Fairhaven UMC

So I know what you’re thinking with these readings. He’s going to talk about Haggai. We all know about Haggai. We’re constantly hearing about Haggai all the time.

Try something new. No. I don’t think you’ve ever heard of Haggai. I can’t remember ever preaching on Haggai.

One of the minorest of minor prophets. Good luck finding it in your Bible. It’s like three pages. And you probably have very little recollection of the context, of what he’s up to, the circumstances in which he’s writing.

So, that said, he’s one of the most urgent prophets in the Old Testament, and he’s one with a very simple message. And that is that God’s people are paralyzed in this moment by a mixture of comfort and inertia, And he as a prophet has been sent to confront their misplaced priorities and get them back to work, behaving as God’s people are supposed to behave. So here’s where we are for some background. Haggai is writing in the 500s BC.

He’s writing at the same time as the much more famous prophet Zechariah, whom we hear a lot from at Advent. And both of these prophets are speaking of a promised future. There’s going to be restored fortunes, blessing from God, a new chapter for the people. And you can see why this fits for Advent.

You know, we await the coming of Jesus and Haggai and Zechariah are promising these things. And these two prophets are mentioned together in the book of Ezra. And some biblical scholars argue that Ezra and Zechariah were actually intended to be taken together. These books were kind of a pack together.

The book of Haggai is extremely historically specific. It’s not general at all. It covers a precise four-month span in the year 520 BC. We know exactly when it was.

So four month period, 520 BC. And what’s happening now is the Persian Empire is allowing all the Jews who have been exiled by the Babylonian conquest to finally return to their homeland. They’ve been away for generations after the exile. And now the Persian king Darius is letting them come back.

And so Haggai’s mission as a prophet is to motivate and help his people rebuild the temple, and ideally the monarchy in Jerusalem after this time of exile. He’s supposed to be restoring a suitable, a dignified house for God among God’s chosen people. And the point here is to embark on a new start, to set things right, to start again. They’re going back, they’re starting fresh, and the goal this time is to avoid the sin, the injustice that caused God to allow the exile to begin with.

They’re going to do it right this time. And so as Haggai begins to write in this year, 520 BC, the Judean exiles who’ve returned to Jerusalem have already been there for 18 years. They’ve been home. Well, as soon as they got back, they laid a cornerstone for a new temple in Jerusalem.

And yet somehow they haven’t finished it yet. They haven’t even gotten close. They’re not even really trying. And so this, God says through Haggai, is just unacceptable.

You know, you came here, you’re back to normal, you laid a cornerstone for my temple and you walked away. Okay. Haggai’s first critique to the people is really personal. This comes in the beginning of chapter 1.

These people say, The time hasn’t come, the time to rebuild the Lord’s house. Is it time for you to dwell in your own paneled houses while this house lies in ruins? The prophet is calling out the people’s priorities in a way that I think is very convicting to how we all live. which of our convictions really come first? What drives us? What’s more important to us to get done before anything else? The people of Jerusalem prioritize their comfort, their private lives, their paneled houses over the presence of God. And I know that I do that.

I suspect that you do that. Our needs, our schedules, our preferences are just too pressing to put our full resources, our full attention on what God wants us to do. We have our excuses. There’s always something.

And Haggai is called by God to put this in the face of both the political and the religious leaders. They’ve chosen to pursue what they want more than what God wants. They’re fully aware that they have obligations to God, which is why as soon as they got there they plopped down that cornerstone to show they’re doing something. but they’ve proven since then with their actions, how they spend their time, how they spend their money, their individual and collective lives, that even though that cornerstone’s there, God’s not really their cornerstone.

So Haggai goes to the governor, Zerubbabel, and he goes to Joshua, who’s the chief priest, and he says to them in front of the rest of the whole nation, who among you is left who saw this house, the temple, in its former glory, And how does it look to you now? Doesn’t it appear as nothing to you? So Haggai calls them to look. They no longer just get to kind of like glance at their peripheral vision as they hurry by to do something else. Haggai says, look at this temple. Look what has happened to God’s house, and we’ve left it as a big, empty, silent construction site.

Look at this place. It’s an embarrassment. We have chosen to ignore this earthly symbol of the covenant God has made with us, of us being his people. He chose us.

