Rebuilding

The scriptures referred to are Haggai 1:15b-2:9.

On Fresh Air this week, Dave Davies interviewed David Owen, who has written a book called Volume Control, Hearing in a Deafening World. And he points out that most people by the time they retire have some hearing loss. And you might just attribute that to aging. But in primitive tribes, elderly people hear just as well as infants. Our problems come largely from the fact that we live in a very noisy world. And it's not just the rock concerts that we attended when we were young that have damaged our ears; it's the lawn mowers and hair dryers and food processors that we use all the time without using ear protection. It's the noisy restaurants that, believe it or not, are deliberately that way because they don't want you to talk but to drink and eat and leave so they can seat someone else. And it means that as we get older our brain has a hard time focusing on listening to just one person in a crowd because of all the ambient noise.

The prophet Haggai was encountering something similar. The noise of the people's lives were drowning out God's voice.

First, some background. His book is one we can date precisely. It took place in the months of August through December in the year 520 BC. When the Persians defeated the Babylonians in 538 BC, Cyrus let 50,000 Jews return to their homeland. But it was a ruin. They had to rebuild everything: their homes, the walls of Jerusalem, the temple. It was taxing and discouraging. They despaired of the rebuilt temple ever matching the splendor of Solomon's temple, though only the very oldest of them could remember seeing it. There was opposition and apathy to overcome. And so work stopped. 18 years later, it was still in a sorry state. Basically, all they had was an altar. And things were not going well for the remnant of the Jewish nation. There was a drought affecting their 3 main crops: grain, wine and olive oil. It seemed like they were laboring for nothing.

And that was the point. The community had no focus, no center, no sense of purpose. They had built nice houses themselves with wood paneling, a luxury then. But God's house was still a mess. The place where they were supposed to come together to meet God was neglected. Their priorities were skewed. As we said, the clamor of their lives was drowning out the voice of God. Haggai called on them to complete God's temple. It would give the people a focal point. It would bring them together as they remembered what made them a nation: the God who gives life and set them free, first from Egypt and more recently from Babylon.

And God tells them that the new temple will one day surpass Solomon's. And he promises his glory will fill it. What's interesting is the governor, Zerubbabel, is a descendant of David and an ancestor of both Joseph and Mary (Matthew 1:12; Luke 3:27) and therefore of Jesus. And oddly enough, the high priest at the time of Haggai is Joshua, the Hebrew name which, transliterated into Greek, is Jesus. God is pointing to the way in which his presence or glory will enter the temple at the right time: through his son, who will replace the fancier temple Herod will build and which the Romans will destroy.

When I do these deep dives into Bible or church history, it's not just to give you cool facts such as you might get in a Smithsonian Channel special. It's because what God says to us in his Word still applies today. And while we do not need to physically rebuild a temple, it is obvious we need to rebuild the church. And just as Jesus, a person, replaced the temple, so the church is not buildings but people, in whom God's Spirit resides and works. And just as Haggai tries to keep his people from despairing because what they are to build will not resemble the splendor of the old temple, we cannot let the old form the church took keep us from working on what God is now directing us to build.

Most of us remember the time when church attendance was at its historic high, the 1950s. It was the post-war era. Our boys came home from the horrific fighting in Nazi-occupied Europe and the devastation wrought in Asia by Imperialist Japan. They had seen enough of man's inhumanity to man and they realized the evil they had seen arose from great spiritual emptiness. So they just wanted a normal life. They started families and along with a baby boom there was a boom in church building and attendance. More people had a church affiliation in the middle to late 20^th century than they did when the country was founded. Historians examining evidence of church attendance and membership estimate that in 1776 only 17% of US citizens had a religious affiliation. The pilgrims may loom large in our popular idea of the founding of this country but they weren't even a majority on the Mayflower. People with business interests were. Throughout the 1800s various circuit riders and evangelists and revivalists managed to get the rate of churchgoers up from 34% to about 45%. It wasn't until 1906 that just over 50% of Americans were members of a church. [I'm getting my facts from here.] So our current slide down to 50% of those in the US claiming church affiliation is still above what it was in the 19^th century. However some research shows that a lot of people lie about how often they actually attend church and they say the real rate of attendance is just over 17%, essentially what it was when our country was founded. [Here]

What made the US a majority Christian nation were the people like John Wesley and George Whitefield and Dwight Moody and their followers, who went around the country spreading the word and planting churches. They did not live in a “Build it and they will come” era, as the Boomers did. They realized that first you have to have Christians, then you build a church. The advantage they had was, ironically, they did not live in a post-Christian society. One minister in the 1800s wrote, “...there are American families in this part of the country who never saw a bible, nor heard of Jesus Christ...the whole country, from Lake Erie to the Gulf of Mexico, is as the valley of the shadow of death.” I feel he must have been exaggerating, at least in regards to people never even hearing of Jesus, but at least he had no misinterpretations of the gospel to dispel when planting the seed. Most people in our society today feel they know enough to say they are rejecting Christianity, even when it is obvious they really don't. They are rejecting a caricature. And sadly, we have either been providing that caricature or complicit in its being spread or we have not been vocal enough in correcting the picture of following Jesus others have painted.

