Curate’s sermon Nehemiah 8.1-10; Luke 4.14-21 26.1.25 Epiphany 3

Can you remember the last thing you read that made you laugh, or cry, or despair (other than the news)? Are there books that have changed your life (hopefully the Bible included)? Is there a poem you find so powerful you’ll never forget it?
Back when I was finishing school I got close to going to university to study philology, with a focus on Finnish and Hungarian. I never ended up learning any Hungarian and have by now forgotten most of my Finnish but I still find languages fascinating. Any language, the very gift of it, is a miracle. An ability to use language to craft stories and texts that have the power to provoke emotions, to me, is no less miraculous.
One of the most exciting but also infuriating matters about languages is the accuracy of translation. It is especially relevant in the church, where the vast majority of the texts we are dealing with are translations. The footnote that says ‘Hebrew unknown’ throughout the Old Testament is far too common to be ignored, and the dramatically ranging translations of the same verse even in English surely invite us to ask questions.
When I was on placement in Helsinki just over a year ago, the Anglican chaplain there asked me to guess what ‘the noble screaming deer’ was in the first Finnish Bible. I failed to guess. The story goes that Mikael Agricola, who translated the Bible into Finnish, did not have a clue what a ‘roaring lion’ was in the original Greek of 1 Peter. He figured it was an animal of some sort, and, in the absence of lions in Finland, decided it was most likely a deer. Shemil Mathew, who led my pre-ordination retreat last year, told us that in some Indian Bibles there are ‘goats’ and ‘fluffy goats’ instead of ‘sheep’ because the translators never knew what a sheep was!
How much of any text do we really understand and do we even really understand it if we are reading in our own language? In a Reformed church, like ours, we regard the Bible and the written word key to our faith. Scripture is our fuel. This is where we look for meaning, and yet, the meaning is often not readily available. In addition, if we follow Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thinking on the subject, language is by definition fluid and reliant on the context to acquire meaning. As a result, reproduction of language, as we see in the Bible, will not retain all of the original context and our reading of it will be adding new contexts as well.
So I don’t think we will ever know what exactly it was like for the people in the synagogue to hear Jesus reading from Isaiah 61, which Luke describes in our Gospel reading. Presumably he was not meant to read this particular passage, since it says he had to find where it was written? Presumably they had never heard it read like that or in that context before, hence the reaction to the text (we hear that ‘the eyes of all <…> were fixed on him’)? In the following verses, an even stronger reaction is provoked: the people are filled with rage, ready to throw Jesus off a cliff, just because he says that prophets are not accepted in their home town.
In the same way, I have no idea what it was like to be part of the crowd in Nehemiah, all standing up, lifting up their hands and shouting ‘Amen’ and then worshipping the Lord and weeping on hearing the words of the law. In this case, we are not told what they hear and what the interpretation they are given is, but we see the strongest possible reaction to the spoken word. It seems that our passages today are not so much about the words but rather about what words can do.
We know words to be imperfect, as the famous song goes, ‘Vows are spoken to be broken; words are meaningless and forgettable’. Our Bibles are printed on the same paper, with the same ink as everything else. With the exception of some words, we don’t have a special vocabulary or language reserved exclusively for holy texts, but there is something different about them. I am inclined to think that the difference is in our intention and attention.
Yes, we have lost a lot of the beauty of Hebrew poetry in Psalms, because it is impossible to translate it with precision, and we may never fully recover the original contexts the words we read were spoken in, but we still approach the Biblical texts looking for God, seeking to speak to Him and to hear from Him. In Nehemiah, the hearers were looking to praise and worship God and so the words of the law, aided by interpretation of the priest, spoke to them. In Luke, the text suddenly comes to life with such power because God himself stands up and speaks those words directly, and no interpretation is even needed. I guess what I am doing here is also interpreting the words for you, so that we can see something revealed in the words. What you are doing is also interpreting the words in your head as you hear them and then listening to what I say, so there may be an internal dialogue going on at this stage. The words are lifted off the page and are no longer words – they are ideas, thoughts, emotions, courses of action. The words are there to point us towards something else. When Jesus reads from Isaih 61, it is no longer about Isaiah or Israel or a prophesy or which scroll it comes from; it is about bringing good news to the poor, releasing the captives, letting the oppressed go free. It is no longer about words.
For better or worse, we exist surrounded by words and texts. This is how most of our communication is done and a lot depends on it. Sometimes lives depend on it!
I worry about things I say. I re-write emails multiple times worrying that they may come across unfriendly or abrupt. I replay spoken conversations in my head, wondering if I have offended someone and they have been too polite and didn’t let on. Sometimes I message people to apologise in case I have said something to offend them. I worry about misinterpreting things I read too and accidentally taking something benign and lighthearted too seriously. I often struggle to compose prayers, especially when I am put on the spot when someone comes into the church and asks me to pray with them. I think I know why. I worry. I want to use nice eloquent words, I want it to sound good, like it sounds when I read prayers written by other people. As I do this, I lose sight of what prayer is for. I think of words, not of God.
Words matter but they are vehicles, not destinations. What we need to do is have our heart in the right place, open it up to be receptive. Psalm 19, appointed for today, finishes with the words I usually use before I preach: ‘let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, o Lord, my rock and my redeemer’.
These lines give us the freedom to acknowledge the inadequacy of the words we use. The Word is perfect but words are not. The essence of the Bible is not in the specific words, even if we read them in Hebrew or Greek, it is in being receptive to seeing and hearing what the words contain. This is something Augustine, being a professor of rhetoric and a specialist in language, discovered. Having read the Bible before and considered it useless and badly written, one day he saw beyond words. Only then his life was turned around and faith emerged. Let this be our guidance. In the reading from Nehemiah, in verse 2, we hear that the law was read before the people ‘who could hear with understanding’. We may never experience weeping on hearing the word of God, but I hope we always have the grace to hear it with understanding, to see and perceive its miraculous power, to let it change our lives, to be lifted off the page and guide us towards the Almighty. Amen.

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