November 7, 2021 “Building Joy” – Nehemiah 12:27-43

Nehemiah 12:27-43 (Chronicles pp. 137, 138)
“Building Joy”
November 7, 2021 – All Saints Sunday

On Tuesday April 7, 1987, Valley Covenant members came driving down Bailey Hill Road, honking their horns and shouting for joy. They left their old place of worship up at Four Oaks Grange Hall on the other side of Kennedy Middle School. They turned into the parking lot here and entered this building, where Pastor Jim Gaderlund preached his first sermon in their new sanctuary. The formal dedication came at the end of May, but it was preceded by that joyous parade.

In late June 2006, when this building still had no air conditioning, the Gathering Place building next door had just been completed. It had air conditioning. So almost the first event in that new building was a Sunday service on a hot day when the thermometer went over 100 degrees. We gladly praised God in the relief and coolness of the new space. Again, the formal dedication followed later, in September.

Both those informal initiations of our buildings and their planned dedications were times of great joy, just like events in Ezra and Nehemiah. Last week in Ezra, we read the first worship times at the Temple site after the Exile, then the start of rebuilding that sanctuary. They were times of joy. In Ezra chapter 6, we read how the Temple was finally completed and dedicated. There in verse 16, top of page 111 in Chronicles, we read that it was dedicated with “great joy.”

While the Temple was the place at the center of rebuilding in Jerusalem, the celebration we heard about today, in Nehemiah 12, seems even more joyful. For one thing, the joy at laying the foundation stones of the Temple was mixed with tears as older people remember the former glory of Solomon’s Temple. But now, sixty years later, when the walls which would protect that Temple and its people were completed, the joy was unmixed. It was all celebration and rejoicing in a glorious musical parade around the city, walking atop that wall itself. Nobody was crying that day.

God gives us times like that, times when, if there are any tears, they are only tears of joy. He gave Beth and me two weeks like that last month in England with our new grandson and his parents. To see him smile at us and clap hands with us, to watch him learn to walk, to hold him and read a book or play with him on the floor, was a time of rejoicing that we will cherish the rest of our lives.

I believe God gives His people, gives you and me, times of joy like that, even though they don’t last, as is clear from the rest of what we read in Nehemiah. They are glimpses of what everything we do on earth is aiming at. Whether it’s a church building project or having babies and raising families, the goal is not just the immediate joy of those things. It’s eternal and everlasting joy of which those present blessings are just a taste.

As I learned from my wife, who learned it from philosopher Josef Pieper long ago, we often have backwards the logical order of work and joyful celebration in our lives. Employers and management philosophies proceed from the notion that employees who get to rest, celebrate and enjoy themselves will be better workers. So vacations and holidays and even things like coffee breaks are considered good because they will make people more productive when they come back to work. But that totally misunderstands the truth. Those times, when we rest and play and laugh and rejoice, are the very point of human life, not aids to better work. Our joy is not for the sake of good work. The good work is for the sake of joy. We work to produce and make possible beautiful times of joy.

Now your mind may be going off on a tangent here, thinking that you sometimes or perhaps even often find joy in your work. May God make that so for many of us. But for the great masses of humanity through the ages and even now in our world, and yes, even in our own country, joyful, satisfying work is scarce or non-existent. The majority simply do unpleasant labor in order to survive, just like God said it would be in Genesis chapter 3. True satisfaction for them and often for us is in those times we get to stop work, and instead rest and share joy with people we love.

What did Jesus tell us in a parable that the master said to servants who had worked hard and been productive for him? “Well done, good and faithful servant… Enter into the joy of your master.” Joy is the end goal, the point of it all. Not the work. So when God’s people do work, when we build things together, again whether it’s a building or a congregation or a family, the purpose is not so much the thing itself as it is the joy which it produces for everyone involved, including God Himself. We’re building joy.

Here in Nehemiah the actual physical object of construction is a city. Those great stone walls which would secure Jerusalem were the final stage in rebuilding streets and homes and other structures in which God’s people could live and offer Him worship. A great deal of Hebrew Scripture rejoices in and celebrates that town as the City of God. Our psalm today sings about doing something like they did here in Nehemiah, walking all around that city, counting its sturdy towers, and saying, “Such is our God!”

By building a city, they built joy. In verse 43 near the bottom of page 138 the Hebrew word for joy is used five times, even though it only shows up three times there in English. A joyous life in the City of God was the aim and purpose of all their efforts. So it is with all our striving and building in this world.

