Who Will Stand in the Breach?

We are going to go Old Testament today. The Old Testament, or Hebrew Scriptures, is a complex story of God’s activity chiefly through his uniquely chosen people, Israel. A short part of this history describes Israel as a glorious nation under the rule of the beloved David and his wise and wealthy son, Solomon. That’s only a small part of the history. By far a greater chunk of the history sees Israel as a small potatoes nation being tossed around by the ruling powers surrounding them – Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia all take their turns at subduing or outright conquering of Israel.

At one point the king of Assyria has overrun much of Israel and all that remains unconquered is Jerusalem, the holy city of David. But just as the Assyrian army is poised to invade lower Judah and Jerusalem, it is hit by a plague of rats and some unknown disease that severely cripples its army and forces them to call off the siege of Jerusalem. Not coincidentally, the chief prophet of Israel at that time, Isaiah, had predicted it and proclaimed that Jerusalem would never be taken by a foreign power. Most Jews believed this – they had seen it powerfully demonstrated before their city walls. Somehow the greatest army in the world at that time had to turn around and go home without a battle being fought!

Everyone in Israel believed that Jerusalem would never be conquered. The great prophet Isaiah said so. Isaiah was right about many things, but he was wrong about that. Roughly a hundred years later the Babylonian armies of Nebuchadnezzar were outside those same walls of Jerusalem, but this time no plague came to rescue Israel. The only plague they saw was the plague of Babylonian soldiers busting through and over their city walls. The walls were breached. Jerusalem fell.

What this event did to the faith and psyche of the Jewish people cannot be overstated. But what I want to focus on is what happened to them physically. Their cities were destroyed, their economy ruined, and their leading citizens were killed or deported. And that’s what became of God’s people for the next fifty years to a hundred years; until a man appears on the scene who will lead the rebuilding of the Temple and city of Jerusalem and the restoration of a nation of Israel. His name was Nehemiah. He was a Jew in exile in the royal court of the king of Persia, the country that had conquered Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. Nehemiah heard of how poor and destitute was the homeland of the Jews. He heard that work on the rebuilding of the city walls and temple had begun, but twelve years later it had not progressed beyond the foundations and, in fact, had stopped altogether. The people were too poor and harassed to do the work.

So Nehemiah got permission and financial backing from the king of Persia to go back to Jerusalem and take up the work. He also stopped in Babylon and gathered a small number of Jews who would return with him to their homeland. When he got there what he saw was discouraging. There was really no city there. Jerusalem was virtually uninhabitable. The Jews who had remained behind after the fall of the city were scattered mostly in the countryside and were fearful of other peoples on their borders.

The first thing Nehemiah had to do was to give the community physical security.

“So we rebuilt the wall, and all the wall was joined together to half its height; for the people had a mind to work.” Nehemiah 4.6


It took well over a hundred years to happen, but Jerusalem’s walls that were breached by foreign armies were finally being rebuilt again.


Sometimes we overlook this very fundamental truth that sometimes people can’t be moved to great spiritual faith, wisdom, and work if they don’t know where they are going to sleep at night, if it will be safe to sleep there, and what if anything they will have to eat when they wake in the morning. We the Church have to admit that sometimes we are preoccupied with what is going on inside the shelter of our buildings while outside the storm rages and the people scatter.

The other weekend I attended the annual conference of our United Methodist Church in Williamsport that was previously mentioned. It was near lunchtime and I had arranged to meet for lunch that day with a small group of pastors that I regularly meet with. I walked outside the Community Arts Center, crossed the street and waited outside the Bullfrog Brewery and watched for my friends to emerge as well. As I sat there reminiscing about those streets where I grew up (my junior prom was held at the Genetti Hotel just down on the corner) I saw a young man walking briskly up the sidewalk in my direction. He was talking loudly on his cell phone and I noticed an expression of anguish on his face. I can’t repeat exactly what he said but his end of the conversation was laced with expletives and he said, “I feel like taking a gun and shooting everyone I work with.”

I heard this and saw his face and I knew that he meant it. And then he said why he felt that way. “I just got (bleeping) fired!”

I would like to say that I followed him and talked him down from his anger and hysteria and counseled him to believe that God was in control. But I didn’t do that. I said a prayer for him that God would help him in his anguish. And I noticed a security guard who had been standing across the street and must have heard what I heard, follow the young man as well. Maybe that was part of the answer to my prayer.

Friends, as the church was meeting inside the Community Arts Center, the world was going on outside the way it often does – people are losing jobs, and fighting with their families, and feeling harassed and helpless. Obviously, I’m not saying the church shouldn’t meet. I am saying that what’s going on in the world is motivation and information for our meeting. We intercede for the world and we strive for God’s work in our community.


Here’s one of the ways that the Church intersects with and is dependent on the services of people like the Police and Fire and EMS in our community. Our First Responders are, in some sense, like the Nehemiahs of our towns and cities. They build the wall, or at the very least they stand on the wall and make sure that no enemy breaches its security. You stare down all enemies of security and safety so that the Church can fight other enemies – things like poverty, addiction, greed, ignorance, selfishness, and loneliness.

If the battle was easy or predictable, that would be one thing. But Nehemiah found out that building a wall wasn’t just about mortar and stone. He had to deal with enemies inside and outside the walls. His enemies tried to mock his project to undermine morale. When that didn’t stop the work, they incited criminal bands, the gangs of their day from among Philistines and Arabs, to make raids on the area. Nehemiah’s enemies tried to lure him from the city with the intent to kill him. When that didn’t work they actually hired a false prophet to convince him his situation was hopeless and he should run for his life. Nehemiah had enemies on all sides!

With all that adversity he might have asked himself was it worth it. He might have asked, “God, are you sure this is what I’m supposed to be doing?”

But Nehemiah continued the work. When things got real bad he divided his work force into two shifts – one shift would lay stone while the other stood guard with swords and spears.

“So in the lowest parts of the behind the walls and in the breaches, I stationed people according to their families, with their swords, their spears, and their bows. After I looked things over I stood up and said to them, ‘Do not be afraid of your enemies. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your kin, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes.” Nehemiah 4.13-14

At the Blair County Policemen’s Memorial Service the other evening the guest speaker told the moving story of one of the officers who died in the line of duty last year, Sgt. John Pawlosky. Pawlosky was a veteran officer in Philadelphia who got up one morning and went to work like every other workday, except that this day, unbeknownst to him, something terrible was about to happen. He was called to the scene of a disputed taxi fare. What Sgt. Pawlosky didn’t know about was the threats the criminal had already made to the taxi driver and any police who would come. Pawlusky didn’t know that this man’s violent anger and his handgun would intersect with his life that day.

Maybe somebody had thanked him earlier that day for serving. Maybe no one had. I can imagine that many of you have days when you wonder if there are only enemies around and you wonder what happened to your friends. I know there are days when you feel unappreciated and unthanked. But you continue to get up and do your job. You continue to answer the call and go to the fire. When everyone else is running away from the crisis you run to it.

I want to tell you that you are doing God’s work. You are standing in the breach of the walls of our community. You are putting yourselves out there as servants of the people and I want to tell you that serving God’s purposes in our community is the highest work.
Jesus himself put it this way:

“No one has greater love than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
Matthew 15.13