This Gloriously Broken House: Haggai 2:1-9
Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time
in the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the
month, the word of the Lord came by the prophet Haggai, saying: 2 “Speak
now to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua son of
Jehozadak, the high priest, and to the remnant of the people, and say: 3 Who
is left among you who saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to
you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing? 4 Yet
now take courage, O Zerubbabel, says the Lord; take courage, O Joshua, son
of Jehozadak, the high priest; take courage, all you
people of the land, says the Lord; work, for I am with you, says
the Lord of hosts, 5 according to the
promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt. My spirit abides among you;
do not fear. 6 For thus says
the Lord of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I will shake the
heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land, 7 and
I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations will come,
and I will fill this house with splendor, says the Lord of
hosts. 8 The silver is mine, and the gold is mine,
says the Lord of hosts. 9 The latter
splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says
the Lord of hosts, and in this place I will give prosperity, says
the Lord of hosts.” (NRSVUE)
I am finishing
my MBA, a degree I’m earning because we seem to have realized that churches
operate as businesses and no amount of my knowledge of Greek declensions helps
me make informed decisions on mortgage payments or human resource training
(although finance meetings are, occasionally, about as brain-bending as a
declension chart). I’ve started the
capstone course just this week, a class in which we are divided into teams to
compete against each other as athletic shoe companies. I’m highly amused to be selling fictitious
shoes during the week and preaching about a Guy Who washed feet on the
weekends, but life is odd like that.
The thing
about doing an MBA as a pastor is that I am never looking at the same end goal
as the assignment. For this simulation,
I need to end the course with certain stock value, image rating, return on
investment, credit score, and earning reports.
My imaginary shareholder is my guide to passing the class, and I get
that; I understand the need for a company to be fiscally sound, to be
productive in the usual financial sense.
But when I read things like today’s text from the prophet Haggai, I
wonder what would happen if my company made all of three cents but changed the
world, helped a city, refused to be part of the fast fashion circuit that so
often ends with landfills of last year’s trends.
You know, the
social justice-y stuff. I’m fairly
certain Jeremy warned you that I would be preaching about the social justice-y
stuff.
The funny
thing about the prophet Haggai is that he isn’t preaching the social
justice-y stuff. Haggai’s book—one of
the shortest in our Scriptures, clocking in at only two chapters, 37 verses—is
not like the call to righteousness and community caretaking that, say, Isaiah
or Joel or Zechariah, his contemporaries, are.
In fact, Haggai has one goal: rebuild the Temple. Unlike many of the books of our Bible, we
know exactly when this one was written; Haggai tells us. The season and kings mentioned put it at 520
BCE, in the reign of the Persian King Darius I, grandson of the guy who
released the Hebrew elite from their Babylonian captivity.[1] The context matters because it was the
Babylonians who tore down the Temple in the first place, in 587. The rubble has been lying there for nearly 70
years by the time Haggai arrives on scene to chastise the high priest and the
king about why there is still no Temple.
The first
chapter of Haggai is that chastisement; if we say we are the people of God but
don’t give God a place to be, what are we doing? This second chapter begins with worry about
what this new Temple will look like.
It’s a pale imitation of Solomon’s original; they didn’t have the time,
people, or materials that the original had—their shareholders would be deeply disappointed
by this particular ROI—and some are lamenting that it doesn’t count, that God
wouldn’t want a knockoff version like this, why even bother. “Is it not in your sight as nothing?” says
Haggai to the people who have looked at the effort and said that the old one had
beautiful carpet, had better windows, had altars that people really
appreciated. These newfangled
churches—ah, sorry, this newfangled temple just didn’t cut it. It was nothing, in their sight.
Today is the
first Sunday of the new United Methodist appointment year. It’s the beginning of my second year of being
the associate pastor at Ann Arbor First, so of course I’m spending it here at
Court Street. The UMC highly prizes the
nature of our connectionality; no congregation stands alone, no one building
represents the totality of the denomination.
I am as much a UMC pastor here as I am in Ann Arbor, and I am appointed
to the Church across the world before I’m appointed to the local
congregation. That’s how we understand
each other—where two or more are gathered in Christ’s name, that’s church.
It might seem
counterintuitive to be preaching Haggai on a Sunday important to
connectionalism, but Haggai’s words here remind us that it was never completely
about the Temple. Like my MBA course
that states a goal of higher stock dividends while I’m actually learning how to
responsibly steward a church that acts as the Body of Christ, like the reality
that some of our churches will never live up to the image we hold of what a
church “should” look like, Haggai was using the rebuilding of the Temple to
remind the people who and Whose they were.
