Transcript
(~50 min 42 sec | Book of Mormon class, opening lesson on 1 Nephi 1)

Nancy (teacher):
This is different, in a while. And I sat there with that light coming in and started to cry, so it’s not a good start for me. It was just so beautiful, and I could hear you talking. And so I wanted to say—and plus I see my children—and oh, anyway, it’s a great honor to be here, and I also thank you for being here.

We have two years on the Book of Mormon. My brother-in-law said, “What are you teaching?” And I said, “Book of Mormon.” Big pause. He said, “Well, that’s nothing to know anything about.” So we’ll try. And we have a couple of new teachers that are wonderful. Hello, Emily. Is it two? Yeah, I don’t know how to—if I knew how I would, or I could put it out. Then you can see my face.

It’s not boring. It’s deep. It’s wild and deep, what we will be studying. Psalm 42 says, “Deep calleth unto deep. In the roar of thy waterfalls all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.” Deep calleth unto deep. And Joseph Smith from Liberty Jail said, “Thy mind, O man, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens and search and contemplate the darkest abyss, and must be introduced into the society of the most ancient and greatest of beings.” Deep call upon the deep.

So we were—let me just pause and say that occasionally I stutter. Don’t be nervous. I was just listening to an actor, this very handsome man, and they were interviewing him on NPR and said, “Now I heard that you stutter.” And he said, “Yeah, not when I act, but when I get home and let it loose.” Love this guy. Anyway, I don’t really even think about it. Well, I hope you don’t. Okay.

We were on a late trip in San Diego this July, and we had bought tickets—a couple of us, a few of us—to the Chris Stapleton concert. But at the last minute the adults couldn’t go, or didn’t want to go, and so my husband John took all the teenagers to it. And they were on the grass, and every few inches there were beer venues, you know. And the day before, everyone had been—all 28 of us went to the San Diego Temple Open House.

So a couple of days after the concert and the Open House we were having a family gathering, and John, my husband, asked the 14-year-old Jackson what the difference was between the Open House and the Chris Stapleton concert. And he said, “Well, there was a lot more beer at the concert.” And you gotta think about what I just said. You gotta love 14-year-olds, right? I think he was joking, but with Jackson you can never tell.

Anyway, so my friends, let’s see this year if we can go deep into this beautiful, beautiful book. Leave the beer behind—which is, you know, I mean the world behind—and find openings into another world.

Thomas O’Dea, a Catholic sociologist, wrote many years ago that the Book of Mormon has not been universally considered by its critics as one of those books that must be read in order to have an opinion of it.

So, 1 Nephi 5:5 and 10, and we’ll start with the word. When Lehi gets the plates after his sons have brought them from Jerusalem at such cost, what does Lehi do? You don’t have to read it, but I can tell you. He takes them in his hands, and he holds them, and begins to search them and to read them. He probably had never held them before. He was not a Levite, he was not a priest. Didn’t have access. Only Laban had access to the scripture and maybe a few elders.

If anybody’s out there, you can—I mean, please come in. There’s a few up here, and we don’t care.

Anyway, and Lehi holding them is so overwhelmed that he begins to prophesy and worship. And I think he began to weep. I’m sure he did, holding those which he had never held himself, been able to read himself. And he says they will never be dimmed by time. So what book is he holding? What are those brass plates? See, I’ll allow you one. The Old Testament, or parts of it—the Torah, the prophets, up to Jeremiah. So right here, these books that we have are the Torah and the prophets and the writings. And of course Hebrew, you go backwards, right? But you can see the Hebrew and the translation over here. So that’s what he’s holding, right? In his hands. This is an older one that I got from one of my children, I think. It’s beautiful.

