Coming Back/Moving Forward

Ezra Chapter 3:8-13

Coming back/moving forward

wasn’t last week great, I actually enjoyed it far more than I thought I would. This certainly seems to be something unique about the people of God meeting together and I know that it might seem a little on the nose, but today we're talking about a return from exile, in many ways our online gathering during Covid has felt like a form of exile, so I’m pretty comfortable with making this comparison.

So often over the past year I’ve heard people say things like I just miss being able to physically be in the same space as people, able to worship fully taking part in the sacraments, I can’t wait to be back in person...but mostly the phrase I hear a lot is I can’t wait for us to get back to normal... Now obviously there is not an exact correlation between the experience of the Jewish people in exile and us having to transition online for a year or so… I would never compare the horrors of the Babylonian decimation of Jerusalem to shifting to a digital format...but in all honesty this past year has been so much more than just a format change. Consequently there are a number of spiritual lessons we can learn from this passage about coming back, that do apply. The return of God’s people could perhaps be expressed in three categories: A hope, a danger and lastly a promise.

Putting it in its historical context, what was the hope of the Jewish people?

For the people of Israel in Ezra 3 they had literally been in exile in Babylon for decades now this wasn’t because of a pandemic but they had been thrust as a community into a space in a world that was not their own, forced to worship the Lord in a way that was alien, where they longed to just to be together again in the temple of the Lord. Consequently God through the prophets had made them an amazing promise. (Jer 3:14–17; 23:3–8; 30:1–33:26; Ezek 34:11–16; 36:8–12). This included a return from captivity and the promise of the Messiah.Isaiah 60 had predicted and promised that coming back from exile would be a glorious event, a triumphant returning nation coming home to rebuild the temple to its former glory and putting their conquering king a son of David back on the throne...I mean it was gonna be freakin epic...

and certainly the book of Ezra suggests that there was a pretty big party. Everybody was pretty excited cheering and praising the Lord and talking about the faithfulness of God, sounds familiar right… Let’s take a look at the text of versus 8t through 10 describing for us their reopening committee if you will, the preceding chapters list name after name of families who returned. This section emphasizes that everybody was going to play a part in relaunching and rebuilding the temple. If I may be so bold as to quote from the Living Liable, as my family fondly refers to this translation, it says “the work force was made up of everyone who had returned” (3:8),as one commentator says not just people from one tribe or one city. This was not the time for people to argue about who would do what job, what hymns or choruses should be sung, or who should sit where. Everyone was overjoyed to be there worshiping their great God.

That about right right? Last week everyone stepped up and helped to make it happen.

but I am pretty tired I’m always tired, it wasn’t like being online was a vacation, I do know some people who took the opportunity to complete video games and struggle to find ways to fill the time but for most people I know, Quarantine was a time of incredible stress loss of jobs, physical and financial instability, personal isolation and in some cases a loss of life. Perhaps for some of us the hope of returning to in person services was the idea of getting back to quote unquote normal. Maybe for some of us the hope was a relief or a break from the labor.

But we know that doesn’t seem to be the biblical blueprint for Gods people. A return from exile always means a lot of joy, a big party and a lot of hard work to accomplish reestablishing themselves in the land and remaining faithful the the requirements of Holiness. but they didn’t return with the same people they left with who already knew what had to be done and could just hop straight back in. They had to train new volunteers and the people had to be willing to sacrifice and step up, perhaps with fewer and newer hands to do the greater work of rebuilding….I know right now there are 4 or 5 ministry leaders praying and waiting on the Lord, in need of our assistance….so if you have hands...

and this is always the way it is when the Jews were coming to the promised land from their exile in Egypt, they wandered for 40 years in the wilderness and they show up. And they have to fight and they have to suffer and they have to persevere… In the words of Winston Churchill “"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat." The good news is this message is not the message folks. There is more hard work but that’s not the only part of the message. They also had the opportunity here to do something new, they weren’t returning as conquering heroes with a king but, perhaps the hope was to to at least return to worshiping the way they used to.. to what they could call normal but as much as normal would’ve meant joyfully worshiping God in the newly erected Temple of Solomon, the truth is the normal would also have been syncretistic religious practices and unfaithfulness that led them into exile.

Now I’m not of course saying that we had any practices at the church prior to Covid that led to us having a global pandemic… But perhaps we were a church that wasn’t particularly growing, in numbers, or our understanding of prejudice of injustice of holiness. I think it would be fair to argue that as a church Covid Quarantine has refined us through trials and challenges and in many ways we returned with a stronger sense of purpose for who we are in Washington Heights, Riverdale and New York and most importantly our identity in Jesus. Unlike the people of Israel in the time of Ezra we did return with our conquering king! Jesus Christ the son of David is on the throne. (can I get an Amen)

We can in fact with a greater sense of assurance say in 2021 that

“he is good,

for his steadfast love endures forever ”

And what did we do last week 11 And they sang responsively, praising and giving thanks to the Lord,

But what happens next?

“And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. 12 But many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers' houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted aloud for joy, 13 so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people's weeping,

Or as someone said to me last Sunday “I dunno man it feels kind of anti climatic” We all have expectations of what returning will look like. For many of us last week was a joyful shout, for some it was perhaps a sobering reminder of who was no longer with us, where’s Joe who was on the sound board, where is Rachel who would sing on the praise team, pretty soon we will be losing all the Williams...as God moves them on to new challenges and blessings... the normal we might want to return to is gone.

