December 13, 2020 “Shaken” – Haggai 2:1-9

Haggai 2:1-9 (p. 400 in Prophets)
“Shaken”
December 13, 2020 – Third Sunday in Advent

Last month, in the midst of election news and rising COVID-19 numbers, one bit of more light-hearted news came from Spain. A sculpture of a smiling woman on a bank façade in Palencia had been “restored” in an awful way. It now looks more like Mr. Potato Head. Spain seems to have a way of doing things like that. In 2012, an elderly parishioner of a village church in Bonja botched a restoration of a painting of Jesus and pretty much ruined it. The joke was that the painting, titled Ecce Homo, “Behold the Man,” had been transformed into Ecce Mono, “Behold the monkey.”

Restorations and rebuildings often do not live up to former glory. That is just a piece of what confronts the community of Blue River and other McKenzie Valley residents and business owners after the fire this year. Even if buildings are restored or rebuilt perfectly, the natural beauty of the area will be decades in returning. In what we’re looking at from the prophet Haggai today, something like that sort of loss and sorrow faced the returned exiles in Jerusalem and the surrounding area of Judea. The Temple they had begun to rebuild would clearly have only a fraction of its former size and beauty.

At the time Haggai prophesied, the Temple rebuilding project was nearly twenty years old. It began with great fanfare as described in the book of Ezra. But it apparently petered out fairly quickly. Part of the message of the prophets Haggai and Zechariah was to encourage the people to resume the project, to start building again. But part of the problem was that people were discouraged by the fact that the new structure could not possibly compare to the old one, or at least that was the general opinion.

It can be discouraging to compare former glory to present reality. Stan shared last Sunday in our Zoom fellowship time that probably about half the residents of Blue River will not even try to return and rebuild homes there. There’s the challenge and cost of bringing infrastructure like a sewage system up to current standards, but there is also the sense that the place will never again be like it was.

In regard to the Temple, God told Haggai to challenge that comparison of the rebuilt structure with a grander, better one that was destroyed. In what is verse 3, God asked, “Does anyone remember this house—this Temple—in its former splendor? How, in comparison, does it look to you now? It must seem like nothing at all!” But it’s surely a rhetorical, ironical question. Twenty years before in Ezra’s time, there were people who had seen the first temple, then lived through decades of exile to witness the groundbreaking for the second. But by Haggai’s time there could not have been many still alive, maybe none.

In effect, God was telling the people that their excuses for not working on the Temple, that it could not compare to the old one, were empty words. The present generation could not even remember the old Temple to make the comparison. It’s a hint of a lesson for you and me, maybe especially if we are a little older. We must not despair about what can be done for good and for the kingdom of God in our own time because the results are not going to match some glory time of the past. That’s true whether the aim is rebuilding a community after a fire, reconstructing national unity after a time of division and polarization, or regathering a church after separation for more than a year by coronavirus.

In the face of such despair over lost glory, God’s word in verse 4 to the leaders of Haggai’s time, to governor Zerubbabel and to the priest Jeshua sounds much like what He said to Joshua as he led Israel into the promised land, “Be strong, Zerubbabel… Be strong, Jeshua…” And the same to everyone, “Be strong, all you people left in the land.” God meant Joshua to be strong and courageous for the battles ahead. He meant His people after the exile to be strong, not for a battle, but for the constructive work of rebuilding and restoring their spiritual center and connection to God.

God caps off that admonition to be strong with the simple command, “And now get to work,” adding this promise which rings throughout Scripture, “for I am with you.” That’s the glorious promise and paradox we are singing each Sunday this Advent, adding a verse each week, “O come, O come, Emmanuel.” Once again, Emmanuel means “God with us.” It’s the name of Jesus. We sing calling for Him to come to us, even while we name Him as the One who is with us. That’s our strength for the present moment and it’s also our hope for the future. God is with us and will come to us.

There are all sorts of parallels in what Haggai says here to our specific hope as Christians. When Jesus sent His disciples out to the work of bringing the Good News to the whole world, He sent them with the same assurance, “I will be with you always.” Haggai even reports for us the way in which that is true in verse 5, “My Spirit remains among you, just as I promised when you came out of Egypt.” Jesus commissioned His followers to the work ahead, but also sent them His Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Through His Spirit God is with us, Jesus is with us.