For instance, Jesus said, “You cannot serve both God and money.” (Matthew 6:24) There is a very influential offshoot of Pentecostalism that teaches that God wants everyone to be rich. This “prosperity gospel” distorts a key element of Christianity: self-sacrificial service. Jesus said his disciples must deny themselves and take up their crosses. (Mark 8:34) As Paul put it, “For none of us lives for himself and none dies for himself. If we live, we live for the Lord; if we die, we die for the Lord. Therefore, whether we live or die, we are the Lord's.” (Romans 14:7-8) Following Jesus means turning from oneself and outward, towards God and towards others.

And this is not really a new feature of God's message. While Haggai focuses on serving God by restoring his temple, his contemporary Zechariah focuses serving God through serving others. He writes, “This is what the Lord Almighty says, 'Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow, or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. In your hearts do not think evil of each other.'” (Zechariah 7:9-10) Haggai's emphasis on serving God and Zechariah's emphasis on serving people compliment each other. And we see Jesus was in line with the Old Testament prophets when he summarized the law into 2 commandments: to love God and to love other people.

If our society, like that of Haggai and Zechariah, seems to be ailing, we see the causes in our ignoring God's priorities expressed in his command to exercise true justice, to show compassion and mercy to one another, to not oppress the disadvantaged, and to not think evil of one another. How can a society work if we are at each other's throats and accusing one another of wanting our nation to fail? Who wants our country or our world to fail? We may have different approaches but provided we want the same goal—liberty and justice for all—the rest is details to be worked out. We need to drop the rhetoric and start listening to each other. We need to take seriously the pain and suffering of every person and not just be concerned with what is good mostly for me and mine.

And that is what is behind the Golden Rule 2020 Initiative. Signed by the Presiding Bishops of both our denominations as well as by by representatives from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the American Baptist Churches USA, the Presbyterian Church USA, the National Association of Evangelicals, the United Church of Christ, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, the Minnesota Council of Churches, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism and more, the statement of support reads:

We are Christians with different theological and political views who have come together to express concern about the polarization and incivility that is tearing our country apart. We are also deeply troubled by the prospect of an angry and hateful political campaign season in 2020 that will further divide us as a nation.

We believe that we can find guidance through this national dilemma in the teachings of Jesus. In particular, we believe that Jesus’ command to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” should be taken seriously by Christians who engage in political activity. We also believe that if enough people follow this “Golden Rule” principle, it will help generate the respect and civility we so desperately need in our country.

Churches have an important role to play in helping to heal America, and we hope and pray that local congregations will be active in efforts to increase understanding and bridge divisions in our country between now and the 2020 election. To this end, we encourage Christians of different political views to come together on Sunday, November 3, 2019—exactly one year before the 2020 election—to participate in Golden Rule 2020: A Call for Dignity and Respect in Politics. On that day, we invite congregations and individuals to do two things: 1) pray for the healing of the divisions in our country, and 2) promote the use of the Golden Rule in our own political discussions and election activities in 2020.

When Haggai delivered his message the leaders, Zerubbabel the governor and Joshua the high priest responded. And when the leaders focused on rebuilding, so did the people. The leaders set the tone. And Zechariah put special emphasis on Joshua, the high priest, cleaning up his act. If the religious leaders let down their end, it demoralizes the people of God. Every week we see religious leaders, often with large churches and followings, caught in financial and sexual scandals. They lose their authority to speak for God. But God offers Joshua a chance to change and then prophesies that he will have a key role in cleansing the land.

We face problems in our land similar to those faced by the people of the land of Judah. The biggest ones have to do with people. Jesus proposed some pretty radical ways of dealing with interpersonal problems: love your enemy; pray for those who persecute you; turn the other cheek; go the second mile; don't call each other names; don't retaliate; reconcile with someone before going to God's altar; don't pass judgment on others; and attend to what's obscuring your perspective of things before you try to remove the speck in someone else's eye. (Matthew 5-7) In other words, don't go with your natural inclination. Don't put yourself before others. Stand up for everyone's well being. And be willing to take a hit for the team: Team Jesus.

Like Haggai, Jesus calls us to change our priorities. He calls us to filter out the noise of everyday life, to tune out the cacophony of the world and focus on God's voice. God is telling us to rebuild his church. It is a mess; there are obstacles and even people opposing it, but that must not dissuade us. Things looked bleak from the cross but Jesus was able to rise above the ultimate obstacle, death, and wrest victory from the grip of the grave.

And God promises that his church will be more splendid than what used to be. We get a glimpse of this in the book of Revelation. “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.” (Revelation 7:9) When we say church, we tend to think of our church. But the church is the body of all believers, throughout the world, worshiping in every tongue, with different vestments, different ritual acts, offering different ministries, but all united in one Spirit, with one set of priorities: to show their love for God through their worship services and their love for those made in God's image through self-sacrificial service.