Read Out Loud
Nehemiah 8:1-10; Luke 4:14-21

January 25, 2004

Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in North Africa in the early 400’s, is one of the geniuses of the Christian faith. After Jesus himself and then Paul, the reason we think what we think about Christianity is largely due to Augustine. We think the way Augustine got us thinking.

Augustine was remembered personally for lots of reasons. Trained in the Latin classics, he was notable in that time for being able to read without moving his lips. He read silently, the words reverberating inside his mind. Reading then was an oral exercise. One writer complained, “I want to read more, but my lips are numb and bleeding.” Libraries in the fifth century must have been noisy places!

Yet, not that noisy. All sorts of estimates of literacy in ancient times range from 5-15% maximum. Few could read, but everyone could listen. Maybe they had an advantage: they knew how to listen better than we do.

I once read a so-called sermon to a congregation that was 50 pages long. I commented to my teacher that not even the angels would have the patience for such a long sermon. He answered smiling, “Their standards of patience were not the same as ours.” Do not complain about the length of sermons today; there’s precedence in every era of Christian history for really long ones. An hour would be on the short side.

Literacy among the Jewish population was considerably higher since as a people of the Book their young men were required to be able to read the Torah publicly in ordered to enter adulthood. However, on their return from exile in Babylon it is probable that a whole generation or two had not gotten around to reading.

Nehemiah was the leader who led the returning Jews to Jerusalem to reconstruct their city and temple, as well as their culture and faith. Ezra was asked to read from the public square the Book of the Law of Moses before all the gathered people. The people were spellbound and fascinated. Most likely, the book from which Ezra read was the first five books of the Old Testament: 265 pages in the New Revised Standard Version. He would read from early morning to noon each day prior to the autumn harvest festival, the Feast of the Tabernacles. How many hours did he read and this throng listen? How much could they absorb and how much could they hear?

Jesus was extended an opportunity to read in his home synagogue in Nazareth, a kind of homecoming gesture. The Torah is divided into sections like the Lectionary readings, and that sabbath he drew the lot of Isaiah 61. Jesus altered reading that day, no longer “a remembrance of things past,” but a picture of the way things are and are to be. “Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” When the word read enters your ear, it is not something neutral that you can take or leave. It explodes inside your brain, jolts you straight into action. This today word adheres inseparably to your being.

Not everything you hear read today does that. Thank goodness that is so, for you and I could not go along very far if every piece of writing you read stirred you deeply. Our minds and hearts and lungs would be overworked in short notice. However, not everything has to be so dispassionate and objective. It is good that there are still things being written, being read, being heard that demand to be heard with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. Reading can make it so.

Good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed can be read and heard as just another fairy tale - nice, real nice, but not a real possibility. But when this is read with the Spirit of the Lord upon me, when it is read by someone who first hears the words as the Word and then proclaims it as the Word, then Isaiah’s words are a not notion or idea, but a push and a shove into action.

Get out there and become good news to the poor. You can’t allow any person to be imprisoned and held captive unjustly. There are sick and lonely and disadvantaged people around us who can only be healed if you don’t pass it off to the experts and professionals, but you do it. It’s my job to make the blind see; it’s your responsibility to make the deaf hear; it’s our task to help the lame walk. And when people are oppressed and subjugated and subjected to inhumane treatment, none of us are truly free, so let’s make sure everybody is free, nobody is considered less than human.

A short scripture being read, a novel that dares to challenge the human soul, a study that stops at nothing to describe who we really are - are hard to listen to and just how do you read them? Read these stories and poems as if for the first time and be startled by the graciousness of God to human beings. Read so that others may have no choice but to respond, “this is the good news we have been waiting for.”

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan