This Week's Sermon: "Haggai"

3 Who among you is left who saw this house in its former glory?
How does it look to you now?
    Doesn’t it appear as nothing to you?
4 So now, be strong, Zerubbabel, says the Lord.
Be strong, High Priest Joshua, Jehozadak’s son,
        and be strong, all you people of the land, says the Lord.
Work, for I am with you, says the Lord of heavenly forces.
5 As with our agreement when you came out of Egypt,
        my spirit stands in your midst.
Don’t fear. (Common English Bible)

“The Minor Leagues: The “Minor” Prophets of the Bible,” Week Eleven

I don’t know if you knew this or not, but buying a home in the year of our Lord 2021 is…not a whole lot like HGTV. I think Carrie and I might be onto the premise of a future HGTV show, something like, “He scouts out the properties and researches the possibilities, she bucks the gender norms and supervises the repairs, they’re attractive and young-adjacent, they’re the Housechasing Couple!” That idea’s free, HGTV, but the next one is going to cost you.

But yeah, it was nothing like that. It was long. It was stressful. We lost out again and again before finding the place for us. And to keep our sanity through it, we perused Facebook groups like Nightmare on Zillow Street, and websites like McMansion Hell, all of which are basically devoted to the sentiment of, “Oh my gosh, have you seen this architectural horror that people really live in?” The humor there kept us sane, but there are also moments of wholesome earnestness—McMansion Hell even hosts an annual Gingerbread Mansion contest every Christmas—and McMansion Hell’s founder Kate Wagner took the time to write about why she critiques the homes she does: because she thinks they are not so much reflections of what homeowners may actually genuinely want, but rather are of what society has told us that we should want. She writes that the homes she roasts are:

Houses designed to impress others, to serve as material, architectural signifiers of the American aesthetic ideal of financial security and social success…Really, the big question being asked here is this: what would our built environment look like in a culture where we felt free to build what we really wanted instead of what we are expected to want? Examining why we want something, why we like something is an edifying exercise.

This is something I do on a regular basis, because I struggle with the same feelings of not living in a space that’s Instagrammable enough. Ultimately, so what if my book collection has outgrown my Ikea bookshelf? So what if my apartment has banged-up walls and black kitchen appliances? I have a roof over my head, and the items I own are reflections of what makes me happy.

Amid the house-themed comedy meant to keep me sane during our house search, that tangent hit me as especially profound, and I tucked it away for when we did find the house we really wanted. It did not have everything that everyone else told us we should have, but it is what we need it to be.

And as a house—of prayer, of worship, of God—should that not also be true of church, for it not to be some artificial reflection of what we are told to want, but to reflect what God tells us to want?

We are in the home stretch now of this sermon series that has taken us all the way through the summer, from Memorial Day weekend up to now, and it is a series that I have wanted to give for a long time now, almost a decade. But it never quite fit into the arc of my ministry until now. After all the work that we as a team put into resuming in-person worship services after fourteen months of online-only worship, a few months of a relatively simple series has, I know, helped me get back in the rhythm of preaching to a sanctuary of people and not a computer screen of faces!

So, this sermon series was born. Each Sunday, we are hearing from one of the twelve (or thirteen) minor prophets of the Tanakh (Old Testament), so-called because the books attributed to them are much shorter in length than those of the three “major” prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. As a group, I have found the minor prophets especially dear and compelling, but I acknowledge for some, maybe many, of you they may seem unfamiliar or even intimidating, and this series is meant to help chip away at that. The sermons are designed to be standalone, so I hope that you have not felt like you are behind if you have missed a sermon or three. And I hope by the end of this series at the end of this month, we have discovered a newfound affinity for these so-called minor prophets, and elevated them closer to major status in our faith.

To best facilitate everyone following along, we will read the prophets in the order they appear in the Protestant versions of the Tanakh. So, we began with Daniel, and followed with Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Doc, Happy, Grumpy, Bashful, Sleepy, Sneezy… (again, just seeing if you are paying attention). Today, we arrive at the prophet Haggai.

