Nehemiah 3

Nehemiah 3 is one of those chapters we mentioned last week—full of strange names and unfamiliar places, a chapter we’re tempted to skip.  In the midst of this strangeness are two key words: rebuild and repair.  Behind them, a word that pervades Nehemiah’s book: remember.

Re- words denote doing something again, typically something that needs redoing because it has been broken, damaged or done incompletely or wrong in the first place, or because circumstances have changed in ways requiring fresh address (e.g., repotting a plant isn’t fixing anything wrong, but making room for new, continuing growth).

Remember is a word-thread that runs throughout Scripture: Remember the Sabbath … remember that you were slaves in Egypt … remember the LORD’s covenant and commands, to do them … do this in remembrance of me.  We think of remembering primarily in terms of recalling to mind something we have forgotten, but this word carries far more weight than the mere recollection of information.

Re + member: to make yourself a member again.  In other words, recover your real identity as a member of a community; member yourself into your people again.  You are not an isolated, atomized individual who comes from nowhere and can go anywhere you desire, connected to no one, accountable to nothing.

Remembering in this way does not mean that your unique personhood is absorbed into a faceless mass; to the contrary as this people remember Jerusalem, remember their identity in God, remember God’s covenant, promises and commands, they emerge in all their uniqueness, as people who are named and known by name: Eliashib, Joiada, Meremoth, Shallum and his daughters.  They are remembered in their unique gifts and callings: Uzziel, one of the goldsmiths, Hananiah, a maker of perfume.  They are remembered for the specific sections of the walls of Jerusalem that were given to them to repair and rebuild.

Many of the people we meet in Nehemiah 3 have journeyed to a place that had never been their home; it had been more than a century since the Babylonians conquered their homeland and deported, not them, but their ancestors.  Even those who had not been deported, who had remained in the land, had no personal memories of “how things used to look.”  They did not have comprehensive maps and blueprints to guide their work.  They couldn’t call back to mind the specific measurements of this gate or the height of that section of the walls.  They were guided by the locations of rubble piles—and by remembering.  Remembering God; remembering who they are as God’s people; remembering what God had said about this city, why it was God’s “local address” on planet earth.  They remembered why their lives and their work mattered—not just for themselves.  For us all.

What is a truth that you need to remember but tend to forget