Jerusalem Presbyterian Church

I’ve never been to New York City. I never saw the twin towers of the World Trade Center while they stood tall and proud against the skyline.  But I can imagine that if I went there today, and saw where the towers used to be, and someone who was a native New Yorker tried to explain to me the grandeur that used to stand on those blocks in Manhattan, I would have a hard time visualizing it.  I would have to rely on photographs to give me any frame of reference. But standing on street level, trying to visualize towers that I’ve only seen photographed from the air would be darn near impossible.  I just would not be able to appreciate the correct perspective.

For the exiles returning to Jerusalem, one of the first big projects was to rebuild the temple.  And the rubble of the temple that they found when they returned home was a disappointment.  None of them had actually been alive during the temples heyday, you see.  That generation—the one to remember how the temple really was—had all died in exile without returning to Jerusalem.  The generation who was to rebuild had heard the legends of the temple—the enormity, the grandeur, the importance to life on the city that the temple represented.   But they had never actually seen it.  They had been born in Babylonian exile, after the temple had lay lain in ruins.  But, oh, they knew the stories.  And the stories gave them something to anticipate when at last they returned.

So when they returned to the site of the temple, it was kind of like standing next to the hole where the towers used to be.  It was difficult to get the full perspective of what had once been.  That’s Solomon’s Temple?

Now, the portion we are reading today is of course part of a larger story.  There is reason that the temple has not been completed.  When the exiles returned, the first order of business was building homes and taking care of the family.  We can understand that, can’t we?   If you’ve got no temple, and you’ve got no home, first you build a home so you have a safe place from which to work on the temple.   You can’t live at the temple—you can’t sleep there, raise your children there, wash your clothes there, cook your meals there.  First things first.  So they built homes.  But something happens once you finally have a safe place to rest your head.  Some times a body just gets distracted.  And once a person has been without a temple for so long…well…a person just might get used to being without a temple.  And the first thing you know a person has forgotten how important the temple was in daily living—how vital it was to know that there is place set apart, a place where God dwells and the presence of the holy is felt and known.

One of the portions of my week that I look the most forward to is Tuesday mornings.  Several months ago I put together a small group of nearby clergy who sit and discuss the texts for the next Sunday.  It has been a dream of mine for as long as I’ve been back in Wisconsin to have this kind of group.   The right people kind of came together, and a group was formed.  We happen to all be small church pastors, and as much as we love our calls to ministry, being a small church solo pastor in a small community can be kind of isolating sometimes, especially when it comes to theological study.  So I am enormously grateful that a few local colleagues took my invitation seriously and that we gather each Tuesday morning to work through the texts.  And I daresay our four or five churches benefit from the interaction, too.

We usually begin with talking about what we preached the prior Sunday, then we talk about our preaching plans for the coming Sunday.  But I’ve noticed a pattern: the final third of our time together—the last 20 or 30 minutes or so—are spent discussing the relevance of the church in modern life.  We all know that even the smartest, liveliest preaching is not all it can be if it does not translate to the daily lives of those who are there to witness it.  Irrelevant preaching might as well be done in empty temples.  And we know, because we’ve all done this for awhile, that no preacher can touch the lives of every person in the congregation on any given Sunday.  Some Sundays we wonder if we’ve touched anyone at all.

And so we end our Tuesday mornings talking about why we do it.  Why, in this world of distractions and comfortable homes, of job stress and the challenging convenience of modern life do we have a place set apart, where God dwells and the presence of the holy is felt?  Why give up the only morning many of us have to sleep in to get dressed and come to a building that never seems to be quite the right temperature, to sit in seats we would never have in our own homes and sing songs that are three hundred years old, and hear obscure texts read that nobody ever quite understands—texts so confusing sometimes that the greatest theological minds in the world disagree as to their meaning?  Why listen to somebody half your age with one-third of your life experience—but with a fancy degree on her wall—tell you what God wants for you?  How can somebody who’s never buried a child, or picked out her mother’s headstone, or watched her life partner slip away from her, or lived out of her car, or started her life over, convincingly tell you in your darkest moments that God loves you to your very bones?  What possible relevance does 9:30 am Sunday morning have?

It was Ann who said it: “I do it because I know I’m part of something bigger that myself.  I do it not because it’s about me, but because it’s not.”

God reminds the people of Jerusalem through the prophet Haggai to the governor Zerrubabbel that re-building the temple is not about them.  It is about the God who is always with them, the God who led them out of Egypt, the God who never left them—not even in exile.   It is about being part of something larger than oneself.  God reminds them that the splendor of the future cannot be measured by the present reality.  God reminds them that God keeps God’s promises and that the rubble of a destroyed temple cannot predict the future of the household of God.  The prophetic word of truth from Haggai is this: The

Kingdom—God’s reign and plan for the universe, which God has created from nothing—is not irrelevant.  Rather, it is the one true thing against which we should measure the relevance of our ordinary lives.

Anne Lamott, one of my favorite writers says this, “Remember, it’s one six-billionth about you.”  God says to us that the “one-sixth-billionth” that is about us is vital, for it is that which God has given us to invest in the kingdom.  You may notice that often when I am preaching, and I mention the Church, I am sure to point out that I am talking about the “Capitol C church”, meaning the whole body of Christ.   It is my hope that by sometimes focusing on the whole body of Christ, of which we are a vital part, we can gain the necessary perspective to understand our place in God’s reign, and can keep perspective on where we are directing our energies when we dedicate ourselves to the body of Christ in this one place and time.  We are part of something bigger than ourselves.

The returned exiles had every reason to be tired and discouraged at the thought of rebuilding and maintaining what was once a shining example of holiness.  If I had been there, I probably would have reacted the same—I would have built my house and taken care of my family then taken a little rest. Realistically those first few temple building steps were likely just a propping up of what had been left behind.  Even more blessed, then, is God’s reminder that God has everything that is needed to bring about God’s kingdom.  The silver is God’s and the gold is God’s that’s true.  But the silver and gold, the true treasures of God did not stay in heaven.  God sent the true treasure down to earth, charges us with keeping it and telling—enacting, reading, singing— the story of God’s amazing love over and over, and over  not as empty ritual but as response of praise and adoration.

I leave you with the fable of the three bricklayers: when asked what they were doing by a passerby one said “I’m laying bricks.”  Another said “I’m constructing a wall.  The third bricklayer said, “I’m building a cathedral.”   Which one are we?

It’s not about us; we are about it.  Let us be about the kingdom together.  Thanks be to God.