Fairhaven UMC

So I’m curious if you think about it, how your heritage, both recent, more recent in your lifetime, and long past influences the way you live now. The way you understand yourself now. Our formative experiences maybe that we had as children and later and the stories that we’ve been told or uncovered about where we’ve come from, those things don’t just stay confined to the past. Those things shape our identities now.

Whether we try to lean into them or run far, far, far away, that’s still your heritage shaping who you are now. A few examples from my life. My grandmother was a university professor. Both of my grandparents were.

My grandmother taught English. She retired and then was dean of humanities at Slippery Rock. And so I have always just kind of been in an academic orbit. My bedroom, now my office, filled with books.

I now have books on top of the books that are going this way, and I need to do something about it. My grandmother had me immersed in the arts of all kinds from a very, very young age. To this day, nothing moves me quite the same as watching a Shakespeare play in a darkened theater. I love going to the theater.

It’s just a good environment for me. Last week, I went to a one-day theology conference at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and I just had that feeling of familiarity, like, Oh, this is a setting that I know. This is a place where I fit really well. I got my book of communion prayers signed by the author.

It was very exciting. The one that I use every Sunday whenever we have communion. Anyways, I’ve gotten older, another thing. As I’ve entered into ordained ministry, I’ve sought to look back into my family’s heritage.

You know, they’ve got some apps. The Mormons are very good at keeping family records, so they have a couple apps about that stuff. And I’ve looked back into my heritage to see if I have any pastoral forebears, because I don’t really come from a religious family on either side. There’s no pastors that I’m aware of personally.

But as it turns out, there’s basically no Methodists. I’m the first one. But as far as I’ve discovered, there are quite a few English dissenters, which is kind of cool. The people who were fighting against the Church of England at the time.

Lots of Quakers. Lots of Puritans. Swiss and French Calvinists. and at least one Kentucky Baptist.

And that Baptist preacher, his name was Francis Davis, ordained in 1812 in Shelby County, Kentucky, in the mountains. And I found a little kind of obituary for him, or sort of a snippet about his life. And it was written about him. He was an excellent fireside preacher, but his gift for preaching was so poor that he did not succeed well in the pulpit.

But he was highly esteemed in love and continued to exercise a good influence for the master Yeah. till he fell asleep in Jesus at a ripe old age. The man used the gifts that he had to exercise a good influence as he was remembered for God’s kingdom. God used what he had to offer, and that’s a good heritage to hold on to.

I do have one pastor in my family who’s a guy that tried his best. And so these narratives that we’re immersed in, the things that we hear of what come before us, the ones that we pass down to our descendants, the stories that you tell your kids, they shape the way that we understand ourselves and the way we relate with God. Okay. And the Bible can be understood more than anything else as a collection of stories that are handed down for exactly that purpose.

Same thing. And there are very few places in Scripture that express that more readily than here in Deuteronomy 26. In many cases in both the Old and New Testaments, including probably this chapter, These stories were told and retold orally long before they were written down. And sometimes you read some Old Testament stories and you can just imagine, oh, this is a story that people would have told around a fire in the evening.

And these stories were passed around communities from parents to children in times of exile and in times of comfort. The stories went with them. So, the Bible is a book that contains law and poetry and history, as well as quite a bit of clunky genealogy. But the reason that all that matters, the reason that it’s all there all together, the reason that we still hear it proclaimed every Sunday, the reason we study it throughout the weeks is because it contains the story of God and God’s people.

And that story is not just past, it’s not just past stories, but ongoing. We’re still in the story of God’s people, and so the purpose of those old stories is to shape the way we live in it now. Scripture situates us within God’s story of salvation rippling out through Israel and eventually through Jesus to all the world through the church. And we’re not supposed to ever be reading scripture as if it’s, you know, this is what some other people were doing long ago in the past in a land far, far away.

Amen. Why would you bother? We’re supposed to be reading it as if we are descendants and inheritors of the people described in it because we are. And worship, meanwhile, this. This is the arena, the theater, where we rehearse those stories collectively.

We are. And the liturgy that we pray, that we go through together, might well be described as reworking the words and the stories of Scripture to make them ours. So think about praying the psalm each Sunday, even though today’s wasn’t a psalm. But whenever we pray the psalm together, or whatever that prayer is from Scripture, the canticle, we take the prayer of whoever originally wrote it in the psalms, King David by tradition, and we’re not just reading that psalm, we’re not reciting it, we are praying it, we’re making it our prayer.

And I always worry that it’s easy to lose track of this whenever we pray anything responsibly on the screen, anything we read together, but we shouldn’t forget what we’re doing. We’re not just reciting the Psalms. We are praying the Psalms the same way David did when he wrote them. The Word of God for the people of God, that’s why we say that.

And consider also the communion liturgy. We start at the beginning of creation. We remember the arrival of sin into the world, Israel falling away. We recall the prophet sent to pull him back.

