By Alex Florez
I live in the vibrant cultural hub of Nashville, Tennessee, one of the fastest growing cities in our nation. Our skyline is adorned with gorgeous buildings; trendy new restaurants are popping up all over town; at any given moment there are more tourists dotting our downtown streets than people who actually live here. And what’s more, there seem to be a hundred churches on every block. Certainly, the kingdom of God must be healthy and thriving in the midst of our burgeoning metropolitan landscape.
There is a stark difference between the devastated Jerusalem of Nehemiah’s day and the healthy-looking modern cities we inhabit, but today’s passage offers a life or death proposition to followers of Jesus. Namely, it’s a question of identity and calling in the midst of this ersatz flourishing that may actually require life-saving intervention. No amount of progress or wealth can hide our spiritual malaise; no amount of gleeful revelry can substitute our desperate need for God.
Nehemiah was up against more than a civil engineering problem; there was more at stake than being an effective project manager. The core of his mission in Jerusalem was to facilitate the restoration of the collective heart of God’s people. Nehemiah wasn’t simply re-rebuilding a wall; he was fighting for the soul of a nation.
And where did he turn for partnership in this existential crisis? In order to reestablish the disenfranchised people of God, Nehemiah called upon the people best-suited for the job: the priests, Levites, temple musicians, and gatekeepers. These groups constituted the professional worship leaders of their culture. “These served in the days of Joiakim son of Jeshua, son of Jozadak, and in the days of Nehemiah the governor and Ezra the priest and scribe” (Nehemiah 12:26).
It would be so easy for us to consider all this and say, “I’m no priest; I’m no worship leader or musician; I’m no gatekeeper. I’m just a regular person living a largely ordinary life.” However, I am convinced that followers of Jesus cannot afford to hide behind those who are vocational priests, pastors, and worship leaders. It is imperative to remember our calling as followers of Jesus according to Saint Peter’s first epistle: We are chosen to be priests in the service of an everlasting king; our holy commission is to share the gospel and to lead people into the presence of the living God.
This glimpse into the life of Nehemiah reminds us that God is capable of empowering His people to do great things. Using His people as instruments of His divine will, He is a God who repairs broken walls, restores devastated cities, and redeems lost people. We have inherited the legacy of the temple priests and the Levites, and the stakes are too high to wait for the “qualified” people to point the way to Jesus. This is not work for others to do, for we ourselves are the priesthood this world so desperately needs.
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