Work, for I am with you!

November 10, 2013

Pentecost 25, Proper 27, Year C

Haggai 1:15b – 2:9

 

Last Sunday I was the storyteller in our Godly Play Sunday school room.  I heartily love Godly Play, but I have to admit that the story as written for last week is one of my least favorites.  

In the story, the people of God have received the Ten Best Ways (which is Godly Play speak for the Ten Commandments).  The people know they are incredibly precious, a sign of the relationship between God and the people, and so they build a beautiful gold box to put them in.  And then they put an altar of incense in front of it.  And then they put an altar and menorah in front of that.  And then they build walls around it, and wall off the Ten Best Ways to create “the holy of holies.”  And then they hang four coverings over the roof made from precious materials.  Then they put an altar and cleansing bowl in front of the whole structure.  And then a fence around all of that.  And then they only allow priests and their helpers inside (all male, of course).

 

The story is based on the numbingly detailed descriptions of the tabernacle set out in the book of Exodus, though Godly Play boils it all down in a much more interesting way than the biblical writers managed to do.  But it still seemed to be holding up and honoring the stuff with which we create a box around God, rather than God and our relationship with God.

             Now I recognize that these ornate structures and these requirements for entry signified how important the Ten Best Ways were to the people of God.  I recognize that in all of this they were trying to put God first, trying to honor the holiness and otherness of God.  And yet it seems (to me, at least) that they somehow got off track.

            It seems to me that while they didn’t realize it at the time, everything they added just served to separate them from God, to exclude from God’s welcome and love rather than include, and to distort the intended purpose of God’s gift of the 10 commandments from its original focus on love of God and neighbor. 

            And so while I know that the language of the Godly Play stories has been carefully thought out and researched, and while I know that this particular one is firmly rooted in the biblical story from Exodus, I couldn’t help changing the language just a teensy bit.  Instead of saying that God told them to build these things, I said that the people felt they needed them.

Because that part I know is true.  I know that sometimes we humans get off track.  Sometimes we make our relationship with God much more complicated than it needs to be.  Sometimes we lose our focus on God while we get caught up in all the ways we want to honor God.  Sometimes we separate ourselves from God in response to our recognition of God’s otherness.  Sometimes we unthinkingly exclude others from the love of God in our attempt at faithfulness.  Sometimes we can lose the forest for the trees. 

Which brings me (finally!) to our Old Testament reading from the book of Haggai.

Raise your hand if you could find the book of Haggai in the Bible?

Me neither.  We haven’t gotten this far in the Bible Challenge yet and I’d actually forgotten all about it. I assumed maybe it was in the Apocropha, it sounded so unfamiliar.  But it’s not.  It’s just a teeny little two-page book stuck in near the end between Zephaniah and Zechariah.  It is one of the shortest books in the Old Testament, and this is the only time we get a reading from Haggai in our three-year lectionary cycle.

Haggai is a weird little book, set after the return of the Jewish people from their exile in Babylon.  When they first returned to their homeland after exile, the Jewish people thought – hoped – it was the beginning of a new era for them.  They believed Jerusalem would be restored to its former glory.  They would rebuild their Temple – symbolizing for their community the dwelling place of God – bigger and better than ever.  Their years of hardship would be over.  But they were soon disappointed.  Many of the Israelites hadn’t returned home.  Those that did faced hostility and even violence from the surrounding people.  In Haggai, we see the Jewish people twenty years after their return from exile.  And they are no closer to a return to their glory days.  They are still facing hostility, still enduring poverty, still not a united people.  The gorgeous temple built by Solomon that had been the central gathering place for their community of faith remains in ruins, and it sounds like the faith of the Jewish people is equally tattered. 

Enter the prophet Haggai, who shares “the word of the Lord” with the struggling people.  In his first prophecy, before our reading for today, Haggai instructs the people that God wants them to start rebuilding the Temple.  It is time for them to stop being distracted by the busyness and turmoil of their lives and to concentrate on building the House of God.  And, clearly they listen (which is a rare and wonderful treat for a poor Old Testament prophet). Two months after Haggai’s first prophecy we see the people have made some progress.  The Temple is in its beginning stages of reconstruction; the foundation has been laid, stones brought in from the quarries, perhaps.  But already, just a couple months into their work, the people have grown discouraged and the work has begun to lapse.  The people are looking at the work they’ve done and seeing only how completely it pales in comparison to their previous temple.  They are sliding back into their old ways, worrying about themselves, separating themselves from each other.

Enter the prophet Haggai with another word from the Lord.  “Take courage, all you people of the land, says the Lord; work, for I am with you, says the Lord of hosts, according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt.  My spirit abides among you; do not fear.”

            For me, that’s what Haggai is all about.  Maybe that’s what this whole enterprise of faith is all about.  Forget all the other stuff that so often gets in the way.  Memories of the fancy temple you used to have, the powerful kings that used to rule over Israel, the wealth of the nation of old.  (Whatever that might represent in your life.)  God is every bit as present with the people living in poverty in a hostile land with a meager temple (or no temple at all) as God was in the glory days of Solomon.  It isn’t about making a fancy Temple or creating more and better furnishings or covering things with gold.  It’s about living into our identity as God’s people in the world.  Doing our work in the world without fear because we know God is with us.  Building up not our physical temple, necessarily, although that is a piece of this community.  But also building up the temple that is our relationships, our families, our spiritual lives, our community and our world.  Right here where we are, not where we have been in the past or where we wish we could be.

            At the end of the Godly Play story last week, I asked the kids one of the four wondering questions that are a part of most of the stories.  “I wonder what is the most important part of this story?”  Some of the children were focused on the lush purple material embroidered with gold that hung over the tabernacle.  Some were focused on the bronze bowl in the courtyard filled with sparkly blue water.  Some were focused on the fancy ark with poles on the side so the people could carry it with them wherever they went.  They are all such beautifully made pieces.  But one child gave an answer that broke through my at least inwardly cynical story telling.  Crashed through my feeling of being left out of the story as a woman.  Pushed aside my theological problems with the Tabernacle.  “The most important part,” the child said, “is God and the People of God.”

            God, and our relationship with God as God’s people, is at the heart of the story.  That is what lies at the heart of any of our stories, though we too rarely recognize it.  That is the forest that we cannot miss.  We, the People of God, are called to take courage and not to fear, to work and to build, and to know that God is with us and that God’s spirit abides among us.

            Which makes me think of Teresa of Avila’s beautiful and daunting reminder: “Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours.  Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion is to look out to the world.  Yours are the feet with which Christ is to go about doing good.”

What might be the work God is calling you to?  What might you be called to build, strengthened by the promise that God is with you?