The conclusion of that paragraph is “So do not be afraid.” You see, that’s the real danger of despairing over former glory, over a lost past that was better than the all-too-real present. When we look back and focus on what we won’t ever have again, be it youth or health, be it a home that burnt or a business that folded, be it a friendship or a marriage that came apart, we can get very fearful. “How will I go on, how will I live,” we ask ourselves, “without that?” So we give up. We stop work like they stopped working on the Temple. We are afraid it will never be the same, so we just quit, shut down inside, and give up hope.

So God comes to us again and says what the angels often said when they arrived, what Jesus said more than once to His disciples, what the apostles wrote to the first Christian churches, “Do not be afraid.” In all that loss, in all that pain, in all that long-gone former glory, do not be afraid. God is with you.

Yet, of course, it’s easier said than done, easier said than believed. God says He is with us, but it often doesn’t really seem that way. Just ask the millions still out of work and those losing jobs right now. Just ask the families of the two people dying of COVID-19 every minute in the United States while you view this worship service. Just ask the thousands of Armenians coming home after a war with Azerbaijan to find their homes bombed or other people living in them, while their churches have had crosses broken off the top. Is God really with us? That question is why there is a second part to our text today.

Starting in verse 6, the middle paragraph on page 400 of Prophets, God makes a different kind of promise, “In just a little while I will again shake the heavens and the earth, the oceans and the dry land. I will shake all the nations…” I have to believe that declaration would have triggered another sort of fear in Haggai’s congregation.

I was in the shower getting ready for high school when the 1971 San Fernando Valley earthquake shook the Los Angeles area. I just got bounced around a little. Then I pulled on some pants, and our family got outside to avoid anything falling on us. In our city of Santa Monica, the shaking was hard, but not devastating. Things fell off shelves and a hanging light fixture in our garage crashed to the floor. North of us in San Fernando and Sylmar, many were not so fortunate. People died in falling buildings, some of them health centers. Freeway overpasses collapsed and cars fell. Transportation was snarled for months.

Years later, visiting us in California from the Midwest during Christmas vacation before we were married, my wife was frightened one night by a much smaller earthquake. It shook her bed on our pullout sofa. The rest of us slept right through it. Now here in Oregon she reminds me that the whole Pacific Rim is due for a big one sometime. She took a CERT (Community Emergency Response Training) class a few years ago. We have earthquake insurance on our home.

The people of Israel to whom the prophet Haggai spoke would have been almost as familiar with earthquakes as we were in southern California. The region sits on and between various faults and rifts where seismic activity is common. That big earthquake in western Turkey at the end of October was only about 650 miles from Jerusalem. Josephus records an earthquake in Israel during King Uzziah’s time. Modern Israeli geologists fear that the area, like the Pacific Rim, is overdue for a “big one.”

It is interesting, then, that, even as God through Haggai exhorts the returned exiles to return to work on rebuilding the Temple, He declares His intention to shake it all up, “the ocean and the dry land,” “all nations.” If anything would discourage you from continuing a building project, it seems like forecast of an earthquake would. Yet that’s what God says He’s going to do.

Fans of Handel’s “Messiah” will remember the bass recitative that begins with that text. The music itself forcefully vibrates to picture the shaking to come. Handel’s librettist followed the text from Haggai with one from Malachi 3 verse 1 about God then suddenly coming to His Temple. Every Advent and Easter as I listen to “Messiah,” bass Gwynne Howell sings that bit from “Messiah” along with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. You can hear that terrible shaking in the music.

It’s clear enough that “shaking” in this text is metaphor for tremors of war and violence, yet citizens of Jerusalem must have associated it with the literal shaking of earthquakes. Whether earthquake or war, the warning, as I said, seems like a strange part of a message aimed to further a building project. But that verse from Malachi added in Handel’s music points us in the right direction. In fact, it points us on to the very next phrase in our text, “and the treasures of all the nations will be brought to this Temple.” Read as in our New Living Translation, it means that wealth from other nations will flow into Jerusalem to support the building project and enhance the glory of the Temple.

There is, though, another, older way to read that part, a different translation of the word “treasure.” As far back as some church fathers, like Augustine in his book, The City of God, Christians read that word literally as “desire.” Sometimes, in other contexts, it clearly means the treasure or wealth people desire. But here, in the midst of proclaiming that God would be with His people and the promise near the end that “The future glory of this Temple will,” in fact, “be greater than its past glory,” Christians have felt a different desire.

