A Sermon preached at Magdalen College, Oxford on October 19, 2025 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Reading for address: Nehemiah 8
Tonight I want to talk about what it’s like to emerge from a really dark and distressing experience. They say you can get the man out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of the man. When you’ve been through an experience of trauma, or a lengthy period of deprivation or oppression, it can be very hard to lose the habits of survival and the instincts of resilience.
In The Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens presents the figure of Dr Alexandre Manette, who’s imprisoned for speaking out against a wealthy family, and spends 18 isolated and debilitating years in the Bastille as Prisoner 105, North Tower. To survive, Dr Manette learns to cobble shoes. On his release, his daughter’s loving attention restores him to life: but every time crisis looms, there he is, in the corner of his daughter’s house, in a trance, miming the methods of shoemaking. The habits of deprivation are inscribed on his soul. This is the context for emerging from trauma. As for Dr Manette, fixing the circumstantial problem only goes part of the way because what’s needed isn’t just safety, it’s healing.
The Old Testament books of Ezra and Nehemiah can be read as a response to a whole people going through this kind of rehabilitation. The people of Judah were overrun by the Chaldeans and their wealthier members carried off a thousand miles to Babylon. A change of regime in Babylon fifty years later meant that gradually the exiles began to return home. The Temple and walls of Jerusalem were rebuilt, and it was like Dr Manette moving into his daughter’s home: the body was in a new place, but the heart and soul were not quite there yet.
That’s where things have got to when we come to tonight’s passage in Nehemiah. Ezra reads the people the Law. What could be more boring than reading out a book of laws for six hours at a time? Why does it make the people weep? Well remember the Law refers to the Torah, which tells how God created the world, called a people, delivered them from famine and slavery, and made an everlasting covenant with them. It’s a story of identity, purpose, and freedom, and a guide in how to keep that freedom. And remember the Exile took away every other dimension of identity – land, temple, and capital city, most of all the ark of the covenant which enshrined this law. So as you imagine a biomedical engineer or surgeon painstakingly but thrillingly reconstructing a part of a person’s body that’s been damaged in an accident, so Ezra reading out the Law in the newly restored Jerusalem was like the consummation of Judah’s return from exile. It’s a beautiful depiction of God restoring Israel around the covenant, described in language that evokes the prophecies of all God’s people rallying together and being reunited at the climax of history.
I want to walk through this account with you and highlight the parts that help us see how this illuminates the experience of emerging from trauma.
See how it takes place in the square before the Water Gate. That could be just a circumstantial detail; but nothing in the Bible is circumstantial detail. Water means creation, as the Spirit hovered over the deep. It means the exodus, where God set the Hebrews free by crossing the Red Sea. It means entering the Promised Land, as Joshua crossed the Jordan. For Christians it means baptism, which brings these three themes together. The Water Gate is a place of nourishment, deliverance, transformation and new beginnings. And this is our first step in emerging from trauma: finding a place of nourishment, safety, support and encouragement; a place where unlike Dr Manette we can begin to imagine a future bigger than the past.
Then while Ezra was reading the Law, the Levites gave the interpretation. If you just read the New Testament, you assume Levites were good for nothing except passing by on the other side. But they served an important purpose in the Old Testament, a bit like deacons in the early church. And here we can see them supporting all the people as the people get used to a new way of living. We all need that kind of support. The second step in coming out of trauma is turning isolation into relationship, and discovering you’re never alone.
Then Ezra and his friends see that the people are weeping when they hear the words of the Law, and so they say, ‘This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn or weep.’ The people are weeping because they realise they’ve transgressed the covenant. Now the last thing you expect a pastor to say is that when someone’s crying you tell them they’re wrong. But see what Ezra’s saying here. ‘The Babylon ship has sailed. That’s history now. Your dwelling on it is locking yourself into the regrets of the past. Now’s the time to turn the page. This is not the day for self-indulgent tears. Save your energy for the work that’s to be done. The joy of the Lord is your strength.’
I wonder if anyone’s ever said that to you. I wonder if you’ve been so obsessed with regret and remorse and recrimination for the china cup that’s dropped and smashed that you couldn’t see the whole high tea that was waiting for you at the banqueting table. To come out of trauma sooner or later you need someone to say this to you. There’s no reason why the story ahead can’t be far more fulfilling, exciting, abundant and rewarding than the story behind you. You can’t live the rest of your life staring into the deep well of what might have been. Stare ahead and see what God has in store. This is not a day for weeping. It’s time to live.
Then when Ezra’s finally finished reading out the Law, the people turn to eating and drinking. And at this point we realise the story has a liturgical shape. There’s gathering, the reading of scripture, the interpretation of the word, the forgiving of sins, and then there’s eating and drinking. For Christians, it’s a Eucharist. And for coming out of trauma, it’s telling us, eating together is the heart of community. We live to eat; we live to celebrate, share, prepare, clear up, talk, listen, enjoy, laugh, relish, remember, tell stories, ask questions, discover wisdom. All the things we do at table together.
And finally, Ezra’s reading of the Law turns into a festival, because they discover, as it says in Leviticus 23, that the new year is to begin with solemn rest and holy consecration. The words are resonant for Christians. There’s seven days of remembrance: and on the eighth day there’s something beyond retrospection, something new, something that for Christians happened after the seven days of Holy Week, something that happened beyond the Sabbath, beyond the crown of creation, something called resurrection. And that’s the fifth part of coming out of trauma: a way of commemorating, of making tangible what’s been learnt in wilderness and exile, and making a kind of plinth for something new and wonderful, an extraordinary, unexpected gift, or miracle, called resurrection.
You can take a man out of the ghetto, so they say, but you can’t take the ghetto out of the man. Ezra saw that as a challenge. He embarked on the job of helping Israel perceive a future that was bigger than the past. That same process takes place every time a person emerges out of trauma. I wonder if that process may be happening to you. What Ezra shows us is this. You can take the heart out of a person, for weeks, months, or decades; but you can never take that person out of the heart of God.
