Everyone Needs a Reason | 9/21/25
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When you think about your own purpose, how has it shifted in seasons of change or uncertainty?
Nehemiah’s grief led him into months of prayer before taking action. How do you balance prayer and action in your own life?
Have you ever felt like your prayers weren’t working? What did you do with that frustration?
What role does silence play in your relationship with God? Is it something you embrace or resist?
Nehemiah relied on the words of scripture and tradition when his own words failed. What words, prayers, or scriptures do you lean on when you don’t know what to say?
Transcript:
Everyone needs a reason. Everyone needs a purpose. And if you'd asked me what that meant a couple months ago, even a couple of weeks ago, I would have known exactly how to explain that to you for myself and for our community. But our world looks different now. Our country looks different now. What is our reason? What is our purpose as Christ followers?
When our common life together is wrought with fear and hatred and anger, when we feel like we are just waiting on pins and needles for the next catastrophic thing to happen, who are we now? What are we called to do now? Nehemiah, a character from the Old Testament, just might be the pathway to help us navigate this moment we find ourselves in.
His story comes to us after King David and King Solomon’s rule. After the great split of Israel and Judah, God’s people were overrun by the Babylonians and sent into captivity. And then eventually those Babylonians were overthrown by Persia. This is where Nehemiah’s story takes place, as an exiled Jew in Persia. And it begins like this:
In the month of Kislev, in the 20th year, while I was in the fortress of Susa, Hanani, one of my brothers, came with some other men from Judah. I asked them about the Jews who had escaped and survived the captivity, and about Jerusalem. They told me, “Those in the province who survived the captivity are in great trouble and shame. The wall around Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been destroyed by fire.”
When I heard this news, I sat down and I wept. I mourned for days of fasting and praying before the God of heaven. And I said, “Lord, God of heaven, great and awesome God, you are the one who keeps covenant and is truly faithful to those who love you and keep your commandments. Let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to the prayer of your servant, which I now pray before you night and day for your servants, the people of Israel.
“I confess the sins of the people of Israel, which we have committed against you. Both I and my family have sinned. We have wronged you greatly. We haven’t kept to the commandments, the statutes, and the ordinances that you commanded your servant Moses. Remember the word that you gave to your servant Moses when you said, ‘If you are unfaithful, I will scatter you among the peoples. But if you return to me and keep my commandments by really doing them, then—even though your outcasts live under distant skies—I will gather them from there and bring them to the place that I have chosen as a dwelling for my name.’
“They are your servants and your people. They are the ones whom you have redeemed by your great power and your strong hand. Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant and to the prayer of your servants who delight in honoring your name. Please give success to your servant today, and grant him favor in the presence of this man.”
At that time, I was a cupbearer to the king. In the month of Nisan, in the 20th year of King Artaxerxes, the king was about to be served wine. I took the wine and gave it to the king. Since I had never seemed sad in his presence, the king asked me, “Why do you seem sad? Since you are not sick, you must have a broken heart.”
I was very afraid and replied, “May the king live forever! Why shouldn’t I seem sad when the city, the place of my family’s graves, is in ruins and its gates destroyed by fire?”
The king asked, “What is it that you need?”
I prayed to the God of heaven, and then I replied, “If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor with you, please send me to Judah, to the city of my family’s graves, so that I may rebuild it.”
My friends, this is the Word of God for us, the people of God. And we say, “Thanks be to God.”
Will you pray with me? Spirit of the living God, you who are present, you who are with us. By your Spirit, open our hearts and our minds that we might hear a word from you this morning. In Christ’s name we pray, Amen.
Everything was fine, dandy even. Nehemiah was living a life better than he could have imagined or anticipated, growing up as a Jew in Persia. He was born to a Jewish family while they were living in exile in Persia. So he grew up living the Persian life. He knew the Persian culture as if it were his own. But also, as he was growing up, he and his brother heard the tales of their homeland. They sang the songs of their people with their mother and laughed as their father told story after story of growing up as a little boy in Jerusalem.
