July 12, 2026
Rebuilding for the Common Good
Nehemiah 2:11-20; 4:15-18
This is the fifth and last week in our series “One Nation, Under God, Revisited,” looking at what the Reformed tradition has to teach us about being good citizens of two realms at once, the United States and, much more importantly, the kingdom of God. We’ve talked about the image of God as the foundation, and how recognition of God’s image in one another moves us to seek compromise for the good of all, to value each person’s contribution, and to work for justice.
Today we’re looking at something that at first may seem like a real yawn: institutions. Even the very idea of institutions seems boring, and old-fashioned, and counter-cultural, but the importance of institutions in our life together is a key contribution from our Reformed heritage.
It’s no accident that we Presbyterians are known for rules, precedents, committees, and doing things decently and in order. Our faith tradition teaches that good order and structure is a gift from God for our common life, to enable the best of what we can do with one another and guard against the worst of what we can do to one another.
Unfortunately, support for institutions is at an historic low ebb. A recent Gallup survey found that confidence in the church, in organized religion itself, has fallen to thirty-one percent, a historic low. That’s one number among many.
Trust in Congress, in colleges and universities, in local school boards and town councils, even in the hospital down the road, has thinned in similar ways. Institutions of education, healthcare, government, and religion are load-bearing walls in our common life. What do we do when those walls weaken?
On a January night, in a small township in Michigan, a room filled up in a building that looked a lot like a church, or maybe a school. People came in from the cold in Carhartts and boots, coats zipped against the wind outside. It was a township council meeting, and people had come to make their voices heard.
A podcast series from The Economist magazine, marking America’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday, has been retracing the journey of a young Frenchman who visited this country two centuries ago. His name was Alexis de Tocqueville, an aristocrat who wanted to study America so he could bring lessons home to his own country. He wrote a book called Democracy in America, one of the defining studies of what makes the American experiment work.
The host of the podcast followed Tocqueville’s route almost exactly, and in Michigan, he sat in on a town hall meeting where the town was deciding what to do about a data center a hyperscaler wanted to build in its backyard. The people didn’t want it. It was bad for the air, for the water, and added only noise to the community.
They made their voices heard, one after another, the way townships have for two hundred and fifty years. In the end, the town attorney informed them that a court ruling meant they couldn’t stop it. The company had the law on its side, if not the town’s blessing.
Tocqueville believed the township, not the Congress, not the presidency, but this small, unglamorous, folding-chair kind of government, was the heartbeat of American democracy. It was the institution that let neighbors work out their differences and build something like a common life. And he worried about whether, over time, an institution like that would be able to survive, or whether it would be at mercy of the rich and powerful.
Scripture, it turns out, has quite a lot to say about what to do when the walls we depend on start to crumble.
A hundred years after the first exiles returned home from Babylon, the walls of Jerusalem still lay in ruins. The walls were more than broken stone. They were a broken symbol. They were what made Jerusalem a city instead of a memory. They gave the people inside a shelter, an identity, a shape, a way of telling insiders from outsiders and safety from exposure. Without them, Jerusalem was an old name attached to a pile of rubble.
Nehemiah heard about the ruins from far away, in Susa, where he had built a good and comfortable life serving as cupbearer in the king’s court. It was a position of trust and access, the kind of job a person doesn’t walk away from lightly, and Nehemiah was clearly embedded in that new life. He could have stayed there, sent a donation, said a prayer, and gone on with his comfortable life. Instead, he asked the king for permission to go and see for himself.
When he arrived, he did not call a meeting. He waited three days. Then, at night, he rode out with a few men and told no one what he was doing. He inspected the walls himself. He examined the ruined gates. He took in the damage with his own eyes. As a leader, Nehemiah was forming a vision of what could be done, but he was testing that vision in silence and in prayer before it was spoken aloud.
Only after some quiet reconnaissance did he speak, and it’s important to notice what he said. He did not say, “You should rebuild this.” He said, “Let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, so that we may no longer suffer disgrace.” Let us. Nehemiah doesn’t hand down an order. He extends an invitation, and his own hands are already committed to the labor. The people answered, “Let us start rebuilding,” and the text says they strengthened their hands for the work.
It didn’t take long for the critics to arrive. Every project, large or small, draws them. Two men named Sanballat and Tobiah mocked the whole plan before a single stone had moved. They accused the workers of rebellion before they had laid a single course. But Nehemiah didn’t let their scorn slow the work. He was convinced God was in this plan to rebuild, and he trusted that if God was in it, God would bless it, and the wall, and the city it protected, would rise again.
I have always been, I guess, something of an institutional person. As a child, government studies and history classes were my favorite subjects. I have always marveled at civic buildings and communal structures, town halls and churches and skyscrapers. I have always been deeply interested in the institutions that support and enable our common life to flourish.