He led us out of slavery, and we’re back here at home now. We’re in this land that God gave to us. We’re enjoying our lives and we’re forgetting about the God who brought us here in the first place. And Haggai doesn’t mention it directly, but I think his listeners would have heard that he was alluding to something earlier in Scripture.

Years before, King David was just pained. We hear this in 2 Samuel. That he was able to live in a luxurious palace built for the king while God was worshipped in a tent. The temple wasn’t built yet, they just had the tabernacle.

And David hated this. He lived in a palace and he wanted to build one for God too. But these people are doing the opposite of that. They live in their own fine homes, wood paneled with fine cedar, and they’re content with that while they’ve just left this half-hearted temple foundation completely ignored for 18 years, almost a generation.

And so in the first chapter, Haggai has already addressed the response that he knows they’re going to give him whenever he gives this command. Times are tough. We don’t have any extra resources to throw at the temple. The weather has been really bad for our crops.

There’s been drought. We’re not prosperous. We don’t have a whole lot of money floating around. And Haggai says, well, have you considered that that’s because of your priorities? Because you’re prioritizing yourself over God? Choose God first, and then despite your fear and anxiety, see what happens.

Get to work. He says, Be strong, Zerubbabel, the governor. Be strong, Joshua, the priest. Be strong, all you people of the land.

Okay? And then Haggai says something that I think is the crux of this whole passage and probably the whole book. This is the most important line. Work, for I am with you, says the Lord of heavenly forces. Work, for I am with you.

There’s a constant tension in Christian faith and in our lives to balance. Because on one hand, we know God’s in control of all things. God decides what’s going to happen, what’s not going to happen. God makes all things possible.

And on the other hand, God has made us responsible for a lot of stuff too. We are co-workers in the tasks that God has laid before us. And Haggai gives this really perfect encapsulation of what that looks like. Again, he says, Don’t fear.

That is, in other words, you can do it, as challenging as it may seem, because I am your God and because I am with you. You can because I am. God brought Israel out of Egypt for a reason. God saved us through Jesus for a reason.

God is doing his part and now it’s up to us to do our part. When we have to be clear of what that means, obviously it wouldn’t be really good news if the message that we’re getting from this is God telling us, Work harder, work harder, work harder, no matter what you do, it’s not enough. That’s not good news. But what is good news is that we have been given holy responsibility and God gives us the power to get it done.

And Haggai knows how hard this is for anybody to understand. And he knows their fears, he knows their insecurities, and so he asks, Who among you is left who saw this house in its former glory? The answer is nobody. How does it look to you now? Doesn’t it appear as nothing to you? He’s cutting right to this root of their insecurity because they have heard about Solomon’s temple. We’ve all heard about Solomon’s temple.

They’ve been told since they were born in exile in a foreign land that about the glory days of Israel when this temple was built with King David, King Solomon, their successors, this time far better than the one they live in now. They were the most powerful little nation in the area. And so now how could their efforts measure up? We don’t have enough, they think. It’s not the way now as it was back then.

Things will never be the same as they were. We can’t do things like that anymore. They were able to do that back then, but we just, we can’t do that now. Do you ever feel that way? I feel that way all the time in all kinds of spheres of life.

Think about this at the national level. There was once a time not so long ago, you know, a family could afford buying a nice house on a single income, send their kids to college debt-free, maybe buy a weekend cabin up on the Allegheny somewhere. Now, now, the average age at which someone buys their first house is well into their mid-40s. people don’t have kids until far later than they used to because the cost is so high, even with two incomes.

And as a nation, we used to build great things, right? We used to build post offices that were lined with fine art. We used to build bridges with pillars and sculptures, and now we build overpasses. And past generations of Americans have set really big goals, ending poverty, ending segregation. They’ve made it a good ways towards those goals.

And all of these kinds of things, these efforts, these reaches, they almost feel kind of foolish now that it’s not possible anymore. We can’t even keep our national parks open. We can’t keep air traffic control paid. We can’t keep food stamps issued.

We can’t do things like that anymore. And there’s a similar situation in the church. Okay. I’m so intimidated, you know, whenever I hear the memories in this place and in all the other churches, of dozens and dozens of kids in Sunday school, of all the extra chairs that we used to need on Christmas Eve.

