Life in the waiting lane
Commentary
How long did it take you to get to work today?
According to a study released in May, the average annual traffic delay per person, nationwide in 1999 was 36 hours. That's up from the 1982 average of 11 hours. And statistically it is higher than that if you live in a large metropolitan region. In other words, the odds are that you waited in traffic -- for lights to change, for construction closures and for cars and cars and more cars.
Technology and science have made our lives a great deal easier, but we wait more and more for it. In fact, waiting has become a way of life. Life in the fast lane has given way to life in the waiting lane. We are waiting in traffic and in the doctor's office, in the grocery store check-out line and at the airport. When we are young, we are waiting until we are old enough to drive. When we get older we are waiting to retire. And at the end, we are waiting to die.
But is that how God intended us to live, simply waiting for the next major step, the next big event? The Bible doesn't seem to think so. On the contrary, God has something else in mind for us. There is a purpose to our lives, a purpose for the times in between, a purpose beyond the big Event That Comes Next. And maybe, just maybe, that purpose is to be found in those waiting times.
Haggai 1:15b--2:9
In 538 B.C.E., the Babylonian Empire, which by that time included Palestine, fell to Cyrus of Persia, a savior of sorts, and Palestine became one province of the Persian Empire. Cyrus understood the practicalities of governing an occupied territory, and so he allowed many of the Judean exiles to return home and even to rebuild the destroyed temple (Ezra 1:1-5).
Haggai, who appears just this once in the Revised Common Lectionary, had a narrow concern: the temple. As Elizabeth Achtemeier has pointed out, Haggai sees the deep needs of the people, their hunger and thirst, and their poverty, spiritual and otherwise. He chalks it up less to their being the remnant and less to political circumstances, than to their neglect of true worship, as they live, seemingly unconcerned, next to the rubble of the old temple. At the call of the prophet Haggai, the governor Zerubbabel, and the high priest Joshua -- really at the call of God -- the temple was rebuilt. But how does this new one look? Apparently pretty shabby, compared to Solomon's temple. The new temple was the work of discouraged, demoralized people, people struggling simply to survive, people who didn't have a sense of God's presence. Or God's power.
And it raises the question: which comes first, the temple or the faith? Haggai's answer would be the former, yet a temple built without faith in God may not stand.
It was to those dispirited people that Haggai speaks words of God's encouragement and promise. Something big is coming. In verses 6-7, which Handel quoted in Messiah, God promises a major shakeup of all creation: heaven and earth and everything in between. And when that happens, the treasure of the world will be at God's feet, the former glory of the temple will be restored, and prosperity will reign. Implied in that, of course, is that the once and future glory of Israel will be restored and exceeded. It is supremely interesting and significant that Haggai never says that God is doing a "new thing," a phrase found in Isaiah and Jeremiah. It is not a new promise; in fact, God points out in verse 5 that it is the same thousand-year-old promise God made when Israel came out of Egypt.
So what happens in the meantime? What are the people to do until this shakeup comes to pass? How can they wait? "Have courage," says God to all involved. "Work, for I am with you." It is a call to trust in God's time. The chosen theme for this week arises out of this last observation. It sounds more New Testament than Old, and indeed it is to be found in the Thessalonians reading as well: Wait and trust, for God is continuing the divine work in you.
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Paul started the church at Thessalonica soon after a not-entirely-pleasant stay in Philippi (Acts 17). His letters to the new church of the Thessalonians are the earliest New Testament writings we have. There is little disagreement on the genuine Pauline authorship of the first letter; more disagreement on that of the second letter. Paul's writing of 2 Thessalonians is challenged on the grounds that the eschatology in the second letter doesn't fit with that of the first, and on the grounds of style. The (slight) majority view comes down on the side that Paul himself wrote both letters, and that they were written in relatively quick succession.
The central theme of the letter is the end times and the coming of Christ, the "day of the Lord," along with "our being gathered together to him." Apparently the people are concerned because some have told them that Christ has come again and that they have been left behind (the title of a recent piece of fiction and movie about the "rapture"). But no wonder the Thessalonians were concerned! After all, in his first letter to them, Paul himself said, "the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night" (1 Thessalonians 5:2). That was a little too jarring for them; they wouldn't even know when it happened. Had it already happened? We knew it was soon, they must have thought, but could Jesus have returned already? Did we lose out?
