Homily: 3rd Sunday OT, Jan 27 2013

It’s hard to imagine the drama behind our first reading. The children of Israel have returned from a long exile. The Babylonians had conquered them utterly, and forcibly relocated them to various parts of the empire. It was about assimilation: a way to preserve the services and productivity of the conquered people, while at the same time destroying their culture and heritage.

So the vast majority of the people of Israel, called and chosen by God to be a light to the nations, disappeared into the wider culture, absorbed into their surroundings. They weren’t killed in a glorious last stand, they weren’t martyred as witnesses to the Lord their God, but just sort of absorbed. To plunder Eliot, you could say Israel ended ‘not with a bang but a whimper.’ The Temple smashed, the homes in decay, the paths untended, the gardens overgrown. And the people, scattered, absorbed, melted away into the background.

Except they didn’t, quite. They almost did. But there remained something so fragile and tenuous that they called it a “remnant of a remnant”. It was enough. Israel began again, not with a bang, but a whisper. A whispered recitation of the words seared into their hearts: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, The Lord alone.” A soft hum of the sacred Psalms... “The Lord is my Shepherd...” Until the wheel of history turned round once more, and the remnant of a remnant set their feet on the long road home.

You can read about the rebuilding effort in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. It began with the city walls and the Temple. The priesthood was restored, worship was resumed, the Psalms began to rise again from Jerusalem like incense before the Lord. The gardens were reconquered from thorns and thistles, the paving-stones reset smooth and straight, and Israel began the long work of restoration.

Our first reading gave us a scene from early on in this effort. A man stands on a platform, with the remnant of Israel gathered around him. The sun is just rising in the East, casting its first ray of light onto the pages of the book that Ezra opens. It is the Book of the Law, and by the time he finishes reading, the sun stands at high noon. The people are weeping.

It’s all too easy to identify with Israel. If you don’t know what I mean, buy me a beer sometime and ask for my thoughts on Western Civilization. But the point of our reading from Nehemiah is not about the devastation of exile or civilizational collapse. It’s about the hope of renewal.

They rebuild the walls right away. That’s about identity. You can’t be a witness if you look like everybody else. You can’t be the light of the world if you’ve been absorbed into the broader culture. Rebuilding the walls was sort of the visible undoing of the exile: Israel had an identity again.

Blessed Pope John XXIII, when he called the Second Vatican Council, spoke of the need to open up the windows of the Church and let in some fresh air. It’s a famous image, and popular. But notice that you can’t have windows unless you have a wall. Good Pope John called for a greater and more effective conversation with the modern world, not to change the Church to be more like the world. It was to change the world by converting it to Christ. Not all walls are good; we can’t be witnesses if we build impenetrable walls and stay inside them. But neither can we be witnesses if we tear down every wall, discard our identity, and melt into the surroundings.

Within the walls, they also rebuild the Temple. They know that renewal starts with proper worship. We can relate to that, too. We’ve been talking about reforms in the liturgy since well before the Council. Our passion for getting liturgy right comes from knowing that our worship is at the heart of who we are. Worshipping God is job one, and any real renewal has to begin with our worship, and flow out of our worship. If we lose touch with that, we become just another social service organization, or just another fraternal club. We can’t be the Body of Christ unless we are in constant, life-giving contact with Him in the worship of the Church.

Finally, along with walls and worship, law. For something like six hours Ezra stands on that platform and reads the law. 

We live in an age of paradox with regard to laws. On one hand, this has been an age of full-out rebellion against laws. We rebel against the laws of generations as we demolish marriage and family, celebrate nihilism, and tear down every vestige of tradition and authority we can get our hands on. And yet, on the other hand, we live lives that are less free and more regulated than ever before, with occasional grumbling but without putting up anything like a real fight. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but I think we’ve become very confused about law and freedom.

God’s law is not the arbitrary whim of a tyrant. It is the roadmap to human flourishing. The Law of God doesn’t say “you aren’t free because I’m God and I’m in charge, and I say you have to live this way.” It says, “I’m God and I made you for freedom, and if you want to be free, this is the way of life that will bring you that freedom.” He created us; He knows how we work. There are consequences to ignoring the manufacturer’s instructions. The consequences of ignoring God’s law are in broken hearts, broken families, despair, alienation, and eventually plain old boredom.

But something amazing happened that day when Ezra began to read, the day they set their hearts on returning to God’s Law. For hours they listened... and they didn’t just listen... they wept. The words of God cut them deeply, and in the clear light of truth, they saw the ugliness and silliness of the lies they’d bought and they wept.

But Ezra understood about law and freedom, and so he offered a gentle correction. He told them: “Do not be sad, and do not weep.  Rather, prepare a banquet with rich food and sweet drink, make sure no one goes without, for today is holy to the Lord. Do not be sad, for rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength!” And so it happened... that day was holy to the Lord, and the people remembered who they were, and they found once more their strength.  Could that happen again? Why not?

Many generations later, in a similar scene, another man stood in front of an assembly and opened a scroll.  He read from Isaiah about good news for the poor, liberty for captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, and a day that would be holy to the Lord.  He told them that that very day Isaiah’s prophecy was fulfilled right in front of them.  He said that He himself was the Messiah, the answer, the savior. That was twenty centuries ago, but we still open that same book, we still read those words, we still see them fulfilled right in front of us, as an acceptable offering is raised from this altar.

Can the remnant of a remnant rise again? Can we still say that God’s promise is fulfilled? Jesus has ascended to the Father, and didn’t He leave an awful lot undone? 

Paul has the answer for the Corinthians, and the same answer for us: you are the body of Christ. The work of Christ is not finished because his body still works in the world. The cause of Christ is not lost so long as the Church survives, and survive she will until the end of days. Christ is the answer, Christ is what the world has lost and must find again, Christ is our only hope. But Christ has now no hands but our hands.

We know from what Ezra witnessed that things can turn around.  A whole people can repent, can find what was lost, can remember who they are and what they could be.  But it’s not anybody else’s job. It’s up to us. It’s intimidating to think of ourselves as the Light of the World and the Salt of the Earth, but that’s what Christ called his disciples.  How can we live up to that? Who do we think we are? We’re not any better than anyone else...we’re in the same mess ourselves. But in his grace, that isn’t the salient point. We aren’t better, we aren’t perfect, but we have been given the book of God’s law, good news for the poor, sight for the blind, liberty for captives. We are the Body of Christ, and we know that with a strong identity, right worship, and the gift of God’s law, even a remnant of a remnant can rise.