In Nehemiah 8:1–9, Ezra, priest and scribe, has come back from exile with a few of the Jews. This is fifth century. Nehemiah 8:1, the people have gathered at the Water Gate in Jerusalem, and Ezra brings the book of the law of Moses before the congregation, both of men and women and all that could hear with understanding, and he begins to read from the book and cause them to understand what he was reading. And when he opened it, all the people—I’m sorry, I cry every time I read this—all the people stood up, lifted their hands, and bowed their heads and began to weep. Why did they weep? Why did those people being carried along most? Because for the first time it was not reserved only for the priests. It was for them. It was for the people, God’s people, and they were included.

Anyway, go to 1 Nephi 1, and the story begins. So after his opening paragraph, which in the original Book of Mormon were one paragraph, Nephi begins with his father’s experience, Lehi’s experience, which he took from Lehi’s own record, the Book of Lehi, which was in a portion of the large plates.

Lehi’s out walking around Jerusalem, listening to the prophets. You’ve been there—it’s a very windy, narrow little place. I’m trying to imagine where the prophets were at places that, you know, intersect, or where are they that he’s listening to. And they’re all prophesying doom for Jerusalem, for Israel, and Lehi begins to pray. This is 1:6. And as he prayed, there came a pillar of fire and dwelt upon a rock, and there was probably someone in the fire—there usually is in scripture.

So he goes home, verses 7 and 8, and lies on his bed, and is carried away in a vision, and he sees the heavens open. Now John the Revelator in Revelation 4:1 says, “I looked and behold a door was opened in heaven.” So it’s the same experience. And I think it slid open like a sliding glass door, because I’ve seen it once. Where do you think heaven is? You can just think. Brigham Young said heaven is all around us. It’s on the earth. It’s around the earth. That’s in Discourses of Brigham Young.

Anyway, verse 8 of chapter 1, Nephi writes that Lehi thinks he sees God on his throne with angels all around, as also John saw. And then Lehi [sees] one descending out of the midst of heaven, and he beheld that his luster was above that of the sun at noonday. So here we have the first mention of Jesus Christ in verse 8 already. And after this, he’s everywhere in the book, as you know.

Verse 10, there are twelve others with him who go out on the face of the earth. And verses 11 and 12, and then the one stands in front of Lehi and gave unto him a book and tells him that he should read the book. And as he reads, he was filled with the Spirit of the Lord. If we knew that every time we read God’s word we would be filled with the Spirit, would we read it more?

So Lehi, verse 13, reads a prophecy that Jerusalem will be destroyed and the people in it killed and taken captive by Babylon. So here’s a question. Why is it that Lehi is to read the prophecy instead of being told the prophecy? Why is he handed a book to read? It’s almost as strange as in Revelation when John is told by an angel to eat the book, and it would be sweet as honey. The book would have been a scroll like this, right? So John does, and he eats the book, and also Ezekiel is told the exact same thing: eat the book. And Ezekiel eats it, and then… say it’s bitter in their stomach. They’d probably about throw up. Sorry. Anyway, it’s very interesting, I think. Okay?

So this summer I read a book that I haven’t read since I was probably in high school. This is Jane Eyre. I mean, and then I looked, I started to read about it. It’s one of the great novels in the world that have ever been written. And it was so wonderful. I was walking around the corner of my house, and I had not really started this, and I thought, I wish I could just eat that book. It’s a very human thing. I thought it was. And then afterwards I remembered, it’s very human to read and to read. But isn’t that a great mystery that Lehi is told to read? To read means to riddle. So when you read, you unriddle, and thus you are starting to think about in scripture about the mind of God that’s beginning to come into you and you’re unriddling it. And so that is what’s happening here. We are seeing, we are unriddling God through Nephi’s mind, and he’s all through Nephi’s mind.

So here’s a thought that just when Lehi and his family are about to leave Jerusalem, and the brass plates will become crucial, Lehi is given a book to read. We have this book to unriddle, begun by Nephi, carried through and abridged by Mormon, finished by Moroni—the three great narrators of the book. And there are main, minor ones, but those are the three great narrators: Mormon, Moroni, and Nephi.

