Lingering in Glory

All the people gathered together into the square before the Water Gate… They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the law of Moses …. He read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and women and those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law …. And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people; and when he opened it, all the people stood up … and they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground [Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6; the OT reading for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany, RCL, Year C].

They had rebuilt the walls. They had restored the Temple. The year was around 445 BCE, and the Jewish people had returned to Jerusalem from Babylon, where they had been exiled for more than a century. They had returned home, but something was still missing. What does it mean to truly come home? What does it mean to be YHWH’s people again after generations of banishment? These were the questions that brought them to the Water Gate—a place named for its proximity to the city’s main water supply, where people would gather daily to draw water for their households and the temple rituals.

This gate, situated on the eastern wall near the Gihon Spring, was more than just a functional entrance. It was a communal space, a place where the rhythms of daily life played out, where the sacred task of drawing water for temple ceremonies merged with the common need for household water. Even those deemed ritually unclean could gather here. Perhaps this is why they chose this spot—not in the Temple court, but in an open space that belonged to everyone, where the boundaries between sacred and ordinary daily life blurred.

Here, in the shadow of their newly rebuilt walls, they assembled to hear words most could not read for themselves. In a society where literacy belonged to barely three in a hundred, this was a moment of significance: YHWH’s word would be read aloud, not just to the priests, not just to the learned, but to all who could understand.

…

Every Sunday morning of my childhood, we drove one of two routes to Olney Presbyterian Church, founded in 1793 in the rolling Piedmont hills of southern Gaston County. The more scenic path took us along Little Mountain Road, which wound its way around what official maps called Jackson’s Knob, though we all knew it simply as Little Mountain. Halfway along this route stood an AME Zion church, and no matter how early we left—and with our devout parents, we usually left very early—the scene at the AME church was always the same. People would already be gathered there. When we went home for Sunday Dinner, they were breaking out their covered dishes to share, and when we passed by again, heading to Olney for Sunday evening prayers, they would still be there, as if the hours between had dissolved in their presence.

As I recall the holy activity at the other church, something of that ancient Jerusalem Water Gate scene echoes in memory. Like those who gathered to hear YHWH’s word in Jerusalem, the congregation at the AME Zion church knew something about being present to holy things. In the segregated South, their church had become its own kind of gathering place, a center where community and worship became inseparable. In my youth, I couldn’t have named what I felt passing by, but I knew something was happening there—something that made time stand still, something that drew people to remain.

The Nehemiah text tells us that when Ezra opened the scroll, “all the people stood up” [8:5]. When they heard the words, they lifted their hands and called out “Amen, Amen” [8:6]. They bowed their heads and wept [8:9]. This wasn’t just a contained, measured response to words being read. These were people encountering something precious, something transformative—and their whole bodies knew it, just as the AME Zion congregation seemed to know it generations later, their sustained presence a testimony to how God’s word can hold a people in its grip.

I think now of our own Presbyterian sanctuary at Olney, where propriety reigned, and enthusiasm was suspect. A story circulated about a visitor who, caught up in the Sunday sermon, called out “Amen! only to be asked afterward if he had a problem. “No ma’am,” the young man had replied, “I just got religion.” Knowing he hadn’t gotten it at Olney, the long-term member suggested he take it elsewhere. You see, we could discuss the theological implications of speaking in tongues, as long as we kept the conversation safely in Greek—Glossolalia—and the experience safely distant.

The Levites – the tribe set apart for religious service — “gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading [8:8]. Here was interpretation alongside inspiration, understanding married to emotion. No false choice between head and heart—the text holds them together, just as the Water Gate itself joined the sacred and the ordinary.

Little Mountain Road still winds its way around those familiar slopes, though fine homes and not tenement shacks now crown its heights. The old AME Zion church has given way to the newer, larger, more well-appointed facility of Mt. Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church. Sometimes I wonder about that ancient gathering at the Water Gate—people drawn together by a hunger deeper than daily bread, by waters that quenched more than physical thirst. They came as they were—learned and unlearned, clean and unclean—to a place where heaven and earth met in the ordinary business of drawing water. Like the Little Mountain congregation that I passed most Sundays in my youth, they knew something about lingering in holy presence, about letting God’s word wash over them until the hours dissolved into glory.