When You Feel Lost...

On of the most spiritually astounding and prophetic voices that I have heard this year eminates from a little church overlooking the main thoroughfare that slides through San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Pastor Joy Yee presides over the 19th Avenue Baptist Church, friendly and diverse congregation of worshippers. Her well exegeted sermons keep me glued to my seat and then release me with spiritual insights to ponder as I seek to live out my faith journey in the world. I am thankful that she has allowed one of her sermons to be reprinted here for us. It is entitled: "Who We Are."

Nehemiah 8:1-2, 5-6, 8-10 Remember . . . as people of God . . . - This is where we come from. - This is who we are. - This is what we are to be about.

In Dr. Seuss’ book Are You My Mother?, a baby bird breaks out of his shell and can’t see his mother anywhere. So he drops out of the nest and walks around and asks a kitten, a cow, a dog, a plane and even a bulldozer in turn, “Are you my mother?” He wants to know where he comes from. What people do you come from?

Those who are interested in finding the answers to that question can sign up to search on Ancestors.com, or google or even facebook. Our family on my mother’s side can actually trace the family tree back to 1066 when our ancestor was a scholar.

It is nice to know – this is where you come from. And from that to understand – this is who you are. And from that to catch a vision of – this is what you are to be about. That’s something of what is happening in all of the lectionary texts today.

v. 1 When the seventh month came and the Israelites had settled in their towns, all the people assembled as one man in the square before the Water Gate. They told Ezra the scribe to bring out the Book of the Law of Moses, which the Lord had commanded for Israel. So on the first day of the seventh month Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly, which was made up of men and women and all who were able to understand. V. 5 Ezra opened the book. All the people could see him because he was standing above them; and as he opened it, the people all stood up. Ezra praised the Lord, the great God; and all the people lifted their hands and responded, “Amen! Amen!” Then they bowed down and worshipped the Lord with their faces to the ground. V. 8 They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people could understand what was being read. Then Nehemiah the governor, 2 Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who were instructing the people said to them all, “This day is sacred to the Lord your God. Do not mourn or weep.” For all the people had been weeping as they listened to the words of the Law. Nehemiah said, “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is sacred to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

This is where you come from. The people in this text had been away from Jerusalem for a long time. These are actually the grandchildren of those Jews who had been conquered by Babylon seventy years prior and sent into exile there. Two generations at least had gone by. In Babylon, the Jews probably did the best they could to preserve their culture and language and heritage for their children. It was during this time that the oral histories were written down. It was during this time that Hebrew was mixed with Chaldean as the language of choice. It was during this time that a whole generation of children grew up without ever seeing Jerusalem or the temple. And now they were back in their homeland for the first time. The wall of Jerusalem had been rebuilt, the people were settling down. And on this day, they all gathered to hear the words that made them a people back when Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt to Mount Sinai. It was these words of the law that were part of a covenant that was made with God. It was these words that had shaped them as individuals and as a community. I imagine that perhaps some of the mourning and weeping that day had to do with remembering – this is where you come from. I imagine that those words gave the people a real sense of identity, belonging, origin.

Some of you might remember Alex Haley’s book, Roots or the movie of the same name. It’s an incredible story. Alex Haley was able to trace his family all the way back to a slave named Kunta Kinte. And then he was able to go even further back. Dr. Haley travels back to Africa and locates an African griot. Griots are highly revered men who have memorized the oral history of a people going back for hundreds of years. At the African village, he writes, “The old griot had talked for nearly two hours up to then, and perhaps fifty times the narrative had included some detail about someone whom he had named. Now after he had just named those four sons, again he appended a detail, and the interpreter translated – ‘About the time the King’s soldiers came’ – another of the griot’s time-fixing references – ‘the oldest of these four sons, Kunta, went away from his 3 village to chop wood . . . and he was never seen again . . .’ And the griot went on with his narrative. I sat as if I were carved of stone. My blood seemed to have congealed. This man whose lifetime had been in the back-country African village had no way in the world to know that he had just echoed what I had heard all through my boyhood years on my grandma’s front porch in Henning, Tennessee . . . of an African who always had insisted that his name was ‘Kin-tay’; who had called a guitar a ‘ko,’ and a river within the state of Virginia, ‘Kamby Bolongo’; and who had been kidnapped into slavery while not far from his village, chopping wood, to make himself a drum.” When Alex Haley relates this to the village, the women all give him their babies in turn to hold as a way of saying, “Through this flesh, which is us, we are you, and you are us!” The village men take him to their mosque where they pray, “Praise be to Allah for one long lost from us whom Allah has returned.” And as Dr. Haley leaves and travels through another village, he is greeted by people who call him “Mr. Kinte.”

