Sermon 6th July 2014

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Simon Brindley, continues our study of the Minor Prophets. This week it is Haggai. 

God’s priorities

[St Saviour’s: As I do the reading, from the Old Testament Book of Haggai, I want you to see if you can work out the answer to this question: “How many days did it take before the message got through and they actually got started?” But if you get it, please do not tell anyone! I shall ask you all shortly…]

[St Paul’s: Thankyou to Greg for the first reading from the Old Testament Book of Haggai, which is mainly what I am going to be speaking on this morning. Without calling out please, I wonder if anyone picked up the answer to this question as they listened:  “How many days did it take before the message got through and they actually got started?” I shall ask you all again shortly…]

I was up in Northumberland 2 weekends ago visiting my parents. They live in Rothbury, in the beautiful Coquet valley. They are quite elderly and not in great health but they still get to the parish church whenever they can make it. One of the things I enjoy about Rothbury Parish Church is that I will often meet people – perhaps people who have retired there or maybe even just visiting for the weekend - who knew me as a child – I lived in that part of the world until I was 12 - and one of those is a man called Jack Tulley. Jack is nearly 90 years old now but still going strong and he is steeped in the culture and life of the North East of England. His family still runs a shop in the village but his father was a coalminer and his grandfather a blacksmith. He grew up in a pit village, long since demolished in the decline of the mining industry, called Benton Square in the coalfields just north of Newcastle. He’s a bit gruff is Jack, never quite as positive about things as you might imagine, but he’s kindly. He gave me and my brother a swing that his daughter had grown out of when we were about 3 years old. I can still remember it. But it’s his grandfather, the blacksmith, who is relevant to today’s Bible reading. We’ll come back to Jack’s grandfather in a few minutes….

The book of Haggai in the Old Testament is very short, just two chapters, and it’s a very interesting little book. I hope you will forgive me if I admit that before I started preparing for this morning, if you had asked me what the book of Haggai was about I would have forgotten. I hope I don’t forget again because it is really quite important….

Even if you don’t remember all the details and all the complexities you will probably remember that there was a time in Jewish history when the Jews were taken off into exile in Babylon and the great Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem was destroyed. They must have felt that their entire identity and their faith in the one Creator God Yahweh, was under threat.  Well, they and their faith survived the trauma of exile and many decades later in 538 BC a new King of the Babylonians called Cyrus passed a law allowing the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem, which they did, partly under the leadership of two of those characters in our reading, Zerubbabel and Joshua, leading figures in the life of the returning nation.

It must have been a great time for the people who returned, back to their homeland and to a re-possession of their Jewish identity including in their main city, Jerusalem. They would have been able without fear to eat and to pray together, to practice their customs, to plan for the future for them and their children, to plant crops and hope that again the nation could thrive. And of course they could build or rebuild their homes and their streets, those that had not been totally destroyed decades before still bearing the scars, I imagine, of the Babylonian devastation.

There seems to have been plenty of material around to build with and they seem to have done a pretty fine job. “Paneled houses” it says that they had. I don’t know about you but that sounds pretty fine to me. I am going to guess they were far from stone shacks or worse, they were grand homes with wooden panels lining the insides for warmth and to give a sense of status and grandeur and self worth. At least that is the picture it conjures up for me..

“We are the returning ones! The fathers and mothers of the new nation, the start of the hope for the future. We deserve the best, and we want the best for our families, so fine wooden paneled rooms are now the order of the day for us!!” Let us show everyone around what this Jewish nation is really like! And when we have finished putting in the paneling maybe we’ll get it finely painted, with murals or maybe we’ll build an extension or a maybe a sunken bath or put on an extra floor. There is always something that can be done to improve our home sand give any visitors a true indication of our new status and the proud future that surely now must be ours…!

But overall things were actually not going well at all….the houses looked great but it seems that much of what the people had hoped for was ending in disappointment. Drought and poor harvest. But not just that, things seemed to be somehow out of alignment. They earned wages alright but they didn’t seem to go as far as they should, as if their purses were full of holes.  Food and drink did not seem to satisfy…There seems to have been in reality a deep sense of dissatisfaction. “We have tried to rebuild our lives, our homes look really great, but we do not seem to have got it right.”

But until the prophet Haggai speaks up for the first time, it does not seem to have occurred to them what might be wrong. History suggests that an early group of returning exiles had done some work on the foundations of the Temple but it still lay in complete ruins. Perhaps they thought it was just too big a job. Perhaps they had become sidetracked away from God, thinking they could do all the rebuilding for the future themselves.

So God leads Haggai to confront them and speak back to them though their leaders what he hears all the time. And the prophet speaks, on the first day of the sixth month:

This is what I hear the people saying, day after day, “ Oh….the time has not yet come for the Lord’s house to be built…”

What were they thinking these people, that they had better get their own places in order first and thinking really seriously about all that God stuff can wait? Oh, put it on the back burner….anyway just look at the size of the task. Too much for us for now! We are just the remnant of the former fine nation. We need to expand our numbers first.  We have only just come back from exile after all. You can’t expect too much too soon, for goodness sake. The Temple will have to wait a while! Only a few more years….

