You can watch the video of the worship service from which this sermon comes at - https://www.facebook.com/david.p.charlton.9/videos/10163592997440298/
It is a very humbling feeling to stand in a place of great destruction and to imagine the overwhelming challenge of rebuilding life. In February of 2006, I was in Waveland, Mississippi, with a group of people working in the recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina. I have mentioned that trip a time or two in past years, and I reference it this morning because I had never before, or since, traveled to an area of such incredible devastation. After our arrival, one of the volunteers who had been there working for a good while, took us on a walking tour of some of the neighborhoods. The two or three blocks of the town near the beach were empty of houses, and all that was left were concrete pads where the houses once stood. The tidal surge created by the hurricane was so large and so strong that it washed everything but the concrete foundations of the houses out to sea. Going the next few blocks from the beach, we walked among piles and piles of rubble. I have never been in a war zone, but I imagined that was what a war zone must look like. The destruction was so immense that the neighborhoods appeared to have been leveled by a bomb. Talking to the residents of Waveland who remained in the community was such a sad experience, because you could feel the immense weight upon them, as they tried to fathom rebuilding their lives after such an incredible loss.
This morning, we begin a new series of messages, based on the book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah was a prophet who lived in the 6thcentury BC. He was among the people living in exile in the land of Babylon. In 597 BC the Babylonians captured the kingdom of Judah, which contained the city of Jerusalem, and many of the people were carried away to live in Babylon, where they would live in exile for almost 70 years.
After the Assyrians conquered Babylon, decades later, King Cyrus allowed the people to return to their homeland, and Nehemiah led the effort to rebuild the temple and the city. As we contemplate the rebuilding of life after the ravages of the pandemic, it seems an appropriate story for us to study. I’m not saying that I believe the pandemic is over and we are on the verge of completely returning to life as we knew it, but we have arrived at the point of thinking about what life will be like, not only in the coming weeks, but in the months, and even years, ahead.
The title of the series is Rebuilding Lifeand today’s message is Returning to Normal?
Hear the words of Nehemiah, as I read selected verses from chapters one and two. Nehemiah 1:3-4, 2:1-5; 17-18 –
3 They said to me, “Those who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been burned with fire.”
4 When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. For some days I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven.
1In the month of Nisan in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was brought for him, I took the wine and gave it to the king. I had not been sad in his presence before,
2 so the king asked me, “Why does your face look so sad when you are not ill? This can be nothing but sadness of heart.” I was very much afraid,
3 but I said to the king, “May the king live forever! Why should my face not look sad when the city where my ancestors are buried lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?”
4 The king said to me, “What is it you want?” Then I prayed to the God of heaven,
5 and I answered the king, “If it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in his sight, let him send me to the city in Judah where my ancestors are buried so that I can rebuild it.”
17 Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in: Jerusalem lies in ruins, and its gates have been burned with fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.”
18 I also told them about the gracious hand of my God on me and what the king had said to me. They replied, “Let us start rebuilding.” So they began this good work.
Although Nehemiah lived so many centuries ago, in a very different time and a very different world, he still speaks to us, because not everything about life has changed over the centuries. Rebuilding life is not confined to any one time in history, or to any one people, or to any one place. Throughout the history of humanity, rebuilding life is a challenge faced by scores of people. Today, however, in the midst of this pandemic, we are on a scale that is not confined to one country, or one culture, or one people, but one that is truly global. We have become very connected across the globe through business, economics, communication, and in so many other ways, but now we have another connection to add to the list – a connection in pandemic. The global connectivity that has been, in many ways, a boon to humanity, is now one that has connected us in shared suffering.
Let’s start this morning with this question –
As We Work to Rebuild Life, How Will We Process All We Have Experienced?
We’ve been in this pandemic, in this country, for a little over two months, and that is bad enough. Imagine what it would be like to experience a great difficulty, a great calamity, not just over days, or weeks, or months, or even years, but over the course of decades, as was the case for Nehemiah and the people in exile. Nehemiah and the people had been in exile in Babylon for decades. Some of the people had never seen their homeland, as they were born in exile. All they knew about their homeland were the stories they had been told. Today, we can tell our children and grandchildren not only about the people and the places of our past, we can show them pictures. Imagine, however, not being able to see a picture of your homeland, of your family homeplace, of the businesses your family were involve in, of your ancestors, or where your family worshipped. All you could do would be to listen to the descriptions and try to build a mental picture.
