Today, you might say, is just like any other Sunday. Get up early, get ready, go to church. Say hi to old friends. And so on. But it isn’t. There’s something unusual about today. You are going to encounter something today you’ve probably never encountered before: A sermon from the Book of Haggai. That’s right. Haggai. The third to last book in your Old Testament.
Haggai is the 10th book of the 12 minor prophets that follow the major prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel. The 12 are called minor prophets because they are short. They are also minor prophets because we often tend to regard them as being of minor importance, which is why you’ve never heard a sermon on Haggai.
In 586 B.C. the people of Judah had been conquered by the Babylonians and exiled to Babylon. Then in 538 B.C., the King of Persia allowed some of them to return home to Jerusalem under the leadership of Ezra, and then Nehemiah. The Book of Haggai records messages given to the remnant of Israel that was trying to eke out a living in Jerusalem in the year 520 B.C.
Haggai speaks into a dismal situation. The people were few, and they had only a tiny piece of land to call their home. They had started to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem, but they failed to complete it. They were poor, they encountered much opposition, and they found themselves unable to reproduce the luxuriant splendor of Solomon’s temple.
Haggai went after the people and their leaders for being lackadaisical about God’s work. In response to Haggai’s plea, Zerubbabel the prince, Joshua the priest, and all the people started to work on the temple once again. Once they started again, though, they quickly fell back into despair. They were a tiny nation, hidden away in the hills of Palestine as the great worldly powers went about achieving their grand ambitions to the North, to the South, to the East, and to the West. Later in the Book of Haggai, we learn that doing the work is only the half of it. Haggai tells the people that unless they repent, and consecrate themselves before God, the temple they rebuild will fail to achieve its intended purpose, and the people will continue to struggle to survive. That part, though, comes later.
When we enter the story, here at the beginning of chapter 2, Haggai is up on his soapbox, offering an inspirational message of hope to get the people back to work again. Haggai calls a spade a spade: “If you’ve seen Solomon’s temple in all its glory, you know that what we have going on here isn’t much.” You’re probably thinking, “it seems like nothing.” But this is God’s Word for you. Do the work. Do the work because I am with you. I promised to be with you when you were down in Egypt, and I will fulfill my word. In a little while I will do something wonderful; I will sake the heavens and the earth, these and the dry land; I will give all the nations of the earth the thing they desire; I will fill this house you are building with glory.
Historians tend to doubt whether Zerubbabel’s temple ever fulfilled Haggai’s promise; it remained small and relatively insignificant, even when it was completed. It is hard to see how it might have had a greater glory than even Solomon’s temple. This being said, Christian readings of Haggai emphasize that, like all human initiatives, Zerubbabel’s temple must be understood not just in terms of what it accomplished but what it failed to accomplish. And what it failed to accomplish is the space that God entered, so he could lead his people where they could not possibly go on their own: into eternal blessing.
The Christian Bible, as you know, ends with a beautiful image: “the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” (Rev. 21:2). When John the Apostle saw a vision of the new Jerusalem, he also heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them” (Rev. 21:3-4).
The city, says John, “shone with the glory of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates” (Rev. 21:12). It must have been a grand spectacle that John saw. The eternal city, coming down from the clouds in all its grandeur, as high and as wide and as long as the known world: he says, “I did not see a temple in the city because the Lord God almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The new Jerusalem does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light and the Lamb is its lamp” (21:22-23). In other words, God will do what none of us has been able to do; he will make the whole known world radiate with the resplendent presence of Christ. There is poor Old Haggai, exerting everything he has to get a few people organized so they can put a roof on their little structure. They are short on funds, short on manpower, short on motivation.
Near the end of St. Thomas Aquinas’ life, he suddenly stopped writing. He had a mystical experience during chapel one day, and he promptly put down his pen. He may well have been the greatest theologian of all time. And yet he confessed that all his work seemed like chaff for the fire once he had encountered the divine. What would he have done had he seen John’s stupendous vision? Is that how poor Old Haggai would have felt? Would he have put down his shovel if he had seen the New Jerusalem coming down from the clouds? Maybe God protected him from such a vision so he could get the work done.