I’ve never been comfortable with protest, and I’ve never been comfortable with cynicism either. I’m sentimental about civic things. This summer, watching the US team play soccer, hearing a stadium full of people sing our national anthem together, I choked up every time. That’s how it should always be, I think. Not a soloist. The people singing.
When I consider our church, I think there’s a decent chance quite a few of you recognize that same instinct. I’ve said often that if First Presbyterian Asheville were a family, it would be the firstborn child. Responsible. Loyal. Inclined to take the long view. Inclined to show up even when showing up is inconvenient, even when the meeting runs long and the air conditioning is broken and little gets decided.
The idea that people can build something together and it will hold, that a town council or a school board or a denomination, for all its flaws, is still a place where ordinary people can accomplish something no single person could manage alone, where the young can grow and the weak can find shelter and the hurting can find help, that idea is noble and good, and the best of what institutions can do.
Somewhere between Nehemiah on the wall at night, alone with his own convictions, and Nehemiah in the town square the next morning, saying “let us,” is where most of us actually live. Convinced something needs doing. Uncertain whether anyone else will show up to help do it. The gap between private conviction and public commitment is where faith has to do its work.
By the fourth chapter of Nehemiah, the mockery had turned into an actual plot to attack the city. Sanballat and his allies were done ridiculing; now they were conspiring. And listen to how the people responded. They did not abandon the work to go fight. They did not set down their weapons to keep building. They did both at once:
“From that day on, half of my servants worked on construction, and half held the spears, shields, bows, and body armor… Those who carried burdens worked with one hand and held a weapon with the other; and each of the builders had a sword strapped at his side while he built. The man with the trumpet stayed beside me.”
The workers weren’t armed because Nehemiah doubted their good intentions. They were building under a real, active threat, from people who had already conspired to attack the city, and they refused to let that threat stop the work. Building and guarding happened together, the same hands doing both, because the moment called for both. That is the whole shape of institutional life: building and guarding are not two separate jobs, they are one. We build institutions for the common good, and at the same time protect them from threats.
James Madison understood something similar, in a different century and a different key. He was trained under Presbyterian instruction at what became Princeton, in a doctrine that took human nature seriously, the same tradition that shaped this pulpit, and he wrote these words in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” That is a very old, very Reformed insight about a humanity that is both made in God’s image and fallen, both capable of great good and prone to real sin. Madison borrowed the insight, and the founders built a government on it.
John Calvin made nearly the same argument two centuries earlier, and made it as a matter of theology rather than politics. Civil government, he wrote in his Institutes, holds a place among human beings “no less than that of bread, water, sun, and air” (4.20.3), a gift ranked alongside the most basic goods of creation rather than a grudging concession to human sin. None of us is right all the time. All of us need something sturdier than our own good intentions to lean on.
Loyalty to institutions is a good habit, but it can also become blindness. Institutions do not always deserve the loyalty we give them. Some leaders don’t deserve the trust placed in them. Some processes grow too slow, or too cumbersome, to serve the people they exist for. Some institutions turn corrupt or abusive, and loyalty to them stops being a virtue. Some of you carry real wounds from institutions, including perhaps this one: a decision made without you, a leader who didn’t deserve the trust you gave.
Naming that here isn’t a contradiction of this sermon. It’s honest. Cynicism doesn’t arrive out of nowhere. Often, our common institutions have earned the distrust heaped on them.
But detachment has never protected anyone from the forces it claims to see so clearly. It only guarantees that when the decisions get made, in the school board meeting or the county chamber or the session room down the hall, the people who cared enough to stay in the room are the ones who shape them.
It is easy to mock an institution. It costs the mocker nothing. It takes no courage to stand outside the wall and point at the cracked mortar. It takes something else entirely to climb up with a trowel in hand, knowing the mortar might crack again, and start laying stone anyway.
The columnist David Brooks has written about the “web of institutions,” families, schools, congregations, civic groups, that used to shape Americans into people capable of showing up for one another. That web frayed for reasons well beyond any one congregation’s control. But it does not have to stay frayed. It gets rewoven the way the wall got rebuilt: one length at a time, by people who return to their own portion of work – day after day.
We are citizens of two commonwealths at once, the kingdom of God and the republic we share with our neighbors. Scripture never asks us to choose between loyalty to one and faithfulness within the other. Our ultimate loyalty belongs to the kingdom of God; our ordinary faithfulness is worked out here, in the institutions of this world, as a way of bearing witness to God’s kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven. That witness to God’s kingdom on earth rarely looks dramatic. It looks like a trowel in one hand, building something up stone by stone, ordinary work offered up as an act of faith.
So, in the words of Nehemiah: let us rebuild. Sign up for a newsletter. Show up at the meeting. Raise your voice and your hand. Ask a leader how you can help.
Show up and speak up for one another. Guard what is worth guarding, and build what is worth building.
Let us give thanks for the common gifts of God — air and water and bread, and the institutions that nourish our common life.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina