people stood up to honor the one whose words and meditations would be spoken from that book, and by the end of the day people were bowing in prayer and weeping in gratitude for what they had heard and felt and believed from God’s word. Nehemiah tells us why they had such a response. “The people understood the reading,” he said. And that changed them. They found the strength and joy they needed to do the work God had given them to do to rebuild their city and their community of faith.
In our Gospel account, Jesus has returned to his hometown in Nazareth to inaugurate his ministry. He has become something of a local legend because of the good report many have received about him. So Jesus goes to worship at the synagogue on this Sabbath day and he is handed the scroll of the book of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolls the scroll until he finds the passage he wants and he stands up to read that famous passage which declares him to be the One who has come to fulfill the scripture they have heard. But there is so much more the people hear in that declaration, for the scripture passage itself says much about how and why Jesus has come to fulfill it. He has come to bring the good news, not to the people who believe they already have it, but to those whom God favors because of their need of the good news. Well, you can imagine how Jesus’ reading of this scripture and his self-declaration were received. We are told, “The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.” The people were undoubtedly stunned by what they heard, and even more stunned by what they understood Jesus to be saying. We know how the story moves on from here. Jesus is chased from his hometown by a crowd who has become angry by what they have heard and understood to be Jesus’ message. And as I indicated in my sermon last week, the first events which inaugurate Jesus’ ministry in each of the gospels is meant to tell us something important right away about who Jesus is and what his ministry will be in a given community. What we learn from this first account in Luke’s Gospel is that Jesus’ message will be rejected by the people thought to be most likely to hear it and understand it. People who have been given ears to hear it, minds to understand it and hearts to feel its power and truth. But the people assembled for worship that day will not receive what is being said. They will not accept a message which challenges their own beliefs and expectations about who God is and who the Messiah will be that God will send to deliver them. So Luke will take Jesus’ Gospel to the gentiles. To people hungry to hear the good news, eager to open their ears to hear it, their minds to understand it, and their hearts to grow in it.
So where we find ourselves in these scripture lessons today? Where are our ears and minds and hearts when we hear the scriptures read to us on any given Sunday? How attentive are we to hearing them; how mindful are we of understanding them; how open are our hearts to feeling their power in us. A power which can change us and transform us by the new way we hear God’s word, by the new way we understand what it means for our life, and by the new strength and courage we receive for living it.
It seems to me our lesson from Isaiah and our Gospel lesson show us two ways we can respond to the acceptability of God’s word and the meditation of God’s heart as we listen to them in scripture. Like the people who gathered in the square that day to hear Ezra read the book of the law of Moses we can come open and eager to receive the words we hear and take them into our mind and heart, so that our faith remains new and our faith community vital. Or we can be like the people who gathered around Jesus at his reading of Isaiah in the synagogue. We can find God’s scriptures to be not acceptable because they are not agreeable to us; because we cannot approve of them. Consequently, we cannot and we will not be open or willing to change anything about ourselves or our life situations which is not to our liking. And there is where I believe our demise begins as a people of God and as his Church in the world.
I believe this measure of acceptability which requires agreement and approval is what makes our faith powerless and our churches stagnant. When we will not listen openly and willingly to scripture and to each other our church communities become merely clubs where membership is invited but it is closed to those we cannot agree with or approve of. Our church communities become divisive places which pits US against THEM. Our church communities take on characteristics of all the scenarios in between divisive and exclusive. And all because we are not willing to hear and receive, not willing to listen and to learn, and consequently not able to change and grow by it. So we can’t be surprised that our church communities are a reflection of all the other communities we belong to. But we should be concerned. Because God shows us a different way of communicating the words of our mouth which come out of the meditation of our heart. He shows us how and why such words must be accepted and acceptable to those who would hear them. Because we honor the God of creation in the others when we are willing to pay attention to what they have to say to us. That makes us good listeners, and good listeners build communities where people care ABOUT each other and FOR each other. We become communities of faith who pay attention to each other, and to God.
One of the desert fathers of the early Church once wrote that the greatest gift we can give another person is to pay attention. It is the best gift we can give to each other in our church, in our family, and in all the other communities we belong to. Paying attention is the best gift God gives to us, and paying attention is the best gift we can give to God. For the sake of our relationship with God and with each other, we need to pay attention. We need to listen—we who have ears to hear, minds to know and hearts to understand—we who have God, and each other.