October 31, 2021 “Old and New” – Ezra 3:1-13

Ezra 3:1-13 (Chronicles pp. 106, 107)
“Old and New”
October 31, 2021 – All Hallows Eve

Studying philosophy, I learned the story of the “Ship of Theseus.” Plutarch told how the ship King Theseus sailed back to Athens after his encounter with the Minotaur on Crete was preserved as a memorial by the Greeks. As each plank of wood in it decayed, they replaced it with a new timber. This continued until every single piece of the ship had been replaced. The philosophical puzzle is whether the ship was still the same ship or not.

However we might answer that philosophical puzzle, there are important matters of continuing identity to be faced as things change. In our text, we might raise a question in regard to the Temple just like the philosophical one about Theseus’ ship. If even the foundation stones of Solomon’s Temple were broken and scattered by the Babylonian invasion 50 years before, would a new structure, with new and completely different stones, be at all the same? Would it be the Temple?

I’ll come back to it later, but at the top of page 107 in Chronicles, verse 12 of Ezra 3, some of the older people may not have thought the new building was the same at all. They wept in sad disappointment at the laying of new foundation stones. And that question whether something changed is the same or not, isn’t just about ships or buildings. Ezra and Nehemiah show us people asking that question about themselves. Were they still the children of Israel, the beloved people of God?

These books of the Bible say yes to such questions, both about the Temple and about the people. Their future would be far different from the past, but they were still Israel, still the same worshipping community who had been uprooted from their home and carried off to a foreign land five decades before. The place where they worshipped would have to be completely rebuilt, from the foundation up, but it would still be the Temple. But how? How did the old and the new connect?

For the Temple, the first chapter of Ezra gives us this connection: at least some of what was to be placed in the new Temple was the same. It begins on page 103 in Chronicles with the edict of King Cyrus of Persia, sending some Jewish exiles back to Jerusalem to build a Temple. Further on, we’re told that Cyrus had Babylonian storehouses opened. Gold and silver vessels and utensils taken from the first Temple were sent back.

Pause with me and note that, while Cyrus said, “The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth. He has appointed me to build him a Temple at Jerusalem…,” that declaration is incomplete and may mislead. It makes Cyrus sound like a convert to Judaism, to Israel’s God, but he was not. The historical record, on a clay artifact called the Cyrus Cylinder, shows that Cyrus did the same thing for other peoples and gods. He had a general policy of restoring people and religious artifacts to their original places. It turned out well for Jewish people, but Cyrus was not particularly devoted to the God of Israel or to His specific worship. He simply wanted people everywhere making every possible offering to every possible god in the hope it would benefit him and his empire.

In any case, Ezra first gives the assurance that when worship restarted in Jerusalem, some of the very same physical objects that had been used before were there once again. In what I read today, when they rebuilt the altar, even before rebuilding the Temple, and began to offer sacrifices on it, some of the same gold, silver, and probably bronze utensils were being used in those acts of worship.

The next assurance we read in Ezra beginning also there on page 103, chapter 1, is a continuity of people. Those “boring” lists of families and towns and priests and Levites and Temple servants, are there to establish the fact that these people were rightfully and truly descended from those who had been there before. The faces and individuals have changed, but it is still the same community of worship.

We believe the same thing about our own church. Go out in the narthex and read the names of those who signed the original charter of Valley Covenant Church. Most of us will not recognize any of them. All the people who started this church are either no longer alive or no longer part of it. Like the ship of Theseus, every old member has been replaced with someone new and many new ones added. Yet this is still Valley Covenant. That’s still your and my charter hanging there on the wall.

That continuity of a community and its worship, even the physical apparatus of its worship, is Ezra and Nehemiah’s answer to fears you and I experience in these times of great change. Even more than in what we may still call “normal” times, the old is giving way to the new. Last year we all sat at home and watched worship on computer and television screens. It was new, it was different. Even with the excellent work Kendal and Garry and Bryan did to blend music and images and your own prayers and reading of Scripture and meditations it often felt strange. Was it still really worship? Were we still a church?