The first part of the divided lectionary reading is Paul's reassurance to the church at Thessalonica. Don't be shaken about the end times and the second coming of Christ, he says, even if it seems to come from me. And in order to ease their minds, Paul points out that a number of things must happen first. He proceeds to set out a brief chronology of the last things and embarks on an uncharacteristic piece of apocalyptic writing, most of which the Revised Common Lectionary omits. The "rebellion" must come first, followed by the revelation of "the lawless one" (RSV: "the man of lawlessness"). These references clearly meant something to Paul's readers. In verse 5, he reminds the Thessalonians that they had discussed these matters previously.
A brief search on the Internet yields a plethora of references to the "man of lawlessness." The classic answers to the identity of the man of lawlessness are: Rome, Caesar and Satan himself. More recently, and more commonly, the man of lawlessness is identified with the Antichrist, in the human persona of such people as Adolf Hitler, Boris Yeltsin, and Saddam Hussein. Along with the lectionary, we might best simply put that in the category of an uncertain reference and live with the mystery.
The second portion of the reading is Paul's thanksgiving for the Thessalonian church. And the reason Paul gives thanks? This infant church has been chosen, given a purpose by God. God has called them and has designated them the "first fruits for salvation." Thus reads the NRSV, but a textual variant chosen by the KJV and the RSV reads "from the beginning" instead of "as the first fruits." Either reading certainly affirms the divine purposefulness in God's choice: God wants this small church in first century Greece to be a part of the Kingdom. Paul realizes (v. 14) his own role in this, but instead of being boastful about it, which one can always imagine Paul doing, he is filled with gratitude. And with that we come to the point of it all: Stand firm, says Paul. Hold fast to the teaching and the faith. And the lection ends with Paul's prayer for God's comfort and strength for the Thessalonians.
What faced the Thessalonians was the age-old question from the gut: How long, O Lord? The question asked by Israel in Egypt, and the question asked by the poor of our cities. How long, O Lord? How long must we be slaves in a foreign land? How long before we have relief? How long before the redeemer comes? How long before the day of the Lord? And Paul's answer: God has chosen you; stand fast, therefore, in the Lord.
Luke 20:27-38
At the outset, we must draw a clear line between the Sadducees and the Pharisees. Both were political-religious sects during late Judaism. One religious difference between the two opposing parties was that the Sadducees denied the resurrection, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of angels (Acts 23:8), while the Pharisees accepted all of them. They likewise rejected the oral traditions that the Pharisees maintained and emphasized as a divinely ordained supplement to the written law.
This passage is found in all three synoptic Gospels, with mostly minor variations. Luke makes some additions to the source, introducing the idea of being "worthy of a place in that age" (v. 35), found neither in Matthew nor Mark. Luke apparently wants to make crystal clear the fact that not everybody is worthy of the age of resurrection.
The Old Testament law in question is the so-called law of levirate marriage, to be found in Deuteronomy 25:5 ff. The idea behind the law, from an anthropological point of view, was to continue the name and family of the man who had died. The custom of levirate marriage extends beyond the early Hebrews and is documented in various tribal cultures, including some in Africa. By the time of Jesus, the law was no longer observed, so the question was distinctly an academic question.
What, then, was the trap? On one level it was merely the pattern of rabbinical pilpul, or hairsplitting. The Sadducees would lead Jesus down a slippery slope, or reductio ad absurdum, in which the woman would end up being the wife of seven husbands in the afterlife, which to the Sadducean mind instantly invalidated the resurrection. On another level, the trap was to catch Jesus squarely between the Sadducees and the Pharisees, forced to choose a path that would turn one group or the other against him. A real case of damned if you do and damned if you don't.
