The Practice of Hope

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“I have hymns you haven’t heard…”

Believe it or not,
that awesome line from Rilke
is what the story from Nehemiah is about —
music we haven’t heard yet.

Spoiler alert:
the punch line of this story
is that whatever ending or outcome

we might expect or dread or dream
for any circumstance
is too small, ordinary, and limited
because God has music we haven’t heard yet.

Allow me to peel back the rind
on this lethargic and lumpy reading
from Nehemiah, because
inside is a juicy fruit
we should be astounded to encounter.

Now if you are an in-person member
of the Trinity Place Geneva community hearing this,
you have likely heard the unpacking
of this story before — every three years if fact,
when it comes up in the lectionary.
But if so, you haven’t heard the ending
because I have music you haven’t heard yet, too.

First of all, I want you to have proper reverence
for this story from Nehemiah.
As boring and confusing a glop of the Bible as it is,
it changed the history of human civilization.
Or at least it points to a scene or event
that would have, if it happened,
and it did happen in one version or another,
changed the course of history.

Picture this scene.

A disparate remnant of freed slaves
limps and hobbles back into their homeland
after decades if not a century of absence.
Of course, they have never actually been there before
but they have heard about it all their lives.
It is there ancestral home
but brand new to them.
All they know is the stories they heard
about a shinning city on a hill — Jerusalem.

So this ragtag group of ancients,
the only ones brave enough
to risk the harsh distance,
return only to find their once famous city
in rubble.

All they knew before stumbling into the ruins
was that once,
once upon a time,
in generations past,
they had had a magnificent homeland.

They had had a capital city
with an enormous and ornate temple
where all the people came to worship.

They had had a king,
and they had had farms
and they had had orchards
and they had had rivers
and they had had a pastoral life of goodness…

But in just five years it all vanished.
All of it destroyed,
and eclipsed from them by miles and miles
of forced exile.

It sounds like a bad movie:
a dark and fearsome empire —
the Babylonian empire —
had crushed their ancestor’s army
and stolen them away to another country
and enslaved them.

But now…
now generations later,
the Babylonians were ground
into the dust of history
as all empires are sooner or later.

Generations have passed and
a straggly group of poorly educated,
labor-hardened
and fiercely independent people
returned to the land they knew
only through the memories of their elders.

Now…
as much as a century later, when they returned
they found only rubble.
Not many of their exiled community would return.
Most of them stayed right where they had been taken
in captivity;
stayed where they were now
assimilated into a new empire.

Just a few came back,
returning with hope-gilded hearts
and an imagination to rebuild.

We know about the history of human migration:
no land remains uninhabited,
especially not good land otherwise surrounded
by more barren lands.
So the few who returned,
returned to a land they found occupied
by other people – people with different languages
and unfamiliar customs
and strange gods.

The few who came back,
did not even speak their own ancient language;
they did not even know the language of their religion –
kind of like us who do not speak Greek or Latin,
Celt or Swahili or Mandarin.

So, we need to stop the story right here
for just a moment.
This is something we do not think about
when we read the Hebrew Scripture
or tell the ancient stories of our religious ancestors.
They did not know how to speak Hebrew.

By the time of Ezra and Nehemiah
Hebrew was already a dying language.
Hebrew was not spoken among ordinary people
of Israelite descent,
it had become only religious language –
the language of ritual,
as Latin became to Roman Catholicism.

By the time they arrived back
in the land of their ancestors,
very few even understood Hebrew.

So now we can understand the scene depicted
in the first reading today.

Even though it seems remote and dry
and terribly uninteresting on the surface of it,
this little story creates a lovely cinematic image:
it is the very first reading of Torah
read to a gathering of strangers
amidst the rubble of Jerusalem.
After a century of exile, forced labor
and absence,
Hebrew is spoken in the place
where the temple once stood.

That image might give you a chill
if you have ever lost something you cherished
and then suddenly arrived
at a moment
or a place or a time
you never expected to experience again.