In the end, however, we must remember that both joy and that beautiful habitation in which it appears are not really our work, our project at all. Hebrews 11:10 talks about Abraham whose descendants built Jerusalem. It says he “looked for a city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” That old word “maker” probably means something like “architect.” God does not just make the City of joy. He designs it.

In the last scene of Scripture, Revelation 21:2, John sees “the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.” All our earthly city and temple building aims at that. Our buildings, once again, are simply a taste of that great structure which God has made and will bring to earth when it is time for eternity to truly begin.

In the meantime, those returned exiles built up the earthly city, restored its walls. If you read Nehemiah in Immerse this past week, you probably noticed how on pages 120-122, in chapter 3 of Nehemiah, all the building families and groups and their leaders were named. Each one’s work was significant. Each bit of that project was recalled in the name of those who labored on it. Human memories fade, but here in God’s Word their names go on and on because they and their contributions were precious to Him.

To the same end, we named some of the saints this morning, remembering not just how loved and precious their memories are to us, but that each of them is precious to God. He recalls them better than we ever can, by name and story and their own unique parts in what He is doing in this world. As we look forward to that final City of God, part of our longing is to be reunited with them just as those exiles were reunited there in Jerusalem.

Looking at those pages where the builders are named, you might also have noticed that the most significant parts of the project were not so much the walls as the gates. Eliashib and other priests rebuilt the Sheep Gate. The Fish Gate was built by the sons of Hassenaah. The Valley Gate was repaired by people from Zanoah, led by Hanun. And on and on.

Those gates appear in the celebration here on page 138 too. The names of gates mark the starting and directions of those two parades atop the walls. There’s even a gate, the Guard Gate, that is not named anywhere else. The gates are obviously hugely important. John too makes a big deal of the gates of the heavenly Jerusalem in Revelation. To him the twelve gates appear like shining pearls.

Gates can be important for what they keep out. We shut the gate to our backyard to keep the deer away from Beth’s roses. But you only have gates if you also want to open them, to go in and out. In “For All the Saints” this morning we sang about God’s people coming into the City of God:

From earth’s wide bounds and ocean’s farther coast,
through gates of pearl streams in the countless host,
singing to Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Let us remember then, as we take up projects for our Lord, whether restoring this building next year or finding ways to help unhoused and housing insecure people in our community, that we also want to set up gates. Gates are ways for people to join us, to become part of the community of saints, to find the love of Jesus and the eternal joy that comes by knowing Him. Let us keep building gates of mission and compassion and justice so that we can keep building joy.

I mentioned singing a moment ago. Many of you have noticed how much music and singing are part of these texts we’ve read in Chronicles. In today’s text, there are not one but two choirs, with all the accompanying instruments needed, cymbals, harps and lyres. It says at the top of 138 that musicians were brought in from all “the region around Jerusalem” and other places. Their warrant for all that music is about a third of the way down page 138, buried in verse 36. “They used the musical instruments prescribed by David, the man of God.” David the king was a musician himself and his legacy to Israel, and even to us as Christians, is a glorious tradition of offering praise to God with instruments and singing. It is all part of that joy we get to taste right now and will be able to enjoy forever.

So let me once again thank all of you who help us partake just a little in the joy of eternal life by leading us in music, whether you play an instrument, lead us in singing, sing in the choir we pray may restart again, or just sing with all your heart here in worship. God bless you for carrying on the praise which angels began and we get to continue.

And thinking of music and the City of God and the joy of it all, I cannot help but remember that my favorite crazy theologian, Robert Farrar Capon, now one of the saints that has gone before us, almost always ended his books by quoting songs from the Bible about the City of God, looking forward to its ultimate arrival. At the end of Hunting the Divine Fox he reminds us that the City is ultimately built by the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. It’s the raising up of His Cross and then of His Body which raises forever the walls of the City of God. There Capon quotes from an old hymn:

There they live in such delight,
Such pleasure and such play,
As that to them a thousand years
Doth seem as yesterday

I decided I had to find that hymn and discovered the original 25 verses of “Jerusalem, My Happy Home.” It was apparently written in the 16^th century by a composer who left only his or her initials, “F.B.P.” It was modified later by Joseph Bromehead. Near the end are three verses which point out that, in the City of God, King David, the Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene will all be singing.

Perhaps drawing on St. Augustine’s writing about the City of God, that anonymous author’s many verses interweave brief reflections on our present sorrow with much more celebration of our joy to come. I commend the whole hymn to you, and conclude with this one verse from it:

Jerusalem, Jerusalem
God grant that I may see
Thine endless joy, and of the same
Partaker may I be!

Amen.