Merry Christmas!
I'm sitting here at my laptop while listening to the new ipod Nano that my wife gave me for Christmas. I've packed out its supposed 2 G capacity (it seems to only hold 1.7 G), and enjoying it. My wife really surprised me with it, as I was never expected such a gift. I only hinted at how nice it would be to have one just a week or so ago (she had already purchased it weeks before!), and lo and behold.
And speaking of lo and behold, as cool as it is to finally have my own ipod, it is hard to believe that Christmas has come and gone once more. Christmas Eve for my family started with us going to our church's second service (no Sunday School that day, so we slept in, and went to a local restaurant for brunch before heading over to worship). After worship and celebrating the fourth Sunday of Advent, we came home, cleaned up some for family coming over later (actually my wife did most of the prep while I played some video games with the kids). My mom and my cousin and her husband came over later in the afternoon, and we all headed back to the sanctuary for our "Family" Christmas Eve service, alias, the "noisy, I don't know how to behave in worship" service (but hey, I'm not bitter!). It actually was nice over all. My daughters both sang as part of the children's choir, and both my oldest daughter and I read from the gospel accounts of Christ's birth.
There's more to our Christmas evening, but I really want to just mention a thought about Christ's birth. To stop and think about it, it is absolutely incredible that such a thing happened, and became reality. The idea of God becoming a human being, and yet, still fully God. It is the most amazing act of love and compassion conceivable. God became one of us. God among us. And that effects of the incarnation still go on. In late Spring we'll celebrate Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was given to those who confess Christ as Lord. The Holy Spirit keeps the power of the incarnation alive in each of us.
This is God's love for us. Jesus Christ. Son of God. God with us. I hope that as you continue enjoy what time you have off from work or school, as you have fun with whatever Christmas presents you received, that you would remember this greatest of presents. May you be blessed by that great event of some two thousand years ago. Merry Christmas!!!
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Wouldn't It Be Strange?
My friend, Fred Kofi Afedzi Hagan gave me the 1999 Charlie Peacock album 'Kingdom Come' this past summer, and I found that the second track has easily become my favorite. In a sense, it's a compilation of some of Jesus' hard sayings focusing on what it means to live in the Kingdom. "Wouldn't It Be Strange?" challenges our understanding of "right" Kingdom living. The choruses goes as such:
Wouldn't it be strange if riches made you poor,
if everything you earned left you wanting more?
Wouldn't it be strange to question what it's for?
Wouldn't it be strange if power made you weak,
if victory came to those who turn the other cheek?
Wouldn't it be strange to welcome your defeat?
Wouldn't it be strange to find out in the end,
the first will be last and all the losers win?
Wouldn't it be strange if Jesus came again?
These lyrics come from places in the Gospels like Matthew 5:39 and Luke 6:29, Matthew 16:25 and Luke 17:33, Matthew 19:30 and Mark 10: 43-45, and Acts 1:9-11. I think the problem is how closely the Church culture strangely reflects Worldly culture, especially in terms of what we place value upon. After working in the Church for twelve plus years, I can testify from first hand experience that there is subtle (and not so subtle) worldliness that has disguised itself as particular kind of false piety. The sad thing is, I think, that most people don't really recognize it. And it is difficult for most pastors and elders to communicate, teach, and model for congregations. One question that comes to mind is, what is normative for interpreting and living out the faith, both personally and corporately? The interesting tension here is the difference between appropriate ownership and indigenization of the Gospel by a particular culture or people group, and the Gospel becoming so acculturated that we equate the controlling of and/or participating in the culture with living out the Gospel rightly. So what is the difference? I'm feeling that there's little difference in the mind of many Christians in the West.
My questions are tough. Is your church preaching this? Is your small group wrestling with what this means? with the implications of this? Are you asking the Holy Spirit to help you living in a manner worthy of your calling? Wouldn't it be strange if Christians suddenly started to live like this?
What do you think?
Wouldn't it be strange if riches made you poor,
if everything you earned left you wanting more?
Wouldn't it be strange to question what it's for?
Wouldn't it be strange if power made you weak,
if victory came to those who turn the other cheek?
Wouldn't it be strange to welcome your defeat?
Wouldn't it be strange to find out in the end,
the first will be last and all the losers win?
Wouldn't it be strange if Jesus came again?
These lyrics come from places in the Gospels like Matthew 5:39 and Luke 6:29, Matthew 16:25 and Luke 17:33, Matthew 19:30 and Mark 10: 43-45, and Acts 1:9-11. I think the problem is how closely the Church culture strangely reflects Worldly culture, especially in terms of what we place value upon. After working in the Church for twelve plus years, I can testify from first hand experience that there is subtle (and not so subtle) worldliness that has disguised itself as particular kind of false piety. The sad thing is, I think, that most people don't really recognize it. And it is difficult for most pastors and elders to communicate, teach, and model for congregations. One question that comes to mind is, what is normative for interpreting and living out the faith, both personally and corporately? The interesting tension here is the difference between appropriate ownership and indigenization of the Gospel by a particular culture or people group, and the Gospel becoming so acculturated that we equate the controlling of and/or participating in the culture with living out the Gospel rightly. So what is the difference? I'm feeling that there's little difference in the mind of many Christians in the West.