In either case, Jesus stepped around the trap to address the assumption beneath the question: that the life of the resurrection would bear strong resemblance to the life on earth, with relationships intact. No, says Jesus, the resurrected are like angels, unable to die. It is a new life, a different life. Paul says the same thing when he speaks of the glorious body being raised. The simple fact is, to use Paul's words from 1 Corinthians 15: "the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed." It is enormously tempting to look to the life of the kingdom through the eyes of the world. And which of us wouldn't hope for our relationships to continue in some way in heaven? We may cling to that comforting thought, but we can't really know, because life, and love, and relationships, and everything else will be changed, deeply.
Jesus' argument for the resurrection on the basis of Moses' burning bush conversation with God seems strange. To say, "I am the God of your fathers" can mean "I was their God while they were alive." There is nothing about it that proves the resurrection. It is, nevertheless, very much in the traditional rabbinic mode of argument. And however it is arrived at, the truth of verse 38 is a singularly powerful truth, and it leaps from the page, full of possibilities for the preacher.
Application
Human beings have always waited; that's nothing new, it's a part of who we are as creatures. But a strange irony has emerged at the end of one millennium and the beginning of another. Life is speeding up all the time, almost to a fevered pitch. We go places faster, we travel farther, we do more things, go to more movies, see more plays, go out to dinner more often, see the doctor more often, take the children to more museums and soccer games. Yet even as life goes faster, our waiting gets longer. A 30-minute commute extends to two hours because of a minor fender bender two lanes over. A cut finger that requires four stitches leads to five hours in the emergency room, as you wait for the more serious cases to be treated. And all the while, we pace and we fume, because our precious time is not being filled with something worthwhile.
The small waits that we all have to endure -- in traffic or at the doctor's office or at the airport -- we think of as fallow time, wasted time, the loss of a minute, hour, day from a finite supply. And then there are the big waits we go through: waiting for that raise to come through, waiting to see if you get into the right college, waiting till the next vacation, waiting for that right man to come along. And step it up even more: the huge things we wait for: birth, marriage, death, Jesus. Put all the waiting together and what do you get?
What you get is an increasingly frantic pace, with people more determined than ever to make every minute count. More things, more events. Postmodern life is marked by a mentality of big events, of jumping from one major experience in our lives to the next, as if from stepping stone to stepping stone, being careful to avoid the space in between. "You only go around once in life," went the old beer commercial, "you need to grab all the gusto you can." It is a quest for the high points, mountaintop experiences, all trying to find meaning in activity. At one extreme, it is bungee jumping and skydiving. At the other extreme, it is a perpetually full appointment book, with no time to sit and think.
John Lennon said, "Life is what happens while you are making other plans." To put it another way, life and meaning are what happens while you are waiting for other things, big things, to happen.
But into all of that, into all the activity, into the quest for the latest new experience, come the words of Haggai and Paul, words for the in-between times. The Judean remnant and the Thessalonian church are not the only ones who need to hear the words for the in-between times, the waiting times. We also need to hear the call to stand fast in the Lord. We need to let God be God and let time be God's. When things are down and depressed, when the new temple is falling apart and there isn't much enthusiasm for it anyway; when we are waiting for the savior to come again and we are obsessed with the possibility that it may have already happened and we're simply out of luck, when that happens, we need to hear the words, "Take courage, all you people of the land. Work, for I am with you. My spirit abides among you: do not fear." We need to hear the words, "God chose you. Stand firm; hold fast to what I taught you."
In the waiting times we learn to be quiet and trust. In the in-between times, the moments when we aren't trying for it and least expect it, God's purpose and meaning for us are born. The Zen archer never aims at the target; instead there is only a vague awareness of it, while he concentrates on his breathing. Yet he hits the bulls-eye unerringly. Experienced sailors will tell you that to see a dim light at sea at night, you can't look directly at it. You have to look away, and see it with your peripheral vision, when your eyes are pointed in another direction. Perhaps in life and in the church and with each other and with God we should just stop trying so hard, and wait.
It is November, with the overcast days, too late in the year for sunshine and too early for snow. Perhaps it is the November of your soul, the in-between time, the waiting lane. That's when it is time to stand firm, and trust, and take courage. Stand firm, and in that we may find what we are ultimately seeking.
