"The joy of the Lord is your strength."

The joy of the Lord is your strength.
The people of God needed to hear these words of encouragement from Ezra, the High Priest and scribe, to the Jews who had chosen to return to their native land, following forty years in exile under Babylonian rule.

The prophet Isaiah had promised those who chose to return that God would prepare a straight and level highway for them to travel on where no wild beasts or other hostile forces would threaten their journey through the desert. They would even discover a lush oasis, a second Garden of Eden, on their way back home. Isaiah even went so far as to declare the words that Jesus selected in today’s gospel when he went to the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth to worship on the Sabbath: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

When those words were first uttered by Isaiah to his fellow Jews during their exile, they were heard as God’s promise that if they returned to their homeland, they would get their land back, the land that they lost when their parents and grandparents were captured and forced into exile, the land that would allow them to start over, to be able to be fruitful and to multiply the produce of the land and be prosperous once more.

If they were still held as captives by the Babylonians in one of their dark dungeons, they would also receive God’s blessing. He would release them from their prisons and let them see the light of day once more.

If their conquerors were still oppressing them and discriminating against them socially or politically or economically as second or third or fourth class citizens, Isaiah promised them that those days would soon to be over. God was about to usher in the Year of Jubilee, a year that Moses wrote about in the Law, a year when all debts are cancelled, when everyone gets to start over again, just as if they were one of the first of God’s people to enter the promised land under Joshua. About ten percent of the exiles believed God’s promises enough to actually pack up and return to the land of Judah.

But when they arrived, they quickly discovered that their land was still a mess from their previous war with the Babylonians, a mess much like the mess in Haiti, only their mess was manmade and not the result of a powerful earthquake. There was still massive devastation, especially in their capital city Jerusalem. The temple had been looted, stripped of all its gold, silver and bronze, and then burned and razed to the ground. The thick, high walls that had defended the city had been reduced to rubble. And the people who were living in the land were a mix of old enemies and other foreigners who weren’t at all interested in seeing a Jewish state reestablished.

And even though the returning exiles put their hearts and souls and everything they had into the huge national rebuilding effort, and even though their liberators, the Persians, gave Nehemiah, their new governor and fellow Jew, a blank check to help get the job done, they eventually realized that they could never recreate the former glory and majesty of Solomon’s temple.

And when they gather today to hear the Law of Moses, they become so discouraged that they break down and weep because they realize just how far they had fallen as God’s chosen people. But Ezra, inspired by God, responds to their tears by reminding them that the joy of the Lord is your strength. Your strength means more to the Lord than anything else. Strengthening you, helping you fulfill your calling as God’s people is what gives God joy. Your strength is what God yearns for, longs for, seeks for you even more than you may seek it for yourself. The joy of the Lord is your strength.

These are words I think we all need to hear, especially in difficult times like ours, when unemployment is at a thirty-year high, when a poor nation like Haiti is devastated and requires each of us to respond as best we can, when our own Episcopal denomination is suffering from profound disagreements and staggering legal costs and dwindling membership despite the genuine love and generous sacrifices of so many like you, year after year, maintaining and sustaining the church you love.

I take great comfort and encouragement not only from Ezra’s words to his fellow Jews – the joy of the Lord is your strength – which I believe apply equally to us, but I also take great comfort in the fact that Jesus doesn’t just go to the large and prosperous temple in Jerusalem, but to the many humble synagogues in the villages of Galilee, which was itself a kind of second-class Jewish land surrounded and inhabited by Samaritans and Romans, by Assyrians and Canaanites and other pagans. His own hometown synagogue in Nazareth was probably too small to afford a full time or even a part time rabbi. Anyone like himself, an itinerant rabbi without any official credentials from the high priest in Jerusalem, could be invited to address the assembled congregation just as Jesus did. More and more Episcopal congregations are in a similar situation, down to as few as the ten households that were the minimum requirement to organize a synagogue, relying on their own lay readers to lead Morning Prayer and to welcome an occasional priest to celebrate Holy Communion.

Jesus in not ashamed to go to such a poor and humble hometown synagogue and to set forth his mission as Isaiah had prophesied, to say, in effect, that what was only partially fulfilled in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah would now be finally and forever accomplished through his life, death and resurrection: that the poor would receive a generous inheritance from God, that those who were held captive by any and every enemy would be released by Jesus, that those who suffered from spiritual as well as physical blindness would be able to see again, that the year of the Lord’s favor would indeed take place wherever was present. We can rest assured that God can take what we have already received from him, our Bibles and our prayer books and those who share our faith to worship together and learn together and put our faith into practice, in the strength that it is the Lord’s joy to give them, to be fruitful and to multiply a growing number of disciples.

One of our rich spiritual inheritances that we have lost sight of is in our own worldwide Anglican fellowship, a Communion whose bonds will be strengthened as delegates from each congregation in our diocese gather this weekend at the Lakeland Center to consider and endorse a new covenant, which will give substance to Paul’s conviction that we are all members of the Body of Christ, in every corner of the world, and that when one member of the body is honored, we all rejoice together, and when one member suffers, we all suffer together.

As discouraging as our present circumstances may appear at the moment, it is precisely now that we need to hear once more that it is the joy of the Lord to strengthen us in our weakness and poverty, and to trust that just as Jesus did not pass by his own hometown, knowing how easy it would be for them to write him off because they thought they had him all figured out, he nonetheless came to them and even announced the very heart of his mission to them first of all.

Let us continue to believe God’s promises and the continuing invitation of Jesus to come and follow him, to discover the truth of Isaiah’s prophecy in our own lives as we dare to take the precious gifts of Scripture and prayer book and pastor and bishop and bread and wine and covenant with us and experience again and again the Miracle Grow quality of our inheritance to make disciples of all people in every place and in the most challenging of circumstances. AMEN.