God of the Living

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Haggai 1:15b-2:9; Luke 20:27-38

In our Luke passage we find Jesus in a spat with the Sadducees over a matter pertaining to what happens to us after we die.  The Sadducees did not believe in resurrection and were trying to use the Law of Moses to show Jesus that he was being scripturally inaccurate.  To prove their point, they confronted Jesus with a ridiculous scenario: A man dies leaving behind a wife and no children.  According to the Law of Moses his brother must marry her.  Oddly, the brothers keep dying.  You would think that after a while the next brother in line would have been afraid to marry her.  Well, all seven brothers die and then the woman dies.  So, the Sadducees ask Jesus a ridiculous question: whose wife she will be after the resurrection?  Jesus answered saying that there won’t be marriage in the resurrection.  He then goes on to say that there will be a resurrection because Moses refers to God as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  He does not refer to God as the one who was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob which would imply that they are dead and gone.  The way Moses has worded things indicates that they are still alive.  Touchez.  Koodos.  Well done lad.  Debate won by means of emphazing the tense of the verb “to be”.  

The problem that the Sadducees had with resurrection was multi-faceted.  They believed that when you died, you died.  This life was the only shot you got. There was no spirit that lived on.  Only God is immortal and the closest we can come to immortality is to have lots of male descendants through whom the family name would live on.  They saw a huge problem inherent in believing in an afterlife in that a person could spend all their time getting and keeping themselves ready for the next life while ignoring the needs of this life.  The Pharisees were guilty of this mistake.  They were Legalists and spent their time trying to appear righteous and getting converts to their way of believing all the while ignoring the Bible’s demands for justice and equity…not that the Sadducees did any better in that department.  

Many Christians today make the same mistake by saying that all that matters is trusting in Jesus so you can go to heaven and doing everything you can to get as many people converted so they can go with you.  They get so caught up in being right about being a Christian, going to church, and their good values and learning about how the Bible says that everything and everybody around them – the world – are wrong and God is going to destroy it all.  They get so caught up in all that and don’t seem to care what happens to the environment because of our lifestyles or that sixty children died from poverty during the two minutes they impatiently sat in the Tim Horton’s drive thru waiting for a coffee that wasn’t the product of fair trade.  Well, I shouldn’t say that it doesn’t matter to them.  It’s just too big a problem for them to think about and it seems there’s nothing anybody can really do about it anyway.  So, they just go on with their “Christian” way of life believing that this evil world is soon to end and they and their Christian friends are going to heaven if they just keep trusting Jesus.

The fact that this world will come to an end and that there will be resurrection and new creation does not get us off the hook for how we live our lives now.  Our lifestyles have consequences.  It is the way that we live our lives that creates the conditions of poverty in this world and which destroy the environment.  We get so caught up in trying to trust God with every little detail of our lives that we don’t see beyond God-and-me to the larger problems that evil and our participation in it causes in God’s good creation.

Sometimes people do catch a glimpse of the bigger picture and go to the other extreme of believing activism and progress will make things better.  These folks put a lot of hope into the hands of politicians thinking that if you get the right people in the right form of government the world’s problems will disappear by means of progress.  In Jesus’ day there were revolutionaries who held this position or something similar to it.  They would raise up a Messiah and start a war.  This was what the Sadducees were afraid Jesus might be up to.  You see, they were the establishment.

Sadducee-ism was the branch of Israelite faith that most of the wealthy and the temple priests held to. Because of their wealth and position they had it pretty good and probably believed that they were doing things just the way God wanted them done and so God was blessing them.  All they had to do was to continue support the temple and the priests and God would in turn continue to bless them. 

I’ve presented you with three ways of doing the faith here.  The first is simply believing that this world is coming to an end so why bother to make anything better.  That’s Escapism.  The second is the belief that activism and progress will bring in the Kingdom of God.  That’s being a Progressive.  The third one is believing that God is on your side because you have wealth and power.  That’s being a Conservative. Jesus was none of these.  Jesus was a Resurrectionist, if I might invent a word.  Jesus wanted his followers to live faithfully in the present according to the hope of resurrection.  

