The Weight We Won't Put Down
When I was in high school, my favorite book to teach was Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. I say "teach" because I was an English teacher before I was a pastor, and that novel did something to my students that I couldn't manufacture with any lesson plan. It cracked them open. O'Brien, a Vietnam veteran, opens the book with a catalog of what soldiers carried into war. It starts practically enough — rations, weapons, photographs, letters from home. But then the list becomes something else entirely. It becomes a meditation on the invisible weight that all human beings share.
O'Brien writes that the soldiers carried grief, terror, love, longing. The intangibles, he calls them. But these intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity. They had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained — the instinct to run or hide or freeze. And in many respects, that was the heaviest burden of all, the one that could not be put down.
Then O'Brien writes the sentence that I think ties his soldiers irrevocably to the rest of us: by and large, they carried these things inside, maintained a mass of composure.
I think that sentence describes most of us, most of the time.
We carry joys and losses, disappointments, questions, shame about money, ambivalence about power. We carry unspoken hopes and quietly held wounds. And then we walk through doors — of offices, of auditoriums, of living rooms — and we put on our composure, because that is what we have been taught is acceptable. Being honest that the things we carry have weight, that our souls are not immune to mass and volume and gravity — that honesty is one of the most essential elements of remaining human in a world that constantly edges us toward dehumanization.
So. That's where we're starting.
Not Just Survival. Activation.
We spent the beginning of this year in the difficult territory of exile. If you missed that series, I'll just say: it was a lot, in the best way. We sat in the book of Jeremiah for weeks — that raw, devastating witness to disaster and lament — and we asked together what it means to move from hearts of stone to hearts of flesh. We learned slowly, imperfectly, how to survive our Saturdays. Those long in-between days when the stone is still sealed and the mourning hasn't come yet.
But now we come to a new question. Not just survival, but stewardship. Not just endurance, but activation. We have named our wounds. Now we ask: what do we do with our hands?
I want to say one thing about a word you'll hear often in this season, because it carries its own complicated weight: stewardship. For many of us, that word has been weaponized. It's been used to extract from people who already have too little, to bolster ego-driven church projects — a private jet here, a beachfront vacation home there. I'm not naming names, but some of y'all know exactly what I'm talking about. The word has been connected, for a lot of us, with pure shenanigans.
But I've come to find the word genuinely gorgeous. Literally, to be a steward means to be a keeper of the house. To be a steward is to already assume that everything in your hands is gift and grace — that the house came before you, that you did not earn it, and that you are tending it for someone else. For those of us who follow Jesus, the world is the house. And we are tending it for a God who longs to draw us into shalom — into community and relationship and flourishing.
That's the frame. Now let me take you to Nehemiah.
The First Move Isn't a Plan
"You cannot repair what you will not grieve. You cannot rebuild what you are unable to admit has been shattered."
The book of Nehemiah was written in the aftermath of exile. By this point in Israel's history, the Babylonian empire had done its worst. Jerusalem was in rubble. The people had been scattered, uprooted — everything that constituted their identity had been destroyed. And then, in what must have felt like an almost impossible turn of history, the Persian empire rises, Babylon falls, and the policies of displacement are reversed. People are allowed to return home.
We meet Nehemiah not in Jerusalem, but in Susa — the Persian winter capital — where he serves as cupbearer to the king. This is a position of intimacy and real power. His job is to choose the king's wine, taste it before the king drinks, and — I love this part — if he doesn't die when he does that, he gets to enjoy a life of relative privilege and comfort. He has proximity to power. He has leverage.
But something interrupts his comfortable life. His brother Hanani returns from Judah with several other men, and they bring news: The remnant there in the province who escaped captivity are in great trouble and shame. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down and its gates have been destroyed by fire. (Nehemiah 1:3)
When Nehemiah hears this, he doesn't immediately convene a task force. He doesn't post a thread. He doesn't pivot to solutions.
He sits down. He weeps. He mourns for days.
The pastor and community organizer Robert Linthicum describes what Nehemiah must have understood in that moment: that the vulnerability the Israelites felt, which they had attributed to their broken-down walls, was actually a manifestation of a deeper problem. A profound spiritual problem. The essential issue was not broken walls. It was broken corporate life. The people no longer knew what it meant to be themselves. They had lost their cultural and spiritual identity — and until they reclaimed it, they could never become what they were created to be: builders of shalom community.
We live in a world that is allergic to grief. We want the bounce-back. We want stoic competence in a crisis. We want to already know what to do. But Nehemiah weeps — and that weeping is not a display of weakness. It is an act of profound wisdom. Because you cannot repair what you will not grieve. You cannot rebuild what you are unable to admit has been shattered.
The first move, it turns out, is not a plan. It's a breakdown.
We, Not You. Us, Not Them.
