God of the living

Haggai 2.1-9; Luke 20.27-38 

When the word of the Lord came to Haggai, the leading families of Judah were in serious disrepair.  Their forebears had witnessed the total destruction of their beloved city, Jerusalem, with the Temple of Yahweh as its centrepiece.  They and their children had been clamped  in chains, and then carted off to exile in Babylon.  Jerusalem had fallen, they believed, not primarily because a greedy emperor wanted their lands, but because God had abandoned them.  The people who now returned to the ruined city had grown up on a steady diet of preaching that condemned their fathers and grandfathers for their sins.  It was their failure to rule for the sake of the poorest and most vulnerable in the land, to live according to the covenant established with Moses and the great King David, that the prophets railed against most.  God had abandoned their families to destruction, so the prophets said, in exactly the same way as they, themselves, had abandoned their covenant duties toward the vulnerable and the poor.

So here the survivors live and worked, a new generation of Jewish aristocrats, earnestly seeking to make new lives.  Released from exile, they had returned to Judah to rebuild their inheritance.  The stately houses had all been repaired, the walls and the public buildings of the city also.  Economic life had begun to return, albeit slowly. Yet—and here’s a great puzzle—the great temple to Yahweh, jewel in Jerusalem’s crown, had not yet been restored.  Not one bit.  It remains, at the opening of the book of Haggai, a pile of rubble on the ground.  But why?  Now, I don’t know about you, but I would have expected the returned exiles to start work on the temple immediately, as a sign of their gratefulness to God for arranging their return!   But perhaps this assumption fails to take account of how deeply traumatising the exile has actually been?  Perhaps it fails to perceive a serious and ongoing spiritual malaise in the hearts of the people.

I put it to you that the pile of rubble at the heart of the city can indeed tell us something about the heart of its people at the time.  Although the people had indeed returned to Jerusalem, it does not necessarily follow that every single one of them was able to attribute that change in fortune to the forgiveness or care of God.  The return had been a struggle, afterall.  Having arrived, the seeding money from the Emperor Darius had been quickly spent on essential capital works to defend the city against its enemies.   But with the walls built, it had proven difficult to grow food and build up acceptable levels of trade and economic life.  No matter how hard the people worked, they could not, it seemed, reach a point of satisfaction in what they had achieved.   I quote from Haggai chapter 1: 

Consider how you have fared, declares the Lord.  You have sown much, and harvested little; you eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill; you clothe yourselves, but no-one is warm; and you that earn wages do so to fill bags with holes.

It seems that many of the people had become hard and pragmatic during their Babylonian exile.  Perhaps they had taken God’s abandonment, so eloquently versified by the prophets, as an unalterable given.   Perhaps a great many of them had decided (deep in their hearts if not as a matter for public declaration), to now make futures for themselves that did not look for God’s blessing in any way whatsoever.  Perhaps they believed that God was permanently absent or disapproving, so that the fortune of one’s family was now something one had to build on one’s own.  If that were true then, of course, there was little point in rebuilding the temple!  Why pour scarce family money and resources into worshipping a God who may not even care anymore?  Surely, if God could not be counted upon, one simply needed to get on with the hard work of securing a future for one’s family in spite of God?  Of course, few would have uttered such things publicly in Jerusalem.  Yet one suspects that this is what most of the people believed.  And their action, or inaction, regarding the public honouring of God tends to betray that fact.

Now, this practical atheism of the post-exilic Jewish leaders, has a familiar ring to it I reckon.  Like the returned exiles, most Australians say that they believe in some kind of higher power they are content to call God.  Like the returned exiles, most of our fellow Australians believe that we are here to make life as prosperous as possible for our children.  To that end, we defend our country against its enemies, and we work as hard as the returned exiles did.  But we are like the returned exiles in another way also.  We are practical atheists.  While most of us declare that God may well exist, we also believe that God’s existence or non-existence is actually rather irrelevant to the way we live our lives.  Deep in our hearts we suspect that God doesn’t actually care for us very much.  Afterall, if God cared for us, if God considered us worthy of his care, wouldn’t our lives be more satisfying than they are?  Wouldn’t they be less painful and disappointing?