After the decades of exile, it was over, and people began to return, which was great. But their suffering and difficulty, they quickly realized, was far from over. When the first arrivals in Jerusalem sent word back to Nehemiah about the conditions in their homeland, his heart was heavy with grief. Listen to that report in 1:3-4 –
3 They said to me, “Those who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been burned with fire.”
4 When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. For some days I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven.
The story of Nehemiah is, on the surface, about the rebuilding of buildings and walls – physical structures. But it is really about much, much more, and that explains the reaction of Nehemiah when he hears of the condition of the city of Jerusalem. Upon hearing of the condition of Jerusalem, Nehemiah was so overcome with emotion that he sat down and wept. Nehemiah just sits down and weeps. It’s not a little bit of heartbreak he feels; it’s a whole lot of heartbreak. It’s the kind of heartbreak that hits you so hard that you sink to the ground under the weight of emotion and loss, and there is nothing to do but weep.
And that’s okay. It was a good reason to weep. Every facet of the lives of Nehemiah and his fellow exiles needed to be rebuilt. It was not just the walls of the city, the gates of the city, and the temple that needed to be rebuilt; it was also the rebuilding of their homes, their businesses, and their traditions; it was every part of life, and it would be a monumentally difficult undertaking.
Ecclesiastes chapter 3 speaks of a time for everything, and in verse 4 says there is a time to weep. Here’s the thing about a time to weep – we don’t always see such a time coming. When tragedy and difficulty come, we might get some warning, but often we do not. And even when we get some inkling of what is coming, we might not comprehend the full weight of what is about to arrive on our doorsteps. When we first began to hear reports of the virus in other parts of the world, I think most of us probably didn’t pay that much attention to it. We heard the news reports, but it was easy to think, that’s another part of the world. It’s not going to happen here. We’d heard of outbreaks before, and somehow those outbreaks passed before reaching our shores. Just weeks ago, we could not imagine where the pandemic would take us, and how it would so dramatically transform life. But here we are, and the virus is here, and life is so different, and there is much rebuilding of life that must eventually take place.
And what do we do in this difficult moment of life? We try and get through it the best we can. We must remember, however, that while we are trying to get through, we don’t always come to the point of processing what we have experienced, but at some point, we will need to do so. At some point, we will be like Nehemiah, where we will sit down and weep, and we will mourn all that has happened and all that has been lost.
When this pandemic is over, there will be a lot of weeping that needs to take place. While we are in the midst of it, we are trying to get through, and it won’t be until it is over that we feel the full weight of what we have experienced. I have been thinking of some kind of service we can have at that point; a service that helps us to deal with all the loss, all the struggle, all the stress of this time. I don’t even know what to call it or what it would look like; I just believe we need to have something that helps us to process everything. Ecclesiastes 3:4 also reminds us that there is a time to mourn. When the time comes, we must mourn what has been lost in this time.
As we look to that time, we talk about returning to normalor the need to adjust to our new normal, whichleads me to a second question to ask this morning –
What Is Normal?
I have often wished that I lived a “normal” life. Have any of you ever felt that way? My life generally does not feel very normal, which leads me to ask, what constitutes normal?
As we talk about returning to normal, here is a question I believe to be worth considering – what was normal about life before the pandemic? Normal can mean a lot of things. Normal can mean the blessing of going into a restaurant to sit down and eat a nice meal with family and friends. Normal can mean gathering in a group without the need for social distancing and masks. Normal can mean coming to church and seeing the sanctuary full of people. Those are experiences that were normalbefore the pandemic, and we all miss those experiences and long for them to return.
But when we long to return to a normallife, it is a longing to return to life as weknew it. It was a life that enjoyed the freedom to go where we wanted, when we wanted. It was a life where we could go shopping and find shelves stocked with everything we needed and no shortages of the items we wanted, it was a life where we could go out to dinner and gather with friends without the wearing of masks or the necessity of social distancing. It was a life of employment that provided an income to take care of our families.