And then we reflect on God freeing them from slavery in Egypt. And then we turn towards the life, the death, the resurrection of Jesus. And the pastor will recite almost word for word the biblical account of the Lord’s Supper. Almost all the words at the end of the great Thanksgiving, whenever I’m talking about the bread and the cup, that come straight from the Gospels.

And finally, we pray for the Spirit to come upon us and on our bread and wine like it did in the upper room. And the next thing we know, we’re eating at that Passover table in the upper room at that Last Supper with the disciples. And we’re eating at the Feast of Heaven with all the saints and the angels and Jesus and the company of Heaven as we pray. And that’s the point of the liturgy.

We’re weaving the past and the future into our lives together right now. We’re part of it. That’s the whole point. That’s why we use these words.

And so I hope now you can see what I’m getting at as it relates to Deuteronomy 26. Deuteronomy 26 that we heard Flo read this morning should be understood as liturgy itself. These words that we heard spoken from God to Moses, then to Israel, and us. Right? And the point here is to situate the people of God for the rest of time into the story of the Exodus.

Moses gave these words to the people after the Exodus. They’ve wandered through the Sinai for 40 years. They’re about to enter into the Promised Land. That’s the moment we’re in here in Deuteronomy.

And Moses tells them, Here’s what you do when you get there. And so, even before the people get out of the Sinai into the Promised Land of Freedom, they’ve got the liturgy for the occasion ready. The bulletin is already printed. And Moses tells them, Once you have entered the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, there is to be an offering.

And they are given an explicit script for how that’s to be done. Not just, you know, give what you feel like, well, figure it out when you get there. No, this is very organized. This is a holy thing.

It’s not casual, not an afterthought. Each person is to go to the temple. Oh, well, there isn’t a temple yet, but whatever place is declared to hold God’s name, they had a tabernacle, a tent for a little while, so they’d go there. And each person then would approach the priest, and they would speak these words exactly.

I am declaring right now before the Lord my God that I have indeed arrived in the land the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us. And as they say that, they’re to hand the priest a basket of their first fruits to be offered to God. And this part’s crucial here, first fruits. Not just fruits, not just harvest, but first fruits.

The offering that they give is, is the first one. It doesn’t come after all of their immediate needs are met, after they put everything away for the winter, have a good surplus stored up, then they scoop some out of that and give it to God. No, this is the very first bit they harvest. God’s offering is not supposed to be spare change given to the priest.

It’s not supposed to be leftovers offered to God. They are to give first to God. An expression of gratitude and trust towards the God who has constantly proven that he’s going to take care of them. And then comes this prayer of dedication, kind of like we pray after our offering.

And this is how it’s paraphrased in the message version. I really like this. This is the prayer they’re supposed to pray together. A wandering Aramean was my father.

He went down to Egypt and sojourned there, he and just a handful of his brothers at first. But soon they became a great nation, mighty and many. The Egyptians abused and battered us in a cruel and savage slavery. We cried out to God, the God of our fathers.

He listened to our voice. He saw our destitution, our trouble, our cruel plight. And God took us out of Egypt with his strong hand and outstretched arm, terrible and great, with signs and miracle wonders. And he brought us to this place, gave us this land flowing with milk and honey.

So here I am. I’ve brought the first fruits of what I’ve grown on this ground you have given me, O God. And so this prayer that they pray, not unlike our great Thanksgiving in the communion liturgy, is this liturgical recounting of why that bountiful basket of first fruits is placed on that altar. Just as we pray to describe the story of why we’re breaking that bread, why we’re lifting up that cup and sharing it, they pray to remember why they’re doing it at all.

God has given us everything that we have, even our very lives, our freedom from bondage to sin and death. God has been with us since the days thousands of years ago when our father Abram, that wandering Aramean, wandered as a nomad in the desert long before he founded a people. God was walking with him by himself through the desert. And so, even now, it’s both an obligation and an honor to give some of God’s blessings back.

The Jewish people have, from the very beginning, understood Deuteronomy 26 here not as just a one-time commandment. They weren’t supposed to just pray that once when they got into the promised land. It’s a recurrent commitment to living as God’s faithful people. And we should do the same thing.

Our context has changed a lot since then. Most of us don’t grow our own crops for one. If you were to bring me a basket of your first fruits and place it on the altar, I wouldn’t totally know what to do with it. Although I guess we could put some of it in the food pantry.

The way we earn our livelihoods is different, so it’s not quite the same. And we also don’t have a tent, you know, a one place where God dwells among us. The Jerusalem temple has been gone for 2,000 years, we’re in a different era. And instead God’s Holy Spirit dwells within us.

And the church is the body of Christ. The physical presence of God among us is us, together. But that same story applies of giving out of gratitude, of joy for what God has done for us, just as applicable. And before anything else, we are called to give by God from what God has given us.

Our prayers, our presence, our gifts, our service, our witness. Those are the five things we vow to give to God in our baptisms and our confirmations. And so across scripture and in the history of the church, we’ve always tried to come up with formulas, straightforward guides as to how we should do that, right? Amen. And most commonly, we land on the financial one because that’s the easiest to put numbers on.

