Rebuilding It Right

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Full Transcript, January 24, 2021:

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I have a practice of looking for answers in books. Not in a research sense, more in a divination type of way. The process is pretty simple: I look at a bookshelf and soften my focus. I take down the book that stands out at me. I open the book and flip through the pages, feeling them fall past the tips of my fingers until something says “stop,” and then I read the first paragraph that jumps out at me. I’ve done this for many years, though I don’t talk about it much, and it’s helped me make a lot of important mental and emotional connections. It’s not as though the books tell me what to do or anything, but the part of me that believes in a higher power which intervenes in my life directly likes to think that it’s Spirit nudging me in the right direction.

So when I received the prompt to do some preaching about a passage from the Bible, I figured I would let Spirit pick the passage for me. When I opened the book, it landed on chapter five of the book of the prophet Nehemiah.

You know, Nehemiah? Or as most of us call him, “who?”

Not one of the better-known Bible stories, Nehemiah’s journey starts in the court of King Artaxerxes I of Persia around the year 445 BCE. When he learns of the state of shambles which his people’s city, Jerusalem, has been reduced to, Nehemiah is heartbroken. He obtains special permission from the King to travel to Jerusalem and try to rebuild it - both the literal buildings and the way of life in the city.

Nehemiah faces a great number of logistical hurdles with courage and grace, motivating every Israelite in the city regardless of status to get involved in the rebuilding process. At the end of chapter four, he has successfully rebuffed mockery and threats from the occupying non-Jews who want Jerusalem to remain a ruin, and the repairs are beginning to take shape. Which brings us to chapter five - the passage turned up by my little divination exercise.

I have to read you Nehemiah’s words from this section, because they give me goosebumps with their relevance. See, the common people come to him complaining that their wealthier compatriots are taxing them to death. Some have nothing for themselves and their families to eat. Others can buy grain, but only by going deep into debt, and mortgaging their fields and homes. And the biggest transgression of all - the Judeans are selling the sons and daughters of their own people into slavery to pay for these debts. Nehemiah says:

When I heard their outcry and the reasons for it, I became very angry. I thought the matter over and then took issue with the nobles and rulers. I charged them, “You are lending against pledges, everyone to his brother”; and I summoned a great assembly to deal with them. I said to them, “We, to the limit of our ability, have redeemed our brothers the Judeans who sold themselves to our enemies. Now you are selling your own family, and we will have to buy them back!” They stayed silent; they couldn’t think of anything to say. I also said, “Moreover, my brothers and my servants, I too have loaned them money and grain. Please, let’s stop making it so burdensome to go into debt. Please! Today! Give them back their fields, vineyards, olive groves and homes; also the hundred pieces of silver and the grain, wine and olive oil you demand from them as interest.”

And just like that, the wealthy citizens commit to returning the resources of the common folk, and to work to return those who had been sold into slavery. Nehemiah binds them to their promise with a symbolic gesture:

Shaking out the fold in my garment, I said, “May God thus shake every man from his house and from his work who fails to live up to this promise — may he be shaken out like this and made empty.” The whole assembly said, “Amen!” and praised Adonai; and the people did as they had promised.

In today’s terms, we might say that Nehemiah turned his pockets inside out and then told the assembled that God would be well within God’s rights to turn the people out of God’s pockets and discard them if they didn’t keep their promise. At the close of the chapter, we learn that from that day forward, despite the demands and privileges of his leadership position, Nehemiah chooses to eat modestly and forgo his wages out of fairness to the commoners who were so heavily burdened.

Alright, so that’s some serious role model behavior, but why did I say this is so relevant?

Well, does anyone else feel a little bit like our way of life, whatever it might be, has been reduced to rubble over the past few years? While world events and the situation in our country have hit a number of boiling points lately, many of us are feeling impacted on every scale - individual right on up to theological.

In this time, Unitarian Universalism has also been responding to a variety of long-term pressures as well as these immediate current events. The resulting shifts, debates, votes, policies, vendettas, improvements, and uncertainties have been optimistically referred to as a “Great Turning.” A huge number of us are feeling hurt and lost, and whether we are longing desperately to go back to the past or yearning for a very different future, it’s pretty clear we don’t want things to continue as they are right now. Like Nehemiah returning to Jerusalem, it’s time to rebuild, and if this is going to work, everyone needs to pitch in.

Nehemiah wants to rebuild Jerusalem because he loves his people and that love drives him to lead from a place of justice. In the words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “I believe that to love God is to love our fellow humans. To honour God is to honour our fellow humans. We may not ask God to listen to us if we are unwilling to listen to others. We may not ask God to forgive us if we are unwilling to forgive others. To know God is to seek to imitate Him, which means [...] to exercise kindness, justice, and righteousness on earth.” Nehemiah understands that to seek right relationship with God, he has to treat the people he leads with the respect of equals.

