Booths and Baptism: Nehemiah 8
I. Here’s a home-improvement project for you to try: Every fall, as the leaves begin to turn and the chill starts to arrive, build a hut in your backyard. Not just any hut, but a hut with at least three walls and a roof covered with branches that allows more shade than sun, but still gives a view of the stars. You should plan to eat in it, and ideally to sleep in it, for eight days. You’ve already missed your opportunity for this year – The feast of booths began on Friday, October 2, 2009. But you can mark September 23-29, 2010 on your calendar so you’re ready for next year.
Depending on your neighbourhood you may already be familiar with the feast of booths – the Jewish holiday of Sukkot – Or the feast of plywood as a friend of mine calls it. Living in the Bathurst and Lawrence area, every fall she would see structures go up as families prepare to cel-ebrate together – Temporary structures, often with plywood walls, and branches for the roof. The feast of booths is at once a Jewish harvest festival – Thanksgiving without the Turkey – and an exercise in collective memory. As described in Leviticus 23, the Israelites are to spend a week living in Sukkot – huts or booths – Older translations use the word Tabernacles – to re-member that their ancestors lived in huts as they wandered the wilderness for forty years after being freed from slavery in Egypt. Like the celebration of Passover, this is a celebration which involves whole families together enacting and identifying themselves with the story of Israel.
II. It was this festival which the exiles discovered through the reading of the law. Two weeks ago, we read a narrative from the book of Ezra about the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. In this weeks reading from Nehemiah, the temple has been rebuilt, and the people gather and ask Ezra to read from the book of the law of Moses. So Ezra read from the law – what we know as the books of Genesis to Deuteronomy – from early morning until midday, and we are told that the “ears of all the people were attentive” to what he read. They listened attentively. They were hearing, perhaps for the first time, the stories that rooted their identity and the way of life to which they were called as those who shared in the history of Abraham and his decendents, in the history of the slaves freed from bondage in Egypt, in the history of those who received instruction at Sinai, and who, as a result of their unfaithfulness, subsequently wandered the wilderness for forty years. This is their story, the story of God with his people, of the people with their God.
And one of the ways which Israel was instructed to remember this story, to indwell it as their story, was to celebrate festivals, including the feast of booths. Deuteronomy 16 describes the feast of Booths as one of three “pilgrimmage feasts” where all the people were to gather at Jeru-salem and celebrate together. The first of these is Passover, the celebration of God’s deliverance of Israel from oppression and slavery in Egypt. The second, the feast of Weeks which is also known as Pentecost, is a harvest festival which celebrates God’s activity in creation and providence. And the third is the feast of booths which celebrates God’s provision for the Israe-lites as they wandered in the wilderness. This feast was a particularly dramatic reminder of their humble past and of God’s care for them in their journey out of slavery and into the land of prom-ise. And it is also a feast in which they are called to rejoice with and extend hospitality to oth-ers: Deuteronomy 16 instructs Israel to rejoice along with “the strangers, the orphans, and the widows”.
It is this concern for strangers that I think is a particularly significant aspect of the celebration for these returned Exiles. The Babylonians did not take everyone into exile. Those who had been taken into exile in Babylon were mainly the “upper crust” of Israelite society: priests, officials, and the like. Most other Israelites either fled or simply remained in the land. Once people began to return from Babylon, tensions arose between those who were returning and those who had re-mained.
Those returning from exile saw themselves as the true continuation of Israel – as those who would rebuild the temple and Jerusalem – perhaps hoping that Israel would once again become a great nation, hoping for a return to the glory that Israel had in the days of David and Solomon. They saw those who had remained in the land, who were still there when they returned, as strangers. The rebuilding of the temple which Marilyn spoke about two weeks ago turned out to be a flashpoint for these tensions. The people who remained wanted to be included in the rebuilding, but the returned exiles refused to allow them to participate.
Against this background, the feast of booths was a powerful reminder of the larger narrative of who Israel was called to be. If, as one commentator suggests, the spirit of Booths represents nothing less than the rebirth of life in the city of God, it is a spirit which pushes the returned ex-iles beyond their own story of exile and return, and also beyond the memory of the Davidic mo-narchy and temple, to the founding story of Israel: to the story of their deliverance from bondage in Egypt, and to the law which was given at Sinai which revealed to them the way of life which God intended for his people: a way of life which included hospitality towards the stranger, the orphan and the widow.