This Resurrectionist way is more like the word of prophecy that God gave to Haggai to give to Joshua and Zerubbabel when they sought to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem upon returning from the Babylonian Exile.  God said, “Work, for I am with you.”  This word came to the small yet faithful remnant who returned to Judah at the end of the Babylonian exile.  When they got back they decided to build their own houses, lavishly I might add, to the neglect of the temple and as a result they did not find fulfillment.  They never seemed to have enough.  God eventually had to send drought to get their attention.  God told them to build the temple and even though it might not be what it was in its former days, it would still be that in that place, in that temple, God would grant peace.  The Hebrew word for peace is Shalom and it is more than simply the absence of enmity.  It means contentment, friendship, prosperity, and mental and emotional soundness.  

So now nearly 2,500 years later we the followers of Jesus are to follow the same word of prophecy.  We too are to involve ourselves in the work of building the temple, but by that I don’t mean church buildings or even the institution of the church.  1 Corinthians 3:16 asks: “Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?”  We are the temple.  This fellowship in Christ is the temple. God’s Spirit dwells in us and is evident in our fellowship.  

One thing to know about the temple in the Bible, it was not simply a place where people came to sing hymns and hear a sermon.  It was the place where human brokenness was dealt with and healed.  It was the place where God and people were reconciled.  It was the place where there was Shalom.  Therefore, as those who are now made alive in Christ, who have the hope of resurrection, and as the Holy Spirit is in us, our first order of work is to be the temple.  Our Christian fellowship is to be a place where God and people, each of us, are reconciled, where our brokenness is dealt with and healed, where there is Shalom. 

Our first order of work is to let the gift of the peace of Christ become a reality in our midst.  We do this by confronting our brokenness; first the brokenness in our relationship with God by just coming to God in prayer and talking it out.  Then we deal with the brokenness in our lives by seeking to heal our broken and hurting relationships with humility, gentleness, remorse, and forgiveness.  Then, we deal with the brokenness in our midst by holding one another accountable to the teachings of Jesus.  Healing and reconciliation is the goal.  That’s living resurrection life now, living now as a reflection of the way life will be post-resurrection.  

Friends, we are the temple where God has chosen to dwell.  Let us not neglect that.  Let’s make it a beautiful temple.  Amen.

Build That New Temple

Haggai 2:1-9

The Good Ole Days, God by the hand of King David delivered Israel from all its enemies and united them into one great nation and established Jerusalem as the capital; the place on Earth where he would dwell.  God had kept his promise made to Israel’s forefather and progenitor Abraham to give to him and his descendants a land and make them to be a great nation.  God had delivered them out of slavery in Egypt and led them through the conquest of the land.  Then with David, there was a measure of Shalom – peace, well-being, security, enough – well mostly, his sons would occasionally revolt. 

It was the Good Ole Days.  Everybody had pulled together and built a nation, a great nation.  Jerusalem with David’s Palace was beautiful, a stately capital city to rival any.  Yet, there was no temple to honour Israel’s God who had made them who they are.  David wanted to build a temple, but God wouldn’t let him.  David’s hands were too bloody from war to build God a house.  So, God said David’s son, Solomon, would build the temple.

Under Solomon the Good Ole Days got even better.  Solomon was legendary for his wisdom, his love of science and botany, and his many wives and concubines.  Rulers came from all over bringing him gold and silver and their daughters.  He was a king unsurpassed in wealth and glory and women.  He built the temple for God and it was beyond being a marvel.  It to took him twenty years to complete it.  Everything was gold plated, silver plated, or made of bronze.  It glowed in splendour of polished metal.  The glory of the Lord dwelled within.  God finally had his place on Earth to dwell.