This is probably a good place to say that when we are reading a book, we should be aware that there is almost always two minds present, and occasionally three minds are present, when you have a prophet who quotes prophets who quotes other prophets. So you are reading through three minds working at the same time, and they’re all—there are sources that are being used, like letters and sermons and lists and poetry and geography and genealogy. It’s a complex book when you really read it as a book instead of just looking up topics, which is what I hope we can do this year.

So let’s go back to what was happening in Lehi’s world. Verse 4, chapter 1 is when it really begins. “In the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah, there came many prophets prophesying unto the people that they must repent, or the great city of Jerusalem must be destroyed.” So Zedekiah is in his first year as king. The Babylonians have put him on the throne, almost like a puppet king. He was the brother of the previous king, Jehoiakim, whom they killed or captured, and they changed Zedekiah’s name from Mattaniah to Zedekiah. He is twenty-one years old. Later, when he rebels against the Babylonians, they kill his sons in front of him and then put out his eyes. One son, Mulek, escapes, as we know from Helaman, and twenty-one, but that comes later. And if you want to read about this, it’s all in 2 Kings chapters 24 and 25. It’s really an amazing read to read this background in the Book of Kings.

So who are the many prophets who are prophesying unto the people that Nephi tells us about? Who are these prophets to be knowing? Well, I think Jeremiah was one of them, although he was in prison at the time.

Class member: Jeremiah, he’s the big one.

Nancy: Lehi mentions him in 1 Nephi 7. He said they have rejected the prophets, and Jeremiah had been cast into prison. Also at that time were the prophets Obadiah, and maybe Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, although the times are kind of fluid, so we’re not sure. But they would have been contemporary with Lehi, and they’re all in the Old Testament.

So in Jeremiah we read, “I have sent also unto you all my servants the prophets.” So does that include Lehi? Well, I think so, because he was there.

So here’s a little bit about Jeremiah. God tells Jeremiah to write the words he has given him. He’s thrown into prison, and Zedekiah burns his scrolls, because he doesn’t like what’s on them, because they’re negative about himself. So when Jeremiah gets out of prison, he goes straight to Baruch, his scribe, and they write it all down again.

Personally, I think we should read—this is me—but Jeremiah along with the Book of Mormon. This great prophet who taught us how to pray, how to worship, how to understand God. He’s a great prophet.

One more thing that’s really important, I think, to understand is that something else was happening in the world when Lehi and his family leave in chapter 2, about 600 BC. So what is happening in the history of the world? Well, the founders of most of the world’s great religions all appear. It’s quite an amazing thing. Contemporary with Lehi: Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra, Pythagoras—they all appear in these few years. So what is happening? Why would this happen? Perhaps God is moving, preparing the world for something big to happen. He’s moving. It’s a really interesting topic.

1 Nephi 1:19–20. This is about Lehi being out, the prophets of Ammon. “The Jews did mock him because of the things which he testified of them, for he truly testified of their wickedness and their abominations, and he testified that the things which he saw and heard, and also the things which he read in the book, manifested plainly of the coming of a Messiah, and also the redemption of the world. And when the Jews heard these things they were angry with him, even as with the prophets of old, whom they had cast out and stoned and slain; and they sought his life, that they might take it away.”

So why did they want to kill Lehi? Why kill him? They mock him when he speaks of their wickedness—“the Jews did mock him because of the things which he testified of them”—but they tried to kill him when he speaks of the coming of a Messiah. Why does that specific prophecy enrage them?

I was listening to a little podcast on Instagram from Moon’s Rare Books, and the man that owns Moon’s was speaking of this rare edition of the Book of Mormon that he had to sell, and the comments below, you know, as you can read them, were pretty interesting. They range from “burn it, just burn it,” “use it as toilet paper,” to others saying it changed their lives and it was the most important book in the world. Why burn it? Who cares if we have it? Why the anger? Because of the truth of God, as Nephi says, and also in 2 Nephi 28:20: “For behold, at that day shall the devil rage in the hearts of the children of men, and stir them up to anger against that which is good.”

