11

“You are pretty sneaky,” I said to Nehemiah. I’d just gotten home from a discussion of his memoir. He was sitting in my extra desk chair, waiting.

“What’s the basis of that accusation?” he asked, calmly. I think he knew my comment was more admiration than accusation.

“In our study, we were looking at chapter 9 of your memoir. It’s the story about gathering on the twenty-fourth day of the seventh month. I realized that if someone didn’t read any of the rest of the Old Testament, any of the rest of the Law and the Prophets, from just this chapter they would learn the story of ‘Patient God and the People of Israel.’”

He just smiled.

“In fact, I was talking to a friend about all the repetition in Paul’s writing and explained that he was writing to different groups and situations. Each time he needed to write as if this might be the only letter they ever read. You are doing the same thing here. If the only thing that got passed along was this memoir, you wanted to be sure that people got the point.”

“Isn’t that what you do, too?” he asked.

It was my turn to be quiet. He was exactly right. I have lots of conversations. Sometimes they are with people, sometimes they are in my head. But I believe it matters to take those conversations and distill them and pass them on. I work to understand the basics of belief, the central story, and weave that into everything I do. It’s why we’re having these conversations. Nehemiah and I. And you and I.

“So tell me about that day in Jerusalem,” I said.

“We’d spent time that month celebrating the completion of the wall and the time to breathe a bit. As we said before, the wall wasn’t finished, mind you. Not enough for the dedication ceremony which would come later. But the perimeter was set. We could start feeling safe, feeling like a people. And, as you know, we celebrated the Feast of Booths with great passion.

“Now we were ready to take the next step. It’s that feeling you have on January 3. The celebration is done. The holidays are over. And you look in the mirror and take stock of where you are and what’s next.

“This gathering was that kind of day. For our people, it’s the day we begin reading the stories from the beginning, the stories of the beginning. In fact, you now call it Bereshit, “In the beginning.” We dressed in humble clothes. We spent the first part of the day hearing God’s words. And then it was our turn. It was time for confession.”

“Who wrote this confession?” I asked. Most of chapter 9 is a confession.

Nehemiah avoided the question. “As you can read, it was the Levites who spoke this to God, on behalf of the people. Leaders can give words to the cry of people’s hearts. They can help those hearts cry. And, you will remember, we had just stood through a reading of  Deuteronomy.”

I decided not to push about authorship of the prayer. “When I read this prayer,” I said, “I’m amazed at its scope. It covers millennia, from Creation to Abram to Mount Sinai. And in that first part, every thought starts with ‘God’. There’s a relentless rhythm. Reading it out loud, you and the rest of the people must have been overwhelmed with God. Reading it off a page loses some of that power.”

He nodded. “It is oral. You forget sometimes that almost everything was out loud until a millennium after me, even reading. And this prayer is communal. We are hearing this and being moved by this and joining in this confession together.”

I understood. “So when the Levites got to the ‘But they, our forefathers’, it had to be an ominous feeling.^[1]”

“It was. It marks a turning point in the confession. Having acknowledged to God our understanding of all that he had done, this ‘but’ is like a punch in the stomach. And then the Levites reminded us that God did not give up at the first offense. There was forbearance. There was forgiveness. There was a renewal of blessing through the wilderness, through the conquest.”

“But isn’t this a little too much of a summary? Don’t the books of Moses record a lot of disobedience in the lives of the people even before verse 16?”

Nehemiah smiled. “Remember perspective. In the account of the Levites, their goal is to highlight the trends. Where is the story taking people? Yes, there were lots of individual rebellions and restorations, but the trend is that God brought us to this land, and once our forebearers got to this land, we wavered. In the same way that the long history is of God moving across millennia to bring us here, our time here was a constant bickering with each other and with him.

“That’s why, if you were to draw this prayer on a flipchart, you would start with a long line going from left to right representing God taking his people to the Promised Land. Then a short line back to the left (rebellion), then a long line going to the right, and then a zigzag scribble and then a line straight down to exile.”

I pictured it. It made sense.

“And then at the end of the line?” I said.

“At the end of the line we are turning to God. Carefully, reverently, but hopefully. ‘Do not let the hardship seem trifling in your eyes’ was as humble as we could be in our request.”^[2]

I read the end of their confession out loud:

But see, we are slaves today, slaves in the land you gave our forefathers so they could eat its fruit and the other good things it produces. Because of our sins, its abundant harvest goes to the kings you have placed over us. They rule over our bodies and our cattle as they please. We are in great distress.^[3]

“There’s poignancy to the ending of this prayer. You are saying to God, ‘and after all this, we’re back in the Promised Land, with these walls. But there’s still a foreign king. We’re still in bondage. We need you.’”

“Isn’t that always the prayer of God’s people?” he said. “We’re never quite home even when it seems like home? Aren’t we always standing before God, confessing our inadequacies, our personal and generational sins, our need of him?”

“This confession is where you started when you first heard of the ruins, isn’t it?” I asked.

He smiled. “Now you are beginning to understand. The broken walls were real, but they also stood for our brokenness. And when I prayed for God to restore us, I wanted the walls to be restored. But I understood that God wanted the people to be restored as well. He didn’t want a city, he wanted a community of faithful people.”

Nehemiah walked out.

And I tried to summarize:

The book of Nehemiah constantly tells the stories of redemption, rejection, repentance, and renewal. God redeems us. We reject God. We repent of our rejection. God renews his promises. And the cycle starts. Chapter 9 reviews it clearly so that if all someone reads is just this one book, they get the story of a man who followed God, and they get the story of a people who didn’t.