My questions are tough. Is your church preaching this? Is your small group wrestling with what this means? with the implications of this? Are you asking the Holy Spirit to help you living in a manner worthy of your calling? Wouldn't it be strange if Christians suddenly started to live like this?
What do you think?
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Scripture as the Ground for Theology
In this last year, I came across two quotes that I found complimentary to one another. While I cannot give credit to the "authors", I cannot take that credit for myself. The first was, "The Bible is the soul of all theology." And the second was, "Theology is the wall that protects the Bible." The two must be paired together; they are mutually informative of one another. In giving serious consideration to how one reads scripture and how one works out theology, we must be careful not to fall into the modernist trap of artificially separating the two from one another. We must read the scriptures, understanding that they were written in a certain context, to a certain people, at a certain time, by certain men. And yet, we must realize that they were written down at the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. But what does that mean? Does it mean, as some would say, that this means that every last word was carefully chosen, essentially dictated by the Holy Spirit to men who merely acted as stenographers? Say it ain't so! The Bible, its content, though divinely inspired, was written down by men, and incorporated by men in its current format, what we call the Canon. We should rightly believe this all to have divine inspiration behind it. But we should not remove the humanity of the authors from our understanding either. After all, what is it to say that one Gospel writer's Greek was better than another writer? Was one more divinely inspired than the other? Can you see the rabbit trails and red herrings that open up to waste our time?
Instead, let us consider that the scriptures are man's divinely inspired words about God. I point to Barth's 3-Fold Word of God, whereby we know and acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the eternal, living Word of God incarnate, the first and true Word of God. Scripture is the second Word of God, that which records God's and God's people's faith, struggles, successes, failures, and histories, not to mention plain old instructions for living out of that faith, but is only and truly the Word of God when read with the eyes of faith. And the third Word of God is the proclamation of the Word of God, rightly done - not every sermon can be said to be this third tier - it is ultimately up to the workings of God's Spirit to bring that about. But all three of these are some how or another integrated. We must acknowledge that any and all revelation of the three comes solely from God alone. Any understanding that we can lay claim to, cannot be misunderstood as to be from our own insight - consider Peter's testimony as to Jesus' identity in Matthew 16; Jesus Himself told Peter that he was able to proclaim that truth only because it was revealed to him by the Father. And so it is today. What we claim to know or understand about God is not through our own shrewd study of scripture, but through the Holy Spirit's work of leading us into all truth.
But this can only happen as we read and learn the scriptures as our frame of reference. We cannot make any faith claims on scripture without first letting God lay claim to every part of our lives (not in a sense that we can become perfected through our own force of will). We must prayerfully read the Bible, asking God to make known to us what it means. This is not accomplished through personal interpretation per se. It relies on a mix of proper exegesis, understanding the historical context, and whole-book context that verses and chapters fall into. This is to say, we must go beyond simple proof texting, and look for what God wants to tell and reveal to us. And, we must do this beyond ourselves. That is, we must work collaboratively, as much as that's possible, to insure that we our not forcing our individual aprioris onto the message of the text, and therefore into our theological statements. At the same time, we must allow the scriptures to critique our aprioris, for as the Word of God, it stands apart from the work that we are trying to synthesize from it. And this is important for each culture and each generation, as our contexts are different, so will scripture's critique be different, and so will our understanding. That is not to say that we should reject the theological workings of the past. But it is to say that just as Martin Luther and John Calvin were required to respond to the challenges of their days, so are we called to step up and biblically and theologically address our age.
What do you think???
Instead, let us consider that the scriptures are man's divinely inspired words about God. I point to Barth's 3-Fold Word of God, whereby we know and acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the eternal, living Word of God incarnate, the first and true Word of God. Scripture is the second Word of God, that which records God's and God's people's faith, struggles, successes, failures, and histories, not to mention plain old instructions for living out of that faith, but is only and truly the Word of God when read with the eyes of faith. And the third Word of God is the proclamation of the Word of God, rightly done - not every sermon can be said to be this third tier - it is ultimately up to the workings of God's Spirit to bring that about. But all three of these are some how or another integrated. We must acknowledge that any and all revelation of the three comes solely from God alone. Any understanding that we can lay claim to, cannot be misunderstood as to be from our own insight - consider Peter's testimony as to Jesus' identity in Matthew 16; Jesus Himself told Peter that he was able to proclaim that truth only because it was revealed to him by the Father. And so it is today. What we claim to know or understand about God is not through our own shrewd study of scripture, but through the Holy Spirit's work of leading us into all truth.