You heard it sung that way in “Messiah,” “and the desire of all nations shall come.” That same phrase in English, “desire of nations,” found its way into at least three of the hymns of the season: We added that verse in “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” for our worship today. It also appears in “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” and “Angels from the Realms of Glory.” The understanding throughout is that what will come to the Temple, even as the world is shaken, is what all nations truly desire, which is the Lord Himself. For Christians that means God incarnate in Jesus Christ will come. He would even come literally into that Temple on which Haggai was encouraging his people to get back to work.

To be honest, there are some good linguistic and contextual reasons for the more mundane New Living Translation “treasures of all the nations,” instead of “the desire of nations.” Haggai does go on to say in our text, “The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.” Yet I still have to believe that there is something more here than just bankrolling the construction project.

When the writer of Hebrews in the New Testament, chapter 12 verse 26, takes up and quotes Haggai 2:6 about the shaking of earth and heaven, he goes on to argue that the purpose of God in shaking created, temporal things, is “so that what cannot be shaken may remain.” That fits very well with the perspective that this prophesy is not ultimately driving at a structure subject to fault lines and shifting tectonic plates. Instead, something better, longer lasting, more glorious, which all the nations do in fact desire, is in sight, something which cannot be shaken. That, as Christians who spoke of and sought “the desire of nations” down the ages knew full well, was and is the arrival of Christ the Lord.

A headline on Friday read, “Europe in meltdown as Covid death tolls soar and progress unravels.” Record deaths were recorded in Germany and Russia. There’s a civil war killing aid workers in Ethiopia, worrisome nuclear development in Iran, a shoot to kill order for protestors in Uganda, a legalization of abortion in Argentina, a wealthy anti-Communist voice arrested in Hong Kong, and refugees homeless and starving all over the map. The nations are being shaken, all nations. You and I know that our own nation is being shaken right now by disease and division and deep distrust of each other. The nations of the world clearly lack what they desire. They lack the peace, the justice, the hope they desire. So they are shaken and we are shaken.

Yet our text and its Christian understanding by the writer to Hebrews shows us that God does not shake us up or allow us to be shaken because He does not care. God keeps telling us “I am with you.” That means that if the world gets shaken, if our world gets shaken, it is only because God wants us to have that which we truly desire, that which cannot be shaken. Our Lord wants us to have Himself.

“Come, Desire of nations, come,” we sang. That’s the hope which God holds out to us here in Haggai. What we most desire has come and will come to us in Jesus. But to really grasp that, we may need to have all those things we think we want, like money and comfort, security and entertainment, shaken a bit, so that we may see that what we truly want is all that remains standing after the shaking.

In an op-ed from the Washington Post, reprinted in the Register-Guard on Wednesday, Michael Gerson says, “The most reassuring message of the season is that the existence of hope does not depend on us.” He means to say that Advent hope is not something we work up or build for ourselves. Instead, wrote Gerson, “It is a delivery from elsewhere.” He goes on to make clear that he is a Christian and that our hope is in the fact that “God is with us. Jesus is with us. This is everything.”

That’s why those returned Israelites could hope as they rebuilt a Temple that would be only a pale imitation of the previous one. Because the glory would be delivered from elsewhere. That future, greater glory would come when the Desire of nations came. The glory would be in the Presence which filled the Temple, not in how it was built or decorated. And when that Temple too was shaken and torn down 600 years later, not long after Jesus stood in it, that Glory, that Presence would still be there, still be here.

That is also why you and I may hope as we work to rebuild peace and justice in the world and in our community, as we strive to remain connected until we gather together again in a few months, as we do what we can at all sorts of small and seemingly very temporary projects which God gives us. Our hope is that the Glory in it all will not come from our efforts but from elsewhere. When all that you and I have built falls down, His Glory will still be there, will still be with us.

God does and will shake things up for us, whether it’s the ground under our feet or a comfortable way of life. That shaking is a call to turn our eyes from that which is so easily shaken and even broken, and to seek that which is truly most desirable in this world. God is with you even as He may shake you. Let that shaking bring you, as we say, to your senses, to the holy sense of His unshaken presence no matter what happens around you and to you. May the great Desire of nations come quickly to you and to all of us, as we “get to work” once again in the world. Yet, let us be at work only in that hope, in that Desire, that Jesus our Savior is and will be everything.

Amen.