After Nehemiah has wept and prayed, he goes to inspect the walls. He goes at night, quietly, not wanting anyone to know what he's doing. He confirms what his brother said is true. And then he leverages his power — he goes to the king, gets permission and resources, and returns to gather the people.
What he says to them matters: "You see the trouble we are in, how Jerusalem lies in ruins with its gates burned. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, so that we may no longer suffer disgrace." (Nehemiah 2:17)
Notice the pronouns. Not you. Not them. We. Us.
The people respond: "Let us start building." And the text says they strengthened their hands for the common good.
I want to be clear about something here. Rebuilding cannot be only individual. In fact, if our reconstruction is not communal, it can easily become something much smaller and more self-serving — a slightly refreshed version of things as they have always been. It's all too easy to build our own private kingdom, just with new labels. Neoliberalism has a very effective trick: it shrinks our imagination of the common good and makes it into something purely personal. It tells us that what we do with our time, our money, our gifts — that's our business, full stop.
But Nehemiah's story refuses that story.
"It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism." — Angela Davis
Angela Davis was asked once what has kept her going through decades of activism. Her answer was this: the development of new modes of community. Communities of resistance. Communities of struggle. She said this is an era that demands we think of ourselves in collective terms, not only individual ones.
The primary collectivity we have as followers of Jesus is the church. Not the podcast. Not the online community. Not the movement, as important as movements are. The church — particular people, gathering, carrying their particular things, week after week, building the section of wall nearest to where they live.
The Scandal of the Particular
There is a chapter in Nehemiah — chapter 3 — that most people skim right past. It reads like the credits at the end of a very long film: pages of names, families, sections, groups. Who built which part of the wall. Where they lived. What they were skilled at.
But this chapter is doing something theologically rich. It is telling us that the common good is only found in the particular. There is no generic wall being built by faceless volunteers. These are specific people with specific names, histories, and skills. And here is the part I find fascinating: for the most part, each person rebuilds the section of wall closest to their own home — because they want to be protected. Basic self-interest and the common good are not opposites in this story. They are woven together into something larger.
Theologians call this the scandal of the particular. The idea that God does not work in generalities. God works in specifics — in a specific child born in a specific stable in a specific town. The universal is always arrived at through commitment to the particular, never instead of it.
I know my own struggles with commitment. A few years ago, I went to a conference with my co-pastor Anthony, and I was gifted a free session with an Enneagram therapist. I thought: free, light-hearted, fine. I came out of that session not knowing what had happened to me. The therapist told me — casual as the day is long — that my work as an Enneagram 4 was to spend no less than one dedicated hour a week doing all the mundane things my romantic heart so diligently avoids. Inbox zero. Actually booking the flight. Going over the household finances.
I went downstairs and found my wife and said: "The Lord is not with that woman."
But she was right, and I knew it. Because there is no pathway to the ultimate without commitment to the particular. We have to, like Alice, pick our own odd and imperfect rabbit to follow down the hole. That is the only way we get to Wonderland. Commitment is not the death of possibility. No matter what our culture tells us, it is the door to depth.
The Weight of Hope
"There is a weight of hope that is different from the weight of burden. It's still weight. But it moves you forward instead of pinning you down."
Here is where I want to close.
Nehemiah and the people rebuilt the wall in 52 days. The walls had lain in ruins — not for months, but for years. Possibly for a century and a half since the Babylonians invaded. And yet the people committed themselves to work.
147 years of ruin. 52 days of committed work.
O'Brien, at the end of his catalog of what the soldiers carried, writes something I don't want to skip over. He writes that when the men — exhausted from carrying everything — would finally let their minds relax at the end of the day, they gave themselves over to lightness. There is a weight of hope that is different from the weight of burden. It's still weight. It still presses on your chest. It still makes you feel vulnerable and exposed. But it moves you forward instead of pinning you down.
It's the weight of committing to something you actually believe in.
We are being asked to carry that weight in this season. To rebuild what has been broken. To steward what has been given. To commit to this house, this community, these particular people building their particular section of the wall.
I've been too shy, in my time as a pastor, in calling our community to commitment. I've been afraid to talk about money — afraid of the trauma it carries, afraid of the shadow of the prosperity gospel. But I've come to understand that not talking about money is not a neutral act. When progressive communities stay silent, we let the dominant story win unopposed — the story that says wealth is private, accumulation is virtue, and giving is optional. We can't be serious about racial justice or collective liberation while treating our finances as entirely personal. As Malcolm Foley writes in The Anti-Greed Gospel: an anti-racist community is an anti-greed community, one in which authority and resources are shared rather than hoarded.
So here is my invitation: find your section of the wall. Commit to it. Not because someone guilted you into it, but because you understand that the universal only comes through the particular — and because there is a weight of hope that, once you pick it up, you find you actually want to carry.
