a sermon on Haggai 1.15b—2.9
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama
“This place is not what it once was!” That cry was heard among the older people
gathered on October 17, 520 b.c. They were looking at the ruins of the temple in
Jerusalem and the new construction recently begun to rebuild it. The work was
only started, but already they could tell, the new temple would be nothing more
than a shadow of the old one, a dim reflection of its glory. As the people
became discouraged, however, the word of the Lord came to Haggai—a message of
encouragement.
At least a few were present that day who had seen the old temple before the
Babylonians destroyed it nearly 70 years prior. That destruction was the start
of the exile. When the exile ended around 538 b.c., many of God’s people
returned to rebuild Jerusalem. Ezra led them to restore the altar, and
sacrifices were resumed. At the same time, a foundation was laid for a new
temple, right where the old one had stood. Some of the temple furnishings were
brought back from Babylon. The work began with high hopes.
These soon turned to frustration. Some local neighbors opposed the work because
it meant increased autonomy and prosperity for God’s people. They caused
political trouble with the Persians who ruled the whole region. The result was,
a foundation was started for the new temple, but then work was abandoned.
Almost twenty years went by, and all the while that half-started foundation just
sat there. Then God sent two prophets onto the scene: Haggai and Zechariah.
Haggai is the one who interests us today. Haggai was rare among the prophets for
two reasons. First, he fiercely supported the temple. The prophets had
traditionally been ambiguous toward the temple. It was too easy for people to go
through the motions in the temple without giving God their hearts. It was
awfully tempting to think, “I’ve gone to the temple and done my part for God;
now I can do whatever I want with the rest of my time and money.” The prophets
warned against these attitudes. Some even prophesied judgment against the
temple. It was part of the problem and would have to go. One reason Haggai was
different may have been his circumstances. When the temple is standing and in
business, it makes sense to guard against abuses. When it isn’t standing, you
miss all the good things about the temple. Another more important reason was
that Haggai spoke the message God gave him, and God had a purpose for the
temple. He wanted it rebuilt, and Haggai passed that word along.
The second reason Haggai was a rare prophet was, people listened to him. Haggai
1.12 reports that the governor, the high priest, and the people “obeyed the
voice of the Lord their God, and the words of the prophet Haggai; and the people
feared the Lord.” Read the Bible. Ask Moses, Samuel, Jeremiah, and Jesus. That
did not happen often!
Haggai said God wanted the temple rebuilt. Why had the work been abandoned? Why
were all God’s people living in nice houses while God’s house lay in ruins? So
work was resumed. The second temple was completed about five years later.
Our passage, however, is a message Haggai delivered early in the effort. As I
said, people realized the new temple would not be grand and glorious like the
first one. This made them sad. They became discouraged. They could not look at
the new temple without reminiscing about the old one. How sad it was!
What Haggai told them is also God’s word to us today. Most of us can identify
with how they felt. We feel the same way, for a couple of reasons. One is we
remember the influence the church and Christianity had in American culture not
so long ago, and we lament the loss of that influence. The other is, we remember
when our church and the other churches in our presbytery were full of people.
Allow me a couple of observations about how we struggle with this.
Our presbytery is trying to figure out how to plant new churches effectively.
The old strategy doesn’t seem to work anymore. The old strategy was: You buy a
piece of property in a growing area, send in a core of people, build a church,
and people will come. That’s how Westminster started in the mid 50s. During the
50s and 60s this was very successful. It doesn’t seem to work anymore. If we
want to start and grow churches, we are going to have to reach people who right
now have no interest in church. And let’s face it, the only reason to have an
interest in church is you believe in Jesus Christ and you know the church is his
people.
The same is true for established churches. We cannot grow and thrive as a
congregation unless we find ways to communicate the good news with people who
are not church-going people. Can they see in our lives and in our message the
truth they need?
America is as religious as ever, maybe more so, though they call it spirituality
these days. Religion, like most things in our culture, is something people once
did together and now they do individually. So religion is up, but church
attendance is down. We see this in our congregation. Membership and worship
attendance at Westminster peaked in the late 1970s and have been in a slow
decline ever since. Those of you who have been around 20 or 30 years or longer
cannot help notice the difference. What are we to do? We feel like the elders
looking at the new temple construction, realizing our glory days are in the
past.
