Haggai 1:15b—2:9
In the second year of King Darius,in the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month, the word of the Lord came by the prophet Haggai, saying: 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, Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing? 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, according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt. My spirit abides among you; do not fear. 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; and I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the Lord of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the Lord of hosts. 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.
Luke 20:27-38
Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to [Jesus] and asked him a question, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; then the second and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. Finally the woman also died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.”
Jesus said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”
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We’re going to spend some time with Haggai today.
The book of Haggai is quite short; two chapters long, just two pages. But this book is important, because unlike so many of the other prophets that we’ve read this season, Haggai is not so much a book of judgement, but rather a book of encouragement.
To understand what’s going on, we need to back up and review a bit of ancient Biblical history.
We’ve been reading through the prophets this summer and fall, and the main historical background to all the prophets in the Bible is the rise and fall of the Babylonian Empire.
So after the Exodus, after the wilderness, after God’s people have settled in Canaan, after the anointing of Saul as the first king of Israel, after the reign of David, the kingdom divides. The twelve tribes of Israel separate into a northern kingdom - Israel, and a southern kingdom - Judah.
These kingdoms struggle with their survival and their role in the empires that rise and fall around them. First the Assyrian Empire, which will take out the kingdom of Israel in 922 BCE, and then, the rise of the Babylonian Empire in 747 BCE, which will threaten Judah.
The early prophets - Amos, Hosea, early Isaiah, Micah: they are doing their work at the very beginnings of the Babylonian Empire, during a time of uncertainty for Judah about what the future will bring.
As it turns out, things get pretty bad. In 598 BCE, Babylon will conquer Judah’s holy city of Jerusalem, destroy the temple, and send the people of Judah into exile. The prophets Zephaniah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and mid-Isaiah are prophesying during this time of crisis.
It is a political crisis - a kingdom conquered and in exile.
It is a religious and communal crisis as well. The destruction of the temple was not just the destruction of a building. In ancient times, the temple was the place where God literally resided. It was a physical sign of God’s presence among the people.
When the temple was destroyed, the very real and existential question on people’s hearts was, “Where is God now? If God has no dwelling-place, does that mean that God is absent?”
The work of the prophets during this time of exile was, in part, to assure the people that God was still with them.
And yet, the promise of God was that they would return, and the temple would be rebuilt.
Forty years later, the Babylonian Empire will be conquered by the Persian Empire, and twenty years after that, Cyrus of Persia will free the people of Judah to return to their lands and cities; to reinhabit Jerusalem, and to being the work of reconstructing the temple.
It is in this time of return from exile that the prophets Haggai, Zechariah, late Isaiah, Obadiah, Joel, and Malachi are doing their work.
Return from exile is filled with hope. They can go home. They can rebuild the temple. God’s presence can once again be reliable among them, something that unifies the community. The temple can once again unite the community around worship, commerce, and communal life.
Haggai steps onto he scene twenty years into this work of recovery and rebuilding. And twenty years in, the energy and excitement of the task has stalled.
Return from exile is great and all. But the work of recovery is slow. And expensive. And the people have lost motivation.
The people moved home, but had to contend with the last stragglers still residing in their lands.
They began work on the temple, but don’t have the resources yet to rebuild it to the splendor of Solomon’s temple.
Frustrated, the people have started diverting resources back into rebuilding their own homes instead of building up God’s home.
Everyone feels disappointed. Dejected.
Haggai is here to stir them back into action. Haggai urges the people to continue rebuilding their temple and their community and their worship life. Haggai encourages the people to put God back into the literal and physical center of their life together.
Through Haggai, God promises both his presence and his glory. Even though the people’s efforts seem overmatched and difficult now, the future temple will be more splendid than the first temple that Solomon built. God will dwell with them, and will prosper their lives, and generations to come will live in security and hope.
Things might be uncertain. Resources might feel scarce. Conflict might feel disappointing.
But this God, who drew them out of Egypt, who led them through the wilderness by a pillar of cloud and fire, who was content to dwell both in the splendor of Solomon’s temple and also in a transient tent in the wilderness of exile: this God who has been faithful and present in the past will continue to be faithful and present now. And into the future as well.