Alternative Applications
1) Haggai: A Fragile Cathedral: In an age when mainline churches are declining, in an age when the church no longer carries much of a role in culture, in an age when church members are discouraged, what keeps the church going? What builds a strong church? The plight of the Judean remnant who returned to Palestine, and the condition of their rebuilt temple, remind us that the real foundation of all temples is not bricks, mortar, stone, or cedar, but faith in God. When that's lacking, can a church stand? Do we worry too much about church buildings? How does strong faith translate over into majestic, rock-hard, serving cathedrals?
2) Luke: God of the Living: The Sadducees had a stake in disproving the resurrection. It would have been to their political and polemical benefit. But the strongest argument in favor of it is found in Jesus' statement in verse 31. More than anything else, God wants a relationship with people. The preacher might use this to move into the resurrection as the way God claims a continuing relationship with humanity.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
Haggai 1:15b--2:9
The first two chapters in the prophecies of Haggai, which were delivered over a period of five months in the year 520 B.C., are concerned with temple-building. Contrary to the scathing indictments of Israel's worship that we find in the words of the pre-exilic prophets, Haggai, speaking on behalf of the Lord, wants the people of Judah to rebuild the temple of Jerusalem, which has lain in ruins ever since the Babylonians destroyed it in 587 B.C. God's concern in this book is not with ritual as such, however, but with the hearts of his people, who neglect his worship for attention solely to their own welfare.
The people's attitude is perhaps understandable. They form only a struggling little congregation in a subprovince of the Persian Empire ruled by Darius I Hystaspes (521-485 B.C.), and while some of them are well off (1:4), most of them are suffering hunger, cold, inflation and drought (1:5-11). But Haggai's message declares that the people are suffering because they have neglected their covenant relation with the Lord. And the symbol of that neglect is their indifference toward rebuilding God's house of worship.
In 1:12-15, however, the spirit of the Lord stirs up Zerubbabel, the governor, and Joshua, the high priest, to begin with some of the people the reconstruction of the ruined temple. Thus, on September 21, 520 B.C., the foundation of the new building is laid (1:15). Yet, how inglorious that new worship site appears. The old folk look at it with tears in their eyes, because they remember the temple's former glory. In the past, Solomon's temple was resplendent with carved cedar and costly gold, olive wood and cyprus. The golden cherubim spread their wings over the Ark of the Covenant, and a fire burned perpetually on the altar. The tablets of the Decalogue were there, and the pot of manna, and Aaron's rod. But all of the temple treasures are gone now, and the building is a meager replacement for the magnificent structure that preceded it. Indeed, in Haggai's words, the people consider the rebuilt temple to be "much more than nothing" (Hebrew 2:3).
That is perhaps a feeling akin to what we sometimes feel when we consider the inglorious nature of the church in our day. In the past, the Christian church counted for something in this country, didn't it? Its voice was heeded in the halls of government and its ethics set the moral tone for society. Its pastors were leading figures in their communities and its charity established colleges and hospitals and welfare centers. But now? Well, now every major denomination is losing members and its governing boards are rent with internal strife over doctrine and polity. Its teachings have been infected with a hundred secular views, and its message is often one of uncertainty and hesitation, lost amid the lures of other religions or scorned among the highest academic circles. Surely it would be easy to view the church in our time as "much more than nothing."
But to all persons who are discouraged by the seeming weakness of the Christian faith, Haggai's announcement from the Lord sounds loud and clear. "Fear not!" God tells the struggling people of Judah, as he tells his struggling church still today in every situation. "I am with you ... My Spirit abides among you" (2:4-5). God yet keeps his covenant promise to abide with his faithful people. That promise is given in both Old Testament and New. "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:20). "Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age" (Matthew 28:20). "I will not leave you desolate. I will come to you" (John 14:18). God never deserts his faithful people.
And the fact we must remember when we hear those promises is that those words are told to us by the Lord God Almighty, the Ruler of all nature and history. The one who promises to be with us is not some weak little godlet who loves but who has no power to put his love into effect. No. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is, as our text says, the one who overcame the power of the Egyptian Empire to deliver his people from slavery (2:5). He is the one who defeated sin and death by the cross and resurrection of his Son. He is the God who spread out the heavens and flung a million galaxies across their span. And says our text, he is the one who can shake the heavens and the earth to bring in his kingdom (2:6-7), the God who controls the future.