This is Enos 1:14 about the Lamanites: “And they swore in their wrath that, if it were possible, they would destroy our records and us, and also all the traditions of our fathers.” This is a big topic, I think: why people want to destroy what’s good, or as Nephi puts it, those who have dwindled in unbelief seek to destroy the things of God. And it will rear its ugly head over and over again, as it does even today.

So let me ask you this: what is the purpose of the Book of Mormon? And this one you can—

Class member: To bring people to Christ. To bring people to Christ. To testify of Christ.

Nancy: To testify of Christ. Okay. Good answer. I mean, they’re all—I’m sure the answer’s in your head—good answers. But I want you to think what you think it is. I mean, I’ve written a few.

Class member: I also think purpose is to bring people to the Book of Mormon.

Nancy: To bring people to the Book of Mormon. And it opened their eyes, opened others’ eyes to come and look. That’s a good answer.

We can read Nephi’s purpose. I’ll just read it to you. 1 Nephi 6:4: “to persuade men to come unto the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and be saved.” And then he writes in 2 Nephi 4 to write the things of my soul and many of the scriptures that were on the brass plates.

Thought over the years is to bring us home to the Father through the Son, which is why we even need the magnificent Son. But is it only to return? Is it only to teach us of Christ? Because once we get home, then what?

Class member: You may speak. It’s part of the gathering and being descendants and promise, the promises of our fathers of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to make covenants and bring us home. Okay, yes. It should be a warning and a warning to us today of what we may be facing.

Class member: Yeah, and to teach the doctrine, and so to invite us to act, so we are not only learning the Christ, but we’re becoming like him.

Nancy: Okay, on that one I’m going to stop and tell you what I think. Because when we get home, when we get home, or wherever it is, then what happens? We are in rest, and we help, you know, bring others to him. What happens to you as a soul?

I think we get a hint from Moroni and his father Mormon. So this is Moroni 10. And again, “if ye by the grace of God are perfect in Christ, and deny not his power, then are ye sanctified in Christ by the grace of God, that ye become holy, without spot.”

If Moroni really did write the title page of the Book of Mormon, which is what we think happened was him, you know, this one—lost my place—then he also says the same thing, that we need to become holy without spot. So is that in effect saying that if you are holy, you are without spot?

The English word holy comes from the Old English halig, which means divine, sacred, or whole. So halig goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root, which is like six thousand years ago: kailo, which means whole, uninjured, or safe. So etymologically, holy or whole and healthy are deeply connected. So to be holy was to be structurally and spiritually whole and sound, or without spot. To be holy is to be whole, to be whole.

So why does this matter? Because the Book of Mormon shows us how we can be made whole, is what I think. Not only to return safely back to the Father through the Son, but as she said, it is a guide to become like the Father and like the Son, that we may one day in eternity be gods. That’s what I mean—it’s work. In the end, if you go down, it’s deep enough, because what else is there he has? And the Book of Moses is right: we are his work and his glory.

So I had a plumber in the house. That is why I brought my plunger, and I washed it, and all of a sudden he was very clean. There were little dubious looks, and I walked into that thing. So the plumber was up in our upstairs bathroom, and I was downstairs, and I had put on the last four last songs of Strauss, which are glorious and stunning and just unbelievably beautiful. Had them on with Jessye Norman. Anyway, and I wish I could play them, but they’re long. But anyway, so I walked by the bottom of the stairs and I happened to look up and the plumber is sitting on the top stairs with his head in his hands listening at this—not waiting for me or anything. He’s listening. I had him on loud.

The human soul is capable of such moments of eternity opening up, and God is there and is waiting for you to have those moments.