Haggai’s message calls the people to regroup around God as the center of their life once again, and not to shy away because of their own fears or their own insecurities or their own nostalgia.
God is present, in the present. And the people are called to live in the present, with God as the center of their focus and their identity.
With God at the center, the people are free to live without being stuck in the hypothetical past…or in the hypothetical future.
If the problem for Haggai is that the people were too focused on nostalgia for the past, then the problem for Jesus is that his opponents in the temple were too focused on anxiety about the future.
Jesus and these particular Sadducees have been going on for many rounds in Luke chapter 20. They have been pummeling him with trick questions, trying to trap him, and finally, they haul out the most unlikely of hypothetical questions:
“If a woman is widowed seven times over in this life, whose wife will she be in the resurrection?”
A couple things to know here. The Sadducees were one sect in first century Judaism, and they were in conflict with the Pharisees, among others, about the nature of scripture and the question of resurrection. The Sadducees didn’t believe in resurrection. Nor in the presence of spiritual beings such as angels and demons. So right off the bat, their question to Jesus is purely hypothetical, questioning him about a resurrection that they don’t even believe to be true.
Moreover, the practice of levarite marriage, that is, the passing along of a widow to her deceased husband’s relatives, is something that was no longer being regularly practiced in the first century. So their question of Jesus is extra hypothetical.
And what they are really asking, of course, is whether there will, in fact, be a resurrection, and by whose authority Jesus is able to answer the question, and, in all of it, whether God is the God of the present or of the future; whether God is the God of the living or of the dead.
Jesus gives an answer similar to what we hear in Haggai.
“God is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”
It’s that last phrase that puts everything in perspective, and silences Jesus’s opponents.
To God, all are alive.
This is what we celebrated last week on All Saints’ Sunday. That the cloud of witnesses are bound together, past, present, and future, held together by God. That in Christ, God is equally present to those of us who live on this earth, and those who have come before, and those who will come after.
God is the center. God is present. In the present.
So what does all of this mean for us?
It means that we don’t have to remove ourselves from this life to experience the full grace, mercy, and splendor of God.
God wasn’t more present and interested in our life fifty years ago, when everybody went to church and Sunday schools were overflowing and cultural Christianity meant that everybody was pretty churchy, whether they really cared to be or not. God wasn’t more accessible a hundred or a thousand or five thousand years ago, and we don’t have to keep lamenting the myth that life was better at some point way back then than it is now.
Similarly, it’s not as if God will like us better in ten or fifty or a hundred years, after we have figured out how to be kinder to each other, or after we do the hard work of tending to our ailing planet; God isn’t waiting to show up to us until we have died and are resurrected at the last.
God isn’t more real in the hypothetical past or in the hypothetical future.
God is here.
It doesn’t matter if our building is held up with cables and columns.
It doesn’t matter whether our bank accounts are flush or fledgling.
It doesn’t matter if our world is not yet as it should be.
It doesn’t matter if there is room at the inn or only a dark cave and a manger full of hay.
God shows up, just the same.
Not merely in a temple or tabernacle. But in a body. A body that walked this earth alongside of us. A body that felt joy and felt pain. A body that knew both prosperity and scarcity. A body that suffered death. And a body that rose to new life, bringing resurrection out of the hypothetical and into living, breathing, eating fish on the beach with his friends reality.
God shows up. Not just in places of prosperity. Not just in times of joy. But in the cries of the poor and the despairing. In unfinished reconstruction projects. In something as unpretentious as a loaf of bread and a cup of wine.
So how might we live differently, if we honestly and truly believed that God is at the center of all things? How might our present and our future look different if we leaned hard into seeing God in each movement of this life?
God at the center of how we use our money and resources.
God at the center of how we treat one another.
God at the center of how we engage in political discourse.
God at the center of how we think about matters of violence and peace and oppression and liberation.
A prayer of protection attributed to St. Patrick includes the following lines, which profess faith in the living Christ, in every space and moment of the present time:
Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
Let this be our prayer today, that we know the presence of Christ, the living God, in this present moment and this present space, and that with God at the center, we live outward in hope and in faith.
Amen.