Listening to the Word, Again

1 All the people gathered together into the square before the Water Gate. They told Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the LORD had given to Israel. 2 Accordingly, Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could hear with understanding. This was on the first day of the seventh month. 3 He read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand, and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law. … 5 And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people, and when he opened it, all the people stood up. 6 Then Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. Then they bowed their heads and worshiped the LORD with their faces to the ground. … 8 So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading. 9 And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who taught the people said to all the people, “This day is holy to the LORD your God; do not mourn or weep.” For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law. 10 Then he said to them, “Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy to our LORD, and do not be grieved, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.”

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 (NRSVue)

1 The heavens are telling the glory of God,
    and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
2 Day to day pours forth speech,
    and night to night declares knowledge.
3 There is no speech, nor are there words;
    their voice is not heard;
4 yet their voice goes out through all the earth
    and their words to the end of the world.
In the heavens he has set a tent for the sun,
    5 which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy,
    and like a strong man runs its course with joy.
6 Its rising is from the end of the heavens
    and its circuit to the end of them,
    and nothing is hid from its heat.
7 The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul;
    the decrees of the LORD are sure, making wise the simple;
8 the precepts of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart;
    the commandment of the LORD is clear, enlightening the eyes;
9 the fear of the LORD is pure, enduring forever;
    the ordinances of the LORD are true and righteous altogether.
10 More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold;
    sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.
11 Moreover, by them is your servant warned;
    in keeping them there is great reward.
12 But who can detect one’s own errors?
    Clear me from hidden faults.
13 Keep back your servant also from the insolent;
    do not let them have dominion over me.
    Then I shall be blameless and innocent of great transgression.
14 Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you,
    O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.

Psalm 19 (NRSVue)

The Democratic fig leaf has fallen from the U.S. presidency. National politics has proudly donned the histrionics typical of world “wrestling,” the byproduct of, among other things, a mass media machine addicted to spectacle, scandal, cheap antagonism, and tawdry catharsis—whatever it takes to command our attention. It is a daunting development. As we might have expected, corporate capitalism and our own moldable appetites have colluded to produce this volatile political culture with the media technology that now pervades all of our lives. It fits well what Neil Postman foresaw in Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985 and what James Baldwin presciently observed even earlier in Harlem with the introduction of the television (“Dark Days,” 1980). We are scattered. And many of us are wandering for bases of resistance and hope. We need ways of gathering, ways that embody God’s gathering presence, even if the names of God in America are justly blasphemed around us and among us.

How might we gather amidst the forces of the scatterer in our current political culture, amidst the manifold powers of fragmentation that Scripture knows as the Satan? How might we gather when our speech now does so much to estrange and so little to communicate? The patterns of speech fomented by the media machine of our day have left our words with little body. Borne of a thinned and fragmented social fabric, they are quickly disembodied, chopped up, and configured to pigeon hole people, including ourselves, and to fuel an omnivorous engine of outrage. So they further thin and fragment our social fabric, and each one of us along the way. How might we gather to stitch more powerful bonds of neighborliness and feed the communication of the body?

As the lectionary reading from Nehemiah remembers, some of the scattered ancestors of the people of God gathered on the occasion of Israel’s new year in the rubble of iconic Jerusalem. Exiled by Babylon, ruled by Persia, they gathered to listen anew to the law of their God: the people asked Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law, they stood, Ezra read from morning until midday, and the people wept. 

On that new year’s day, those gathered were but a small, broken remnant of their people sprawled across their known world. But they sensed the gravity of what they heard; it pulled them together and grounded their loss. They gathered to remember who they were after being so torn from one another and their adopted homeland. They gathered to remember their God. Still laboring under the weight of empire, still emerging from exile, in the ruins of what their people had built, they listened, grieved, and fed each other. They dared to piece together an imagination of their hope. They did this as witnesses to the fragmentation that is produced by empire and ancestral injustice, fragmentation that is glossed over by the speech patterns of the dominant. Their liturgical act was flawed, to be sure. It wasn’t enough. But it was how they gathered in the wake of being scattered. They listened to the scriptural word, again, and their written memory invites us to listen, too, again.