We still got them just in case. Invite your friends. We used to have the kind of resources flowing that we could buy these windows, which were nothing small in the 1880s. Yeah.

And that’s not to mention, you know, the history of Methodism, this movement that began as a prayer group of Oxford students and reached millions of people before Wesley even died. And we inherit a faith that rippled out into the whole world from 12 guys And yet we’re expected to do something now, us, in these footsteps, here in the ruins of Solomon’s temple that we’ve heard about, that some of us might even remember a little bit. What does God possibly expect us to do? Something to understand here that Haggai is saying as well is we are correct in our fears that things will never be the same again. Things will be different.

They’re not going to rebuild Solomon’s temple. They’re rebuilding a different new temple, but not necessarily a worse one. Listen to what God says through Haggai in verses 7 through 9 of chapter 2. I will make all nations quake.

The wealth of all nations will come. I will fill this house with glory, says the Lord of heavenly forces. The silver and the gold belong to me, says the Lord of heavenly forces. And this house will be more glorious than its predecessor, says the Lord of heavenly forces.

I will provide prosperity in this place, says the Lord of heavenly forces. Amen. We can do the work of building the kingdom of God that we’re called to, not because we’re something special, neither we’re David or Solomon, but because God is with us. Work for the Lord is with you.

It’s really hard to swallow, I think, that we might accomplish something now in our lifetimes that is more glorious than its predecessor. We could do better things in the future than there were in the past. That doesn’t seem possible. But yes, that’s what Haggai says.

And whatever we need, gold and silver for Haggai’s people, that’ll flow. Just trust in God and get to work. And everything that’s mentioned in that passage we just heard, Okay? the people’s quaking, their wealth pouring in, prosperity upon the temple that’ll outweigh the original, God’s gonna do it. Just work, for I am with you.

You do your part, God does God’s. And it’s wrong for us to understand, as the people of Jerusalem did back then, that what we have, our faith, our people, our money, our skills, our strength, that those are dwindling resources because they’re not. God has given us, as individuals and as the body, sufficient resources to do what we got to get done, to build the bridge to the future that God has planned for us. So what does God want to do with you, do you think? What is it that you are called to that you’re tempted to say, oh, but I could never do that, at least not like whoever did? What is it that we are called to collectively that we’re called to? Where we’re tempted to say, we can’t.

We don’t have enough people. We don’t have enough money. The world isn’t interested like it was in the old days. Maybe, just like for Haggai’s people, there’s plenty of these things floating around.

If we decide to work as if God is with us. I think about here at Fairhaven, you heard this morning about the Thursday meal where we had 50 plus people here eating lunch, receiving blankets, happy to come in, talk to us, be in this place. You know, Living Stones is here once a month attracting 80 to 100 people to eat a meal in this place. We’ve had services before Living Stones where we’ve filled up the sanctuary for Easter.

We have people. There are people around. There is money around. There are resources around.

But we have to trust ourselves to work like the Lord is with you to love our neighbors and welcome them in. And so maybe today is the day that God is saying, as Haggai says to the people of Jerusalem, you don’t get to ignore this unfinished structure anymore. This project that belongs to you, but you’ve chosen to leave kind of incomplete. You don’t get to keep tending only to the things that lie in your comfort zone, but In the same way, what personal foundation have you laid in Jesus that now goes unfinished? Is it maybe your call to make a tangible commitment to working in missions, to working for justice, to starting a daily habit or devotion of prayer? Maybe is it to get in touch with somebody who’s wronged you, an enemy within the church or beyond it, and seek forgiveness, seek reconciliation.

What are these things in faith that you have started but not finished? Yeah. Maybe it’s just to start treating your days like a gift given to you by God to work on transforming yourself and the world. Haggai reminds us that you cannot just look at your resources, your schedule, or the failures of the past and decide that building this temple is just beyond what you’re able to do. God says, yes, you can.

Don’t let yourself believe that those who can do these things, those who have done these things are any different than you. I hear that all the time whenever we do any missions. Some people will say to those who are at more things, you know, I wish I had the time. I wish I had the energy you do.

You do. Just do. Instead, God says, work, for I am with you. We can stop standing in the ruins of what was, and because God empowers us, work with courage towards the glory God has in store for us.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.