And so he tells the people in Haggai's time that the era will come when all nations will bring their treasures to worship him, and he will establish shalom -- all abundance, all goodness, all peace -- on the earth. This God of ours holds the destiny of the world in his hand, as he holds the destiny of his church and of you and me. And so his command in our text for the morning is, "Work, for I am with you" (2:4). Never be discouraged by what you see or experience or suffer. Never turn from clinging in faithfulness to the Lord. For his Spirit abides among us, and with him, all things are possible.
Job 19:23-27a (Lutheran Option)
In a sense, this famous passage from Job strikes the same note that we find in the Haggai text discussed above, that despite all appearances to the contrary, God will bring good out of a seemingly hopeless situation.
Job, as we all know, is a sufferer -- perhaps the symbol of all sufferers on this earth. He has lost his wife, his children, his home, his friends, his good name, his health and his fortune. He has been reduced to a lonely figure, sitting on a garbage pile, scraping at the festering sores that cover him with bits of broken pottery. And Job cannot understand why. If anyone has been a good man, Job has deserved that title (cf. ch. 29). He has walked, he testifies, in the light of God, with the friendship of God upon his tent. He was esteemed by all in his community because he did so many good deeds toward the poor and widowed and fatherless. He opposed unrighteousness at every turn, and stood for nothing but justice in his society. But despite his sterling character and actions and unfailing piety, God has seemed to turn against him and reduced him to nothingness.
The magnificence of Job, however, is that he will not give up on God. It seems to him that God has given up on him, but Job will not return that attitude. Instead, he clings to his faith in his Lord, and he believes, despite all his suffering, that God is good. In our text, therefore, Job declares that after his death, he will meet God face to face -- the God who has seemed to hide from him -- and he believes that he will finally see that God is nevertheless on his side.
This is one of the few passages in the Old Testament in which life after death in the company of the Lord is affirmed. There are a few other hints of that in the Book of the Old Covenant -- in Psalm 73:24 and Isaiah 25:8, for example. And in the very late second century B.C. Book of Daniel (12:2-3), the resurrection from the dead is clearly set forth. That immortality is only hinted at here in the earlier Book of Job. But Job's faith is such that he is sure, as the author of Psalm 73:24 is sure for example, that death will not destroy his relationship with his God. His faith that God is nevertheless good will be confirmed.
The question for us is, of course, if we can affirm the same truth. No matter what happens to you, can you declare that God is good? Can we make that affirmation when we suffer and are in pain, when we lose a child or a loved one, when everything seems turned against us and hope is but a futile dream, when all our world has crashed around us, and there is nothing but darkness in the future? In the depths, can we believe that God is on our side and wishes us nothing but well? Job did. And so did our Lord Jesus Christ, as he agonized in Gethsemane and then died in pain upon the cross. Christ believed that beyond his death God was nevertheless in charge and would vindicate him. And that vindication found its glorious confirmation on Easter morn. Cling to that faith, good Christians, and never let it go, for God is indeed all goodness, and he will never, never desert us.
PREACHING THE PSALM
Psalm 145:1-5, 17-21
The concerns of this psalm are "the mighty acts of God." For the self-understanding of the ancient Hebrew community, it was typical to look at the mighty acts of God in the past and in the present, and therefore to learn to trust him. For us today, recalling the mighty acts of God are not empty commemoration of historic events. They infuse life into something that might otherwise be only dead memory.
The entire psalm is an acrostic poem. In the Hebrew, there are 21 lines, each beginning with the next letter of the alphabet. Thematically, one logical breakdown of the text is:
* verses 1-7: the greatness of God,
* verses 8-13: the graciousness of God,
* verses 14-21: the goodness of God.
For no good reason that we can see, the lectionary omits verses 6-16 from the reading. We commend the entire psalm to you, especially since this is the only time it appears in the current lectionary.