So, we are not so very different, contemporary Australians and post-exilic Jews.  Who would have thought?  Because of our practical atheism, neither of us are particularly inclined to provide, out of our hard-earned resources, for any public honouring or worship of God.  We are all very aware, are we not, that most of our friends and family visit  the church for particular occasions, but they do not belong to the church in the sense of submitting their own fortunes to the will and way of God in Christ.

The word of the Lord that came to the prophet Haggai is therefore as much a word for us as it was for his contemporaries.  Allow me quote: 

Is this a time for you to live in your panelled houses, while my house lies in ruins? . . . Take courage, all you people of the land, says the Lord Build my house, for I am with you, according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt.  My spirit abides among you; do not fear.  The latter splendour of this house shall be greater than the former, say the Lord of hosts: and in this place I will give peace. 

This prophecy addresses the pragmatism of practical atheists in two ways.  First, to our deep-down grief and resignation in the face of God’s absence or abandonment the prophecy speaks a word of gentle comfort.  “I have not abandoned you,” says the Lord.  “I felt betrayed and hurt and angry at your sin, but that does not mean that I have abandoned you altogether.  See, I am with you now.  My spirit is nearby, even as I have been nearby in the history of your people.”  The word of comfort in Scripture is usually associated with an encouragement to remember, to remember the ways in which God’s love and care have become tangibly real in days gone by.  “Remember what you learned from your parents,” says the Lord.  “When the people of Israel were slaves in Egypt, I rescued them and brought them into a land of their own.  When you were taken in exile, I forgave your sins and brought you back to the land of your inheritance.”  And for we who came to birth in latter days, God says, “Remember, most of all, the way I myself came to be with you in human form, to receive in my own body the full consequence of human evil; but also to show you the way of love that leads to peace.  Remember Christ hanging on a cross.  This is my loving solidarity with you in the tragic logic of your inhumanity toward one another. But remember, also, Christ risen from the grave into the bosom of God’s peace.  This is the future you may share, also, if you cling to Christ absolutely, if you allow his way to become your way.”  The word of prophecy comes first, therefore, to resist the story of abandonment with a story of God’s loving presence.

But there is a second element to the prophecy.  We noted earlier the grumbling of the returned exiles that no matter how hard they worked to secure the prosperity of their families, they were never entirely satisfied.  No matter how much they grew, produced or procured, the prosperity they sought somehow eluded them.  This is how it is, I think, with all who believe they can built a prosperous future apart from the gift and blessing of God.  Without God, you see, we are all at sea when it comes to knowing what to build.  For we do not, apart from God, understand what genuine prosperity might look and feel like.  How many people believe that keeping up with the economic fortunes of the Joneses or the Chiangs or the Rajahs will bring prosperity and peace?  How many people believe that if we work hard all our lives, we might eventually experience peace and prosperity in some kind of leisured retirement?  The prophecy of Haggai, by way of contrast, understands that prosperity has very little to do with economic security, but everything to do with Shalom, that is, with our willingness to be at peace with everything that God would give us.  Shalom is not something that we may earn by our hard work.  It is something to be received as a gift from God.  If we believe we must produce it by our energy and effort, then it shall allude us forever.  If, on the other hand, we are able to see that all the world—earth, air, fire and water—is a gift from God, then we shall perhaps be content to simply share in the common wealth of that gift with our fellow human beings.  God’s way to prosperity is, in fact, the opposite of that which is pursued by most of us.  It is to share our food and our homes with the hungry and to honour God with our praise and thanksgiving.

When a people abandons its worship of God, when the symbols of public worship (a temple or a church, for example) are allowed to fall into ruin while the symbols of private wealth (houses, cars and lots of gadgets) grow ever more glamorous, then we are in serious trouble as a culture.  For when we scramble to procure our own security, our own salvation, we finally lose the very quality that makes us human:  our capacity to be thrilled by all the wonder of the God’s gift, our capacity, in short, to be really alive and awake as human beings.  For the resurrection of Christ is not the final procurement of an economically secure future for ourselves or our offspring, as the Saducees suggested in their question to Jesus in the gospel story.  No.  The resurrection of Christ is neither a buying nor a selling, but a simple enjoyment with our brothers and sisters (of every age and tribe) of all that teaming life that God would give us, if only we could put aside our hankerings, and simply receive what is offered with thankfulness.  May God grant that it may be so, even for this Uniting Church.