Epiphany 3
Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a; Psalm 19; Luke 4:14-21
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I.
This is the first of a planned two-part sermon series called “Operation Reconquista.”
If you’re getting my Substack, you’ll have some background for what I plan to talk about today and why.
The immediate frame is the controversy surrounding the National Day of Prayer Service at the National Cathedral this past Tuesday.
For those of you who don’t know, up until about this time last year, I was a priest in the Episcopal Church.
The National Day of Prayer Service took place in an Episcopal cathedral, and the words that generated so much controversy were spoken by an Episcopal bishop, the Rt. Rev. Marianne Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C.
(For the record, I was a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of New York.)
To say that the controversy of this past week hit home for me would be an understatement.
I wrote about it extensively on my Substack, and I would direct you to it if you are interested in reading more.
At last count, my op-ed on the debacle had 65,000 views on X alone, and my letter to the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church had 47,000 views, also on X.
If you’re not getting my Substack, give me your email, and I will add you to the list.
Newcomers, if you put your email in our guest book in the hallway as you’re coming in from the back of the church, I will add you.
II.
I am going to talk today about the “Reconquista” of the mainline Protestant Churches of America.
Reconquista is a Spanish word that simply means reconquest, to take back previously captured territory, returning it to its rightful owners.
It refers to the roughly 800 years between 722 and 1492 when Muslim invaders were driven out of Christian Spain.
It’s a fraught term, mostly because revisionist historians have sought to undermine both the history and culture of Christian Europe for over a century now.
Nevertheless, it is a useful term, because it is clear. It is easy to give the sense of it, just as Ezra and the scribes gave the sense of God’s law in this morning’s reading from Nehemiah.
Reconquista also refers to an online movement, begun in 2023, by a young man who goes by the online handle, Redeemed Zoomer.
Redeemed Zoomer is a real-life college student, I believe now in his senior year, and recently married. My wife and I have both met him in person.
His YouTube channel has 500,000 subscribers.
If you are a member of Gen Z and are remotely interested in American Christianity — and you might be surprised just how many young people today are interested — you will have consumed hours of his content.
Redeemed Zoomer’s goal is simple. He wants to see our mainline churches full again. He wants them to get back to the biblical basics and stop the progressive nonsense that is destroying them.
He makes three very simple and compelling points.
First, the biggest and most beautiful church buildings in every town in America belong to one of the mainline Protestant denominations.
There is some debate about what constitutes the “mainline” Protestant Churches, but at the very least it includes the Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregationalist churches.
First Church Woodbury is a mainline Protestant church.
His second point is that there is tremendous cultural capital attached to these mainline churches.
Third, these churches have been taken over by latter-day heathens, modernist, progressive, neo-pagan invaders who do not belong in these churches, who, in fact, hate them.
His goal is to drive them out, hence the name for his youth movement, Operation Reconquista.
III.
Now, I want to stop here and say something. This sermon may be difficult for some of you to hear.
You may think I am blaming you for how the church got to be this way. You may recognize as we go on that you yourself have been complicit in some of what has happened to our churches.
Whether or not you have is not the point. The point, as with all preaching, is to preach redemption.
God is a God of second chances, and I am here to preach about getting a second chance to do this thing called “church” — and to do it right.
There is certainly more than enough blame to go around for the wretched state of the mainline church in today’s America.
But I am not here to preach guilt or to assign blame.
I am here to preach you out of the mess you’re in, that every church up and down Main Street in Woodbury is in, along with every other town in Connecticut and across the country.
If you find my message upsetting, please understand, I am not trying to upset you just for the sake of upsetting you.
I am here to deliver a message that I think you need to hear, and my wife and I came here to live with you so that we can help you do what needs to be done.
So, with that, please open your Bibles and let’s read today’s gospel lesson from Luke 4:14-21, and since Ezra had the people stand when he read from the book, I invite you to stand for the reading as well.
Let us pray.
Lord, this is a hard message you’ve given me to preach. I pray for your anointing and for the grace to deliver it clearly, with words that are easy to understand, and I pray that your people may receive the word you have for them in this hour. Amen.
You may be seated.
IV.
What are both readings talking about today? They are talking about the reformation of the Church.
In Ezra’s case, it’s the reformation of the Old Covenant church.
Ezra, Nehemiah, and about 30,000 others had just returned from exile in Babylon to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and to restore their worship and way of life.
The way they do that is they start with preaching. They start with instruction.
Nehemiah 8:8 says, “And they read from the book, from the law of God, clearly; and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.”
They read the law clearly and they gave the sense, they gave the meaning of it. That tells me two things.
First, the Bible can be understood.
Second, the people will always need a little help understanding it.
Friends, this is why it is so important to choose your pastors and your preachers carefully, and this is precisely why the mainline Protestant Churches failed.
It started in the 1920s when the seminaries stopped teaching the Bible clearly so that the last several generations of preachers haven’t been giving the people the true sense of God’s word.
They’ve been giving them nonsense about commas instead.
You know what I am talking about, right?
We have one of these commas on the back of the church near the driveway, catty-corner to the Red Barn. It looks sort of like a hex.
Almost 20 years ago the United Church of Christ came up with an ad campaign called “God is still speaking.”
The main symbol of that campaign was not the cross of Christ, or a dove, or tongues of fire, or any other symbol that we normally associate with the Christian Faith, but a comma.
One of the campaign’s taglines was, “Don’t put a period where God has put a comma.” They called it “God’s comma.”
This was very clever sounding, but, of course, it was clever sounding nonsense.
God is still speaking, of course, but He speaks to our hearts, through the power of the Holy Spirit. He anoints faithful preachers with unction from above.
But that was not what the UCC’s slogan meant.