Here are some preaching possibilities:
1) Verse 4 reminds us of the obligation of each generation to pass on to the next one the story of God's mighty works, reminding us of the old saying that "Christianity is always only one generation away from extinction." It is not just commemoration this verse calls for, but the teaching of the next generation, handing down both faith and memory. This means we must translate God's deeds into how we live. If we miss that, memory will be useless. Also, by reciting what God has done, we become part of those mighty deeds.
2) This psalm is an excellent example of how language can become a vocabulary of praise, a medium of extolling the character of God. The psalmist here uses language artistically and yet always meaningfully. Psalm 145 gives us occasion to talk about the marriage between praise and content. For some, "praising God" seems to mean only uttering his name or mantra-like phrases ("bless God," "only you are worthy," and so on), and we would not discount that. But here the psalmist demonstrates praise that says something, that recites the mighty acts of God that the present generations may be heartened.
3) A special emphasis of this psalm is the public declaration of what God is doing for his people. He is not a static God, but one who makes himself known through his ongoing deeds. As soon as we insert the element of time, it becomes necessary to proclaim God in the actuality of historical events. We need to tell how God has dealt with humankind in the past because those dealings are not only "past" but are our bloodstream now. We must make God's great deeds known to free him from the obligation to again and again establish himself.
According to a study released in May, the average annual traffic delay per person, nationwide in 1999 was 36 hours. That's up from the 1982 average of 11 hours. And statistically it is higher than that if you live in a large metropolitan region. In other words, the odds are that you waited in traffic -- for lights to change, for construction closures and for cars and cars and more cars.
Technology and science have made our lives a great deal easier, but we wait more and more for it. In fact, waiting has become a way of life. Life in the fast lane has given way to life in the waiting lane. We are waiting in traffic and in the doctor's office, in the grocery store check-out line and at the airport. When we are young, we are waiting until we are old enough to drive. When we get older we are waiting to retire. And at the end, we are waiting to die.
But is that how God intended us to live, simply waiting for the next major step, the next big event? The Bible doesn't seem to think so. On the contrary, God has something else in mind for us. There is a purpose to our lives, a purpose for the times in between, a purpose beyond the big Event That Comes Next. And maybe, just maybe, that purpose is to be found in those waiting times.
Haggai 1:15b--2:9
In 538 B.C.E., the Babylonian Empire, which by that time included Palestine, fell to Cyrus of Persia, a savior of sorts, and Palestine became one province of the Persian Empire. Cyrus understood the practicalities of governing an occupied territory, and so he allowed many of the Judean exiles to return home and even to rebuild the destroyed temple (Ezra 1:1-5).
Haggai, who appears just this once in the Revised Common Lectionary, had a narrow concern: the temple. As Elizabeth Achtemeier has pointed out, Haggai sees the deep needs of the people, their hunger and thirst, and their poverty, spiritual and otherwise. He chalks it up less to their being the remnant and less to political circumstances, than to their neglect of true worship, as they live, seemingly unconcerned, next to the rubble of the old temple. At the call of the prophet Haggai, the governor Zerubbabel, and the high priest Joshua -- really at the call of God -- the temple was rebuilt. But how does this new one look? Apparently pretty shabby, compared to Solomon's temple. The new temple was the work of discouraged, demoralized people, people struggling simply to survive, people who didn't have a sense of God's presence. Or God's power.
And it raises the question: which comes first, the temple or the faith? Haggai's answer would be the former, yet a temple built without faith in God may not stand.
It was to those dispirited people that Haggai speaks words of God's encouragement and promise. Something big is coming. In verses 6-7, which Handel quoted in Messiah, God promises a major shakeup of all creation: heaven and earth and everything in between. And when that happens, the treasure of the world will be at God's feet, the former glory of the temple will be restored, and prosperity will reign. Implied in that, of course, is that the once and future glory of Israel will be restored and exceeded. It is supremely interesting and significant that Haggai never says that God is doing a "new thing," a phrase found in Isaiah and Jeremiah. It is not a new promise; in fact, God points out in verse 5 that it is the same thousand-year-old promise God made when Israel came out of Egypt.
So what happens in the meantime? What are the people to do until this shakeup comes to pass? How can they wait? "Have courage," says God to all involved. "Work, for I am with you." It is a call to trust in God's time. The chosen theme for this week arises out of this last observation. It sounds more New Testament than Old, and indeed it is to be found in the Thessalonians reading as well: Wait and trust, for God is continuing the divine work in you.