And here we are now, back together in our building, like those Jewish exiles coming home from Babylon. Things are still different, just as they were for them. We’re wearing masks. We’re receiving communion in little plastic packets. We’re not sipping cups of coffee and munching cookies together when the service ends. There are cameras sending the service out to some of us who are still staying home. And soon we’ll be changing our worship space a bit to bring some of those images we enjoyed during on-line worship here to screens in our sanctuary. Lots of the old is still with us, but much is and will be new. Is it still worship? Are we still Valley Covenant Church? Yes we are.

Our continuity, our connection with each other, is not just a physical place. It’s not even a particular style of worship, or kind of music, or any of the things which something like a pandemic can change. What holds it all together, just as it did for the people who came back to Jerusalem, is the God who whom we worship, and the story of what He has done for us.

Notice there about a third of the way down on page 106, verse 4, that the first festival they celebrated after building an altar was the “Festival of Shelters,” the Feast of Tabernacles or “tents.” It was the holy time God gave His people to remember how they had wandered in the wilderness and lived in tents before God brought them home and gave them their own place to live. Now, after being strangers in a strange land for fifty years, they needed to recall again how God brings His people home.

Let us recall that same kind of promise God makes to us in Jesus Christ. No matter how we wander through this world, no matter how displaced and strange we feel at times or even still right now, our God is leading us homeward.

In the second part of today’s reading, the returnees made a start at rebuilding that Temple. An altar outside was not enough. They wanted to restore it to its proper place, to raise again a building wherein they might meet the Lord. In the sermon I preached three weeks ago, we read how King David gathered materials and collected silver and gold so that his son Solomon could build the Temple. But now in rebuilding the process looks more like it did when Israel first created a tent for worship in the wilderness, the Tabernacle. The “people” instead of a king hired workers, and paid for the work with offerings from their farms, food, wine, olive oil.

Note that when David had stones cut for the first Temple he used forced labor of foreigners. That Temple was built with slavery. But here in verse 8, about two thirds down page 106, we read “The work force was made up of everyone who had returned from exile, including Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, Jeshua son of Jehozadak and his fellow priests, and all the Levites.” No more outsourced, conscripted labor. Instead the work of this new Temple would be everyone’s work. Both people and leaders helped pay for and build it.

They all worked on it. So, on the bottom of page 106, when the first step was completed, when the foundation was laid, they all came together to celebrate it. Once again the writer wants to show us the continuity. It was a new Temple, begun in a new way, but when they got together there to worship they blew their trumpets and “clashed their cymbals to praise the Lord, just as King David had prescribed.”

Old things, then, were done in new ways. And perhaps the most important of those old and new things was the song they sang, there at the top of page 107, verse 11,

“He is so good!
His faithful love for Israel endures forever!”

There was the deepest and most foundational source of continuity for those people who had come home to a home most of them had never seen before. There was what connected the old with the new. God is so good, and His love endures forever.

Yet even that song did not completely reassure everyone there. That song and the description of their worship, “Then all the people gave a great shout, praising the Lord because the foundation of the Lord’s Temple had been laid,” is followed by one of the most poignant passages in the Bible, verses 12 and 13.

“But many of the older priests, Levites, and other leaders who had seen the first Temple wept aloud when they saw the new Temple’s foundation. The others, however, were shouting for joy. The joyful shouting and weeping mingled together in a loud noise that could be heard far in the distance.”

We’re not told exactly why those older people who had seen the first Temple wept when they say the foundation for a new one. A first impression might be that it was because it was so small and crude in comparison to the glory of what Solomon built. In addition to that thought, the ancient Christian historian Bede suggests they were weeping because they realized it was their own sins which caused the destruction of the first Temple. Others think that they may have simply been tears of joy at seeing the rebuilding begun.

The simple truth is that for all of us, tears often flow when old and new are brought together in our minds. We rightly love and cherish old things that are good, be they a building, hymns or songs. We cling to traditions, whether they are bits of liturgy or coffee after church. And when something new comes along in their place it can make us sad.

Such sadness can even happen with newer things. Most of you probably don’t miss YouTube worship that much, but I think there was a little sadness among your worship leaders when it ended in May and we switched to live streaming in-person worship.