But this can only happen as we read and learn the scriptures as our frame of reference. We cannot make any faith claims on scripture without first letting God lay claim to every part of our lives (not in a sense that we can become perfected through our own force of will). We must prayerfully read the Bible, asking God to make known to us what it means. This is not accomplished through personal interpretation per se. It relies on a mix of proper exegesis, understanding the historical context, and whole-book context that verses and chapters fall into. This is to say, we must go beyond simple proof texting, and look for what God wants to tell and reveal to us. And, we must do this beyond ourselves. That is, we must work collaboratively, as much as that's possible, to insure that we our not forcing our individual aprioris onto the message of the text, and therefore into our theological statements. At the same time, we must allow the scriptures to critique our aprioris, for as the Word of God, it stands apart from the work that we are trying to synthesize from it. And this is important for each culture and each generation, as our contexts are different, so will scripture's critique be different, and so will our understanding. That is not to say that we should reject the theological workings of the past. But it is to say that just as Martin Luther and John Calvin were required to respond to the challenges of their days, so are we called to step up and biblically and theologically address our age.
What do you think???
Monday, December 11, 2006
Behind the Sermon on Suffering
As a matter of course, I want to explain some things about my previous entry, this sermon on suffering. What started out as a class assignment (and not necessarily one I was enthralled with), actually took on a life of its own. As I sat down to write it, it proceeded to write itself. It was, for me, a catharsis of sorts.
And this is at the heart of what I wanted to share here... In writing out this sermon, in examining this short passage of Haggai, and trying to determine what this passage was saying, I had to deal with how do we look at God with eyes of faith, when so-called promises of redemption seem to fall flat. Haggai made some pretty audacious statements at the end of his prophetic work. And little came to pass in terms of its coming to fruition. I not only wondered how the people of God felt, I actually was wrestling with my own issues of disappointment with God, and wondered, what's next?
This sermon allowed me to work through some of those issues. And, as I struggled to understand the text beyond the text, I came to a quiet and silently provacative understanding that ultimately, God calls us to have faith in the silence that follows the text. That is where I am. That is the power of the sermon, at least for me. It ended up being a powerful sermon to preach in class, and as I finished giving it to my class, I knew I had glorified God.
And this is at the heart of what I wanted to share here... In writing out this sermon, in examining this short passage of Haggai, and trying to determine what this passage was saying, I had to deal with how do we look at God with eyes of faith, when so-called promises of redemption seem to fall flat. Haggai made some pretty audacious statements at the end of his prophetic work. And little came to pass in terms of its coming to fruition. I not only wondered how the people of God felt, I actually was wrestling with my own issues of disappointment with God, and wondered, what's next?
This sermon allowed me to work through some of those issues. And, as I struggled to understand the text beyond the text, I came to a quiet and silently provacative understanding that ultimately, God calls us to have faith in the silence that follows the text. That is where I am. That is the power of the sermon, at least for me. It ended up being a powerful sermon to preach in class, and as I finished giving it to my class, I knew I had glorified God.
Saturday, December 02, 2006
A Sermon about Suffering
This is a sermon that I delivered to my 'Theology of the Exile' class as an assignment. We had to preach from the text of a Post-Exilic prophet. Hey, I like challenges, so I chose to preach from Haggai 2:20-23, with the focus on how do we deal with disappointment with God? It was one of those inspired sermons. As I sat down to write it, it pretty much wrote itself. It's not perfect, to say the least, and a couple of my class mates felt I rushed too quickly to the "Jesus" answer, but the point is that ultimately, the sermon was written for me, and for that matter, for anyone struggling with God's silence in the face of suffering. So read on ... and let me know what you think ...
Today, I want to invite you to consider life’s roller coasters; to look at the ups and downs of life in general, and our own lives specifically. We’ve all experienced that excitement that happens when words of promise and hope come our way, it’s a difficult thing not to get caught up in the whirlwind, no matter who you are. Think back a couple of years ago. We saw it when the democrats put forth John Kerry as their presidential candidate four years after a disappointing defeat. We saw it when the republicans nominated George W. Bush to a second candidacy, hoping for four more years. We felt it when the Eagles made it to their fourth NFC championship game, and then to the superbowl for the first time in over twenty years. Let’s face it, when people get excited, they really get excited. To be hopeful, to live for something hopeful is, I think, something we are naturally wired for as humans. No one would say that it’s wrong to want or yearn for hope. And in our scripture passage today, we read that the prophet Haggai is delivering a message that is full of such excitement, hope, and promise such as the Jews have not seen in a long time. After all, they had been exiled from their home land. Their lives not only disrupted, but devastated by the events of Babylon’s destruction of Jerusalem, and the beloved Temple.