Nehemiah always wanted to go there one day so that he could see it for himself, a spiritual pilgrimage, if you will. But then life got busy, as life is known to do. And now he was living in as much luxury as a Jew could get. He was the cupbearer to the king, a lowly member of the king’s royal court, but a member nonetheless.
And so he was safely tucked into his bubble of security in the fortified city of Susa. Everything was fine and dandy until he received news that would change everything. His brother was able to go on that pilgrimage to Jerusalem that he had always wanted to take. But instead of hearing stories of mountaintop worship experiences and tearful reunions with long-lost cousins, Hanani brought back images of utter destruction.
The temple they had heard so much about, reduced to dust. The markets that were once filled with the smell of fresh produce now emptied, carrying a lingering stench of slaughter. Like the highlight reel from hell, Nehemiah could almost see the fear on the faces of children and parents alike. He could probably hear the screams of terror as the ones who chose to stay in the city attempted to flee at the last minute.
As these images flashed through Nehemiah’s mind, I wonder if he felt the wall of safety crumble like the wall that protected his homeland. He couldn’t unsee the atrocities his brother described. That sacred place of his own identity was shattered. It was gone. Inconsolable, Nehemiah fell to the floor, weeping and wailing, grieving what he never knew but yet longed for so deeply in his spirit.
And I wonder if there was a pit of guilt and shame that weighed heavily on his chest, so much so that he couldn’t draw a full breath. “If only I’d gone sooner. Maybe I could have done something, anything. I have to do something now. But what?” That refrain of “What can I do?” probably became very familiar on his lips.
Then those weeks turned into prayer. And prayer turned into action. In the span of just six verses, we see Nehemiah resume his cupbearer duties and bravely ask the king for some time off, an extended leave of absence, so that he could rebuild what had been devastated.
If you’re like me, when it looks like the world and the nation are crumbling to dust all around us, all you want to do is something, anything, to help fix what is broken, to rebuild what has been lost. And in the moment when you are waiting with your hammer held high, ready for instructions of when and where and how, somebody says the dreaded words:
“Why don’t you just pray about it? Praying is the best thing we can do right now.”
That is so frustrating to hear when I am ready to go, ready to do whatever needs to be done. But then I’m told to pump the brakes and pray about it. If I’m honest, my frustration doesn’t come with the invitation to pray. And yes, praying is a great thing to do. But the reality for me is that the frustration comes when I feel as though my prayers aren’t working.
Are my prayers really doing anything? Does praying to God that every child who goes to school in the morning would come home safely really help? After 47 school shootings with reported injuries since January of 2025, I wonder if praying is actually doing anything to help stop the violence across our world.
As people scream in fear, frightened for their lives day in and day out, I wonder if my prayers are actually doing anything at all to help us treat our neighbors as neighbors, instead of as enemies who need to be fought. Sometimes, if I’m honest, I don’t think my prayers really work, at least not like Nehemiah’s seem to. The way it reads in the text this morning, it seems like when Nehemiah prays, boom something happens. He realizes his divine purpose and then makes it happen.
But if we were to take a closer look at his prayer, it’s not really what it seems at face value. When we read through these six verses, it’s easy to think that Nehemiah’s deep grief gave way to this miraculous prayer, and that this prayer yielded a call to action in just one night. But did you notice the dates that bookend this narrative? At the beginning we start in the month of Kislev (effectively our November or December) and then we end in the month of Nisan (March or April for us). Instead of just one night, this prayer spans a five or six month time period.
And did you notice the words? They seem just a little bit too prim and proper for someone as distraught as Nehemiah was described to be. Those words were prim and proper because they weren’t Nehemiah’s words entirely. This prayer is a compilation of scriptures and other prayers from his tradition that he probably learned as a little boy and kept using as he grew up.
Because maybe in these moments of prayer, he didn’t have the right words in his heart, because his heart was just so full of sorrow. All he could do was groan. And so he relied on the words that had carried him through day in and day out.
Did you notice that Nehemiah seemed to jump to a conclusive idea that we aren’t even aware of when we first read the text? His attention, toward the end of his prayer, turns from God’s people in Jerusalem who need help to a petition for success “in the presence of this man.” We only learn later that this man is the king. But when we read the prayer for the first time, we don’t know.