To rebuild Unitarian Universalism with love, we have many lessons to learn from Nehemiah.

It’s easy to miss the cause-and-effect relationship between Jerusalem’s efforts to rebuild and the people raising the need for anti-exploitation policies. After some close study of different interpretations of the book, it becomes clear that the reason the common people brought their complaint to Nehemiah at the time they did is because the rebuilding efforts took their already-difficult situation and made it even harder. The cost of repairing the city was coming out of their already-empty pockets, while those who held their debts kept bringing in interest.

When rebuilding is supposed to be for the good of the whole community, sometimes we don’t realize that the greatest burden falls on those who are already struggling. Who is being metaphorically taxed to death while we’re all working to build up our faith? Is it the people of color who are being expected to serve as free educators for their white neighbors? Is it the person on disability income who is sitting through the church budget forums while wondering how they will pay rent this month? Is it the working single parent who is being pressured into spending their only free hour each week serving on a committee? It’s so easy to forget that when we must all pitch in “equally,” the same amount of demand doesn’t impact everyone equally.

So again we do well to follow Nehemiah’s example: first, we listen. Then, we find practical ways to alleviate the burdens of the struggling. We educate the privileged about their actions, and we set an example by acknowledging where we’ve also taken advantage of injustice. Sometimes, no matter how hard we’ve worked to deserve them, we forgo our comforts and luxuries so that others may survive.

When making changes like this, our communities tend to talk ourselves in circles about how “we can’t fix wealth disparity because the logistics are impossibly complicated and it just doesn’t work that way,” but when it boils down to it, Nehemiah said, “This is wrong. Stop it.” and the wealthy said “Okay.” and things improved. Jerusalem certainly faced further hardships, but people weren’t starving while others feasted or being sold to settle debts anymore.

The other thing that really gives me goosebumps is when Nehemiah says, “Please, let’s stop making it so burdensome to go into debt!” He knew that ignoring the struggle of others in order to accrue more wealth was wrong, and he knew it twenty-five hundred years ago. But today, we have nearly two full generations of Americans who, at this rate, will still be paying student loans when they’re 80 years old. We have people getting kicked out of their homes during a pandemic crisis because the income of their landlords is more important than the lives of the tenants. We have insurance schemes which inflate the cost of urgent medical care to the point that the success of a cancer patient’s online fundraising campaign determines who lives and who dies.

What would Nehemiah say? To paraphrase, “You are letting your own family die in the streets, and this will not fly.” The prioritization of the economy over life and health is an outrage. To rebuild our faith community, we need to look at ourselves with a searching eye. We need to uncover all the places where this insidious system of selfish priorities has taken root in us, and we need to keep our response simple and on message: this will not fly. Not here, where we affirm each person’s inherent worth. Not here, where all people are beloved. Not anywhere, but especially not here.

In the United States, we live in a country where all of these outrageously selfish decisions surround and impact us on a daily basis. And while, as individuals in this congregation, as a people who believe in justice and human equity, we may not be participating in any of the big crimes against justice which Americans perpetuate - that doesn’t mean our work is done. The culture of harmful individualism which surrounds us will naturally find ways to seep in and express itself in our community and in our selves. Our work is to seek out those expressions and eradicate them - in our selves, and in our congregation, and in our denomination - it is just as urgent as working to dismantle those injustices on the world scale.

As we state every week, it is our mission to transform ourselves AND our world. We journey through this world as members and friends of MDUUC, as the people of Unitarian Universalism, and we observe this exploitation and injustice in the wider society through the lens of our own location. We can’t lose touch with our self-awareness and hope to make a lasting difference.

We cannot rebuild a healthy Unitarian Universalism without hearing the call to treat humanity with honor, equity, and forgiveness. We need Nehemiah’s courage to work tirelessly, get everyone involved in the process, and address the injustices that we encounter along the way. And then, like the Judeans who chose the way of reconciliation and forgave the debts of their neighbors, we may feel taken over by the joy of coming back into right relationship, and we will find ourselves celebrating together. If, however, we miss the opportunity to steer in a new direction which has been uncovered by all the recent big shifts in our landscape, we may find ourselves perpetuating the same painful mistakes for another 2500 years.

Unless we choose the path of honor, equity, and forgiveness - putting right relationship before individualism, forgoing comfort in favor of uplifting those burdened by history and society - we stand to lose so much that is necessary and good. We could lose our neighbors, we could lose the power of our community, we could even lose the integrity of our whole denomination. So instead, let us reorient our beliefs and actions to discover what is to be gained when we open our minds and hearts to faith in the community where selfish gain is not an option - a community we are building as people together - a community built on common good.

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[Copyright 2021 Miranda (Bran) Lennox]