This sermon was preached on Sunday 29th October 2023 at All Saints Church, Oakham. Watch it here from 28:35.

Nehemiah 8:1-12

Step right up, it’s time for the sermon! Please try to contain your excitement, though I know that for some this might be too much. It is Bible Sunday after all. The sermon is the point in the service where the preacher comes and speaks about the words we have heard in the Bible reading. Their job is to try and bring these words to life for us in a way that is meaningful, and hopefully relevant. The purpose of the sermon is to help us all understand more about what God’s word is saying to us.

Now I am aware that there is much debate and opinion when it comes to the sermon. In particular, the debate on sermon length is a hearty topic among churchgoers. I know that each of you (or at least most of you) keeps a number in your mind indicating the number of (hours, sorry) minutes that you would like a sermon to be. Some people even make a point of telling me their preferred sermon length.

Well on that point, would you turn with me as we look at our Old Testament reading from the book of Nehemiah (page 6 or 9). Let’s begin by setting the scene of where we are in the story of Israel. We remember how Israel was a land governed by kings. There was the first king Saul, and then we get the likes of King David and Solomon. This is around 1000 BC. After Solomon, the kingdom of Israel splits into two kingdoms, the kingdom of Israel in the north consisting of 10 tribes, and the kingdom of Judah in the south consisting of the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin. Each of these two kingdoms of Israel and Judah have a rocky time when it comes to their kings. Israel’s are all bad, and the Judah’s are up and down but they finish off bad. God has enough of these kingdoms turning away from him, and so he gave victory to the Assyrian army to invade the Northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC, and he gave victory to the Babylonians to invade the Southern kingdom of Judah in 636 BC, which included the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. After this the Jews are taken into Exile in Babylon, which is where we read about the stories of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. After 70 years of Exile, the Persians are now in charge, and God commands the Persian king Cyrus to let the Jews return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. This story is recounted in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, two Jewish leaders of the time who were helping to rebuild Jewish life in Jerusalem.

Cut to our reading from Nehemiah. Here Nehemiah and Ezra have gathered the Jewish people together for a festival, and they began the festival with the reading of scripture, specifically reading the Torah (the first five books of the Bible). Let me read from Nehemiah, and pay attention to some specific lines:

‘All the people gathered together into the square before the Water Gate. They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the LORD had given to Israel. Accordingly, the priest Ezra brought the law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could hear with understanding. This was on the first day of the seventh month. He read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law. The scribe Ezra stood on a wooden platform that had been made for the purpose. And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people; and when he opened it, all the people stood up. Then Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God, and all the people answered, ‘Amen, Amen,’ lifting up their hands. Then they bowed their heads and worshipped the LORD with their faces to the ground. So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.’[1]

Two things there. First, raising your hands in a sermon and shouting ‘amen’ isn’t a Pentecostal charismatic thing; it’s a Jewish thing. Second, did you catch how long Ezra was reading for? He read from early morning till midday. That is the equivalent of starting at the 8am and not finishing till the end of the 10.30am! Well…Stephen isn’t here to tell me not to…so…

Don’t worry. I’m not going on for four hours, just one. Kidding. Could you imagine me standing here for 4 hours reading and preaching from the Bible? Sorry, I shouldn’t joke. I know some of you are already panicking at my current sermon length. But get this: ‘the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law.’[2] They weren’t there huffing and puffing thinking ‘When is this going to be over, I’ve got to go and get my Sunday lunch on.’ No, they were hanging on every word that Ezra was saying, waiting with bated breath. When was the last time, if ever, that you were that excited for a sermon?

Now I am not saying this in order to say that you should all listen to my preaching and be excited to hear me preach. Don’t get me wrong, my pride would love that, but that is not what I am trying to say. What I am getting at is that a lot of the time we can treat hearing God’s word as an inconvenience rather than as a joy and a privilege. But the Bible isn’t an inconvenience, though at times it can be inconvenient for the way in which we want to live. Rather the Bible is the living, breathing word of God. It is a written account of God speaking to his people at a particular time and place, but by God’s grace, he speaks through these words to us today as well. It is just amazing and mind-blowing to think that the same God who created the world and parted the Red Sea, is speaking to you and me today.

