The Third Sunday after Pentecost
Nehemiah 8:1-10
There are more copies of the Bible in the world than any other book. Every bookstore has several editions. You can find it at the library. When you stay at a hotel, you’ll find a copy right there in the nightstand, just in case you want to pick it up and read. Most homes have at least one copy of the bible, even if it never gets read. There are study bibles, gift bibles, family bibles, men’s bibles, women’s bibles, children’s bibles, picture bibles. There are bibles in just about every imaginable language, and in most languages there are several different translations to choose from. And even if you can’t get your hands on a book, there are hundreds of versions of the bible freely available on the internet. Just about wherever you are, if you want to, you can easily get access to a bible. They are everywhere. You can just pick one up and read.
And that might be what makes today’s story for the Book of Nehemiah seem so strange to us. All of the people come and gather at the gates of Jerusalem and they ask the scribe, Ezra, to come out and read to them from the law of God. He probably read from the Book of Leviticus. It’s a huge ceremony. There are what seem like legions of priests and laypeople there to assist with the reading. Ezra reads to the people for about six hours, while they stand and praise God. All the while, there are priests and leaders out among the people, helping them to understand what is being read.
Now, I don’t know how much time you’ve spent reading the Book of Leviticus. Hopefully not very much. It’s filled with all kinds of details about how the priests are to perform various kinds of sacrifices, and how they should identify and treat various kinds of skin diseases, and how they should celebrate various festivals. It’s not exactly an airport thriller. In fact, I don’t think many people would argue with me if I said it was the most boring book in the bible.
And yet, for six hours, all of the people are captivated as they stand outside and listen as some priest reads from the scroll of Leviticus. Rules and sacrifices and diseases. But the people find it fascinating, enthralling.
Now, maybe it was just that they hadn’t invented streaming television yet. Maybe there was just nothing more entertaining to do in ancient Jerusalem than to stand around and listen to someone reading scripture. For all I know, it may have been the fifth century BC version of a rock concert.
But I think there was something more. It’s not just that there wasn’t much entertainment. There also weren’t any copies of the bible. People didn’t have personal bibles or family bibles. In fact, they didn’t even have the technology to create a bible that could be held in the hand. But even if they were to have their own copies, most people weren’t literate; they wouldn’t have been able to read them. The only time that people had access to the scripture was when someone like Ezra read it to them.
That’s the way it was for centuries. Ordinary people didn’t have direct access the scripture. They had to rely on professionals—priests, scribes, and pastors—to read the bible for them and to tell them what it meant. But that all changed in the sixteenth century, when the combination of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press and Martin Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers meant that bibles were mass produced and that Christians came to believe that they had a right to read it for themselves.
But along with the freedom that we have to read the bible whenever we want and to interpret it for ourselves has also come a certain blasé attitude about the bible. It is so common, so easy to get ahold of, that it doesn’t really seem very special anymore. And if anyone can read and interpret it for themselves, then there must not be anything very interesting in there.
Before I became a pastor, I used to work in the immunization clinic at the Marion County Health Department. One year I worked there, there was a delay in production of flu vaccine. Everyone wanted to get vaccinated. We got angry calls all day every day, people who claimed that we were trying to kill them because we wouldn’t give them the vaccine that we didn’t have. The next year, we had plenty of vaccine on hand. But you know what, hardly anyone came in to get vaccinated. We gave significantly fewer vaccinations the year we had plenty of vaccine than we did the year before when the vaccine was scarce. When it was readily available, people didn’t feel any pressure to come get the flu shot, but when they thought it was scarce, we couldn’t keep people away.
Maybe it’s not that different with the bible. It is so easily available to us, that we hardly give it a thought. It’s not rare, and so it doesn’t seem very valuable. Anyone can read it, so it doesn’t seem very interesting.
And maybe another part of the reason that the bible often seems uninteresting to us is that we don’t read it with sense. The story today tells us that as Ezra read from scripture, there were teams of experts who gave the sense of the reading. They helped the people interpret it. And even though the text of the bible is very familiar to us, the world that it describes are in many ways very foreign. It’s hard for us to understand because on the one hand, it seems so ordinary, so everyday, and on the other hand it is separated from us by thousands of years, by language, and by vast differences in culture.
The democratization of biblical interpretation has had the unintended consequence that we behave as if the bible is very simple, very straight-forward, very easy to understand. Of course you know that it’s not. What makes the bible so interesting is how complex, how mysterious it really is. If the bible were simple, it wouldn’t have to be so long. If the bible were easy to understand, there wouldn’t be so many different translations. If the bible were straight-forward, there wouldn’t be shelves and shelves of commentaries trying to tease out its meaning.
The bible is absolutely fascinating, and it is a wonderful source of wisdom, comfort, and even life. And yet we miss much of its wonder and beauty if we don’t read it with sense. If we assume the bible is simple, then we will only get simple benefits from reading it. But if we assume that bible is packed full of hidden treasures, just waiting to be unearthed, if we approach the bible with a sense of mystery, with a sense of questioning, then we will not be disappointed. If we pick up the bible expecting to be bored, we probably will be. But if we pick it up expecting to be challenged, expecting to be changed, then we open up ourselves as well, open up ourselves to the action of the Holy Spirit.
This book is a marvelous gift, a gift of great power. And like anything that is powerful, it can be abused. It can be used to enslave when its purpose is to liberate. And so it is our responsibility and our joy to read it, to struggle with its message, to discuss and debate it, to learn from its teachings, and to share the good news of its message with the world. This word is precious, even if it is no longer rare. Let us treat it as the thing of value it really is.