That was the normalwe enjoyed. But let us remember that for so many in our world, normalwas something very different – it was a life full of difficulty, of suffering, and of struggle. While we enjoyed our normal, millions of people struggled through their normal, a normal consisting of poverty, violence, hunger, disease, and a litany of other difficulties that led to a daily struggle to survive.
I am not saying that we were indifferent to the sufferings of others; we are, after all, a church, and one of our callings is to work to alleviate the suffering of others, and we work hard to do so. I would say, however, that we can become somewhat immune to the suffering of millions because that suffering is a normalpart of life in this world. We can, without realizing it, become susceptible to the idea that such suffering is simplythe way the world is. We see hunger, disease, poverty, and war as a normalpart of the human condition, because hunger, disease, poverty, war, and other sufferings have always been with us. The world has always been far from perfect, which can lead us to say that’s just the way things are. There are always people who will suffer. There are always people who will be hungry. There is always war and violence. It’s life. It's “normal.” It’s normal for suffering to exist in the world.
The unforeseen danger is that we see as we are conditioned to see. Normalis what we are conditioned to see and to understand. Jesus recognized this when he said the poor you will always have with you(Matthew 26:11). That is an oft-misunderstood verse, as it is sometimes seen as a justification for accepting the normalof poverty and all of the problems that come with that poverty, but it was actually a warning given by Jesus, a warning that humanity will believe and accept that it is normalfor some people to be poor and that it is normalthat some people will always be victims of violence and war. But it is anything but normal.
We are called not only to weep and to feel the heartbreak for what we have lost, but to weep and feel the heartbreak for what others have experienced. Let us sit and weep not only for ourselves, but for those who have for so long suffered and struggled.
So, then, what is normal? Let’s finish with a consideration of the new normalthat Jesus brought to us.
What Is the New Normal? The New Normal Is the Kingdom of God.
Nehemiah was given a great opportunity when it came time to rebuild life. Nehemiah was in charge of the rebuilding effort in Jerusalem, and in the course of rebuilding, he had the opportunity to create a new normalrather than simply returning to what had existed before.
Jesus brought the idea of a new normal to humanity. It was a new normalthat meant much more than how the new normal is now defined, which is the need to continue social distancing and other practices that come with living in an age of pandemic. The new normalof which Jesus spoke reminds us there were some things about life prior to this pandemic that were not normal, and to which we should not return. It is a normalthat invites us to believe that as we rebuild life, we can build a life and a normalthat is really new and really different from the old normal.
When Jesus sat down on the mountain, and his followers gathered around him for the Sermon On the Mount, he gave them a glimpse of the new normalhe offered to humanity. It began with the Beatitudes, which gave a list of qualities that seemed so foreign to the normalof the day that they seemed backwards and opposite to what people understood and believed about life. He continued with a list of qualities that seemed as far out of reach as does a utopian world. The vision of a new normaloffered by Jesus was one where judgment would not be the norm and where it would not be rendered upon others, but people would be accepted for who they are. It would be a normal where everyone is loved; not only our friends and families, but even enemies would be loved. It would be a normal where revenge is not sought, a normal where forgiveness would reign while bitterness diminishes, where honesty becomes the rule of the day, where generosity is so engrained that it is offered without pause, where those who are in need – whatever the need – would receive what is necessary, and where worry and anxiety would pass away.
That’s a beautiful picture of what could be, isn’t it? It is what Jesus presents as the new normal, the normalthat comes with the kingdom of God. Let us think about what it means to return to normal, or what it means to live in a new normal. Let us believe that normalcan mean the opportunity to correct the problems that plagued millions in the pre-pandemic world. Let’s build a normalthat provides equality and justice to all people, where every person has enough to eat, where people do not have to live in poverty and the despair and other difficulties that it breeds, and people will not have to fear the violence that comes from war or lawlessness.
As we rebuild life, as we rebuild the world, let us pray that it indeed becomes the new normal.
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