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.