They meant that God was still making up His mind, that the words He had inspired His prophets to utter long ago and to commit to writing under the watchful eye of the Holy Spirit were not final, that they were not the last word.
The point of the ad campaign was clear.
God was not to have the last word on issues like same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia, and, most of all, salvation.
Man was.
Now, any seminary student taking first-year Greek knows that there is no punctuation in the original biblical manuscripts.
All the punctuation was added later. It’s man-made.
So, despite them calling it “God’s comma,” it will never be anything more than man’s punctuation mark.
The United Church of Christ is saying that man can put a comma on God’s word, making space for men to add their own words, and to interpret Scripture however they like.
Ezra, the good priest and preacher that he is, says “enough.”
Ezra is doing what I am trying to do. He is doing what Redeemed Zoomer and his generation want to see accomplished in their lifetimes, over the next forty to sixty years.
What is it that we want to see done?
(Hopefully, it won’t take forty or sixty years, because we want to see it done now.)
What is it that Ezra is doing?
Ezra is restoring scripture to its rightful place in the life of the Church.
Ezra is deliberate in how he does this. So, let’s look at what Ezra does.
First, he reads the Bible from a pulpit.
Nehemiah 8:5, “Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was above all the people.”
There’s none of this walking around and shuffling up and down the aisle so that he can be on the same level as the people.
There’s no fake attempt to be cool, to be relevant, or to show the people that you have the common touch.
You see preachers nowadays who can’t be bothered to wear a jacket and tie, let alone a Geneva gown, handling the word of God like it’s some common thing.
Do you think Ezra treated it like a common thing? No. That’s because it was a precious thing. For seventy years in captivity, they had kept the word of God close to them and guarded it with their lives.
The Bible doesn’t need preachers to make it look or sound cool. It doesn’t need skits and a dance routine. That may be fine for the children’s Sunday school, but not for the preacher in his pulpit.
That’s rank showmanship and too many preachers are in love with it.
The word of God is not on the same level as the people.
It comes down from above. It ought to be read from on high, not only to signify where it comes from, but so that the people can hear it.
You see, there were practical reasons behind all these old ways.
Why? Because the words of the Bible must be read clearly first, before you can expect anyone to make any sense of them.
Now, let’s look at what Jesus does. It turns out He does something similar.
Luke 4:4 tells us that Jesus goes to His hometown synagogue in Nazareth where “...he stood up to read.”
He stood up so that He could be heard, and only then did He read.
He read from the book of the prophet Isaiah.
He read these words:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.
Very well, that’s what the text says, and Jesus has read it in a clear voice. But what did it mean?
Jesus tells us what it means.
In Luke 4:21 He says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Now, the context for this, as we’ve been studying it out these past several weeks, is that Jesus has come to purify His people and to restore right worship in Israel.
Jesus is saying, “It’s time. It is happening now. You are here to hear me say it.”
Jesus is like a king issuing commands.
He is like the new president signing hundreds of executive orders on Day 1.
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Ezra is preaching the law. Jesus is fulfilling the prophet’s words.
It’s really happening. Jerusalem is being rebuilt! The Church is being restored!
Now, look around you. We have people in our pews! We have someone to play the organ!
V.
There are two things to take away from this.
First, the Church has never been without the Scriptures.
Even after seventy years in exile in a hostile and foreign land, Israel did not lose her Bible.
And even after 100 years, and the ravages of modernism, and the higher criticism, and the feminist retellings of the text, and the gay and liberationist and Marxist theologies, the mainline Protestant Church has never lost her Bible.
It is right here in front of you, sitting on this high pulpit.
It’s resting right below you, in the pew racks in front of you.
The Church has never been without the Scriptures, and so the second point is this: all Church reformation begins by going back to the Bible.
Ezra is rebuilding Jerusalem. He is also reforming its worship. That is why the people weep, which I plan to come back to next week.
And Jesus, who will soon send judgment on Jerusalem and destroy it (but not before He calls out His church — both Jew and Greek) is reforming their worship.
When King Jesus is through with things, which is to say when He is finished sifting the hearts of men before His judgment seat, there will be no more pagan idolatry and no more turning the House of God into a den of thieves.
We will stop here for now and return, Lord willing, to our examination of what it means to reform, to reconquer, if you will, the mainline Protestant Church next week.
Let us pray:
Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and all the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Preached on January 26, 2025 at the First Congregational Church, Woodbury, Connecticut.
Questions for reflection and discussion:
What does “Reconquista” mean in the context of the Church, and how can this idea inspire today’s Christians to rethink the direction of the Church in America?
How do you understand the connection between the controversy at the National Cathedral and the larger struggles facing mainline Protestant denominations?
What role do modernist theological movements play in the current state of the mainline Protestant Church? How can we discern between cultural trends and true Christian doctrine?
In what ways can the Church reclaim its cultural capital, and why is this important for future generations?
What does Ezra’s reading of Scripture in Nehemiah 8 teach us about the importance of clear, faithful preaching in today’s Church?
How do you react to the idea that modern Christians may have become complacent or complicit in the decline of the Church? What steps can we take to change this?
What is the significance of Jesus’ proclamation in Luke 4:21, and how does it relate to the reformation or renewal of the Church today?
What does it mean to restore Scripture to its rightful place in worship, and how can preachers and congregations achieve this in practical terms?
How do we balance the need for faithfulness to tradition with the need to speak to contemporary issues in the Church today?
In light of the cultural challenges facing the Church, what role do younger generations, like those following Redeemed Zoomer, play in the future of the faith?
What is the danger of placing man’s ideas above God’s Word, as seen in the “God’s Comma” campaign, and how can we guard against this in our own church communities?
What are some practical ways the Church can begin to “reconquer” or rebuild in its local communities, starting with biblical literacy and faithful preaching?
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