Those were the Good Ole Days.  Solomon’s temple stood for roughly 250 years until in 586 BCE the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and levelled the temple and took all its treasures.  They also took most of the people into captivity, back to Babylon where they resettled.  Apparently, idolatry and abusing the poor did not please God.

Our reading from Haggai picks up nearly seventy years later.  A remnant of the people had returned to Jerusalem.  The rest stayed in Babylon because they were doing well there.  Those who returned were expecting God to give them shalom when they got back, a return to the Good Ole Days.  But, it just wasn’t the same.  They began to do well enough to build nice houses for themselves but they never seemed to have enough.  Haggai prophesied that they were wanting because they had looked after their own houses while neglecting to rebuild a house for God.  The remnant got the message and got busy rebuilding the temple. 

Well, it just wasn’t the same as Solomon’s Temple.  It lacked the splendour, the gold and silver plating and with things just not being the way they used to be, enthusiasm waned.  The people felt the hopelessness of lacking the resources to do it like they used to.  No temple treasure.  Not enough people.  And there was the pervading question of where was God in all this.  The people needed a word from the Lord, a sure sign to go on.

Haggai rose to the occasion.  It was the 440^th anniversary of the day that Solomon completed his temple.  He started by acknowledging their profound disappointment.  The seniors in the crowd, the octogenarians, they would have been the only ones to remember the glory of Solomon’s Temple and they were few.  It was time for those who had never seen that temple to get on with building a new temple, a new temple for their day and time.  God would provide the resources and the splendour of the new temple would surpass the splendour of the old one.  “Take courage.  Work for I myself am with you standing in your midst.  My very breath is in you.  Do not fear.”  So says the Lord God himself.  This new thing happening in their midst, coming back to the Land and rebuilding the nation, was nothing less than God shaking the heavens and quaking the earth to churn up something fundamentally new into being.  Take courage political leaders.  Take courage religious leaders.  Take courage people of God.  Your God is doing a new thing.

It is quite difficult for me to read this passage from Haggai and not see and feel a correlation to our present day and circumstances.  It is Remembrance Sunday and when reflecting on those who made the ultimate sacrifice of their lives in war in protection of our society from fascist tyranny we, like Private Ryan in the movie by that name should be asking ourselves have we been good people.  Have we continued to better the society they died for or have we spoilt it with narcissistic entitlement so that we never seem to have enough.

This is the also the Sunday before the American Presidential election.  The Good Ole Days are definitely gone for my home country.  As the world watches that election we must keep in mind that the American president is not the Saviour of the world who can fix everything.  The last time I checked that role was reserved for Jesus.  The American President is a servant of the people, and supposed to be a wise leader and role model.  An image of what it is to be an American.  Speaking as an American we have spoilt with narcissistic entitlement what my grandfather fought for and for which he saw many of his friends die right beside him.  America, though you have a right to them, put your guns away before you needlessly kill someone and learn to respect and help each other.

As the church, the Good Ole Day is gone.  The former splendour of Christianity in North America is no more.  Things will never be like they used to be.  Our society has changed too much.  Rick Warren, Pastor of the Saddleback mega-church and author of all things “purpose driven” said with respect to the way things are today for the church, “People aren’t looking for a church.  But they are looking for friends.”  People need loving community and trusted friends, but gone is any sort of notion that they can find that at a church.  People just are not going to come to church like they did twenty years ago and days prior because something culturally ingrained in them makes them feel like they need to go to church for things to be right.

Working the metaphor of Solomon’s temple and church buildings, there are going to be fewer to very few church buildings being built from here on out because the church building of the very near future will be somebody’s home or barn or a coffee shop or a storefront – something visibly open and directly present in the neighbourhood.  Old church buildings like this one will persist but the congregations that meet within are going to have to figure out, as this congregation is doing, how to open their doors to their neighbourhoods and be good neighbours.  The congregation that can get known for things like throwing block parties and its open-to-everyone-no-strings-attached front lawn Barbeque will have a likely chance of making it through the next thirty years.

