Nehemiah 2: Building up the Wall

The king said to me, "What is it you want?" Then I prayed to the God of heaven, 5 and I answered the king, "If it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in his sight, let him send me to the city in Judah where my fathers are buried so that I can rebuild it."

Decades after returning from exile, the Jews have a temple in Jerusaelm but very little else. The Holy City remains sparsely occupied, mainly because most people prefer to live in outlying villages. Indeed, with all the intermarriage and mixing with foreigners, the Jews' cultural and religious heritage is on the verge of slipping away.

What can stop the downhill slide? One man, a Jewish exile who until this point has stayed behind in Babylon, has an idea. Like Daniel before him, Nehemiah has risen in the ranks of a foreign government (Persia) and is prospering even as a foreigner. When he hears the dismaying reports from Jerusalem, however, he feels compeeled to act. He obtains the king's permission to lead an expedition there with the goal of rebuilding the city's walls.

Now strictly speaking, Nehemiah is not a prophet, though he is certainly a man of prayer. In an appearance before the king, he shoots an "arrow prayer" to God, silently asking for help in the middle of a crucial conversation (2:4). Improvising as he goes, Nehemiah meets each new challenge with a combination of business savvy, courage and dependence on God. He mobilizes work crews, fights off opposition, reforms the court system, purifies religious practices and, when necessary, rallies the troops with stirring speeches. And he does all this while on leave from his responsibilities as statesman in the Persian court.

Life Question: For the Israelites, a wall was imperative to keep the faith in tact. Should more churches today use "a wall" to assure that its members are not tempted to stray?

I think that "a wall" carries so many negative conotatations- primarily ones of exclusiveness and arrogance. Holy Communion was a big stumbling block for me when I first left the Catholic Church. For years, I had been taught that it was a sacred sacrament reserved only for Catholics who had made their First Communion as a child. It was not an arbitrary ritural that was to be shared with other Protestant Christians. Obviously, our church (the Chapel) has a whole different outlook on this topic, and it took me quite a while- along with a number of conversations with some of our pastors- to knock down this wall and embrace the idea that communion was intended for the entire community of Christ believers.