Picture it for yourselves… to be under the impression that you are under the protection of the LORD and that He shall always inhabit His Temple, and then the shock of becoming a beaten and subjected people, carried off to a foreign land, wondering what would become of everything you knew and loved. But then hope! Your family has actually made a go of it in this strange land. You’ve been able to prosper. And suddenly, your people find out that the Babylonians themselves have been beaten by a new empire, the Persians. And you wonder, what does this mean? What does it mean when the Persian King Cyrus issues an edict announcing that the Jews in Babylon can return to Judah, to Jerusalem? What does it mean? You return, though not entirely certain, for life was good in Babylon, and not everyone left, even with the promise of rebuilding that old beloved city. And so you go. But when you arrive your hopes are fast to fade. The city is in ruins, a sense of hopelessness, and the first images of devastation grip you firmly as you arrive in the old land of promise. And as you gather your family, that family that has grown and prospered in exile, you wonder if you’ve made a major mistake by returning to Jerusalem. Here you are, and your heart is at a fork in the road, with one direction leading to despair, and the other toward hope. So what are you thinking? What are you going to do? Perhaps these are the questions that many of the Jews who returned to Jerusalem felt or struggled with.
Into this situation of doubt comes the prophet Haggai. Not much is known about this prophet of the post-Exilic period. He seems to have begun his preaching around 520 BC, around the beginning of the reign of the Persian King Darius. It is not known whether he was among those returning, or was someone who had been left behind in the land. We do know that this prophet was very concerned about the future of the people, and he saw their future blessings tied up with the construction of a new Temple. But he was faced with overcoming a lot of disappointment first. After all, you can’t just launch a major building fund campaign when the people aren’t exactly confident of where God has led them. It may have been easy for Jeremiah to have purchased a plot of land so long ago. It may have been easy for the prophet Isaiah to speak about new beginnings and a new exodus. But when it looks like the land of milk and honey curdled or soured a long time ago, you know it’s not going to be easy going.
And here’s Haggai, this walking, talking mystery prophet who challenges the people to harken back to the days of yester year and remember how great it was to have a great Temple to the One True God, and to have a King in the line of David on the throne. And he pushes that button, that button of hope; that the LORD is going to do it all over again. Oh, Zerubbabel may only be the governor of Judah now, but the LORD has plans for him. Consider what the text says: The LORD has promised to shake the heavens and the earth, to overturn royal thrones and shatter the power of the foreign kingdoms, to overthrow chariots and their drivers. This is good. This is just what a Jew coming out of the exile might want to hear. And if that’s not enough, the LORD Almighty has promised to make Zerubbabel His signet ring. Although there’s a great many opinions as to what Haggai means by making such declarations about Zerubbabel, whether he’s speaking of outright political independence from Persia or any other foreign power, or he just means a resurgence of Judah from the ash heap of its last hundred years is hard to say. But how can you not feel the excitement, or not get caught up in the promise of new hope, the promise of a new beginning? This must have sounded like good news to those who had returned from Jerusalem and were questioning the sanity of that choice.
And yet ultimately, we must deal with the realities of life. I think Haggai’s prophecy, for all of its hope, for all of its excitement, for all its promise, is a story that ends on a silent, unwritten post-script: what happened to Zerubbabel? There is no other mention of the governor, … by Haggai, or any other prophet or chronicler. One commentator even says that this passage cannot be adequately explained by its contemporary history. We are left to wonder. And I wonder if it didn’t leave the people of Jerusalem to wonder just what had happened.
It certainly leaves us moderns to wrestle with the implications of this promise that seems unfulfilled. And it leaves us to wrestle with the painful question of what do we do when God disappoints. Oh, this goes far deeper than the disappointment of your candidate for President losing another close race, or your candidate for President winning, but then taking the country in the wrong direction. And it’s oh so much more than when the football team you’ve loved and rooted for all your life finally gets over that final hurdle and then goes onto lose the superbowl.
No, this is real life. This is the deepest, heartsick notion of disappointment with God that we must wrestle with today, because it is a place that too often we as Christians tread, and at the same time, it is a place too many of us deny having been. Let’s face it, who wants to hear a sermon on disappointment, let alone disappointment with God; who wants to be confronted by the dashing of one’s hopes and joys upon the rocks of disappointment? And yet, that is where we tread this morning because we carry disappointments, and many of us have walls up between us and God, and between us and one another.
And so, what is your disappointment? Author Philip Yancey says that disappointment occurs when the actual experience of something falls short of what we anticipate or expect. How do we gauge the effects of a failed marriage?; of getting fired from a job?; of receiving a devastating medical diagnosis?; or of losing a pastor to sin? What do we do when we’ve prayed for healing and it doesn’t come? How do we deal with God’s “promise” not coming to pass? What are we to feel and think when we believe, or think God has let us down – that God has disappointed our hopes?
Disappointment is quite possibly one of the oldest of human experiences. It must have been present when Adam and Eve buried their youngest son after his murder by his older brother. After bargaining with God to spare Sodom, did Abraham feel disappointed when the LORD wiped out that city? And consider the many Psalms of disappointment, such as Ps. 44: 23-24, “Awake, O Lord! Why do you sleep? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever. Why do you hide your face and forget our misery and oppression?” Did Haggai feel this way? Have you ever felt this way? Has God ever left you to wonder if He’s rejected you? I think many of us have. And perhaps, as you sit here listening, you are even now, wrestling with such feelings in your hearts.