The New Testament church was buildingless because the fellowship of the people is the temple where God dwells on earth.  The splendour of the new Temple is the presence of God in our midst.  God is with us, in us shining like gold and silver.  But, God is out there as well among our neighbours doing stuff.  Our neighbourhoods need Jesus people to be out there being good neighbours who listen, and help, and work at building good, solid, unconditional, compassionate friendship in our neighbourhoods. 

Finally, this congregation has its particular concerns to deal with.  I hear God’s word through Haggai speaking to us today.  Let us not be so lost in humble arrogance to think that we cannot take verses as a direct word from our Lord to us.  God does speak directly to us through the Scriptures.  This day God says to us, the remnant people, the people through whom God is building the future church here, God says,  “Take courage.  Keep working, for I am with you.  My Spirit abides among you.  Do not be afraid.”  We’ve a good, blessed fellowship here.  The Triune God of grace abides in our midst.  Let’s not be fearful.  Let’s take courage and keep at it.  And all God’s people say, “Amen.”

Work for I Am with You

Text: Luke 20:27-38; Haggai 2:1-9

Just shy of fourteen years ago my father died. It was cancer. He was just 60. I remember the evening of the funeral home visitation. The place was packed by the time I got there. I had one objective in mind of getting to the casket to see my father but I had to push through all those relatives and family friends and be cordial along the way. I finally got to him. The Lord only knows what I was expecting. My brain was humming and for an instant I almost passed out. My always inappropriately dramatic step-mother was trying to distract me because she thought I was going to lose it or something. Nevertheless, there was Dad and there he was not. Where did he go? My father, my truest friend. The one who topped the list of the very few people in this world that I feel love me unconditionally, whom I feel safe around. Where did he go?

Fourteen years later, I still grieve. I miss him. These past few years there have been times when I really needed him and he is gone. I'm really angry and heartbroken that my children have no idea who that man in the picture is. Will they ever meet him? You people know what I'm talking about. Death has touched us all. It's brutal. Death is serious business and not easily euphemized or should I say euthanized with fairy tales of what happens to us when we die...let alone our pets. Boy, I'd better lighten it up here a bit. So, looking there at my dad there in that casket, where did he go? What happens to us when we die? What should I tell my children when they want to know where my daddy is? 

Well, there's myriads of pop-culture ideas floating around that we have borrowed from ancient Paganism and still people espouse them. A common theme among these ideas is that we have an immortal soul that leaves us and goes somewhere else where we will be forever. Sometimes we say something like we become a star or an angel and look over our families. Or, we are still here watching over things but we just can't be seen. Or, we're eternally doing all those things we loved doing like driving tractors or hunting deer. Though nobody ever says what happens to the deer that get killed in heaven. Do they go on to another heaven where they get to hunt the humans or something? Sometimes our immortal souls get stuck between here and there and we become a ghost. Then there's the really bad among us. They can go to Hell.

Now, I'm going to shock you here for a minute. There is a pop-Christian Gospel that we are all familiar with that states that if we believe Jesus died for our sins and serve him in this life our immortal soul will go to Heaven when we die and conversely, if we do not repent of our sins and accept Jesus as our Lord and Saviour in this life our immortal soul will go to Hell when we die. Here's the shocker. The Bible never claims we have an immortal soul. In fact, nothing about us is immortal, at least not yet. Only Christ Jesus has immortality (1 Tim. 6:13-16). Rather, what the Bible says is that because of God’s grace extended to us in Jesus Christ by the gift of his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, in us, we will live for a time in paradise or heaven with Christ without bodies until Jesus returns and the Trinity makes all things new and in the midst of that there is the resurrection of the dead when we are given new, immortal and imperishable bodies. It is the Holy Spirit in us by, with, and through whom we live past death. Go and read Romans Chapters 6 and 8 and particularly Rom. 8:11 which reads: “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” N.T. Wright, an Anglican New Testament scholar likes to quote another scholar's analogy that our software gets uploaded into God's hardware until the time he restores it all. When we die everything about who we are in our entirety as persons, the Trinity somehow keeps with and in himself until he restores us to our bodies made anew when he raises us from the dead.