“Take courage, all you people of the land, says the Lord; work, for I am
with you, says the Lord of hosts, according to the promise that I made you when
you came out of Egypt. My spirit abides among you; do not fear.” Or, as Dr. John Hulbert of Southern Methodist
University puts it, “The bricks and mortar of any building have no meaning
apart from the conviction that God has brought us out of the bondage of Egypt
and remains with us still. No matter what this building looks like, God is
here, and God is working.”[2]
A couple of
days ago, there was a slew of decisions that came from the U.S. Supreme Court
whose repercussions will be felt for years.
The majority-conservative court ruled against affirmative action as a
guiding category in college admissions, shutting down the awareness of systemic
racism in balancing the disparity of student entrance;[3] the court ruled for
commercial businesses to refuse to do business with LGBTQ customers if they did
not want to work with us; and it ruled against the president’s attempts at
action alleviating the burden of student debt.
These rulings have shaken the idea of liberty and justice for all,
allowing deep-seated discrimination in education and commerce to continue and
flourish.[4] They have desecrated the concept of the
temple to justice that the court was modeled on in its architecture; they have
privileged the amount of shoes sold over any attempt to wash the feet of the
weary.
Joel and
Isaiah and Zechariah would have words specifically for the rulings, for the
companies, for the ways in which the last and the least are being forcefully
shoved even further back. Haggai,
though, brings us back to the idea that building a Temple is the concrete
recognition that God is here in the middle of the hopelessness and the weariness. We as Christians do not have the same
relationship to our churches as the Hebrew people did their Temple, no matter
how much we idolize the buildings we call holy; they are important, these sanctuaries
that house our worship, and we grieve when they are closed or sold, but they
are not the core identity of Christianity in anywhere near the same sense. Yet we, too, can learn from Haggai; we, too, come
to all the places that we call church even if it’s a church that some see as
nothing in their eyes and are reminded that God’s Spirit abides among us; do
not fear.
When we speak
out against injustice whatever its form, just like our United Methodist
baptismal and membership vows promise we will, God’s Spirit abides among
us. When we refuse to privilege money
over mercy, God’s Spirit abides among us.
When we connect to each other not only across cities but across the
world as the full and holy Body of Christ transforming the world as God
transforms us, God’s Spirit abides among us.
When the Church becomes a temple not to our crystallized understanding
of an idealized Christianity that offers communion without compassion but to
the God Who loves beyond measure and welcomes all to the table to be fed until
they hunger and thirst no more, then we will know truly that God has shaken the
heavens and the earth, the seas and the dry land, and filled this house of many
rooms with splendor beyond description.
What if we
build that temple, Church, that is not made of bricks and mortar but of blessing
and miracles? What if we look at the
world that says only the best and most ostentatious will do and say instead
that we will build that which heals, which brings peace no matter how it looks
or how great its stock portfolio is?
“In this place
I will give prosperity, says the Lord of hosts.” Most translations go with “peace” as the
thing given; I’m not sure why the NRSV and the CEB chose “prosperity.” The Hebrew is shalom; peace, prosperity,
but also wholeness, completeness, a sense of being settled deep in one’s core.[5] The new temple that Haggai champions may look
sad and paltry compared to the old one, but what God is going to do with
it, and through it, and with and through the people who build it and worship in
it and are changed by the awareness of the God to Whom it points—that will be
restoration in a way the original Temple never achieved. The way we do church now will never look like
the four staff pastors and the cross on every corner and the fifty kids in
Sunday school again, but that doesn’t mean God isn’t at work here, shaking our
limited concepts of what God can do. The
shifting sands of protection and justice in our nation may feel unsteady under
our feet, but that doesn’t mean that God is done working shalom, peace
into the world God is always bringing back to Godself no matter our
self-important rulings of discrimination.
On this
Sunday, in our connection not only to The United Methodist Church but to the
whole of the Church called Christian across all denominations and times, we are
taking communion. As part of the ritual,
we repeat Christ’s words to remember, every single time, that this binds us
together as the Body, as a people with whom God dwells. All are welcome; take courage, beloved of
God, for the table is laid for you and God meets you here and walks with you no
matter what temples you may or may not build or tear down in your life. Take courage, beloved of God, for the cup is
poured for you in recognition that shalom is offered as often as you
drink of it. Take courage, beloved of
God, for God is not done with us yet, this broken and crumbling Church that we
are, this pale imitation of our gilded memories, this beautiful and glorious
possibility of all that is yet to come.
Thanks be to God that we are still building, still being built, and that
our hope is never lost. Amen.
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