As I bring you this word, I can testify to its challenges and difficulties, because I too am struggling with disappointment with God. I am in the midst of trying to make sense of what God has allowed to happen, or has not kept from happening in my life of late. I have spent tearful times in prayer lately, asking God to make it all right, to bring me vindication and justice. I have told God that I am thoroughly disappointed with Him, and that my faith in Him has taken a beating. And to be brutally honest, I have found little relief - - - There is no wonderful Christian triumphal celebrating in my story so far. I bring you this word this morning amidst my personal disappointments. I bring you this message of disappointment from a place of dark uncertainty. And I can tell you that even as I struggle with my disappointment with God, I am brought lower in my struggle by being disappointed with myself, with the guilt I feel due to what seems to be my egregious lack of faith and trust in the God who has shown Himself faithful and trustworthy so many times before in my own past. And I have to admit, both to God and to myself, I can’t do this anymore. I don’t have the strength to keep on keeping on. Does this sound familiar to your own story of disappointment?
So I ask, what do we do now? So what that we are being honest. Yes, we hurt, we admit it. But now what? I offer you no trite or plastic offerings of hope this morning. They are meaningless to me, and I will assume they would be equally meaningless to you, too.
And yet, as if to contradict myself, I will say there is hope, true hope. And paradoxically, we find it by going back to those same four verses of Haggai. For in the same way that we found a strange silence following such excitement, we must look to this text and allow what it says in and of itself to have the integrity to stand on its own. I said just a moment ago that I offer nothing trite, so please do not misunderstand what I say here: I have discovered that there is only one answer to disappointment, and that is hope. We must hope, even when the only evidence we have for such a thing is found in the ancient writings of some far away people and place. As we read the last verses of Haggai, we should ask such questions like what happened? Why didn’t God make good on His promise? - - - But to get mired and stuck in this… this disappointment, is to ultimately miss the point of Haggai’s words to the people of Jerusalem as they dealt with the disappointment of returning to that haggard land. It is exactly in these words of hope and promise that God’s people must find hand-holds and foot-holds for our faith. It is only in these words that we can sufficiently understand what God is offering, ironic and empty though they might seem.
Yes, perhaps nothing came of these grand promises. After all, Zerubbabel disappears from the pages of history. Whether he had second thoughts and cold feet, and dropped out of the limelight, or was forcibly pulled off history’s stage by nervous Persians who saw the potential for further unrest in their empire has yet to be decided - - but we know that nothing happened. And if we leave it at that, we have every right to be mired in our disappointments. BUT there is more. For Haggai’s words are not meant to hold us in the doom and gloom of the present, but rather, to look to the future, to look to God.
Haggai’s prophecy of hope may have been rooted in Zerubbabel, but we must look well beyond the scope of the text, knowing that God’s work reached well beyond that: that the promise was made good in the incarnation of His own Son, Jesus.
Sometimes, many times, I think that the very thing we think God offers us as the hope we’ve longed to see fulfilled is merely a signifier for something even far better than what we can hope for or imagine. Yes, Haggai prophesied in the name of the LORD, and nothing seemed to have come to pass, and yet it was not the end of the people of Israel. Yes, disappointment after disappointment was met by the supposed people of God, and yet, even after 400 some years of silence, the people of God were still a part of God’s story, and heard the voice of one calling in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord. I think it is fair to say that when we read Haggai, when we hear those words of hope and promise read aloud, we must admit to the disappointment of their unfulfillment. But we must also look at and listen to those words, and see where they are pointing, because ultimately, they are not pointing at Zerubbabel, but at the LORD, the one who is the source of hope and promise.
We may not be able to make such connections between the person we’d like to see in the White House, or the team we’d like to see in the superbowl, or the relationship we want to see repaired, but through Haggai’s words, we can wrestle with our deepest disappointments and still discover hope. The overcoming of our disappointments is not so much found in our finally getting what we wanted in the first place, but perhaps they’re found in realizing that what we hope for, what we so desperately cry out for is not so much what we need as much as we really only need the One to whom we cry. What we hope for is never enough. For the One in whom we hope is the only answer to the silence that follows Haggai, and the silence that empowers such disappointment as we struggle with. I offer this wrestling match to you this morning, not because I make light of anyone’s disappointments, but because I, too, struggle this morning. This sermon is for me as much as anyone else. Only in dragging this beast out of the dark recesses of our hearts and minds, even now kicking and screaming, can we see our disappointments in the perspective of the light of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. In His light, we receive His grace that gives us even just enough hope to keep on keeping on.
I hope that in the midst of this roller coaster, you have received even a small nugget of that grace this morning. There are no easy answers, no easy solutions, no magic spells to make things the way we think or want that they should be. But better than all of that, God offers Himself in the place of our broken dreams and unfulfilled hopes. And that is the best promise of hope in the face of disappointment. Amen.
