September 23, 2018 – “Arise and Build: Dreaming” by Rev. Cody Sandahl
Lay Reader = Jeremiah 29:4-7
4Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 5Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 6Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. 7But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.
Introduction
We are starting a new series looking at how Nehemiah was moved by God to dream of a better future for his people, and then rally the people to achieve that future.
Nehemiah is one of my favorite Old Testament books. Nehemiah is a man of action, but he also demonstrates compassion, wisdom, and deep faith. That’s a model for us as we dream of what God has in store for our future as well.
It’s useful to know where Nehemiah sits in the history of the nation of Israel. This takes place kind of in the twilight of the Old Testament narrative – it’s pretty close to the end where the Bible goes silent for a few hundred years before Jesus comes. So most of what you know from the Old Testament has already happened by this point.
Most importantly, this is after the destruction of Jerusalem by the armies of Babylon. This is after the Temple was destroyed – the greatest national catastrophe in Israel’s history. We don’t really have an analog for that, but the closest would be if Washington DC was destroyed along with every church building in the whole country. It was about as bad as it gets.
We heard in our first text from Jeremiah that God told the Jewish people to settle in and thrive where they were. Many of the leaders were captured and taken back to Babylon and other cities. And God told them to bloom where they were planted, because God was going to let them simmer there for a while. God let them stay in exile for about 70 years before giving them a way home.
Many of the Jewish people rose to positions of power in Babylon and later Persia, which conquered Babylon. You’ve heard about Daniel – who went into the lion’s den and came out unscathed? He became the chief advisor to the Babylonian king. Esther? She was the wife of the Persian king. And here we see Nehemiah, who is the cupbearer for the Persian king.
Cupbearer sounds like a waiter, right? But if you were an ancient king, and you were in constant danger of being poisoned, you cared a great deal about the person serving you drinks. The king’s life was literally in the hands of the cupbearer, so it was a position of great trust and influence. Think of it more as a confidant than a waiter.
Here in chapter one, we see how God opens Nehemiah’s heart, opens Nehemiah’s mind, opens Nehemiah’s vision to see what God has in store.
Nehemiah 1
1The words of Nehemiah son of Hacaliah. In the month of Chislev, in the twentieth year, while I was in Susa the capital, 2one of my brothers, Hanani, came with certain men from Judah; and I asked them about the Jews that survived, those who had escaped the captivity, and about Jerusalem. 3They replied, “The survivors there in the province who escaped captivity are in great trouble and shame; the wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been destroyed by fire.” 4When I heard these words I sat down and wept, and mourned for days, fasting and praying before the God of heaven.
5I said, “O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments; 6let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for your servants, the people of Israel, confessing the sins of the people of Israel, which we have sinned against you. Both I and my family have sinned. 7We have offended you deeply, failing to keep the commandments, the statutes, and the ordinances that you commanded your servant Moses. 8Remember the word that you commanded your servant Moses, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the peoples; 9but if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, though your outcasts are under the farthest skies, I will gather them from there and bring them to the place at which I have chosen to establish my name.’ 10They are your servants and your people, whom you redeemed by your great power and your strong hand. 11O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant, and to the prayer of your servants who delight in revering your name. Give success to your servant today, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man!” At the time, I was cupbearer to the king.
Reaching the Heart
I have marvelous news! I did a Google search this week, asking “how many people are hungry in the US.” And Google actually had already processed the answer to that question by pulling some data out of an official website. So, here’s the marvelous news. According to Google, the number of people who are hungry in the US: 6 people! That’s it! 6 people!
OK, well actually Google messed up, and the website actually said ONE in SIX people have times in their lives where they can’t provide food for everyone in their family. And other websites have lower numbers depending on how you count it. But the numbers seem to fall somewhere between 25 and 50 million people in the US have issues feeding their family. Or, again, 6 people according to Google.
What do you feel when you hear that? If you’re like most people, probably the real, God’s honest truth is that you don’t feel anything when you hear that. It’s too abstract. Even if you hear something closer to home – about 20% of the kids in Littleton schools face times where their families can’t feed them – you might think it’s wrong, you might wonder about the number, but you probably don’t feel anything.
Nehemiah probably wasn’t alive when Jerusalem was destroyed. Its walls lay in ruins for decades. Its people had been scattered for generations. So when Hanani told Nehemiah, “The survivors there in the province who escaped captivity are in great trouble and shame; the wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been destroyed by fire,” that’s the very definition of yesterday’s news. That’s almost yester-century’s news.
And yet, Nehemiah says, “When I heard these words I sat down and wept, and mourned for days, fasting and praying before the God of heaven.” Why on earth did he have that deeply-felt reaction to something he already knew?
Sometimes God uses old news to reach us in a new way. It’s one thing to know there are hungry people in our city – it’s another to meet someone at the Community Dinner who took three buses and spent hours of their time to get a free meal here. Or someone who has a deep-seated fear of crowds, but they’ll brave the 70, 80, 100 people at the dinner because they wouldn’t eat that night otherwise. For some reason, when Nehemiah heard about Jerusalem this time it struck a nerve. It reached his heart, his feelings, not just his mind.
We heard something similar from our students who went on the mission trip to Houston. Most of us are thinking about the harrowing rescues going on in the Carolinas with Hurricane Florence. Can you even remember the hurricane that hit Houston last year? So when they showed up and saw how these people still didn’t have homes over a year later – it touched a nerve in the students in a very Nehemiah-like way. And also like Nehemiah, it inspired them to do something about it. They sanded longer and harder. They spent time on the details inside the closet, where no one would see it, because they cared with their heart.
