Sermon Series, Readings from the Minor Prophets — Haggai 1:16b–2:9
The Israelites had been trapped in a foreign land for seventy years. Generations came and went. Their elders told stories of the beautiful land, flowing with milk and honey, they came from. Now their captors had been defeated by a new army from the southeast, and the emperor had decreed that the captives could go home. Their joy was great.
Until they got there. Jerusalem, the great city of David and the home of their God, was a ruin. What wasn’t destroyed decades ago had collapsed over the years. So had the fields. With only the poorest people left behind to tend to them, crops had rotted and decayed. There was no milk and honey here.
Rebuilding began, but where to even begin? They needed a roof over their heads, food to eat, the very basics of life. But they believed in themselves. They could do this. They were strong. The children of Israel. They survived captivity. They would survive this, too.
Then God’s word came to Haggai. He wasn’t much of a prophet; his book is one of the shortest in the Old Testament, just two chapters. He prophesies only four times over a few months.
God asks why nobody has started rebuilding the temple. From our perspective, it sounds like they need a place to worship. But the Israelites believed the temple was literally God’s home. “You’ve built houses for yourselves,” he says, “but where is God’s house? You all have comfortable places to live, but where will God live? Even foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Creator of the universe has no place to lay his head.”
Funny, considering the first temple. In chapter seven of 2nd Samuel, we’re told that King David of old decided to build a house for God. God said, “No. What do I need with a house? Ever since I brought you out of Egypt, I lived in tent. You build your city. Your son, Solomon, can get to the temple, if he has time.” Now it sounds like God is saying the opposite. The temple matters more than the rest of the city. Get building.
But King David remembered how God brought them out of Egypt, rescued them from slavery, sustained them in the desert, gave them a new land. When Haggai spoke, they had forgotten. It was the new Emperor who brought them out of Babylon, who gave them their land back. It was their work, their hands, that would provide. It seemed God had left decades ago; they would rely on themselves.
Haggai insists that, if they start rebuilding the temple, if they start relying on God instead of themselves, everything else would fall into place. The crops would grow, the city would flourish, their lives would be whole again. God calls the people to start building the temple, and then: When they decide to do it, before they even lay the first stone, God proclaims: I am with you. I am already here.
The building of the temple is not for God’s sake. It’s true; he hardly needs a house of his own. But the people need him to have a house. They need to see that God is with them.
They also need to prioritize God in their lives. It’s the same thin Jesus teaches: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Many things enslave us; money is the worst of them. It controls us, destroys us, makes us think we have to rely on ourselves, makes us behave as if we can only rely on our wallets and bank accounts. By calling on the Israelites to start building, God invites them to make God more important than any of their resources—to free them from reliance on their own wealth and power.
This isn’t a stewardship sermon, but it is what stewardship is really all about. If we give to the church because we want to fund the congregation, believe it or not, we are doing it for the wrong reasons! God calls us to give our money, and our effort—not necessarily only to the church, but to things that benefit others instead of ourselves—because that’s the only way we can stop relying on our treasure and start relying on God instead. God wants us to give of ourselves because it frees us from slavery to ourselves, our wallets, our world.
Our society’s great heritage—our society’s great heresy—is self-reliance. We are independent people. We can take care of ourselves. It is so, so difficult to ask for help for any of our needs. We have to hide them, look like everything is well, because if we don’t—it’s actually not that people will think something’s wrong. It’s that people will think we can’t handle it. Our problems are not the cause of embarrassment and shame. Our inability to automatically fix them is.
Last week, I talked about dropping out of college. I didn’t say why, partly because at the time, I didn’t know why. After all, as little as twenty years ago, psychiatric science was still in relative infancy.
Seven years later, I was in seminary, struggling yet again. Well, no; still struggling. One day, I crawled out of bed at about 4 in the afternoon. I’d missed several appointments that day. I didn’t want the whole day to be wasted. My paycheck from my school job was on my desk, and I decided to take it to the bank. I put on some sweatpants, and walked out the door to my house. Two minutes later, I was back in bed. The streets of Chicago were too much to deal with.
At 2 a.m., after ten more hours of sleep, I called my pastoral care professor’s voice mail and asked if he would suggest a counselor. It took another seven years before I learned the words “Bipolar Depression,” and ten before we hit on the right medication to help me live abundantly. I’ve accomplished a lot in my life. But not alone. Medical professionals, understanding friends, even the legitimately terrible pharmaceutical industry—I’ve needed them all. And certainly God.
Haggai’s message is exactly that. We can’t rely on ourselves. We need build the temple, to know God is here. In our reading today, he says we need to trust that God’s plans are greater than our imaginations. In his third oracle, he says God will spread holiness faster than we can spread destruction. And then, that God will bring life and prosperity, just because he wants to. We do nothing. God does it all.
As we look to the future of our Church and our lives, we might wonder how captive we are to the individualistic ideal of our time, to the idea that we cannot rely on anyone but ourselves. God has planted a community of faith in this place, so that we can rely on one another. And God has placed himself in front of us so we can taste and see that he is indeed here. God frees us from slavery to money, to the world— to even ourselves. How might we use that freedom to free others?