How many hours of your life should you give? Well, I don’t know. But as for numbers…

Christians how often landed on 10% of your income, the standard bottom line of what should be given to God. And that’s well and good. That’s fine. If every person in our churches gave 10%, there are other pastors, other consultants who’ve run this data.

If everyone in American churches gave 10% of their income, despite none of us being rich, we would never have another financial shortfall again. We’d be fine. I think I read once that a church of 15 families at the median income, if everybody tithed 10%, every church could afford a full-time pastor. Crazy.

The ministry that we would do here would be strong. It would last well into the future. And yet, with that easy number, our contribution to God’s work is not ever an easily calculable line in our individual household budgets. You know, maybe for you financially it should be 10%.

And that is a good general rule of thumb. There’s a reason people land on it. It’s sacrificial, but it shouldn’t be a terrible burden. But it can’t really make rules easy like that because, you know, maybe for some people it’s more.

And of course, yes, it could be less. If you’re a person who genuinely can’t give much in financial terms, but has a lot to offer by way of prayers, presence, service, and witness, that’s good. Or maybe you’re a person who’s always been a bit more comfortable with financial giving than the other kinds. Maybe you are the kind of person who’s much more comfortable to cut a check to try to meet a need while keeping a personal distance.

This is a big temptation in the church. I see this all the time from churches as a whole. It’s a lot easier to write a check to somebody else who’s doing something than get our hands dirty, go meet people face to face. But maybe if you’re more like that, God is calling you to offer time, presence in ministry, face-to-face with people.

It doesn’t sound like it’s a big deal, but it is a big deal. I’m telling you that getting to know our neighbors, building real relationships with them is a service to this church and to God’s kingdom that you can’t put a price tag on. That’s the only way. that people meet us, meet Jesus.

Now, don’t hear me as discounting monetary giving. Obviously, it’s foundational. The gas bill’s got to get paid. Our United Methodist missionaries around the world need to be funded in their work, too.

But prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness. All five. All foundational. And like I said, for some people, financial giving is the easiest of these vows to keep.

Maybe it even masks the need for hands-on relationship. But for some, maybe for more, turning our money over to God’s use is the hardest vow and the easiest to wriggle out of because we can always find a reason why we can’t. But all that we have should be given out of an abundance of love, not pressure. You heard that in 2 Corinthians.

Not because someone’s twisting your arm, not because you feel guilty. All of the things that we do for God are out of love. Now, we don’t put a check in the offering plate because we have to or to get smited. You won’t.

If you don’t, you won’t, right? We don’t come to church every Sunday morning because we have to. You don’t have to. We don’t pray out of fear of what will happen if we don’t pray. You don’t have to pray again for the rest of your life and God’s not going to strike you dead for that reason.

We do these things not because Christ our King is some tyrant emperor who demands our attention and our money and our time. No, that’s not what Jesus is like. Christ’s reign is one that has given us all that we have to begin with. Christ invites us to reach back now in relationship.

And so participation in God’s work is a grateful response to all we’ve been given. It’s not out of pressure. It’s not out of obligation, begrudging. Paul says he doesn’t want any of that.

God’s given us all the seeds that we have planted and then invites us to share the harvest. So hear Paul’s words again in 2 Corinthians 9. This is from the message too. I just really like how this is put.

Paul says, remember, a stingy planter gets a stingy crop. A lavish planter gets a lavish crop. I want each of you to take plenty of time to think it over. Make up your own mind what you will give.

That will protect you against sob stories and arm twisting. God loves it when the giver delights in his giving. God can pour on the blessings in astonishing ways so that you’re ready for anything and everything, more than just ready to do what needs to be done. He gives you something you can then give away, which grows into full-formed lives, robust in God, wealthy in every way so that you can be generous in every way, producing with us great praise to God.

Producing with us great praise to God. Think about what that looks like here. Do you think maybe there might be great praise to God that we fill that food pantry every day because of our generosity? because of what God has called us to participate in. What you decide to give to God’s work, to Christ’s body, and whatever forms you decide to offer it in, time, money, prayers, presence, that is always going to be between you and God.

And that’s why Paul says, I like the way this is translated, I want each of you to take plenty of time to think it over. Make up your own mind what you’ll give. Paul wasn’t going to say 10%. Maybe.

But how we make these decisions is critical. To do it faithfully, we have to put ourselves in God’s unfolding, continuing story. Remember that your father was a wandering Aramean. Right? Remember that God has brought you to the Promised Land, free from slavery to sin and death.

And remember that through His own death and resurrection, Jesus has made you part of Christ’s body. And remember that God has been faithful, choosing to come to earth to love you long before you existed. And invites you to enjoy that unchanging, inexhaustible love beyond the end of time. Christ as our King has not demanded a tax on your life.

Jesus isn’t like that. Instead, he has made you wealthy in every way, a steward of his own royal abundance. And so he invites you. Take the fullness of grace that he has given you, your prayers, your presence, your service, your witness, and your gifts, and offer it not as a reluctant tribute, but as a shower of first fruits for God’s kingdom.

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

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.