So as we begin to read the Book of Mormon again, it’s good to remember a few things. So this is a little background. Nephi is writing his book looking back. I brought my clock. She’s broken, by the way. He’s not recording events as they happen. He’s been keeping records on his large plates, but then about forty years after they leave Jerusalem, he’s told by God to make other plates, as you know, for the profit of his people. These are the small plates, which is what we are reading now, as you know, this writing, and they are usually called these plates so you can differentiate. So they’re a second version of his memoir, based in part on the writings of Lehi, and also about the spiritual matters of what was happening at the time.

So as a reader, you know why there are two records, right? Because Martin Harris lost the hundred and sixteen pages. And so Joseph was able to go back and translate from Lehi, or Nephi’s other memoir. So Nephi, when he’s writing this, is about sixty years old, and he’s looking back. He’s a middle-aged man, recounting incidents from his teens and early twenties.

[Civilization] lasted one thousand years, and then they destroy themselves. Then there’s the Jaredites that are in Ether, as you know, who arrive pre-Lehites, and they also conclude with mass self-destruction. Then there’s the Mulekites, a colony from Jerusalem with strong leadership. They had a Davidic king that lasted no more than a few generations before they also cease their existence as they combine with the Lehites. This is all in Omni.

So really, we have this—what one man said was an unrelenting record of human folly and ruin. Sorry to disappoint you. And there are many things that just break your heart in the book. One is that Lehi saw in vision not only that all of his posterity would be destroyed, but that it would be his brother’s descendants who would destroy his own posterity, and that his brother’s line would be preserved, not his. Except for a few, because as we know, Mormon is a descendant of Nephi. So there had to be a few extending. And Nephi took this information hard, and indeed this is hard again, reading from—never really recovered from the shock and the disappointment of that vision, his posterity. He would be wiped out. This information was given him even before he married and had children.

Here are his words. This is 1 Nephi 15? “A speedy destruction cometh unto my people; for I have seen it, and it grieveth my soul.” This is 1 Nephi 15:5: “I was overcome because of my afflictions, for I considered that mine afflictions were great above all, because of the destruction of my people, for I had beheld them.”

There’s Nephi, Arnold Friberg, right? It’s nice to have, you know, a little bit of an image. These are really all we used to have him in a bag for our children, and we would have, you know, families. Anyway, so I just brought a couple.

I read the small, sad comment about Nephi that throughout his writing there is an undercurrent of grief and worry. So we’ll talk about him a lot more in the next few weeks, but there is more bothering him than the loss of his posterity, if I could go on. If you think a minute about his situation, he was educated in Jerusalem and literate at a time when that kind of literacy was very rare. He says, “I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father,” 1 Nephi 1:1. He seems to have loved books and records, and then in his teenage years he’s suddenly taken from the culturally rich and intellectually stimulating environment of Jerusalem to live in a place far away, with only his relatives for company and one text to read the rest of his life. Imagine how he felt as well.

But is sadness and grief all we get from this record? Let me read you this wonderful quote from Daniel Walker Howe, who is a historian and professor at Oxford who died last year. It’s from his book What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, which won the Pulitzer. This is the quote:

“True or not”—he’s not a member—“the Book of Mormon is a powerful epic written on a grand scale with a host of characters, a narrative of human struggle and conflict, of divine intervention, heroic good and atrocious evil, of prophecy, morality, and law. Its narrative is complex. It tells a tragic story of a people who, though possessed of the true faith, fail in the end, yet it does not convey a message of despair. God’s will cannot ultimately be frustrated. The Book of Mormon should rank among the great achievements of American literature, but it has never been accorded this status it deserves.”

So somehow Nephi manages to let us know that he is also full of gratitude for being “highly favored of the Lord in all my days.” That’s 1:1. Full of joy, hearty, tender mercies of the Lord and the power of their deliverance. So that is 1:20.