And we might think of normal as a nostalgic return to physically doing life together in an incredibly loving and close knit community, while we strive to participate in works of justice and mercy together. But normal also looked like a church of 70-80 people doing life together for years while the majority of those around us lived or died without hearing about Jesus Christ…

What is nostalgia? “The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”

Or as Thomas Wolfe so poignantly put it in his classic novel “You can’t go home again” "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

In some ways we are trying to do this all the time, it was the anniversary of my mothers passing yesterday, and I was remembering all kinds of little things, like being a very little boy and climbing out of the bathtub cold and naked and my mum wrapping me in a warm towel. That’s a particular feeling that I can’t really get back, and even if she were here today I wouldn’t be able to. we have lots and lots of these irretrievable moments in life right? The sound of your child taking his first breath and crying or the moment you met or fell in love with your spouse, I remember watching Phin eat his first Mr Sofftee ice cream when he was like 3, parenting judgment aside, there was this ice cream all over his face dripping down his shirt and he had this expression of pure joy,-Mr Softee just blow his tiny mind. I remember thinking I don’t recall the last time I ate anything and had that experience.

I would like to suggest that we as Christians cannot go home again because actually home is a place we have not yet been. That all of the moments of joy that we cannot recreate were not just fantasies, they really happened and they were really great.

but they were Not sustainable earthly realities, they were merely coming attractions for eternity, for the joys and pleasures at God right hand, A home we are on our way to. Psalm 84 says Blessed are those whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.

We came back, but only so that we can move forward. We are continuing our journey together. This should help us in the face of disappointment and also in the face of obstacles as we recognise we face them with the strength found in Jesus. Otherwise we will do as the people of Israel did, come back disappointed, exhausted and discouraged. Or as things will fall short of our expectations it will be anti climatic.

The reality is that our hopes are not going to be snuffed out because we are still heading toward our glorious promise. We are still on our way home.

With This longing to return to normal, to home, to precious moments we can as believers in Jesus Heave the pilgrims sigh as is St Augustine calls it. we live, and revel in the tension of verse 13 indistinguishable joy with longing, celebration and suffering or to use the theological lingo the tension of Already not yet…

C.S Lewis writes "Our life-long nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation." Though secure in God, we long for our true home. We must endure with a holy discontentment.

But if we are just left with this temporal milaze we won’t have the will nor the spiritual power to face all the obstacles we are going to face as we speak to Washington heights about Jesus.

there is a bittersweet quality to our return because there are so many who are no longer with us, normal is gone.

We celebrated last week we celebrated this morning and it’s great but as we say in the UK, at some point the shine comes off the apple, and you just realize some friends are gone those who did alot of the work are no longer here the work that is to be done has to be done with fewer hands:

whenever God does something there is always struggle and opposition the book of Ezra in the book of Nehemiah constantly referred to the difficulties they faced. What does the bible tell us to do? In some ways God has galvanized our faith in quarantine in preparation for the difficulty of the work ahead. As Reyn mentioned last week we now live in a world that is even more opposed to the gospel and particularly to Christians than it was two years ago. Our recent emphasis on the mandate to evangelize and to spread the gospel is exciting but also pretty scary, I don’t know much about animal husbandry but i’m pretty sure that sheep produce sheep, we have always been good at growing grass and accumulating sheep from elsewhere but evangelism is scary we have to defend the gospel on the grounds of a supernatural God in a hyper empirical environment, we have to show the love of Jesus as we defend the biblical sex ethic, the Bible’s position on homosexuality etc... now we have to navigate legitimate accusations for being part of a faith that on a broader scale has poorly handled systemic racism issues, climate change, vaccination etc…. There will be so many challenges we may well be tempted to get even more nostalgic. What does the passage suggest? 3 When the seventh month came, and the children of Israel were in the towns, the people gathered as one man to Jerusalem. and they built the altar of the God of Israel, to offer burnt offerings on it, 3 They set the altar in its place, for fear was on them because of the peoples of the lands, and they offered burnt offerings on it to the Lord, burnt offerings morning and evening. Where do we turn? To the once and for all sacrifice of Jesus, time to pray Psalm 127 baby, unless the Lord builds the house the labours labor in vain right?

Yes we have this longing but we also have a mission and a confidence because where the people in Ezra wept because the temple was not glorious, we can just sweat because we have the most glorious temple in Jesus John 2:19-21

19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body.

Jesus is in fact the fulfillment of all our longings and while we are on pilgrimage, on mission together we get to be part of this beautiful promise

1 Peter 2:5 says

5 you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

Tim Keller wrote in The Prodigal God, "All the mini-exoduses and mini-homecomings of the Bible failed in the end to deliver the final and full homecoming the prophets promised and everyone longed for." A kind of spiritual homesickness resides in every heart. Though we experience redemption and forgiveness in this life through Christ, we still long and wait for our full redemption (Rom. 8:23-24).We don’t have to dig down deep, pull ourselves up by our boot straps and some how win the day! Jesus has already won the day but we are called to faithful obedience on mission together

Hebrews 12:1

12 Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,

Thank God we don’t have to win the race, cos am not fast..Jesus won it for us but we still gotta run.

Resting in that drawing from that we look to that eternity we will simply get to relive our greatest hits. But we will be with Jesus and all of our shadowy mysterious deep heart felt longings will be and are satisfied in him.