excerpt from a sermon on Haggai
Below is an excerpt from a sermon I preached a few weeks ago. You can find the full audio here.
The sermon text is Haggai 2:1-9 and 2 Cor 5:1, 5-7, 14-18.
“Structures of Peace”
…
The exiles who return had grown up with stories of their parents’ and grandparents’ beloved Jerusalem.
Jerusalem is being rebuilt, the place is not new to structures, but the builders are new to the place.
To understand their priorities in building their new-to-them home, it’s worth wondering what their lives had been like back in Babylon.
Likely, in the first years of the exile, they struggled with language, with culture, living in insular communities on the edges of towns, trying desperately to preserve the old ways, doing so in attempt to preserve their wounded souls.
As time went on they engaged more and more in their new culture and found ways to assimilate and perhaps found contentment.
Even so, it’s easy to imagine that late at night, when the doors were shut and the fires were low and only other exiles were gathered close, they let loose the memories of the Jerusalem they had left, and the former selves they left behind.
They gave those born in exile the stories of what once was. These stories intermingle memory and myth and paint a picture of a Jerusalem where they were comfortable, prosperous, powerful.
This is the destination of those who return:
the Jerusalem where every labor produces something,
where their homes are more luxurious than the ones left behind,
where they are no longer relegated to the edge of town but
dominate the center of it,
where they don’t merely survive, but thrive.
They return to Jerusalem
fueled by borrowed nostalgia
and are intent to prosper.
Do these longings resonate with us?
The longing to return to the forefront of the community,
to return to thriving,
to return to a nostalgia-tinged notion of
power and influence once held?
I think, sometimes, this is a longing of the church.
I think we struggle to place ourselves, our own faith stories, within the narrative of church and power and politics, some happy with the statistics of a certain number of Christians voting for certain politicians, along certain issues, guided by a faith that sometimes sounds like fear regarding control over the culture.
Others are less happy with the same statistics, wondering how those Christians - our brothers and sisters, may we never forget - get to dominate the narrative, and wondering how we can take it back.
And perhaps you’re groaning and thinking: “listen, I definitely have nostalgia for times gone by when the preacher didn’t use the word “politics”” and, fair enough.
But it’s worth naming that narrative, it lives, it lives on cable news and social media newsfeeds, and we should be aware of it, of how it tugs at us with promises of power once held and now faded, and it’s just like any other memory, affected by nostalgia, the collective story being told, in this case, by those with an agenda.
Sometimes these longings to return to the forefront, to return to thriving, to return to a nostalgia-tinged notion of power and influence once held, also play out in the local church, in our church, when we think we remember times of every room filled and Sunday schools overflowing with children.
That is a real and I think entirely healthy nostalgia, a story told with emotions similar to that of the exiles, a story I hear and hold and carry of what this place once was, long before I arrived.
….
Who of you is left who saw this house in its former glory?
How does it look to you now?
The story-filled exiles are beginning to build, and, as per usual, when God’s children begin to build things, along comes a troublesome prophet.
Who of you is left?
If we agree that it was an unlikely journey for those who had left Jerusalem 70 years before, and if we agree the prophet probably knew that, because he is, after all, a prophet…
it seems like Haggai isn’t actually asking who remembers the house in its former glory.
He’s not asking for their memories.
He’s doing something else, with this question.
