The Joy of the Lord is Your Strength

Photo of The Rev. Joe Behen by The Rev. Joe Behen, Clergy Assistant

One of the many videos I saw last week about the devastation in Haiti was that of a man who was inside his 10-story apartment building when it collapsed.  He had managed to find holes here and there through which he could climb, and eventually found his way out.  During the filming of the video this man was still moved to tears by the sight of the destruction, and by the thought of all the people not so fortunate as he had been.  When he was asked what he would like to say to the world right now, he spoke of the outpouring of support, the people who dropped everything and came from their safe homes to find and heal survivors.  He spoke of all the money and food coming in from people that he would never know.  Then he thought for a moment, and said simply that God must here for these things to happen.  We’ll come back to that thought.

“Do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”  This statement at the end of today’s first reading comes from the story of Israel’s coming home, their coming back from exile in the land of their conquerors.  The problem they find on their return, is that it doesn’t look or feel like the glorious victory of God that one might have anticipated.  The whole city was little more than a pile of rubble.  They had strife with neighboring peoples from the moment they returned.  Everything was difficult, and life was hard.  At the moment of today’s reading, the newly reconstructed city was so much less, than what was remembered of the city’s glory before its destruction, that people who remembered it then, could only weep now to see its new humility.

But Nehemiah and Ezra are careful to take the stark reality of this new beginning, and to “re-frame” it for the people.   They do this simply by reading to them from the stories of Scripture.  Among others they would have heard the story of their ancestors struggling for survival in the desert as they followed Moses out of Egypt.  “Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die here in the desert?”, they asked Moses.  God had seemed to them to be absent. But the reader knows God to be very present, leading and guiding them. 

As it turned out, things continued to be difficult for Israel, and God now seemed remote at best.   The hearing of Scripture did not change that reality.  But at this defining moment, when they began to wonder themselves where God is, they listened together to learn something about who they were, and about their relationship with God.  Nehemiah and Ezra did not choose that moment to gather them together for a lesson in history.  But rather, to learn how their ancestors had found God in the midst of trouble.  And it taught them something about seeing God right now.

In doing this, Ezra and Nehemiah have effectively “re-framed” the reality of their present world.  The obvious facts of difficulty and suffering were no longer the only measures of life.  The fact of God’s presence here and now helped Israel to see this humble renewal in a particular context.  God is about renewal, making all things new.  From death God brings life.  The strength of people is not found where you thought it was.  Your strength is in your God.

This is what we do each Sunday in gathering here in this church. We here these same stories that Israel heard in today’s reading.  But we hear them with an ear toward reframing our own life.  We still have all the facts of economics and disaster and death and difficulty that we had coming in here.  But now we add to those facts that of our being in God’s presence.  That changes everything. We learn that our strength is not in the ability control - to make people do what we want them to do or to make the world the way we think it should look.  Our strength is in the joy of the Lord.    It means that we no longer have to wonder if God is near.  We simply know that he is.  What this means to us in our life together can hardly be overestimated.  It frees us to see what God is doing, not if he’s doing.  When you remember that you are walking in the presence of the Lord, the world and everyone and everything in it looks very different. 

I think that the Haitian man from the video I spoke of knows this first hand.  He was able to re-frame his surroundings, his experience of suffering and disaster, because suffering and disaster are not the only facts informing him.  And knowing that God is near, opened his eyes to see God acting on behalf of his people.  How easy would it be to look at this tragedy and conclude otherwise?  But this man has internalized the stories of his ancestors and their struggles to see God in their lives.  He has been changed by God through them.  The world no longer looks the same to him.  He knows that he is walking through life in God’s presence.

May God continue to have mercy on those in Haiti,
- tending the sick,
- giving rest to the weary,
- blessing the dying,
- soothing the suffering
- and showing mercy to the afflicted. 
And may we all know that God is not only present to the people of Haiti in this disaster, but also that God is among us, and that we are walking ever in his sight.

Amen.