In the Church today we may wrestle a bit with Habakkuk, be
challenged a bit by Jonah even though we find parts of it a fishy, dust off a
couple of verses of Joel at Pentecost, mention Malachi's first fruits when we
want to talk about tithing and money issues, confuse Amos’ best line as Martin
Luther King Jr’s and haul out Haggai when a church is looking at a building
project. But all in all the minor Prophets are not often the focus of preaching
in Churches these days. We may see the minor to mean not important, far from
it, they are called Minor not because they are lesser in significance, but
smaller in size, compared to the major; bigger works of Isaiah, Ezekiel and
Jeremiah. Your always telling me you want shorter sermons. The Jews get round
this minor major thing by simply calling them the twelve. Over the month of
August we are going to be working our way through one of the twelve: the book
of Haggai.
Let me start by saying relax, it does not mean we are
venturing on a building programme. But we are looking to Haggai to build us up
as the Church. Haggai was a significant prophet
who ministered during the time of the return of the exiles from Babylon. The
people of Jerusalem had been taken into exile in 587bc and after seventy years when
the Persian empire conquered Babylon, they were allowed to come back and
rebuild the city and live there.
I’m calling the series Haggai: Renewal in the Ruins… because
it is about a group of God’s people rediscovering, the presence of God and
focusing on God’s pleasure and the Glory of God as central to their community.
For the people of Haggai’s day that focus was the temple, a very real and
tangible expression of God dwelling with them, for us it is in the very real
and tangible presence of Jesus Christ, his purposes and mission for us as a
church community. As Justin Welby, the arch bishop of Canterbury, puts it,
renewal comes as we once again find ourselves captivated by Jesus Christ.
The Book of Haggai is a series of four messages, each given
at a specific time and place. The reading we had today is actually two
messages, given twenty-three days apart, but they are seen as a unit because
they start and finish with the dating, they start and finish with the mention
of the same specific people, and by structure. In verse 2 We have what the
people say, then what God says, the people’s actions in response to Haggai
appears as a narrative in verse 12 then we have God’s reaction in verse 13-14.
The year we are given is the second year of king Darius.
Darius came to power in 550bc in a time of turmoil in the Persian Empire and
his first period of reign was full of dealing with rebellions, it was also a
time of economic hardship caused by heavy taxation. It was the first day of the
sixth month, which is the beginning of the grape, fig and pomegranate harvests
in Judea, the first day would have been the new moon festival, and the civic
leaders represented by Zerubbabel, a
descendant of the Davidic kings and the governor of the region and the
religious leaders, Joshua the high priest and all people would have gathered to
pray for the pending harvest and it is at this gathering that Haggai speaks.
He starts by what the people are saying, “The time has not
yet come to rebuild the temple”. They would have been gathered amongst the
ruins at the site of the temple to worship. The state of the temple would have
been obvious to them. They had come back from Babylon specifically to rebuild
the temple and to once again constitute themselves as God’s people, a
worshipped and witnessing community. They would have had many good reasons, why
it wasn’t time to rebuild the temple. They were struggling to make ends meet,
there was political and economic turmoil, would it be seen as a sign of revolt
against Persia. The harvest was due, then the planting and the tending and all
the other things that just seemed to demand their time. They had to get a head,
was it really a priority. It is easy for us as well to make those kinds of
decisions about the priority in our life where we place our faith and identity
as God’s people. It is not the right time. We can find so many things competing
for our time and attention… in fact the people gathered there had been saying
the same thing for about eighteen years at this stage, as various small groups
had started to come back to Jerusalem with their focus on re-establishing the
city and the temple and their religious identity, but it was never the right
time…
Then Haggai tells the people what God says. God asks the
question is it right for the people to live in their panelled houses while the
temple is in ruins? Have they got their priorities right? Now the idea of
panelled houses can mean that the houses had roofs on them that they were
living in finished houses and the temple wasn’t even started let alone
finished. But panelled houses could also mean a degree of luxury was starting
to manifest itself in those houses, they were wood panelled houses, and the
temple wasn’t even seen as a necessity.
God asks ‘them to think carefully about their ways’. The
focus was on their own material wellbeing, not on God and in a series of four
images that feel so relevant for today, this is seen as not satisfying them at
all. They eat and drink but never seem to have enough, they pile on the clothes
but are still cold, they earn wages only to put them in purses with holes. It
is a great picture of our own twentieth first century consumer society, that
offers us so much fulfilment but in fact does not deliver. Individually it is
based on having more to fill the hole inside, and it can simply be a purse with
a hole in it that just seems to get bigger and bigger to fit our incomes. Societally,
trying to keep that standard of living consumes all our effort and resources
and the hole through whish so many people are falling into poverty seems to be
growing.
Tom Sines a Christian thinker and futurist talks of the
current cost of housing and says that the generation growing up today, and he
is talking of the ones at university today will be the first post world war 2 generation
who will not be able to afford the same standard of living that their parents
did. And if they want to live that same lifestyle in the same kind of house
they were bought up in it will shut down all their other options it will
consume all their time and resources and even then may be out of reach. You
just have to look at the fact that for most people it takes two incomes these
days to simply run a household. Sines says for this next generation of
Christian young people they will have to make some radical choices between
lifestyle and their faith. His challenge is like that of Haggai that we
consider our ways very carefully, what is the dream and priority and faith
centred life that we pass on to them.