Today, I want to invite you to consider life’s roller coasters; to look at the ups and downs of life in general, and our own lives specifically. We’ve all experienced that excitement that happens when words of promise and hope come our way, it’s a difficult thing not to get caught up in the whirlwind, no matter who you are. Think back a couple of years ago. We saw it when the democrats put forth John Kerry as their presidential candidate four years after a disappointing defeat. We saw it when the republicans nominated George W. Bush to a second candidacy, hoping for four more years. We felt it when the Eagles made it to their fourth NFC championship game, and then to the superbowl for the first time in over twenty years. Let’s face it, when people get excited, they really get excited. To be hopeful, to live for something hopeful is, I think, something we are naturally wired for as humans. No one would say that it’s wrong to want or yearn for hope. And in our scripture passage today, we read that the prophet Haggai is delivering a message that is full of such excitement, hope, and promise such as the Jews have not seen in a long time. After all, they had been exiled from their home land. Their lives not only disrupted, but devastated by the events of Babylon’s destruction of Jerusalem, and the beloved Temple.
Picture it for yourselves… to be under the impression that you are under the protection of the LORD and that He shall always inhabit His Temple, and then the shock of becoming a beaten and subjected people, carried off to a foreign land, wondering what would become of everything you knew and loved. But then hope! Your family has actually made a go of it in this strange land. You’ve been able to prosper. And suddenly, your people find out that the Babylonians themselves have been beaten by a new empire, the Persians. And you wonder, what does this mean? What does it mean when the Persian King Cyrus issues an edict announcing that the Jews in Babylon can return to Judah, to Jerusalem? What does it mean? You return, though not entirely certain, for life was good in Babylon, and not everyone left, even with the promise of rebuilding that old beloved city. And so you go. But when you arrive your hopes are fast to fade. The city is in ruins, a sense of hopelessness, and the first images of devastation grip you firmly as you arrive in the old land of promise. And as you gather your family, that family that has grown and prospered in exile, you wonder if you’ve made a major mistake by returning to Jerusalem. Here you are, and your heart is at a fork in the road, with one direction leading to despair, and the other toward hope. So what are you thinking? What are you going to do? Perhaps these are the questions that many of the Jews who returned to Jerusalem felt or struggled with.
Into this situation of doubt comes the prophet Haggai. Not much is known about this prophet of the post-Exilic period. He seems to have begun his preaching around 520 BC, around the beginning of the reign of the Persian King Darius. It is not known whether he was among those returning, or was someone who had been left behind in the land. We do know that this prophet was very concerned about the future of the people, and he saw their future blessings tied up with the construction of a new Temple. But he was faced with overcoming a lot of disappointment first. After all, you can’t just launch a major building fund campaign when the people aren’t exactly confident of where God has led them. It may have been easy for Jeremiah to have purchased a plot of land so long ago. It may have been easy for the prophet Isaiah to speak about new beginnings and a new exodus. But when it looks like the land of milk and honey curdled or soured a long time ago, you know it’s not going to be easy going.
And here’s Haggai, this walking, talking mystery prophet who challenges the people to harken back to the days of yester year and remember how great it was to have a great Temple to the One True God, and to have a King in the line of David on the throne. And he pushes that button, that button of hope; that the LORD is going to do it all over again. Oh, Zerubbabel may only be the governor of Judah now, but the LORD has plans for him. Consider what the text says: The LORD has promised to shake the heavens and the earth, to overturn royal thrones and shatter the power of the foreign kingdoms, to overthrow chariots and their drivers. This is good. This is just what a Jew coming out of the exile might want to hear. And if that’s not enough, the LORD Almighty has promised to make Zerubbabel His signet ring. Although there’s a great many opinions as to what Haggai means by making such declarations about Zerubbabel, whether he’s speaking of outright political independence from Persia or any other foreign power, or he just means a resurgence of Judah from the ash heap of its last hundred years is hard to say. But how can you not feel the excitement, or not get caught up in the promise of new hope, the promise of a new beginning? This must have sounded like good news to those who had returned from Jerusalem and were questioning the sanity of that choice.
And yet ultimately, we must deal with the realities of life. I think Haggai’s prophecy, for all of its hope, for all of its excitement, for all its promise, is a story that ends on a silent, unwritten post-script: what happened to Zerubbabel? There is no other mention of the governor, … by Haggai, or any other prophet or chronicler. One commentator even says that this passage cannot be adequately explained by its contemporary history. We are left to wonder. And I wonder if it didn’t leave the people of Jerusalem to wonder just what had happened.
It certainly leaves us moderns to wrestle with the implications of this promise that seems unfulfilled. And it leaves us to wrestle with the painful question of what do we do when God disappoints. Oh, this goes far deeper than the disappointment of your candidate for President losing another close race, or your candidate for President winning, but then taking the country in the wrong direction. And it’s oh so much more than when the football team you’ve loved and rooted for all your life finally gets over that final hurdle and then goes onto lose the superbowl.