Scripture has acquired a lethal familiarity in our political culture. It is ubiquitous only as something disembodied and chopped up, configured as jingoistic slogans or the commodified mantras of what is now a veritable social justice industry. So often the words of Scripture today seem to have nothing revelatory to say. In its currently fragmented reception, including the bits that are read before or during sermons, Scripture is tired. We think we have already heard it before it is read, perhaps even that we have understood it once and for all. Some of us have taken to hearing it, or rather to tolerating it, as a steadily regressing word, which never gives itself to inspirational understanding. It seems to give itself only to canned moralizing, withering and technocratic debates, or fodder that some other, more stimulating discourse must turn into real food. Perhaps we must listen to the word again, otherwise.

In Nehemiah, the people did not listen to a few lines of Scripture before a lengthy sermon or nibble on a few scriptural bits as the spice or headline of something else. When they gathered on Rosh Hashanah, they seem to have listened to the reading of Scripture for several hours, “from early morning until midday,” likely hearing an entire book of the law of Moses, if not more, all in one go. They could not seize upon a few words or their “favorite verses” and quickly dissolve them into their current, hackneyed, scattered understanding of things. They listened long enough to be drawn into a world that was not of their own making, one strange and yet known enough to make them weep. And listening for a long time, they were drawn into that world together. 

It will do no good to fetishize the Bible, of course, and Scripture alone is not enough to invigorate our speech and bond us to our neighbors in love. But if we consume Scripture only in selective fragments—especially if we consume it primarily while alone, seated at a desk or staring at a phone—the words are too easily another tool of the scatterer rather than food that gathers us. We must gather to listen, and listen long enough for what we hear to gather us. 

The gathering on that ancient Rosh Hashanah in the ruins of Jerusalem is striking: the law was not read only to authorities, Nehemiah tells us, but to “both men and women and all who could hear with understanding.” The power of the word lay partly in who was listening, and in their listening together. What is more, guides were present to translate and interpret: “They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” Not only did the guides interpret the old, faded words by translating them to the tongues that their hearers were forced to acquire in exile; they also gave a fresh rendering of their sense with teaching in those acquired languages. 

Written words cannot really live across generations—across the veil of death—any other way; their sense grows with the people, and so it must be rendered anew and in a way that resonates with those who hear. The repristination of some exoticized original, which has been adduced in recent generations to ground the authority of Scripture, is a fiction. It cannot help but be a ruse, one that kills words and augurs their extinction. Thus, in Nehemiah the interpretive guides “gave the sense.” We rightly bristle at trusting the interpretation of Scripture to elites. But Nehemiah reminds us that we do need teachers, that one of their responsibilities is to interpret scriptural discourse so that the people understand, and that it is interpretation that “gives the sense.” 

The promised family of Abraham is now sprawled across most of the populated surface of the earth. It has survived its many generations, against the forces of the scatterer that render peoples extinct, partly by the power of the scriptural word. Among all our other words, Scripture is a stubborn remembrance: it checks the tendency of the people who live by it to remake their past in their own image or to imagine themselves as without precedent. Interpreted wisely, it is not a pleasant, reassuring harmony of voices but a chamber of generative dissonance, of probing, and of creation. Perhaps it can help us to gather, to give more body to our speech, especially when we mean to be political, to speak with power to inspire and persuade in the midst of political struggle.

Surely that will often mean that we say less or keep silent, perhaps that we do not respond to trollers or troll ourselves. But when we do open our mouths or start punching the keys on our computers or phones, the formative power of Scripture may enable our words to be searching, unveiling, true to the people we address, true to ourselves, truthful about others. Scripture does not do this by itself but in virtue of the people who hear it. But the people must hear Scripture patiently together if they are to draw from its power when they speak. 

