While appreciating how far they have recently come, they also understand the labor and sacrifice still before them. Still others cry tears of a faithful bewilderment … a faithful bewilderment … upon hearing of their people’s former glory. They have married the people of the lands where they found themselves, and they worry that the old robes and the old rituals will not fit their new habits. Without the Temple to center their piety, they have found God at work wherever they lived. Yet, others cry tears of defiance, for, after all, it’s been a long time – seventy years – since these people lived in Jerusalem, and, in the process of making do, they’ve started new lives with a new order. Some in that old congregation cry tears of relief, for their turn in fortune seems scarcely less than a miracle: whatever the city’s condition, they have returned to Jerusalem they have reunited with family long feared lost they have begun rebuilding the altar of their Temple and they have even raised new walls for the city, signs and symbols that their new situation might endure.

And upon hearing stories of their past renown, the people of this morning’s appointment cry complicated tears. Haggai’s strongly suggests that the city’s earlier glory has not, yet, been restored. While we do not know exactly the condition of either Jerusalem or the nascent, second Temple in this particular moment from Nehemiah, the short book of the prophet Haggai, penned during these same years, complains that the house of the Lord still “lies in ruins, while ” than rebuilding the Temple of their God. In response to this blessing, the people answer, “Amen, Amen.” And Ezra “gives the sense” of the lesson, aiding the people’s understanding, before he and the whole congregation bow, together, in common prayer.Īside from the details of the preaching carrying on for hours and the people ecstatically raising their hands (church behaviors we Episcopalians tend to view, at best, as impolite) we can recognize glimmers of ourselves in these Jewish liturgics from nearly 2,600 years ago. When Ezra opens the book, the people stand, and, when he finishes reading, he praises God. The detail “on the first day of the seventh month” locates the event in early fall, in September or October, and, despite the faraway setting, the form of their worship should sound familiar: the people gather, and Ezra, a priest, reads from scripture. Today’s lesson from Nehemiah narrates a moment not long after the laying of those first stones.

Less than a generation after the Decree of Cyrus, the returning exiles laid a new Temple’s foundation – sometime between 520 and 515 BCE – beginning the period known to the religious academy as “Second Temple Judaism,” that stretch of Jewish history into which Jesus would eventually be born. The Babylonian Exile ended when the Persian King, Cyrus the Great, conquered Babylon and, by his decree, allowed the Jewish people’s return to Jerusalem. This destruction of Solomon’s grand achievement traditionally marks the beginning of “the Babylonian Exile,” that period of roughly seventy years during which the Jewish people lived in diaspora, separated from one another and from their ancestral homeland. In 587 BCE, following deportations of Jewish kings from Jerusalem, the Babylonians conquered the holy city and destroyed its temple. Come Holy Spirit, and enkindle in the hearts of your faithful, the fire of your Love.

Brave church trinity