These returned exiles, who had refused to allow the people of the land to assist in the rebuilding of the temple, now find themselves going into the fields and forests, gathering branches and creating temporary huts in which, together with the people of the land, they would identify the story of Israel’s wanderings as their story. The festival of booths is an exercise in collective memory – a way of inhabiting the story of Israel’s journey with God, of coming in some sense to participate in that story, to inhabit it as their story – by quite literally enacting the narrative through living in temporary shelters as the Israelites did in the wilderness.
The celebration of booths provided a larger context within which to understand the more imme-diate narrative of exile in Babylon and return to the land. It pushed them beyond their expe-rience as a displaced minority that finally had the oportunity to begin to re-establish themselves, to build walls around Jerusalem and perhaps to restore it to its former glory. It invited them to identify not first of all with the Israel of David and Solomon, but of Israel of the wilderness, whose identity was rooted in God’s covenant with them, and God’s care for them; who relied on God rather than walled cities and standing armies. And as God’s people, they were called not to secure their identity over-against their neighbours, and the strangers among them, but to extend hospitality to others – to embrace others.
III. This story of the exiles celebrating the feast of booths invites us to reflect on the stories which form our identities, which we identify with. Christians do not celebrate Sukkot, but we do have other “exercises in collective memory”, practices whereby we narrate our lives in terms of the story of God. Two of these are the practices of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. These are two communal celebrations where we identify with the story of Jesus, as the feast of booths was an identification with the story of Israel.
It may seem a bit odd to speak about baptism and the Lord’s Supper on a day when we are cele-brating neither. But as I reflected on the text from Nehemiah in the context of my ministry with Youth at TUMC, these Christian practices came strongly to mind. These are the practices by which we most explicitly link
what we do as a community of followers of Jesus with the story of Jesus, and by which we invite others, including youth, to share in that story.
The two events in Jesus life to which baptism and the Lord’s Supper have the most direct refer-ence, that of Jesus’ own baptism by John the Baptist in the Jordan, and his death on the cross, are like bookends which summarize his life as a whole. They are practices whereby we inhabit the story of Jesus who was baptized in solidarity with all those who heard John’s call to repent and were baptized in the Jordan; we inhabit the story of Jesus’ eating and drinking with the margina-lized, with sinners; we eat and drink together with Jesus, who suffered and died at the hands of the religious and political powers; we identify ourselves with Jesus who loved his enemies, who forgave those who crucified him, who refused to do evil and who poured out his life for others. In these celebrations, we identify ourself with Jesus, whose history is the Word of God, the reve-lation, even the enactment of God. It is the story of Jesus that we have first of all to hear and understand as the way of life to which we are called.
Like the feast of booths as it was celebrated by the exiles, our celebration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper helps us to frame our identify first of all in terms of the story of Jesus. Israel af-ter exile needed to ground their identity as a people in something beyond the experience of exile and return; and we need to ground our identity in something beyond experiences of exile and return, of persecution and migration. We need to understand ourselves in terms of something deeper than the Anabaptists of the sixteenth centuries, or more recent martyrs and heroes of faith. Which is not to say that we should forget these stories of persecution and migration, of martyrdom and confession – they are part of our history and are to be celebrated. But the decisive thing, I think, is that we understand these stories in light of the more foundational narrative of the history of Jesus Christ, the history of the one who is Emmanuel, God with us. Like John the baptist, these witnesses of faith point to Jesus Christ.
If, like the feast of booths, baptism and the Lord’s Supper are understood as ways of inhabiting the story of Jesus, what might this mean for how we practice them? Maybe this means that we need to take another look at how we understand Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. What does it mean to understand these as communal celebrations of our identity in terms of the story of Jesus?
For example, I think, we should celebrate the Lord’s Supper more often – I grew up with weekly celebration and confess that I would lean in that direction. But I think we should also talk about it more than we do. Certainly that is an important part of it playing an identity forming role. Perhaps that is one of the strong points in the feast of booths – that families spent significant time together in these structures. Significant conversations undoubtedly arise in such a situation, as children ask “why are we spending time in this shaky booth with a leaky roof when we have a perfectly good house to live in?” How can our celebrations of baptism and the Lord’s supper lead to similar conversations? Do they need to become less ritualized? What would it mean to return our practice of the Lord’s Supper to the context of an actual meal? Would that provide more of a context for conversation to become part of the celebration itself, providing space for children, youth, and adults for that matter, to ask questions and learn to articulate, to learn to speak together about the story of Jesus and what it means to be a community shaped by that story – the story of God’s love at work bringing healing and hope to the world.