Photo Credit: Patricia Espedal
Ezra 3:8-13
Neighbor, O neighbor:
I have so many things I could tell you about my past,
But, Neighbor,
I’m more nostalgic for the days ahead.
They say, “There’s no place like home.”
As a matter of fact, we ourselves may have said it on numerous occasions, “There’s no place like home.”
We may have returned to our house after a long day at work, and been able to put our feet up, finally to relax, and have said, “There’s no place like home.”
We may have returned from vacation, those weeks many among is take during the summer months, free from school, and obligations of work and all the usual pressures of life, and we may travel to far-off places, but when we arrive back after all those adventures, we reflect on our experience, and as we unpack our suitcases and start to put all those rumpled dirty clothes into the wash we may say, “Vacation was great, but their’s no place like home.”
We may get so worn down by the world and feel so lost sometimes like Dorothy in the land of Oz, that we may wish we could just close our eyes, and tap the heels of our ruby slippers together three times and say, “There’s no place like home,” wishing when we open them again we will be back in Kansas, wherever our own Kansases are — sometimes we may not even know exactly where they are, we just know sometimes that anyplace must be better than here.
So we are familiar with these words, “There’s no place like home.”
In the days of Ezra, too, there were a lot of people who had told themselves, “There is no place like home.” Let me tell you, or take a moment to remind you, about those people of Ezra’s day.
Ezra’s people lived most of their lives in exile. Which is to say, Ezra’s people had been forcibly taken from their ancestral home, and had they had been forcibly, marched, at sword-point, hundreds of miles from the places they had been born. And these people had been forced to populate and work for the benefit of their captors throughout a long period of time. For some seventy years and more, Ezra’s people had been held hostage in foreign lands, dreaming all the their homes, back in their ancestral Israel. After seventy years and more of working and living in a foreign land, you can imagine the yearning they had in their hearts. You can imagine that if someone had said to them, “There is no place like home,” how much they would have given to be able to go back. And yet, for seventy years and more, there was no returning, no going home, only dim hope, and no future for Ezra’s people. And with each passing year, their hopes grew dimmer and dimmer.
But then, into that darkness, there came an amazing opportunity. In the beginning of this book of Ezra, we can read that one day in the first year of the reign of a new king, King Cyrus of Persia, God stirred up the heart of King Cyrus, and he issued an edict, an executive order, declaring that those people from Israel should be allowed to return again to their ancestral land.