So now the prophet gives it to them straight and he just puts it to them: “Do you really think it is OK for you to be living in your fine houses while God’s house remains a ruin? No wonder the rest of your lives are unsatisfactory and your efforts not bearing fruit, do you not realize you have got your priorities all wrong. No wonder things feel out of alignment. Get God back at the centre of your lives and get the Temple rebuilt…

And they did. They started  to rebuild. And now God inspired all of them:  Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, Joshua son of Jehozadak the High Priest and the whole remnant of the people and they began to work on the Temple on the [twenty fourth] day of the sixth month?

So how long did it take for the message to get through?

So, what do we think this passage might be saying to us today? Is it saying we must put our church buildings above everything else? That maybe buildings are more important than people? No, I don’t think that is it.

That is not to say however that buildings are not really important. I was reminded as I was preparing for this morning about a major new housing development that Jennie and I drove through earlier this year on the way to the Kent coast. We were looking for a road through and took a wrong turning and got a bit trapped in this huge, new and what looked to be fairly luxurious estate of beautiful house after beautiful house, of all different designs and sizes,  terraced, semi and detached, two storey, three storey, roundabouts for the cars everywhere, road after road, turning after turning (I am not naming it just in case you know someone who lives there!) but after 5 or 10 minutes, apart from getting lost I realized that we had not seen any evidence at all of any places where people could come together, no shops, no green spaces that I could see, no obvious community, certainly no church that I could see. Just lots of individual homes, like beautiful boxes to hide away in from everyone else. I may of course have got it wrong and taken all the wrong turnings, but that is what it felt like to me.

And I contrast that with another new development I spotted a few weeks ago when out cycling. I don’t mind naming this one. It is on the edge of Edenbridge in Kent and it is called, fittingly perhaps, the Eden Centre. It has a doctor’s surgery and a library and a place for young people to meet and for toddler groups to meet and a Citizens Advice Bureau if people need help…and it has a church.

I can almost see the prophet Haggai smiling! (Just try for a moment and see if you can conjure up a picture of an Old Testament prophet smiling!)

Yes, buildings and how we build them are really important. We have been powerfully reminded this year of just how important our church buildings are with the reopening of two of our own main parish buildings. So we truly delight that St Paul’s has gone from an OK, sort of a bit tired, typical church building to its new magnificence and for those of us privileged to have been at the reopening of St Johns Lowden Road recently under the new ownership of the Ghanaian Seventh Day Adventist church, we truly rejoice that that building has been beautifully restored and modernized, to the glory of God.

So is that it then, did the prophet Haggai want the people to rebuild the Temple magnificently? Is the magnificence of a building of faith its true measure and its most important feature? No, important though I think it is that our buildings look and feel like good and beautiful places to be, I think what we are hearing today is that that is not all that God desires.

I think back to that wonderful reopening ceremony at St Johns Lowden Road, where one of the regional leaders of the Seventh day Adventist Church, a modern day prophet perhaps, spoke powerfully to the people assembled in great numbers. Do not make this beautiful building he said, just a place for your choirs and a place that annoys the neighbours because there is no place left to park on a Saturday, what they know as the Sabbath. Get out into the streets round about, get to know them and their concerns and be Jesus to the people of this community. Serve those who might otherwise be annoyed by you and show them what your faith really means. It was a powerful and a highly relevant message…

And what about St Paul’s? Who can doubt that the time was right for us to rebuild when we see the building so wonderfully used not just on Sundays but as a place to come together to weep at the Thanksgiving Service for Nicky Tinegate and a place to come together to rejoice, at the wonderful and warm-hearted and inclusive wedding of Emma Peebles and her husband Chris.

I think the prophet Haggai would have approved..

Because what I think lay behind the message from the prophet Haggai to the returning Jewish exiles was this. You need to put God back at the centre of your lives and the heart of your community. And for them without a doubt, in the culture of the day that had to start with the Temple, the symbolic heart of their centuries old faith. Then and only then will things be in proper balance, whatever life may bring.

For us, in our Christian faith the challenge in the words we know well and say often in our churches, is to bring Jesus to the centre of our lives and the heart of our community.  And thank God that sometimes the best way to do that will be to develop our buildings to make them fit for that purpose.  But it is Jesus at the heart that is the challenge for us. But I would have to say that it is my experience that then, whatever life may throw at you, both good and bad, things will be in the right order and you will find the strength to get through. In fact I would go as far as to say that I do not understand how anyone can get through the whole of life, from its very beginning to its very end, whenever that may be, with all the intensities of its incredible highs and its incredibly challenging and persistent lows without God at the centre in His rightful place. That is my experience anyway and I pray that it will be yours…

Ah yes, I was going to tell you about Jack’s Granddad. Well he was the blacksmith in the coal mining community of Benton Square some time in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. This was well before nationalization of the mining industry and safety standards were not what you would expect today. Life would have been very dangerous in the mines and very tough for the men underground and the women and children at home above. They would have had very little money. Jack told me two weeks ago that there was no church in the village and the people had to walk a mile or more to the next village called Killingworth on Sundays. And that was a long way for those people, especially in bad weather.  We tend to forget it in our relatively comfortable times but in those days not everyone had shoes to wear and enough clothes to keep them warm. So the coalminers and the whole community, Including Jack Tulley’s Granddad, used as they were to hard physical labour in rock, wood and iron, built themselves a church in the village of Benton Square.

I think the prophet Haggai would have smiled down on them at that time too…

Amen