For the home stretch of these last three minor prophets, we have to fast forward in time by at least several decades, and shift gears tremendously as a result. These last three prophets—Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi—are what scholars call postexilic prophets, because they each prophesied after the exile in Babylon had ended. Sometime around 538 BCE, almost fifty years after the Israelites were sent into exile by Nebuchadnezzar II, the Babylonians themselves became yesterday’s news as Cyrus the Great conquered them, liberated the Israelites, and sent the Israelites home, free to worship God as they saw fit so long as they remained loyal subjects of their new sovereign. (Ever wonder why Cyrus is called the Great? That’s why.)

In order to worship God, though, the newly-returned Israelites faced a whole lot of big obstacles, and at least one huge obstacle: the Jerusalem temple that had been the center of their faith since the reign of Solomon some 400+ years earlier, had been destroyed in the sack of Jerusalem. It would have to be rebuilt.

Now, to have a bit more sympathy for the Israelites, consider when in your life you have faced a task so big or intimidating that you scarcely knew where to begin, and so you just decided to put it off instead. That is more or less what the Israelites did with the temple. The job of rebuilding so grand a religious edifice seemed so daunting after fifty years of exile that by the time God sent Haggai, not only had Cyrus died, but so had Cyrus’s successor! That is some holy procrastination, and it is in response to some holy-sized pressure, albeit arguably self-inflicted.

Haggai’s two-chapter message, then, boils down to “Look, y’all, it’s really time to rebuild the temple, and here’s how,” but there is also a bit more to it than just that. In the opening of Haggai 2, God—through the prophet—reminds the people that God is with them, intends to keep the promises made when God led the Israelites out of Egypt, and that the Spirit remains to that day. Memory of that matters, just as memory of the temple matters, as Haggai asks who among his audience would have even remembered the Jerusalem temple.

But it would have been impossible—and so surely Haggai would have intended this—to miss the parallel between the Israelites being led out of slavery from Egypt, and being led out of exile from Babylon. And in the journey out of Egypt (after the whole golden calf fiasco, that is) the temple of God was essentially a mobile tent. For that moment in time, a tent sufficed for the worship of God. It had to. Whatever else other civilizations were doing with the worship of their gods—and ancient Egypt in particular was light years ahead of the Israelites because that is often what happens when one people enslaves another—a tent suited God and the Israelites just fine for that moment.

Haggai is not suggesting that the returned Israelites substitute the former temple with another tent. But by highlighting that moment of the Exodus out of Egypt, he is underscoring two things: God’s faithfulness in the face of injustice, and the need for a temple that suits the moment, not whatever the Persians or the Egyptians or the Macedonians might you that a temple must be or look like. Since Haggai is asking (rhetorically or otherwise) what they remember of the Jerusalem temple, it is at least an open question of what inspirations and influences would impact the second temple.

As a result, Haggai is not interested in the human expectations for a second temple, only God’s expectations. He does not care what the Persians or the Egyptians or the Macedonians will think of a new temple. He wants to see it built as a reflection of God’s enduring connection to the people. That is what matters here, not external expectations.

So think back again to your house. What about it is a reflection of you and your needs, and by the same token, is there anything about it that is maybe a bit more a reflection of what others or society has told you that you should want in a house?

Now apply this same line of questioning to the church. What about church is a reflection of your walk with God and your spiritual needs? Is there anything about the church—it could be Valley, it could be the church universal—that you see as more a reflection of what society says God’s house must be like as opposed to what God says God’s house must be like? Especially when we know just how much over history we have gotten wrong, what and who do we rely on to finally get it right?

That dilemma is, I think, at the heart of what Haggai’s people face. They were severed from the geographic heart of their faith, and as generations passed, they may have lost some of the instruction of how exactly God’s temple was supposed to look and feel. It is little wonder they may not have known where to begin, and I can very easily see how they may have felt the presence of “what does everyone else say a temple has to look like?” looming in the background.

Now, once again, the Israelites are free, and God hastens to remind them through Haggai that God is still God—still present, still powerful, still part of their lives…and ours.

And so let the house of God be defined by God, says the prophet Haggai. May we take his words to heart in fashioning for ourselves a faith that reflects the God whom we need our Lord to be.

By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

August 15, 2021