No, this is real life. This is the deepest, heartsick notion of disappointment with God that we must wrestle with today, because it is a place that too often we as Christians tread, and at the same time, it is a place too many of us deny having been. Let’s face it, who wants to hear a sermon on disappointment, let alone disappointment with God; who wants to be confronted by the dashing of one’s hopes and joys upon the rocks of disappointment? And yet, that is where we tread this morning because we carry disappointments, and many of us have walls up between us and God, and between us and one another.
And so, what is your disappointment? Author Philip Yancey says that disappointment occurs when the actual experience of something falls short of what we anticipate or expect. How do we gauge the effects of a failed marriage?; of getting fired from a job?; of receiving a devastating medical diagnosis?; or of losing a pastor to sin? What do we do when we’ve prayed for healing and it doesn’t come? How do we deal with God’s “promise” not coming to pass? What are we to feel and think when we believe, or think God has let us down – that God has disappointed our hopes?
Disappointment is quite possibly one of the oldest of human experiences. It must have been present when Adam and Eve buried their youngest son after his murder by his older brother. After bargaining with God to spare Sodom, did Abraham feel disappointed when the LORD wiped out that city? And consider the many Psalms of disappointment, such as Ps. 44: 23-24, “Awake, O Lord! Why do you sleep? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever. Why do you hide your face and forget our misery and oppression?” Did Haggai feel this way? Have you ever felt this way? Has God ever left you to wonder if He’s rejected you? I think many of us have. And perhaps, as you sit here listening, you are even now, wrestling with such feelings in your hearts.
As I bring you this word, I can testify to its challenges and difficulties, because I too am struggling with disappointment with God. I am in the midst of trying to make sense of what God has allowed to happen, or has not kept from happening in my life of late. I have spent tearful times in prayer lately, asking God to make it all right, to bring me vindication and justice. I have told God that I am thoroughly disappointed with Him, and that my faith in Him has taken a beating. And to be brutally honest, I have found little relief - - - There is no wonderful Christian triumphal celebrating in my story so far. I bring you this word this morning amidst my personal disappointments. I bring you this message of disappointment from a place of dark uncertainty. And I can tell you that even as I struggle with my disappointment with God, I am brought lower in my struggle by being disappointed with myself, with the guilt I feel due to what seems to be my egregious lack of faith and trust in the God who has shown Himself faithful and trustworthy so many times before in my own past. And I have to admit, both to God and to myself, I can’t do this anymore. I don’t have the strength to keep on keeping on. Does this sound familiar to your own story of disappointment?
So I ask, what do we do now? So what that we are being honest. Yes, we hurt, we admit it. But now what? I offer you no trite or plastic offerings of hope this morning. They are meaningless to me, and I will assume they would be equally meaningless to you, too.
And yet, as if to contradict myself, I will say there is hope, true hope. And paradoxically, we find it by going back to those same four verses of Haggai. For in the same way that we found a strange silence following such excitement, we must look to this text and allow what it says in and of itself to have the integrity to stand on its own. I said just a moment ago that I offer nothing trite, so please do not misunderstand what I say here: I have discovered that there is only one answer to disappointment, and that is hope. We must hope, even when the only evidence we have for such a thing is found in the ancient writings of some far away people and place. As we read the last verses of Haggai, we should ask such questions like what happened? Why didn’t God make good on His promise? - - - But to get mired and stuck in this… this disappointment, is to ultimately miss the point of Haggai’s words to the people of Jerusalem as they dealt with the disappointment of returning to that haggard land. It is exactly in these words of hope and promise that God’s people must find hand-holds and foot-holds for our faith. It is only in these words that we can sufficiently understand what God is offering, ironic and empty though they might seem.
Yes, perhaps nothing came of these grand promises. After all, Zerubbabel disappears from the pages of history. Whether he had second thoughts and cold feet, and dropped out of the limelight, or was forcibly pulled off history’s stage by nervous Persians who saw the potential for further unrest in their empire has yet to be decided - - but we know that nothing happened. And if we leave it at that, we have every right to be mired in our disappointments. BUT there is more. For Haggai’s words are not meant to hold us in the doom and gloom of the present, but rather, to look to the future, to look to God.
Haggai’s prophecy of hope may have been rooted in Zerubbabel, but we must look well beyond the scope of the text, knowing that God’s work reached well beyond that: that the promise was made good in the incarnation of His own Son, Jesus.
Sometimes, many times, I think that the very thing we think God offers us as the hope we’ve longed to see fulfilled is merely a signifier for something even far better than what we can hope for or imagine. Yes, Haggai prophesied in the name of the LORD, and nothing seemed to have come to pass, and yet it was not the end of the people of Israel. Yes, disappointment after disappointment was met by the supposed people of God, and yet, even after 400 some years of silence, the people of God were still a part of God’s story, and heard the voice of one calling in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord. I think it is fair to say that when we read Haggai, when we hear those words of hope and promise read aloud, we must admit to the disappointment of their unfulfillment. But we must also look at and listen to those words, and see where they are pointing, because ultimately, they are not pointing at Zerubbabel, but at the LORD, the one who is the source of hope and promise.