You might be saying, well that’s great, Shakeel, but that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t understand half of what is said in the Bible. How is God speaking to me through words that I don’t even understand? Well, I am with you on this one. A lot of the time we hear scripture, and we are smiling, thinking, ‘Wow God, it’s great that you spoke to me (I think), but I have no idea what you just said.’ But look back the reading and see what it says halfway through: ‘So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.’^[3]

Along with the reading of scripture came an interpretation, something to help make sense of the reading so that the people understood the reading and what God was saying. The whole point of a sermon is to help us all try and make sense of what God might be saying to us through the Bible.

Do any of you remember doing poetry at school? The Shakespeare sonnets or the poetry anthologies? I remember my anthology was the AQA ‘Moon and the Tides,’ and we were looking at conflict poems. I chose Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade. When you first read these poems, they can often feel dull or confusing. The task of the student of poetry is to look beneath the surface to find the deeper meaning. And this is what the sermon does as well. The sermon seeks to go beneath the surface of the words of scripture to find the deeper meaning and understand more of what the writer intended. This is for understanding both its earthly author and the heavenly inspiring and guiding author, God. That’s why we have the sermon as part of our Sunday gathering. It is a time when we collectively read God’s word and try to understand what God might be saying to us through his scripture. It’s a time of encounter with God. This is something to be excited about. The God of heaven and earth is speaking to you and me today. See how at the end of our reading that ‘all the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions and to make great rejoicing, because they had understood the words that were declared to them.’[4] Are you going out of church with the same rejoicing, with eating and drinking and celebrating because you have understood the words of God?

The Bible is sometimes described as God’s love letter to us, which I think is a brilliant description of the Bible. We often fall into the trap of thinking that the Bible is just a list of rules, but it is more than that. The Bible is a love letter that paints the love story between God and humanity, starting at the beginning in Genesis and going right up to the end in Revelation. Throughout the Bible, we see God repeatedly saying to his people, ‘I love you, I want you. Come back to me. Let us be together as God and people. You will be my people and I will be your God.’ The Bible is God’s love letter in which he is pouring out his heart to us saying, I want us to be together in a loving relationship.

I said at the start of today that today is Bible Sunday. Now I really dislike this day: Bible Sunday. Not because I don’t like the idea of a whole Sunday dedicated to the Bible. As you can probably tell, I’m quite excited about the Bible. But what I find frustrating with the day is that surely every Sunday is Bible Sunday. Every Sunday we gather around God’s word to hear what God is saying to his Church. More than that, we should be hearing God’s word daily. Every day is Bible day. I don’t say this flippantly. I mean it. Every day is a time to open up God’s word to hear what he is saying to us. God is speaking, don’t you want to listen?

In a relationship, particularly a marriage. Regular communication with the other person is essential. You can maybe get away for a few days without communication if one of you goes away for a bit, but you know that without daily communication, your relationship is going to fail. We all know this about marriages and friendships, yet when it comes to our relationship with God, that daily communication doesn’t seem to matter. So what I do like about Bible Sunday is that it is a prompt and a challenge to all of us, me included, to turn to hear God daily in his Word.

My challenge for you going forward this week is to read the Bible every day this week. It doesn’t have to be long. It can be one verse of scripture. You can read it on paper, you can read it on your phone, you can listen to it (we all love David Suchet). Whatever you find helpful. Bible Sunday reminds us that God is speaking to us and invites us to come and listen. If you are listening daily, then that is great, and I want to affirm and celebrate that. But if you haven’t, and we have all been here, me included, today is an opportunity to start afresh. To take your relationship with God to a greater depth as you commit to listening to him daily.

Let’s pray.

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[1] Nehemiah 8:1-8 [NRSV].

[2] Nehemiah 8:3 [NRSV].

[3] Nehemiah 8:8 [NRSV].

[4] Nehemiah 8:12 [NRSV].