Neh 3: 1-16 - Staying on the Wall

I don’t know about you, but I normally am not a fan of a passage like this one - filled with lists on names that are hard to pronounce. Names of people I do not feel a connection to or know anything about. Honestly, most of the time I would rather skip right over them. Yet, as time passes such passages intrigue me, especially this one. Each of the names listed represents someones hard work in rebuilding part of a society that had been left in ruins. They joined together in the hard work of something that is bigger then themselves. They model what it looks like for us to work together for the Kingdom of God today.

Brick by brick. Checking that each stone and piece of each wall is placed perfectly, both so the walls are functional, not leaning to the point of collapsing, but also to honor God. Can you imagine how slowly progress is being made? Could the men see progress or did they simply see more work in front of them? Were they excited about what they were called to do, or were they bemoaning the endless work?

When I was in elementary school my parents decided that we needed more space. We had two options - move or add an addition on to the house. After looking at a few houses my parents decided to build on - and the result is now an extra master bedroom, large kitchen, laundry room, mud room, and basement. But the process of getting there wasn’t always pretty. The house just seemed to be in shambles for months, as we were confined to even less room in the hopes of having more. The living room doubled as the dining room. There seemed to be dust everywhere. We were tripping over each other. Plastic sheets hid the work from us, but once in a while we would go through and see the progress being made. At first we were able to rejoice over every little thing done, every little brick laid. It was exciting! But as time dragged on, even with leaps and bounds being made, we were less apt to rejoice and more likely to focus on bemoaning the process.

Another example is road construction. No one really enjoys it. Most people complain about it. And its worse when it seems to be never-ending. I apparently have the plague of never ending roads. There was a stretch of road outside of Pittsburg that brought traffic to a snail like pace the year I went to school there and the many years that I visited following. In fact, I went to a wedding along that same road in 2009, five years after I started driving it, and it still wasn’t finished. I could tell similar stories of both of the other schools I went to. Yet, really, even if I cannot see progress by my standards I have to trust that progress is being made.

In the midst of the rubble, back-breaking work, and slow (and perhaps unnoticed if not uncelebrated progress), the Israelites had to trust that they were working towards a vision they had, a call from God to rebuild. What makes this task even more remarkable is the fact that these men working alongside each other would have never seen the original temple in all of its glory. By this point at least a whole generation has died off in captivity. They would have surly heard stories around the table about the splendor of the temple. Of the God of the chosen people who would one day lead them back to the land where they could all worship together in one place. They would have heard the longing for Jerusalem in their parents and grandparents stories. But these were of a different generation. Not only were the a generation who had never seen the temple with their own eyes, never worshiped in it, or felt an intimate connection with it, they also aren’t the first to work on building the temple. This is the second wave of people rebuilding. They were laying bricks upon the foundation of the work of others - work that they were unable to finish. 

I can only imagine how distressing it must have been to those first builders. The ones who now had to watch others with their work, trusting that they will complete it in a way that honors God. Maybe the second wave of builders learned under the tutelage of the first. Would that make it easier to hand over such important work? Perhaps one of the most humbling things that we need to realize in this life is that while we may start working on something, we may not be the ones to bring it to completion. We may not be the ones with our names in the history books. We may not even be the ones to plant the seeds. Sometimes we are just one of many waves of workers on a project whose task is to bridge the gap between those who have come before us and those who will work next.

Of course as with anything, there were some who would not put their hands to the work of the Lord. They thought the task of building was beneath them, unworthy of their time. Around them the community was doing this new thing, but they refused to participate. No matter how passionate we are about working for the Kingdom of God, there are simply some who will not come, stand, and build with us. And there will be others who quickly grow weary of the work without immediate results, so they will not stay with us on the wall building. 

We live in a world full of instant things and expectations that follow. If we turn on a light switch we expect their to immediately be light. If we turn the faucet we expect water. And we have a host of appliances to make our work more efficient, easier, and faster, such as microwaves. But the downside to a society filled with the instantaneous, is that we quickly tire out if we do not get the results quick enough for our liking. So we abandon the work we are called to, we leave the work of building the Kingdom.

But part of the reason the building took so long is that the Israelites wanted to do it right. They wanted to rebuild the temple in a way that honored God. They wanted to build it the specifications of their ancestors through the laws handed down to Moses. And that was time consuming work. Sometimes instant is not always better. Sometimes its the hard work, over a long period of time, with very little progress that people notice, that honors God the most.

This week I have been reading Change the World by Mike Slaughter, the pastor of the second largest United Methodist Church in the United States. The church he serves, Ginhinsburg UMC, did not always used to be large. In fact, it would be generous to call it mid-sized when he first got there. It took many years of hard work, tears, and sweat, and nights of prayer to help the church see growth. Mike writes that one of the biggest dis-services that we do for the Kingdom of God is make our membership requirements to laxed. When we focus more on the quantity of people we are ministering to instead of the quality of the ministry we are sharing with them. When we give up and don’t stay on the wall, even though we know it is the path God is leading us to, because it simply seems too hard. To honor God, we don’t need to have big results right away or fast growing programs, but we need to do our best to be faithful to what we are called to do - giving our very best. 

Friends, are we going to be the people who stay on the wall, working for results we know we may not see, but that we are called to? Are we people who can give our very best and raise the next generation to continue to work with a passion for the Kingdom? Are we going to trust that the ground work the God has laid cannot be stopped? This week, in the Ridge Runner, our district newsletter, this passage of scripture was highlighted because it speaks of people working side by side, doing something bigger than themselves. Are we going to be those people? Working towards something we may not have ever seen before ourselves, but that we know glorifies our God and Savior! It is my hope and prayer that we do not see this passage simply as a list of names, but rather as part of our own stories, working together, doing the hard but beautiful work of building up the Kingdom of God! Amen.