But go back to 1:1, this opening verse. “I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents, therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father; and having seen many afflictions in the course of my days, nevertheless, having been highly favored of the Lord in all my days; yea, having had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God, therefore I make a record of my proceedings.” There’s a lot to unpack in that one verse. Goodly parents, what exactly was he taught, afflictions and joy together, and how was he highly favored, and what exactly are the mysteries of God? We could, you know, talk about that all the time.

Well, he has told us two mysteries to begin in this first verse, and they are that you can be afflicted, have affliction and yet highly favored, and you can have affliction and yet great knowledge of the goodness of God. I think these are the mysteries of human experience. How does this happen?

Here’s Jeremiah again. He’s in the stocks, he’s being mocked and tormented, you know, the stocks for them, and is very angry to God. He says—this is Jeremiah 20, one of the great verses of scripture—“I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name.” He’s so mad. “But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.” And then his friends denounce him, and he says, “But the Lord is with me as a mighty terrible one: therefore my persecutors shall stumble, and they shall not prevail.” You’re not going to forget. You know, he’s so passionate. This is a big topic.

Even Alma says, and his missionaries, as Alma 31, and the Lord provided for them that they should suffer no manner of afflictions, save it were swallowed up in the joy of Christ. Perhaps it’s the biggest topic of our lives. We talk about affliction a lot, don’t we? And here Nephi introduces it in his very first words.

I’ll tell you what one Book of Mormon prophet had to say about it. This is Jacob, who had such a painful childhood because of his two oldest brothers. We get that in 2 Nephi 2:1. Jacob who said that we did mourn out our days. That is the saddest line in the Book of Mormon.

So this is Jacob talking to the pure in heart who have been abused and traumatized, these women. He says, behold, this is Jacob 3:1–2: “Behold, I, Jacob, would speak unto you that are pure in heart. Look unto God with firmness of mind, and pray unto him with exceeding faith, and he will console you in your afflictions, and he will plead your cause, and send down justice upon those who seek your destruction. O all ye that are pure in heart, lift up your heads and receive the pleasing word of God, and feast upon his love; for ye may, if your minds are firm, forever.”

Now that’s an interesting thing to say to a person whose heart is breaking with sadness. Have a— I didn’t say it. Don’t look at me.

So what are the mysteries of God that you find is referring to? There are a lot of opinions out there from Nebula to, you know, to authorities. Here’s my one take on it. Perhaps the mysteries of God are how God moves upon the earth and through the lives of his children. How he moves to deliver us. Power.

So I’ll end with the word that Nephi ends with in chapter 1: deliverance. 1:20. The very last word.

In the old days in China, it was desirable for women to have tiny feet. You’ve heard this. So when a child was very small, her feet were bound in tight cloths so they could not grow. And as the child grew, her feet remained the same size. You can imagine the pain as the bone had nowhere to go and became deformed. So it is. Little shoes, lotus, that I brought are four inches long, and they bound their feet to be three to four inches.

So my mother was raised in Hawaii. She was born in 1925, and in those days there were still many Chinese women hobbling down the streets, swaying back and forth on their little tiny feet. So here’s my point. We’re all bound in some way. Childhood sins, afflictions, disabilities. We all need deliverance.

But some lucky people have learned to see the world for what it is, not only a stop on the way to somewhere else, but a place to become whole. These people—this is Rachel Naomi Remen, as you’ve heard of her Kitchen Table Wisdom, who died about three weeks ago. These people tend to embrace life, to have a willingness to show up for whatever life has to offer, and meet with it rather than wishing to edit or change the inevitable. When people have such an attitude, they are intensely alive and intensely present. Life has not made them resentful, victimized, blessed or bitter. Instead, they experience joy. They take, I think, the power of God into their hands. They hold it.

“I, Nephi, will show unto you that the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of deliverance.”

And I’ll end with this little quote from Annie Dillard: “Give me time enough in this place, and I will surely make a beautiful thing.” In the name of Jesus Christ.

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