When we realize how great and how awesome and how powerful God is, and how great his glory is, all we are and do and strive to achieve seems like a drop in the bucket. “Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket,” Isaiah says, “they are regarded as dues on the scales; he weighs the islands as though they were fine dust” (40:15). But does this mean that there isn’t any point in trying?
This is the great paradox of our existence as humans under God; everything we are and have and do seems to amount to nothing in the light of God’s grandeur; and yet God tells his people to do his work. When they work it is his work they are doing. “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of Heaven,” Jesus tells his disciples. “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matt. 16:19), and again, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt. 25:40).
No wonder the author of the letter to the Hebrews reminds his readers that even the most insignificant gesture can have cosmic proportions: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers,” he says, “for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it” (Heb. 13:2).
Erich Auerbach was one of the 20th century’s greatest literary critics. Since he was a Jew, he was driven from Nazi Germany and spent the war years in exile in Turkey, without his library. He still managed to write Mimesis, one of the greatest books of the 20th century. I’m convinced that Auerbach understood the Christian faith more than most. What he saw was that early Christian literature, the books we have in our New Testament, aren’t at all like Greek and Roman classics.
The Greek and Roman classics insisted that significant events could only be performed by heroes and gods, and they described these events with grand and florid rhetoric. But in the New Testament, we find poor and uninspiring people doing everyday things, described in everyday language, and yet these everyday things are claimed to have cosmic and eternal significance. This is because Christianity, as Auerbach points out, teaches:
Christ had not come as a hero and king but as a human being of the lowest social station. His first disciples were fishermen and artisans; he moved in the everyday milieu of the humble folk of Palestine; he talked with publicans and fallen women, the poor and the sick and children. Nevertheless, all that he did and said was of the highest and deepest dignity, more significant than anything else in the world (Auerbach, 2003, 72).
Haggai and his compatriots eventually managed to finish a makeshift temple. But they certainly didn’t manage to restore Israel to its former Solomonic grandeur. Their contributions were meager. Through Haggai, though, God gave the people a very great promise. He promised that he would be with them as they worked. And he promised them that somehow, someday, perhaps in a way known only to him, perhaps only with the coming of the New Jerusalem, he would fill their temple with his glory, an even greater glory than that of Solomon’s temple (Hag. 2:7-8).
We encounter the same paradox that Haggai encountered every single day here at St. Peter’s. Maybe you were part of St. Peter’s in the glory days, when they had 150 kids in the Sunday school. Maybe you remember the glory of Solomon’s Temple. And maybe you’re thinking, gee, what we’re trying to build here can never be as wonderful as it was. Maybe our efforts, like Haggai’s, are meager at best. Or maybe you’ve just showed up at St. Peter’s for the first time. You talk to our very nice but not quite celebrity administrator, or one of our smart but not altogether perfect priests. You may go away thinking that St. Peter’s isn’t all that bad a place.
But what if there’s more going on than we see? Could it be that place where we are isn’t just a building; could it be that it is Holy Ground? Could it be that we don’t come together just to get good advice? Could it be that we’ve heard God speak? Could it be that the people you meet here, the clay jars that seem so unimpressive, are filled with divine treasures of unsurpassed worth? Could it be, as Paul says, that they are temples of the Holy Spirit?
What if the founders of St. Peter’s didn’t just found an organization? What if they are our spiritual fathers and mothers? What if the bricks they laid here aren’t just mortar? What if the gifts they gave so that this church could be here today aren’t just gifts in kind? What if the all-too-human offerings we stand upon are offerings given to God himself? What if Peter Leigh and the other members of the parish council that work on the building, on maintenance, and on finances aren’t just tinkling around with nuts and bolts, doing all that practical stuff that needs to get done? What if they are doing God’s work? Could it be that your hands are the hands the God of the universe wants to use?
The Rev. Dr. David Ney is a native of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, and a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada. He currently serves as associate professor of Church history at Trinity Anglican Seminary, in Ambridge, Pennsylvania.