We may not be able to make such connections between the person we’d like to see in the White House, or the team we’d like to see in the superbowl, or the relationship we want to see repaired, but through Haggai’s words, we can wrestle with our deepest disappointments and still discover hope. The overcoming of our disappointments is not so much found in our finally getting what we wanted in the first place, but perhaps they’re found in realizing that what we hope for, what we so desperately cry out for is not so much what we need as much as we really only need the One to whom we cry. What we hope for is never enough. For the One in whom we hope is the only answer to the silence that follows Haggai, and the silence that empowers such disappointment as we struggle with. I offer this wrestling match to you this morning, not because I make light of anyone’s disappointments, but because I, too, struggle this morning. This sermon is for me as much as anyone else. Only in dragging this beast out of the dark recesses of our hearts and minds, even now kicking and screaming, can we see our disappointments in the perspective of the light of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. In His light, we receive His grace that gives us even just enough hope to keep on keeping on.
I hope that in the midst of this roller coaster, you have received even a small nugget of that grace this morning. There are no easy answers, no easy solutions, no magic spells to make things the way we think or want that they should be. But better than all of that, God offers Himself in the place of our broken dreams and unfulfilled hopes. And that is the best promise of hope in the face of disappointment. Amen.
Friday, December 01, 2006
Rarely Early, Never Late, and Always on Time
The title refers, of course, to the fact that with my church severance (ooops, I meant to "say" compensation) package about to run out in the next couple of weeks, God came through for our family. After many months of prayers, our own and many friends, the Lord provided a full-time position for my wife, at the company she's been working at for the last ten years (almost eight as p-t), within her department, at the same pay rate. All I can say is, "PRAISE GOD!!!"
This is BIG. I will admit to several things. First, I was really hoping she was going to get this position back in September so we could start paying off all of our credit, and still have some money to put into savings. Second, as time went by, I was starting to sweat some bullets and honestly was wrestling with some profound doubts about what God was doing with me and my family. And third, the Thursday a week before Thanksgiving was like a night of spiritual burn-out for me, and I was so gosh-darn angry at God over what seriously felt like His shoving my face in dog-dookie not at all of my own making. And then, just like that, it was as if we had turned a corner. I saw it that night, and took it in, but I was nervous to acknowledge that it could be so.
Yeah, we turned a corner. I felt it; sensed it. But I was afraid to say it aloud. Fearful that my Job-ian experience wasn't quite finished. After all, where were three "good" friends to tell me what a bad person I was (wait, I had already heard from them back in the church back in June!), and was still waiting to have God humble me profoundly. He did. But this time it was through the generosity of His Saints, the real church. A group of unnamed and unknown brothers and sisters (at least to me - certainly not to God) got together on three separate occassions, and provided for us out of their pockets for our material needs - which of course go far to help sustain our spiritual needs (can you tell I don't buy into a false bifurcation of spiritual and material?). In truly taking care of our needs out of love instead of some false sense of obligation, the people of the church subversively showed the impotency of certain individuals who think they represent God as leader in the church. It's a great moment of irony that will somehow miss the pages of the next edition of Church History, but it's a great read none the less for its potency in the face of such pathetic impotency.
But that's God. He's good. All the time. And though He wasn't early, He wasn't late; He was right on time! And I praise Him for His loving kindnesses. May we turn this corner together, and give God the glory. Amen and Amen.
This is BIG. I will admit to several things. First, I was really hoping she was going to get this position back in September so we could start paying off all of our credit, and still have some money to put into savings. Second, as time went by, I was starting to sweat some bullets and honestly was wrestling with some profound doubts about what God was doing with me and my family. And third, the Thursday a week before Thanksgiving was like a night of spiritual burn-out for me, and I was so gosh-darn angry at God over what seriously felt like His shoving my face in dog-dookie not at all of my own making. And then, just like that, it was as if we had turned a corner. I saw it that night, and took it in, but I was nervous to acknowledge that it could be so.
Yeah, we turned a corner. I felt it; sensed it. But I was afraid to say it aloud. Fearful that my Job-ian experience wasn't quite finished. After all, where were three "good" friends to tell me what a bad person I was (wait, I had already heard from them back in the church back in June!), and was still waiting to have God humble me profoundly. He did. But this time it was through the generosity of His Saints, the real church. A group of unnamed and unknown brothers and sisters (at least to me - certainly not to God) got together on three separate occassions, and provided for us out of their pockets for our material needs - which of course go far to help sustain our spiritual needs (can you tell I don't buy into a false bifurcation of spiritual and material?). In truly taking care of our needs out of love instead of some false sense of obligation, the people of the church subversively showed the impotency of certain individuals who think they represent God as leader in the church. It's a great moment of irony that will somehow miss the pages of the next edition of Church History, but it's a great read none the less for its potency in the face of such pathetic impotency.
But that's God. He's good. All the time. And though He wasn't early, He wasn't late; He was right on time! And I praise Him for His loving kindnesses. May we turn this corner together, and give God the glory. Amen and Amen.
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