Perhaps hearing Scripture patiently together can help us to break our addiction to rushed outrage and to other forms of entrenchment. I suspect it will often prompt us to mourn, as the ancestors of the people of God did in Nehemiah. But then we may know that grief as the food of holiness so that, as we are gathered by Scripture and other gifts we offer to one another, our mourning turns to joy, for “the Lord is our strength.” We may learn that the captivity of our political speech has not in fact claimed all of our life, that our sense of loss is itself testimony to a life together that can be revived. “Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared,” the people heard, “for this day is holy to our LORD; do not be grieved.”

If indeed we resolve to listen to the word, again, let us forego quixotic romances about healing our language with Scripture. Some of its words will remain boring for some time, if not forever. We are not sure what to do with whole swaths of it, if we are honest. The tired ruts in our imagination run deep, and our imagination does not grow independently of the growth of the rest of our life. Even if we recover the regular, public reading of Scripture in our communities, following the pattern of Nehemiah and many synagogues in our day, we can remain shortsighted in our perception of others, of ourselves, and of our places; we can remain poor in our speech, hardened to God’s word, even as people who regularly read or listen to the words of the Bible.

In light of the limits of the written words of Scripture, our lectionary reading from the Psalter offers us a song of what must fill scriptural words, and our words, if they are to be words of life. It sings of the speech that pours forth, day to day and night to night, from the heavens; it chants of the knowledge of the bridegroom sun that runs its daily course with joy.

The light of God’s written law, which the people hear, is to refract the rays and the heat of that powerful groom above us each day. If it doesn’t, then that generative light of creation has not reached us with life by the words we have heard. The daily run of that bridegroom compasses the heavens from one end to the other; “nothing is hid from its heat.” The word of God, then, comes to us not as just anything that we hear from the Bible but as a profligate light that revives us and makes us wise. It fills our hearts with joy and illumines our eyes, the psalmist sings. We find it priceless and sweet, and, just so, it warns us: it lays bare our own hidden faults before it spills onto the injustice of others. In this way it “keeps us back from the insolent.” The impudent will not have dominion over us, the psalm declares; they will not rule us. They will not rule us through our spitefulness toward them, among other things. Then the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts may be acceptable to the God of the scattered, gathering us as the word of our rock and our redeemer.

In a generation of scattering, the public reading of Scripture—all of the community gathered to listen for God’s word in the Bible together, at some length, regularly, and with the help of wise teachers who “give the sense” of it—may help to give body to our speech, political and otherwise. But in order to do so, it can be no more judgmental than is the sun (cf. Matt. 5:43-48). Its power to judge justly and to inspire sound judgment depends on our eschewal of hypocrisy. It must be open to the light of God’s creation in all its abundance, whatever grievances are currently attached to the words we hear. 

Those exiles among us, those whom our addiction to spectacle and outrage has most silenced—and so those who can perhaps feel and name the ruin of our words more than others—will be important witnesses as we “give the sense” of the words of Scripture. Their grief at what they have lost in our political culture, and are still losing, may help us to hear in Scripture what will feed our political discourse with body and truthfulness. Sometimes they will tell us how the words of the Bible are themselves the problem, prompting us to hear them again, differently.

With our communication broken by the scatterer, we are prone to consolidate with spite and bitterness, with tight, self-righteous narratives, and with determination to defeat our hardened human opponents. But such words will not gather us. We cannot prey upon our enemies without preying upon one another. Can we instead allow our patterns of speech and perception to be broken open by gathering to hear the words of Scripture patiently together. Can we listen for the generous light of the heavens in them, even if that must pass through weeping for what we and others have lost?

In the days ahead, we will need to denounce. We will need to oppose. We will need to resist. We will need to organize. We will need to prophesy. But there will not be much redemption in it if our words lack body and remain scattered fragments, familiar contrivances of joyless group-think and fearful self-righteousness. Amidst a culture of media and politics that scatters us, the memory and song of some of the ancestors of Abrahamic faith invite us to listen to the word of Scripture, again, otherwise, and to gather by the light that shines through it.