I believe Haggai has two important things to say to us in our circumstances—a
word from God for us. The first is, we need to remember that God does not look
at things the way we do. God might look at a church that appears to be thriving
from a human perspective—big, new buildings; big budget; lots of people—and he
might be sad and say, “Their hearts are far from me.” He might look at a tiny
little church of only 5 elderly women and say, “There’s a church I can send
people who need love and good news.” That’s based on a true story. I heard it in
a lecture by Jerram Barrs, a professor at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis. It
happened on an island in the English Channel. A young couple was into drugs, and
they moved into an abandoned house. They found in the house a Christian
devotional guide, which they began to read. They became Christians from reading
it, and since it said they needed a church, they went looking for one. It was a
small island with a small population. They found a tiny Pentecostal church with
only five elderly women, who had been praying that God would send them someone
to help. The young people dressed counterculture. They didn’t look like
potential church members, but the women welcomed them with open arms and loved
them and helped them. We might look at those women and think, “That’s not even a
real church.” God thought otherwise.
God does not see things the way we do. Consider again the temple in Jerusalem.
Back in the glorious days of the first temple, built by Solomon, the building
was beautiful, the ritual elaborate, and the sacrifices regular. How often God
looked at that beautiful temple, running exactly the way he had said it ought to
be run, and felt disgusted! His people’s hearts were far from him. When the new
temple was built, everyone agreed, it was not as good as the original.
Ironically, however, this modest second temple lasted longer than the first one.
It stood for 500 years.
In today’s reading, God promised the new temple would be greater than the first.
This promise was fulfilled in two ways. One was the building itself. About 20
years before Christ was born, Herod the Great began rebuilding the temple. This
was no renovation. It was a tear-the-old-one-down, build-a-new-one project. Now
Herod had been made king of the Jews by the Romans, who were then in control.
But he was not a Jew himself, but an Idumean. How could he get the Jews to
accept and like him? He would rebuild the temple! He wanted the temple in
Jerusalem to be among the world’s finest. He was limited in what he could do
with the temple building, because the dimensions were specified in scripture. So
he made the temple courtyard and grounds the largest and grandest in the ancient
world. The holy area alone was twice as large as Trajan’s forum in Rome. The
retaining walls towered more than 80 feet above the roadways below. Today only a
portion of this wall remains, but one stone is 40 feet long and weighs over 100
tons. Herod did it first class.
So, you ask, how long did this, the most glorious and beautiful version of the
temple, last? It was probably finished in the mid-60s, and it was destroyed in
a.d. 70, so less than 10 years. And was God pleased with it? There is a verse in
Matthew in which Jesus’ disciples marvel at the grandeur of the temple, still
under construction in Jesus’ time. Jesus answered, “Truly I tell you, not one
stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down” [Mt 24.1-2]. It
seems the bigger and fancier the temple was, the less God liked it. Don’t
misunderstand me. We ought to give God our very best. We should be embarrasses
to give him anything less. Giving God our best and attention to detail can
express our love for God. But our hearts have to be right first. That’s what
matters. As Haggai said, God has silver and gold. As another passage says, he
can raise up children of Abraham from stones [Mt 3.9]. What he cherishes is the
hearts and faithfulness of his people.
God’s promise through Haggai had a more important fulfillment, however. Jesus
presented himself as a replacement for the temple. The temple had been the place
where God met his people and how they sought forgiveness for their sins. Jesus
took on these functions, making the temple redundant. In fact, though God’s
people did not realize it in Haggai’s time, the most important function of the
temple was to point to Christ. This was much easier to see after Jesus died and
rose again. The sacrificial system of the temple helped explain how Jesus’ death
benefits us. The temple had been a type, a shadowy pointer to the more important
work of Jesus.
The outward trappings of success were never important to God. He wanted his
people to worship him in spirit and in truth. He wanted them to be faithful. He
wanted the temple to point to Jesus. These were the important things then. They
are still the important things. Do we love God with all our hearts? Do we
worship him sincerely? Do we strive to be faithful? Above all, do we as a
congregation point people to Christ. If so, God can use us. That’s what we need
to worry about. God will take care of the rest. Be warned that God’s priorities
may not be the same as ours. Haggai’s elders wanted a beautiful temple covered
in gold and silver. God didn’t give it to them. We can be faithful with what God
gives us. Can we be content? … It takes grace.
The second message Haggai speaks to us is basically the same thing he said in
today’s passage. He comforted people by saying to them, as I have said to you,
“God will take care of it.” Then he drew out what this meant for them: Get to
work!