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Paul started the church at Thessalonica soon after a not-entirely-pleasant stay in Philippi (Acts 17). His letters to the new church of the Thessalonians are the earliest New Testament writings we have. There is little disagreement on the genuine Pauline authorship of the first letter; more disagreement on that of the second letter. Paul's writing of 2 Thessalonians is challenged on the grounds that the eschatology in the second letter doesn't fit with that of the first, and on the grounds of style. The (slight) majority view comes down on the side that Paul himself wrote both letters, and that they were written in relatively quick succession.
The central theme of the letter is the end times and the coming of Christ, the "day of the Lord," along with "our being gathered together to him." Apparently the people are concerned because some have told them that Christ has come again and that they have been left behind (the title of a recent piece of fiction and movie about the "rapture"). But no wonder the Thessalonians were concerned! After all, in his first letter to them, Paul himself said, "the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night" (1 Thessalonians 5:2). That was a little too jarring for them; they wouldn't even know when it happened. Had it already happened? We knew it was soon, they must have thought, but could Jesus have returned already? Did we lose out?
The first part of the divided lectionary reading is Paul's reassurance to the church at Thessalonica. Don't be shaken about the end times and the second coming of Christ, he says, even if it seems to come from me. And in order to ease their minds, Paul points out that a number of things must happen first. He proceeds to set out a brief chronology of the last things and embarks on an uncharacteristic piece of apocalyptic writing, most of which the Revised Common Lectionary omits. The "rebellion" must come first, followed by the revelation of "the lawless one" (RSV: "the man of lawlessness"). These references clearly meant something to Paul's readers. In verse 5, he reminds the Thessalonians that they had discussed these matters previously.
A brief search on the Internet yields a plethora of references to the "man of lawlessness." The classic answers to the identity of the man of lawlessness are: Rome, Caesar and Satan himself. More recently, and more commonly, the man of lawlessness is identified with the Antichrist, in the human persona of such people as Adolf Hitler, Boris Yeltsin, and Saddam Hussein. Along with the lectionary, we might best simply put that in the category of an uncertain reference and live with the mystery.
The second portion of the reading is Paul's thanksgiving for the Thessalonian church. And the reason Paul gives thanks? This infant church has been chosen, given a purpose by God. God has called them and has designated them the "first fruits for salvation." Thus reads the NRSV, but a textual variant chosen by the KJV and the RSV reads "from the beginning" instead of "as the first fruits." Either reading certainly affirms the divine purposefulness in God's choice: God wants this small church in first century Greece to be a part of the Kingdom. Paul realizes (v. 14) his own role in this, but instead of being boastful about it, which one can always imagine Paul doing, he is filled with gratitude. And with that we come to the point of it all: Stand firm, says Paul. Hold fast to the teaching and the faith. And the lection ends with Paul's prayer for God's comfort and strength for the Thessalonians.
What faced the Thessalonians was the age-old question from the gut: How long, O Lord? The question asked by Israel in Egypt, and the question asked by the poor of our cities. How long, O Lord? How long must we be slaves in a foreign land? How long before we have relief? How long before the redeemer comes? How long before the day of the Lord? And Paul's answer: God has chosen you; stand fast, therefore, in the Lord.
Luke 20:27-38
At the outset, we must draw a clear line between the Sadducees and the Pharisees. Both were political-religious sects during late Judaism. One religious difference between the two opposing parties was that the Sadducees denied the resurrection, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of angels (Acts 23:8), while the Pharisees accepted all of them. They likewise rejected the oral traditions that the Pharisees maintained and emphasized as a divinely ordained supplement to the written law.
This passage is found in all three synoptic Gospels, with mostly minor variations. Luke makes some additions to the source, introducing the idea of being "worthy of a place in that age" (v. 35), found neither in Matthew nor Mark. Luke apparently wants to make crystal clear the fact that not everybody is worthy of the age of resurrection.