Last Sunday afternoon, while we were in Oxford in England, we broke away from a new grandson just a while to have tea with old friends who live there. Steve and Alice are part of an ancient Anglican church in the village of Iffley. Alice told us how much she enjoyed their “Zoom church” the previous year when the pandemic prevented them from meeting in person. Alice is a delightful, extroverted person who gives extravagant parties and loves conversation. When their congregation met on Zoom and then broke into a series of Zoom chat rooms with participants changing each week, she was in her element, getting to see and talk with so many different people.

Then worship in the old, dark stone church resumed, with everybody masked and distanced and no singing. Alice said it all felt so gloomy to her. She wanted to go back to Zoom church, where she could see everyone’s face and talk to them as much as she liked.

What I’m trying to say in all this is that feelings like those older exiles experienced are perfectly natural and right. When things change, especially when they change drastically, sadness and tears are normal and acceptable. While others rejoice in what’s new, others may be mourning the old which has been lost. And “the joyful shouting and weeping mingled together.” It is all good and proper worship of the Lord whose faithful love endures forever.

It is also good to remember the larger time frame of it all. They celebrated the laying of the foundation that day, but that promising beginning fizzled out. Over the next twenty years, enemies within and without halted work on the Temple. A series of political interchanges with governors and kings of Persia who followed Cyrus took place before the work could resume. And the people lost heart. At the beginning of Ezra 5, the bottom of page 108 in Chronicles, we read that the prophets Haggai and Zechariah, whom we can still read in our Bibles, were sent to encourage people to start rebuilding again.

One particular prophesy of Haggai is particularly amazing. He must have seen that rough foundation laid and heard the comments and the weeping of old folks who thought it could not possibly compare with what Solomon built. But in Haggai chapter 2 the prophet speaks for God who says, “work, for I am with you,” and then in verse 9, “The latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former.” In other words, God promised to make that seemingly inferior second Temple greater than the first one.

It might be possible that Haggai’s prophecy was literally fulfilled when Herod the Great started remodeling that second Temple just before the New Testament begins. By all accounts “Herod’s” Temple was amazing. But Christians believe the real fulfillment of Haggai’s promise happened when a young woman named Mary carried a baby into that Temple. An old man named Simeon took that baby in his arms and said,

“Now may your servant depart in peace;
your word has been fulfilled:
my own eyes have seen the salvation
which you have prepared in the sight of every people:
a light to reveal you to the nations,
and the glory of your people Israel.”

I have to believe there were tears in Simeon’s eyes as he spoke and that he wept both with joy for the new day that was breaking and with sadness for old days and years lost and gone waiting for that Child.

Jesus Christ is the glory of God, the enduring love of God, come to us to fill all our earthly temples and places of worship with glory. Our friends gave us a tour of their old Norman church there in Oxford. Like the ship of Theseus you might wonder if it’s still the same building. The original stones are nine hundred years old, but the basilica at one end had collapsed, and newer chancel built at the east end. Along the sides you can see stained glass windows in three different styles over the centuries replacing original tiny Norman windows. A beautiful 20^th century stained glass window is at the back. Yet it’s the same church. People have worshipped and prayed in it, perhaps every day, for all that time.

Alice told us a story that happened a few years ago. She said that a Catholic priest from Sri Lanka visited them, a sophisticated theologian and scholar. They took him also to see their church. When he walked in that ancient door, decorated to symbolize a transition from earth to heaven, he did something he said he had never done before. He went down on his face upon the stones in the aisle, overwhelmed by a spiritual sense of all the prayer that had gone up in that place over time.

Our 35-year-old church building is a baby compared to ancient structures like that. But as you and I plan to give and work to repair it next year, and, even more importantly, plan to continue to worship and pray to our Lord Jesus Christ in this place, there is a promise and a goal for us. “The latter glory of this house will be greater than the former.”

There will be the old and there will be the new. There will be weeping for the latter and rejoicing at the former. Yet “Jesus Christ,” as Hebrews 13:8 says, “is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” Let this physical space, let the virtual spaces we create on the Internet, let the temporal spaces of the days and years God gives us, let the spiritual spaces of our own selves be inhabited by Christ our Lord, and let His glory and His love be our praise forever. His faithful love endures forever.

Amen.