This is where you come from. As people of faith, when we read the stories of the Old and New Testaments, we learn that this is where we come from. We are born of a God who created all things in abundance, with richness and diversity and showered us with gifts of life and grace. We come from people who learned about this God because he rescued them from slavery, persevered with them while they rebelled, and showed up in person as Jesus Christ. We come from a family of God who witnessed Jesus die and then witnessed him alive again . . . and that experience so changed them that they went throughout their world sharing this news over hundreds of years until the words reached each one of us at some point in our lives.

Not all of us come from healthy homes and families. Not all of us know our genetically connected relatives. But when we come to God, we become adopted into a family that has a long history. And their story becomes ours. This is where we come from.

In our second lectionary text, we are reminded of who we are. Paul tells the church at Corinth (12:27) “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.” Paul writes these words because there were those at Corinth who were feeling that they didn’t belong. He uses the illustration of the human body and says things like, “If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body, it would not 4 for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body . . . The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’” As people of God, this is who we are.

We are part of the body, regardless of how we feel or what we think. When we come to God, we are part of the body of Christ. Each one of us is included and each one of us has gifts to share with the church. This is who we are.

In the third lectionary text, we are reminded of what we are to be about. Luke tells the story of when Jesus came into the synagogue in Galilee and read a text from Isaiah (Luke 4:18-19): “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he said to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Jesus was shaped by those words he read. Other people might have had their ideas of what they wanted Jesus to do and be – miracle worker, forceful military commander, powerful political king. But it was these words from scripture that rose above all else and determined his ministry and what he was to be about. The same is given to us as individuals and as a church. From the words of the law read in Nehemiah to Paul’s words to Corinth to Isaiah’s words read by Jesus. As people of God, this is what we are to be about. Be shaped by the Laws of God, which have to do with two things: love God, and love others. Be those people who bring good news to the poor in spirit and in resources, who proclaim release to captives imprisoned by bars or situations or thinking, and recovery of sight to the blind who cannot see the beauty in the world or the beauty in themselves or the beauty of God. Be those who release the oppressed with generosity and grace, forgiveness and love - not bind them up with heavy loads of requirement. Be those who proclaim the Lord’s favor to this world. To all parts of this world.

People of God, in the pressures of life’s challenges, and in the midst of personal struggle, in the reality of limits and failures, do you ever lose sight of where you come 5 from and who you are? In the face of skepticism and whirling doubts or practical atheism, do you ever forget what you are to be about?

I do, sometimes. But these words of scripture today remind us that we all come from a long line of God followers who found God and failed again and again and ended up in Babylon as exiles and then found God again because God was faithful. We all come from a long line of village peasants and fishermen, tax collectors and prostitutes, rich young rulers and poor, lame, ill, hungry men and women - Jesus followers who were captivated by God’s love and endured great challenges and often persecution to share good news that saved them and cannot die. We are aliens and foreigners who have been welcomed into God’s family and now have the status of sons and daughters of the king. We are people who can tell others with words and many deeds, “God is real. Jesus loves you. You are called beloved. There is redemption for every death you are dying” and mean it because we know it is true.

So many situations in our lives, so many doubts about ourselves, so many voices can pull us off center until we fall out of the nest and begin to wander around here and there looking for where belong, and who we are, and what we are to be doing.

But then there are these words of God we have read today. Words spoken to Israel returned from exile, to the church at Corinth, to those in the synagogue at Nazareth . . . reminding them and us: This is where we come from. This is who we are. This is what we are to be about.