When I tell my children where my Daddy is I say he is with Jesus and we'll see him when, as my kids like to say, God has a body. They picked that up around Easter a couple of years ago when their Sunday School teacher was trying to explain resurrection to them. Bodily resurrection is our hope. Resurrection and embodied life in a creation made new, a creation in which there no longer is sin or death and as Isaiah said in chapter 11:6-9, “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowing of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”

The Day will come when God's kingdom will indeed come and his will will indeed be done here on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus will return and reign over his creation unhindered, visibly, and righteously. He will put things to right. In Jesus' kingdom there is justice. We must work for it now. In Jesus' kingdom things are beautiful. We must work to make our lives and our communities and the world around us beautiful with art and music and picking up after ourselves. In Jesus' kingdom there is no poverty. We must work to end it even if it means we ourselves must live with less. In Jesus' kingdom there is nor war or violence or abuse of power. Therefore, we must be leery of how we use power and work for reconciliation now. What we do now towards Jesus and his kingdom coming will endure into the new creation as Paul writes at the end of 1 Corinthians 15, his great chapter on the resurrection. “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labour is not in vain” (1 Cor. 15:51).

The LORD gave the prophet Haggai a word to give to two Jewish leaders a long time ago that speaks strongly to us today as churches seem to be dwindling away all around us. The Lord said “Work, for I am with you.” This word came to a small yet faithful remnant who had returned to Judah from the Babylonian exile. When they got back they decided to build their own houses, lavishly I might add, to the neglect of the temple and as a result they did not find fulfillment for never having enough. God eventually had to send drought to get their attention and when he had it he told them to build the temple and even though it might not be what it was in its former days, in that place, in that temple he would grant peace. The Hebrew word for peace is Shalom and it is more than simply the absence of enmity. It means contentment, friendship, a kind of prosperity where everyone has enough and no one has too much, and mental and emotional soundness...and it is because God is in our midst.

That word is for us too. We are to work at building the temple but let me tell you about that temple. Paul in 1 Corinthians rhetorically asks; “Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you (3:16)?” We are the temple; God’s Spirit dwells in us and is evident in the fellowship we share. The temple in the Bible was not simply a place where people came to sing hymns and hear a sermon. It was the place where human sin was dealt with and and borne away. It was the place where God and humanity were reconciled. It was the place where there was Shalom. So, for us now as those who are presently made alive in Christ, who have the hope of resurrection as the Holy Spirit is in us, our first order of work is to be building the temple, building shalom, here and among ourselves. We do this by confronting sin; first the sin in our own lives by prayer and confession and avoiding it. Then, we deal with the sin in our midst by holding one another accountable to the teachings of Scripture. In both cases, healing and reconciliation is the goal. Our second order of work is to bring reconciliation to the world; first, by announcing God’s forgiveness through Jesus Christ, then by working for reconciliation in the midst of brokenness of human community around us and in the world. We are those who name sin and evil for what it is and then strive to heal the brokenness left in its wake bringing forth reconciliation. Friends, let us not neglect the temple in which we by God’s grace freely live. Resurrection, New Creation, and Jesus returning to put the world to rights these are our hope for which we strive. Yet, here and now our Christian fellowship is the temple wherein the Triune God of grace lives and moves in his very being to make us anew right now. The way we love one another and our neighbours, the quality of our Christian fellowship, is the living proof there will be resurrection and New Creation and that Jesus indeed is the Risen Lord and will return to put his world to right. The way you people love each other is the proof my kids will one day meet my father. Please do not forget that. Amen.