It has been the custom in this country that when a President is inaugurated he has placed his hand on a Bible and has promised “faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States.” Then, with the words “So help me God,” he has asked God to help him keep his promise. 

Why do we do that? One reason, of course, is that George Washington did it first. It has become a “tradition.” But the real reason, the reason Washington did it in the first place, is deeper than that. The real tradition goes back to the Bible itself, back to the very nature of things. It goes back at least to the 5th century B.C., back at least to that day when the people of Israel had come home from exile in Babylon, that day when Nehemiah, with the Bible in his hand and on his heart, promised faithfully to execute the office of Governor of Jerusalem and asked God to help him do it.

The people of Israel were glad to be home, but their lives were a mess! They had no Temple. It had been destroyed by those who had conquered them and taken them away in chains. Because of their captivity, they were impoverished and they had no vision, no national purpose or hope. They flirted with despair. Now, back home as freed slaves and with their Temple gone and their city in ruins, the focus of their life was gone.

But Nehemiah had become their governor, and the first priorities of his administration had been to rebuild the walls of the city and to put some life and direction in things. And one day, Ezra, the priest and scribe, came to see Nehemiah, and the two of them called a meeting of the people, a meeting of all the people, both men and women, the Scriptures say, a meeting of everyone who was capable of understanding what the Scriptures had to say, a great national convention. 

And with all the people gathered in the public square, Ezra began to read from the Bible. He read from Torah, which was all the Bible there was in those days. Probably he read in Hebrew, while the Levites translated the reading for the people into the dialect the people spoke, ”giving the sense so that all understood.”

And everyone stood for the reading, because it wasn’t just any reading; it was the Lord speaking to them through the reading. So all the people stood as a sign of reverence and respect. They stood – get this! – from dawn until noon, listening to what the Lord God had to say to them about their life.

And when they heard it and understood it, they wept! Tears!

Tears. Frederick Buechner says that “you never know what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you’ve never seen before. A pair of somebody’s old shoes can do it. Almost any movie made before the great sadness that came over the world after the Second World War, a horse cantering across a meadow, the high school basketball team running out onto the gym floor at the start of a game. You can never be sure,” says Buechner.

“But of this you can be sure: whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next.” (Whistling in the Dark, p. 105)

That is why the people wept in Ezra’s day, when they heard the reading from the Scriptures! They wept in sadness, because they heard from the Book the mystery of where they had come from. They heard the story of the gift God had given them centuries earlier, the story of the covenant God had made with them. They heard the story of their sin and unfaithfulness, which caused them to lose the gift. It was all words, only words, but in Israel in those days a word spoke forth reality itself, and the words from the Scriptures that day spoke the mystery of where they had come from and caused them to remember. 

“Be careful to follow the commandments I am giving you today,” the Lord had said when he gave them the gift, freedom in the land of Canaan, the Promised Land. “Be careful to follow them so that you may live and increase. Remember how it was the Lord your God who brought you out of slavery in Egypt and led you all the way in the desert these forty years, feeding you and teaching you that man does not live by bread alone, but by the word of God. So observe the commandments of the Lord your God, and walk in his ways, and you will have life. But if you forget the Lord your God and follow other gods, and worship and bow down to them, you will surely be destroyed.”

And all the people wept tears of sadness, because the words spoke their story. They had forgotten God. They had forgotten, and had walked in the ways of other gods. They had begun to believe that it was their hands and their power that provided their fine cattle and built their fine homes. They had begun to believe that they could live by bread alone. They had begun to believe that the horse and its chariot and their soldiers were mighty to save, and they had been defeated by the horses of a foreign power, and torn apart as a people, and taken into slavery again.

But as they listened to Ezra read, they also wept tears of gladness, because, once again, they also heard God summoning them to where, if their souls were to be saved, they should go to next. They heard God’s promise of forgiveness and grace. God had brought them home again, once again out of slavery into the Promised Land, not to die, but to live. God would be their promise and joy and hope in the future, just as he had been the promise and joy and hope of their mothers and fathers in the past.

This is why every President, and thousands of other officeholders in our land as well, have placed their hands on the Bible as they have taken their oaths of office. Because, from Nehemiah to George Washington to George W. Bush, the Bible has told us “the mystery of where we have come from,” and because in it we hear God’s summoning us “to where, if our soul is to be saved, we should go to next.”

When was the last time you had an experience like that? When was the last time you either wept or laughed while reading a book? If it has been a while, then you haven’t been reading books that are good enough. Or maybe you haven’t been reading as the people of Israel were listening, attentively, listening to the sense. Because good books, words, above all the Scriptures, are power. Words can cause tears or lift one’s spirit, or both. That’s what Emily Dickinson knew when she wrote these lines:

                                         A Word is dead
                                         When it is said,
                                         some say.

                                         I say it just
                                         Begins to live
                                         That day.

Words, books, good books, above all the Scriptures, are ways of meeting, ways of bringing us face to face with other people and, if we are listening attentively, ways of bringing us face to face with ourselves, with our story, and with God.

That’s what happened to the people of Israel when Ezra read from the Scriptures about the great promise of God. They heard their story. They heard about God’s covenant with them, about how, if the people walk in the ways of God they will be blessed, and about how, if they do not walk in his ways, they will lose the blessing.

And when the people heard Ezra read those ancient words, words first spoken or written in the days of their great-grandfathers, they said, “He’s not reading about our great-grandfathers! He’s reading about us and our unfaithful lives.” And they wept. Because they heard in the reading “the mystery of where they had come from,” and they heard God’s “summoning them to where, if they were to be saved, they should go to next.”