That provides a genuine alternative for the increasingly unobtainable
and unsustainable western dream.
Haggai goes on to ask them to again think carefully about
their ways. He calls them to go up to the mountains and bring down the wood to
start building his house. He uses the imagery of curse and blessing from the
Torah to explain what was happening to them. That drought and low crop returns were things that their covenant relationship
at Sinai had said would happen if God’s people did not keep the covenant. He
says that the people had been focusing on their own houses their own pleasure
and honour, rather than building a house for God’s pleasure and honour. At the
heart of their identity as a people and a community was the presence of God, in
the wilderness this had been seen as God dwelling in the tabernacle, then the
temple was the focal for that. The glory had come down on the temple as Solomon
had dedicated it. It was the meeting place between God and his people. As the
exiles were taken away to captivity, Ezekiel has a vision of the presence of
God leaving the temple and going with them into exile. God had never abandoned
his people, now the call is to rediscover that presence and the pleasure and
glory of God as the central focus of their community and being a people. They
were focused on their own houses, their own pleasure, honouring themselves
rather than God. In doing that they were depending on their own resources their
own know how, on themselves and it wasn’t working out. They had forgotten that
rain and harvest and abundance was a blessing from God. We can try and find
fulfilment in life in trying to fill up our lives and focus on our own needs
and wants and dreams and expectations and forget that as God’s people, and
Haggai was speaking to God’s people, that meaning and purpose and fulness of
life, comes not from what we have but from putting God and God’s glory first in
our lives. Jesus said we were to put first the kingdom of God and his
righteousness and all these things would be added unto us. We can easily focus on the added on’s hoping
they will add up to enough and miss the core.
The great thing is that the people listen to what God brings
through Haggai and they begin to build. It starts with a change of heart. The
leaders and the people listen and obey, and they once again fear the LORD.
Which does not mean that they are afraid of God, but rather they once again
have a sense of wonder and awe and reverence for God. Jesus says at the end of
the sermon on the mount if you love me you will hear my words and obey them put
them into action in your life. That is the person who builds on a solid
foundation.
There is a change here between how the people are viewed or
how they view themselves. Haggai had started by calling them not God’s people
but ‘these people” but now they are called the remnant, there is a sense that
they are seen and see themselves as the people God has bought back to
Jerusalem, they have owned their identity as God’s people and their priorities and
purposes have changed accordingly. They now see that they are a people by grace
saved for the purposes of God, rather than a rag tag group of returnees.
Historically, when the church has seemed to move away from
its focus on Christ his glory and become simply assimilated into the worldview
around them a there have been those who have been willing to step aside and
reconstitute themselves in terms a new community. The desert fathers and the
Celtic monks were a response to the compromise they saw in the imperial church,
they developed practices and routines as a community that reprioritised them on
knowing and following Christ. You can see it in the Wesleyan revival and its focus
on small groups as a way of maintaining and developing disciplines for a Christ
centred life, beyond Sunday worship. Today there is a growth of what’s called
new monasticism, communities who don’t necessarily live together, but who hold
a shared set of spiritual practices and routines and rhythms through which they
want to grow in a Christ honouring way. Simplifying their lifestyle and shared
resources and shared sense of mission and outreach is part of that. It is ways
they have built a new community together, reflecting that change of priorities
that comes from seeing Christ’s presence and Christ’s pleasure and glory as
what is at the heart of being a faith community.
The passage finishes with God’s response. As the people have
taken the time to carefully consider how their ways, and with the harvest out
of the way, They still needed to do those essential things as we all do, but
they started to respond by rebuilding the centre of their community together,
and God does two things. God speaks and
reassures them that …“I am with You”… The temple was a symbol of that, but the
reality of God’s presence is reaffirmed. The abiding presence of God. It’s
interesting that the temple they rebuilt here would be the one Jesus entered
into the one that at his death the curtain would be ripped in two as a symbol
that God’s presence as not longer simply tied to that local but was going to be
with God’s people in Christ where ever we are. It was Jesus last words as he
commissioned his apostles to be his witnesses and lo I am with you to the end
of the age, it was the starting point of the church as the holy Spirit came and
filled all the believers gathered in that upper room at Pentecost, and did the
same thing with the gentile gathered together at Cornelius’ house in Acts 10.
It is what we experience in our lives as God’s people in this time and place as
well.
The second thing that God did was to stir up the spirits of
Zerubbabel, Joshua and all the people to build the temple. As they responded to
God, God responded to them and re-ignited that passion within them. We’ve just
finished looking at 2 Timothy and I can’t help but thing of Paul telling
Timothy to fan into flame the gift with him, the presence of God in Jesus
Christ, by the Holy Spirit. How are we to respond to the passage today? It is
a call to think carefully of our ways? Which way are we going. Are we focused
on our own houses, our own pleasure and honour, do we need to turn around and
look at our priorities? Are they God’s pleasure and God’s Glory, are they about
a life and community built round the presence of God with us. As we do that we
will find that God is with us, Christ is with us, the Holy Spirit is present,
and as we change direction, our spirits will again be stirred up , we will
focus again on the pleasure and the glory of God, and seeing his kingdom built
up. We will find fulfilment and purpose and meaning in knowing and being known
by the God who loves us and showed that love through Jesus Christ.
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