So there in the rubble
Ezra, a priest,
and Nehemiah, a lay person,
begin the task of re-educating Israel
and bringing back to life
a nearly dead religion and culture.

Just think about that,
let it take hold of your imagination.
Take just a moment to think about
what we know of Judaism today.
All that it was,
and all that it would become over a millennium,
was hanging by a thread,
a fragile spider’s silk.

Ezra and Nehemiah
stand there telling the people
that the present moment is a time of joy,
an occasion for feasting and celebration.

Then, the story says, people weep.
Joy runs freely into the river of grief,
where they are mixed together into poignancy
by the currents of memory, relief, and hope.

It is an amazing story.
Think of all that would have been lost to the world
had Judaism just died out in exile.
But it didn’t.
A remnant restored it
and breathed life into the last ember.
What would have seemed an impossible dream —
wishful thinking even —
just two generations before
was now being ignited in the rubble of the Temple.

Now zoom ahead 450 years,
from Ezra and Nehemiah
to Jesus.

We just heard a little story
about Jesus going home
to teach and preach
in the synagogue where he grew up.
You know as well as I do,
that’s a tough gig.
No matter who you are
or where you are from,
going home again as an adult
and an expert in your field
is a hazardous journey.

Luke imagines Jesus
returning to his home synagogue,
which was likely not in a building
but an outdoor gathering place
set aside for worship.
Once there, he reads from a scroll.

What we need to realize is that Jesus
is NOT doing
what we do on Sunday morning.

He is not READING,
word for word
from an Aramaic translation
of the Hebrew text,
the way we read
word for word
from an English translation
of a Greek text.

Instead, what Jesus is doing
is offering a free-style rendering
of Isaiah’s prophetic poetry,
and saying what he thinks it means.

But get this.
If modern New Testament scholars are correct,
Jesus couldn’t even read – in Hebrew or otherwise.

What Jesus is doing
in this little story from Luke
is what others like him would do at the synagogue too:
stand up and offer from memory,
what he had been taught to memorize from the Scripture
and then, sit down to preach.

He would sit down
and tell them what he thought it meant.

There is absolutely no reason
we should have this story today.
Not the one about Ezra and Nehemiah
or the one about Jesus going home to preach.

Think about it.
History is told by the winners.
History, especially ancient history,
preserves the stories of war,
the stories of battles and heroics,
the stories of emperors and kings and queens.

Somehow Luke’s story of an itinerant,
likely illiterate preacher,
going home to preach in his local synagogue
to a dozen or two dozen people,
all of them poor and insignificant too,
is preserved.

Obviously more than this one story is preserved.
His teachings,
that he probably could not have written down himself,
wandered through history
like a worm through soil,
all the way to us.

In my wildest dreams,
even though I can write
and my words have actually been published,
I cannot imagine human beings
two thousand years from now, reading them.

But here is the thing.
Every time we cannot or will not,
imagine possibility
when starring at a wall of darkness,
we need to remember
that God has music we haven’t heard yet.

Remember, hope is something we have to practice
so that it is strong enough in us
that when we need it most
we have it as a resource
for ourselves and others.
Trusting that God has music we haven’t heard yet
is what it means to practice hope.
Or think about it in terms of the Baptismal Covenant.

Persevering in resisting evil
when it looks or feels as if there is no new music,
is what it means to practice hope.

Proclaiming our values and faith
by living them,
by living them with our bodies
and living them with our money and our other resources,
even when everyone else
seems to be dancing to different  music,
is what it means to practice hope.

Struggling to discover the God in all people,
even people we hate and fear,
even when they are despicable, ridiculous,
and strange,
and serving that God within them when it feels
like the same old music over and over again,
is what it means to practice hope.

Battling for justice
and wrestling for peace
even when all the weapons seem to belong
to those who resist any new music,
is what it means to practice hope.

God has music we have not heard yet.
Trusting that,
and living as if it is absolutely
the truest fact we could ever hold,
is what it means to hope.

You and I
are agents of that hope,
and even we
have music we haven’t heard yet.