In between those two final paragraphs of Nehemiah’s prayer, something happened, something we, the readers, are not privy to. As my son Christian would say, it was an A and B conversation, and we can just see our way out of it. But we wonder. We’re curious. What happened between Nehemiah’s words? When the words seemed to just stop, what happened in those moments?
When we think about prayer, we often picture prayer looking a lot like this: seated in an upright position or kneeling down with our hands folded just so. And in our prayers, we have just the right words that we want to offer to Jesus. It’s almost like, along the way, we picked up the idea that our prayers have to be filled with every single word we know in our encyclopedia and dictionary. And we need to use them all, and they all have to make sense, with the right syntax and all those fun things I was supposed to learn in language arts but can’t remember now.
Because when we have our words lined up just so, and we use the “good words,” maybe then God will hear us.
But maybe prayer looks more like this: exhausted from the onslaught of emotions, without any more words left to offer. I wonder if Nehemiah discovered something miraculous. When the words are no more, Nehemiah learns that silence is prayer too.
But we don’t like silence. Silence is disruptive. Silence is uncomfortable. And yet in the silence, God has the opportunity to respond to all the words we have offered, or all the words we did not offer.
I wonder if, in the silence, God used Nehemiah’s imagination to help him envision a reconstructed Jerusalem. I wonder if in that silent space, God wrote words upon Nehemiah’s heart, revealing his new reason, his new purpose, his divine purpose in this season of his life and in this season of the life of God’s people.
This is the heart of what we call contemplative prayer practices. It’s the process of opening ourselves to God through the gift of silence. It’s getting in the habit of pushing away all of our thoughts, and sometimes even our emotions, so that we might be in tune with God’s own heart.
One of the most famous practitioners of contemplative prayer is Father Thomas Keating. In his book Open Mind, Open Heart, he says it this way: “Contemplative prayer is the world in which God can do anything. To move into that realm is the greatest adventure. It is the offering of ourselves, of who we are, just as we are.”
But friends, sometimes we just need to be quiet. We need to be still. And we need to know that God is God, and we are not.
Over the summer, there were a couple of different small gatherings that took place across our church community of people who were deeply distraught over the events of our life together as a nation, and the divisive rhetoric that has become commonplace in our society these days. I had the privilege of attending one of these small group gatherings at Steve’s house.
Fifteen or so of us were gathered, asking the question, “What do we do now? Who and how are we to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ in this moment of our history?” In those conversations, a nebulous idea began to form around holding another event like the one that was held here several years ago for peace, love, and understanding. But there wasn’t a clear vision or picture yet of what that could look like.
And so Steve invited us to pray. He said, “The best thing we can do right now is pray.” And I thought, Really?
But a few days later, the Sunday that followed, a woman came up to us before worship started. She said, “I’ve been praying and thinking about the idea of this event. And a phrase came to me: ‘Hope and Love Are Stronger.’”
She had done her homework, and I was shocked because I hadn’t had the time to do my homework just yet. And I don’t quite know how she prayed; I didn’t ask her. But we can imagine it was in the space between the words she offered, in that silent space where the breath resides, that she heard clearly these words of hope and love from our God. Words that speak of the divine presence that I believe we’re all longing for, longing to feel in a tangible way in our time.
These words have been the centering thread for the interfaith community here in Gainesville as we discern together what we might do. So on November 16th, Trinity will hold an event and host people from all different faiths, all different viewpoints, but all of whom believe that Hope and Love Are Stronger.
And maybe, like Nehemiah, we can begin to rebuild our communities and our country with the building blocks of faith, of hope, and of love.
It was in the silent space when God spoke. In the silence, our reason, our purpose, was revealed. Everyone needs a reason, yes. And I believe everyone already has a reason. Everyone already has a purpose. You have a reason. You have a purpose for such a time as this: to bring about healing and restoration, hope and love to our broken world, right here and right now.
But maybe God is just waiting to reveal it to you in the silence.
Amen.