Take courage, Zerubbabel. (He was the governor.) Take courage, Joshua. (He was
high priest.) Take courage, all you people. Work! Why? Because “I am with you,”
says the Lord of hosts. That’s verse 4. In the next verse he adds, “Do not be
afraid.”
“Work, for I am with you.” When circumstances make God’s people feel as if their
best days are in the past—when the past looks golden and the future looks like
mud—God’s people have a choice. They can live in the past, lamenting the way
things are, and every time they look at the current temple dream wistfully about
the old one. Or … they can roll up their sleeves and get to work. That’s what
Haggai urges us to do.
God is with us, and that is the important thing. This does not mean God is
standing by to make everything we try successful. God has his own plan and
purpose. But it means that our best days are not behind us and we do not need to
live in the past. God is the same—yesterday, today, and forever. The same God
who raised Jesus from the dead and then fell with power onto a small group of
disciples and sent them out to turn the world upside down is at work today—right
now, in this church, in our lives. As Elizabeth Achtemeier has written, “As long
as God is on the scene his people may confidently expect things which eye has
not seen nor ear heard.” Take courage, says the Lord—to us.
God’s presence is our antidote to discouragement. We are tempted to give up
whenever the present looks smaller than the past. What’s the point, right?
Haggai claims there is a point. “Work,” he says, “because your efforts are not
in vain.” With God around, who knows what might happen? Plus, our work matters
precisely because the present and the future, like the past, are in God’s hands.
That seems a contradiction at first. If God holds the future and God “takes care
of the rest,” then why does our work matter? God doesn’t need our help. And
that’s true. God doesn’t need our help, just as he didn’t need the people of
Jerusalem in Haggai’s day to build him a house. God did not require anything
they could provide him, and he could have built a much better temple himself.
But in his grace he chooses to use us. He puts his treasure into what Paul calls
clay jars. The treasure is the good news about Jesus. We are the clay jars.
Imperfect, flawed, limited, cracked—choose your adjective—but chosen by God.
Yes, God is at work, and generally his work goes forward in spite of us more
than because of us; but … he does work in us and through us, and that’s
exciting. You never know what God might do if we are faithful.
If you think about it, Haggai’s message sounds a lot like the risen Jesus giving
the Great Commission: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me
… I will be with you always … so go make disciples of all nations. Teach them.
Baptize them. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. I am with you.”
OK, you might answer, I’m ready to get to work. What do I do? Or you may already
be hard at work, in which case you need to persevere and not get discouraged.
What else can you do?
The first and most important thing is to pray and be open to God’s leading.
Remember the five elderly women who prayed for God to send them someone to help.
They really wanted to make a difference. They were open to what God might do.
They prayed. And God answered their prayer in an unusual way. You ought to pray
for God to use you, and for God to bless our church and use our church for his
glory.
Second, you ought to look for ways to get involved. We have needs, particularly
in the area of children’s ministry. The Refresh and Renew event in February
provides an excellent opportunity. Help us get the word out. Invite friends.
Host some of the visiting team in your home.
Third, be open about your faith with your family. The most difficult people to
minister to are often family. Be persistent in prayer.
Fourth, be open to changes that result from whatever it is God might do. I don’t
know what those might be, and I have nothing in mind. I rarely plan change. I
think you just have to follow along where God leads. Sometimes that means
changes we would prefer not to make. When that happens, we must bow before God
and do what we believe he wants. That is not always easy for me, and I don’t
expect it is easy for you either. But that is part of what it means to call
Jesus Lord.
Fifth, … I don’t know fifth. There are so many ways you can answer God’s call.
You have to listen to him and try to figure out what your calling is.
What does God think of Westminster? I’m not sure I can give an adequate answer.
I suspect he finds a lot that pleases him, maybe more than we know. I suspect he
also sees a lot of room for improvement and much potential. I know that what he
cares about is our hearts and our faithfulness. Do we love him? Do we love the
people in our community? Is the church our refuge where we hide to protect
ourselves from the world, or is it a place of love and welcome, a sign of hope
for those who are searching? I know he does not want us to live in the past.
Certainly we give thanks to God for his faithfulness in our past, but he calls
us into his future. He asks us to perceive his hand at work right now, and to
join him. I know he doesn’t want us to say, “This place is not what it once
was.” He wants us to say, “God is today who he always has been.”
“Work, for I am with you,” says the Lord of hosts. Amen.