If you’ve been here at all over the last month, you’ve heard a bit about what God has been moving in my heart lately. I have been circling around the concept of place, or neighborhood. I have access to a ton of information about our area, and as a staff we just looked at the info in a one mile circle around our church. That gets you about to Santa Fe on the West, Broadway on the East, Bellview to the North, and Caley to the South. When I talk about our neighborhood, that’s about what I’m thinking.
But I’ve also been thinking about my neighborhood. I don’t live in that one mile circle around the church. Most of you don’t, either. Maybe that tells us something about how we have gotten out of touch with our local area. But the fact is that I live about four miles away – that’s close, but not close enough for me to know the people right around our church. So I’ve been thinking about my actual neighborhood in addition to the church’s neighborhood.
Like with Nehemiah, it’s not new information that moved my heart. It just suddenly made its way from my mind to my feelings. Now, I do get some deep insight about the blocks right around our church. I get a very unique perspective. Caleb goes to the preschool just a few blocks from here, and many days we park at the church and walk there. And so I can tell you the color of all the dumpsters between here and there. And I can tell you that one of our neighbors had a broken truck, and it’s been fixed. And if anyone forgot to pick up after their dog, Caleb will let me know about it. So I have some insight on our church’s neighborhood.
That’s how God is moving my heart right now in a very Nehemiah-like way. How is God moving your heart right now?
Praying and Dreaming
After Nehemiah was deeply moved in his heart, he prayed to God. He said, “O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments; let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for your servants, the people of Israel.”
What a prayer! Any time you can work in “great and awesome God” into your prayer, you know you’re dreaming something big!
Sometimes when our hearts are moved – even if they are moved to sadness – we can find dreams that are worthy of the “great and awesome God.”
A pastor named Mark Roberts was in a period of transition, and he asked God to speak to his heart about a possible move. He visited a small Presbyterian church the morning after praying that prayer. And what did he experience that morning? “The service was dreary, the worship insipid, and the preaching weak. Not only did God fail to speak to us in an inspiring way, but we left feeling discouraged and very sad.”
The sadness lasted far beyond the less-than-inspiring worship service. And he finally realized why his heart had been so moved – so discouraged – by this experience. He says, “Gradually I began to realize how much it grieved my heart that Christians had gathered for worship but ended up wasting their time.” Ouch.
But out of that sadness, he uncovered his sense of calling as a pastor. He started dreaming about genuine worship, Gospel-centered preaching, and making Sunday mornings worth every minute invested in it. That’s a dream worthy of the “great and awesome God.” But he had to experience that sadness first. He could dream only after finding his heart moved.
I want to share with you the exercise that moved my heart toward this concept of place, of neighborhood. On the back of your bulletin, you’ll see a blank space with “Your Neighborhood” at the top. Grab a pen from the pew rack in front of you. And in the middle of that space put a little square to represent where you live. Write “Me” in that square.
Now think about the people around you. Who lives next to you? Draw a box for that person or that family. And put their names in if you know them. Keep going – finish out your block. Write down the names you know, or just leave blanks where you don’t.
Put in boxes for other people you know in your neighborhood – maybe they’re a few blocks away, that’s OK. You can just put a box in space for them.
How many people do you know, by name, in your neighborhood? Is it pretty filled in? Or is it a bunch of empty boxes? And now, you don’t have to write this down, but go down those names. Do you know enough about their lives to pray for them? Could you come up with one thing to celebrate, or one thing to ask of God on their behalf?
That’s the one that got me. I know a fair number of names in our neighborhood, but I don’t know most of them well enough to be able to give you a joy or concern for prayer. And for some reason, that saddened me recently. It feels wrong.
And then I started thinking about the blocks around this church. And I can’t even fill in the names, let alone prayers. That feels wrong, too. It saddens me, like Nehemiah hearing about Jerusalem.
But it has also led me to pray, like Nehemiah, to “the great and awesome God.” Nehemiah was saddened by the sorry state of Jerusalem, but that led him to dream of what could be and how he could help make that better future happen. I believe we can dream together of what could be in our personal neighborhoods and the neighborhood around this church. And if we can dream, if we can pray to “the great and awesome God,” perhaps God will reveal how we can make that better future happen. Are you with me?
Prayer Walk
The first year I was here, we did something together that I believe we need to do again – but now with a different focus. About three years ago, fifty of you picked a block around the church and walked it, observing and praying. I think we need to do that again.
It looks like we might do this on Sunday October 14, but the beauty is that it doesn’t have to be done at the same time. If you want to do it, but you are out of town that day? Just do it on your own a different day. Prayer works no matter when you do it.
But here’s the twist. We have two different places, two different neighborhoods. We have the one mile around our church – that’s one neighborhood. And then we have the neighborhood where we live – the one you drew on the back of your bulletin. I’m feeling called to invest in both, but maybe you feel more strongly called to just your own neighborhood. That’s fine.
So on or around October 14, I invite and challenge every single one of us to pick a block and pray for it. I’ll put together little guides to help you. Pray for a block around this church or a block near where you live. Last time we were really just gathering information. This time, I want to encourage you to open your heart. How is the Holy Spirit trying to speak to your heart in a way that inspires you to act on behalf of these neighbors? How can you get to know their names, and their joys, and their concerns? If it’s in the church’s neighborhood, how can we demonstrate the love of Jesus in a way that makes them glad we’re here?
Summary
Sisters and brothers, how is the Holy Spirit trying to reach your heart like Nehemiah hearing about Jerusalem? How is the Holy Spirit trying to inspire you to dream and act on what you’re feeling like Nehemiah? And how will you pray fervently like Nehemiah? If we dream and act and pray in the same direction together, the “great and awesome God” might move in our midst. Do you want to see that? Because I do.