Would we not do well to listen for that same word today? Would we not do well to hear “the mystery of where we have come from”? Would we not do well to hear God’s “summoning us to where, if we are to be saved, we should go to next”? And should we not be moved to tears of sadness as well? The focus of our life is dim. 24/7 has displaced the fourth commandment in our lives, and of course we have forgotten, and our vision is blurred. God’s Temple has been destroyed in our land. The walls of our cities are in need of repair. We have forgotten that all life is gift, for which gratitude is appropriate in response. We have begun to believe that it is our hands and our power that have built our strong economy and our fine houses, and our families are in disarray. Life as entertainment, often uncivil entertainment, has displaced life as memory and meaning. Our commitments are weak. In our focus on self and our “rights,” we have forgotten others and their needs. We work and pay dearly for physical health, but neglect our spiritual health, and our hope is faint as we listen to our story, the story of how we have come to where we are today.

But our story is much longer and larger than our story as Americans. Our story – the mystery of where we have come from and God’s summons to where, if we are to be saved, we should go to next – is as old and large as the story of Creation and Redemption. And that’s why we need the help of God, both to understand it and to live it.

Frederick Buechner also has something important to say about story. He says that it’s important to remember that the Creed – God from God; begotten, not made; born of the Virgin Mary; suffered; crucified; dead; buried; rose again; sits at the right hand of the Father; will come again, with glory, to judge the living and the dead – it is important to remember, Buechner says, that this “is not a theological idea or a religious system.”

The story we recite in the Creed “keeps our eyes on the central fact – that the Christian faith always has to do with flesh and blood, time and space, more specifically with your flesh and blood and mine, with the time and space that day by day we are all of us involved with, stub our toes on, flounder around in trying to look as if we have good sense. In other words, the Truth that Christianity claims to be true is ultimately to be found, if it’s to be found at all, not in the Bible or the Church or Theology, but in our own stories.”

What the Bible and the Church and Theology do is point us to the size, to the largeness of our stories. For what else, as Browning asks, is a heaven for, except to give us a reach that exceeds our grasp? 

“If the God you believe in as an idea doesn’t start showing up in what happens to you in your own life,” Buechner adds, “you have as much cause for concern as [you have] if the God you don’t believe in as an idea does start showing up. It is absolutely crucial to keep in touch with what is going on in your own life’s story, and to pay close attention to what is going on in the stories of others’ lives, [because] if God is present anywhere, it is in those stories that God is present. If God is not present in those stories, then you might as well give up the whole business.” That’s what Buechner says. And I agree with him, which is why I put his words in here. (Ibid, pp. 103-104)

The people of Israel wept when they heard Ezra read their story to them from the Bible. But then Ezra and Nehemiah both said, “This day is sacred to the Lord your God. Do not mourn or weep or grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength, because, although we walked away from God in the past, God has promised again to be part of our story in the future. Therefore, the Lord’s joy in us continues to be our strength, and our hope.”

And that’s why Ezra and Nehemiah proclaimed that day to be a day sacred to the Lord, and why we, too, invoke God’s help with our national story as well as with our personal stories. Because with our walls in disrepair and with God’s Temple in ruins in our nation, we know that the story of God, the story of Creation and Redemption, is a story about us. And though the story began in the past, it will be fulfilled in the future. Because God is Lord. God is the one who “proclaims the year of the Lord’s favor: good news to the poor, freedom to those who are captive, recovery of sight to the blind, release to the oppressed.”

That, dear friends in Christ, is our agenda for the year 2007, and for every new year, just as it was the agenda of Ezra and Nehemiah as they inaugurated a new day in their time, because, as John Quincy Adams reminded us at his inauguration 182 years ago, and as John F. Kennedy reminded us on the night before his inauguration 47 years ago, and as the psalmist reminded Ezra and Nehemiah 2,500 years ago, “Unless the Lord builds the house, their labor is in vain who build it. Unless the Lord watches over the city, in vain do the watchmen keep their vigil.”

Our agenda in this year of the Lord’s favor 2007 is to remember our story – that God renews his covenant with us on this sacred occasion, so we are to rejoice and be glad and remember, once again, that our life in God is justice and mercy, not sacrifice, that our life in God is to preach good news to the poor, to bring recovery of sight to the blind, to proclaim release for those who are captive and oppressed, to “take up the weak out of the dust, and lift up the poor from the ashes,” as the psalmist puts it, “and to set them with the princes of the people.” (Psalm 113)

This is our agenda because it is our national story: allegiance not just to a flag, but to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice, not just for some, but for all. 

But more than that, it is our agenda because it is our story as people of God, the story that echoes through the centuries, from Nehemiah to Jesus to you and me, proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor – good news for the poor, new sight for the blind, and release for the captive and oppressed, the story that calls us, in the Church certainly, but also in the streets and in our homes, to the task of seeing that it gets done.

So, despite our tears, despite the sins of our past, on this day sacred to the Lord we rejoice in the vocation God has given us, because what else is a heaven for? Or a God, for that matter. And we rejoice because the One who proclaims it, the One who gives us the hope and the work, promises to be with us to help us with it.

And that’s why Ezra and Nehemiah and George Washington and you and I all say, “So help me God.”

                                           A word is dead
                                           When it is said,
                                           Some say.

                                           I say it just
                                           Begins to live
                                           That day.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.