The Old Testament law in question is the so-called law of levirate marriage, to be found in Deuteronomy 25:5 ff. The idea behind the law, from an anthropological point of view, was to continue the name and family of the man who had died. The custom of levirate marriage extends beyond the early Hebrews and is documented in various tribal cultures, including some in Africa. By the time of Jesus, the law was no longer observed, so the question was distinctly an academic question.
What, then, was the trap? On one level it was merely the pattern of rabbinical pilpul, or hairsplitting. The Sadducees would lead Jesus down a slippery slope, or reductio ad absurdum, in which the woman would end up being the wife of seven husbands in the afterlife, which to the Sadducean mind instantly invalidated the resurrection. On another level, the trap was to catch Jesus squarely between the Sadducees and the Pharisees, forced to choose a path that would turn one group or the other against him. A real case of damned if you do and damned if you don't.
In either case, Jesus stepped around the trap to address the assumption beneath the question: that the life of the resurrection would bear strong resemblance to the life on earth, with relationships intact. No, says Jesus, the resurrected are like angels, unable to die. It is a new life, a different life. Paul says the same thing when he speaks of the glorious body being raised. The simple fact is, to use Paul's words from 1 Corinthians 15: "the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed." It is enormously tempting to look to the life of the kingdom through the eyes of the world. And which of us wouldn't hope for our relationships to continue in some way in heaven? We may cling to that comforting thought, but we can't really know, because life, and love, and relationships, and everything else will be changed, deeply.
Jesus' argument for the resurrection on the basis of Moses' burning bush conversation with God seems strange. To say, "I am the God of your fathers" can mean "I was their God while they were alive." There is nothing about it that proves the resurrection. It is, nevertheless, very much in the traditional rabbinic mode of argument. And however it is arrived at, the truth of verse 38 is a singularly powerful truth, and it leaps from the page, full of possibilities for the preacher.
Application
Human beings have always waited; that's nothing new, it's a part of who we are as creatures. But a strange irony has emerged at the end of one millennium and the beginning of another. Life is speeding up all the time, almost to a fevered pitch. We go places faster, we travel farther, we do more things, go to more movies, see more plays, go out to dinner more often, see the doctor more often, take the children to more museums and soccer games. Yet even as life goes faster, our waiting gets longer. A 30-minute commute extends to two hours because of a minor fender bender two lanes over. A cut finger that requires four stitches leads to five hours in the emergency room, as you wait for the more serious cases to be treated. And all the while, we pace and we fume, because our precious time is not being filled with something worthwhile.
The small waits that we all have to endure -- in traffic or at the doctor's office or at the airport -- we think of as fallow time, wasted time, the loss of a minute, hour, day from a finite supply. And then there are the big waits we go through: waiting for that raise to come through, waiting to see if you get into the right college, waiting till the next vacation, waiting for that right man to come along. And step it up even more: the huge things we wait for: birth, marriage, death, Jesus. Put all the waiting together and what do you get?
What you get is an increasingly frantic pace, with people more determined than ever to make every minute count. More things, more events. Postmodern life is marked by a mentality of big events, of jumping from one major experience in our lives to the next, as if from stepping stone to stepping stone, being careful to avoid the space in between. "You only go around once in life," went the old beer commercial, "you need to grab all the gusto you can." It is a quest for the high points, mountaintop experiences, all trying to find meaning in activity. At one extreme, it is bungee jumping and skydiving. At the other extreme, it is a perpetually full appointment book, with no time to sit and think.
John Lennon said, "Life is what happens while you are making other plans." To put it another way, life and meaning are what happens while you are waiting for other things, big things, to happen.
But into all of that, into all the activity, into the quest for the latest new experience, come the words of Haggai and Paul, words for the in-between times. The Judean remnant and the Thessalonian church are not the only ones who need to hear the words for the in-between times, the waiting times. We also need to hear the call to stand fast in the Lord. We need to let God be God and let time be God's. When things are down and depressed, when the new temple is falling apart and there isn't much enthusiasm for it anyway; when we are waiting for the savior to come again and we are obsessed with the possibility that it may have already happened and we're simply out of luck, when that happens, we need to hear the words, "Take courage, all you people of the land. Work, for I am with you. My spirit abides among you: do not fear." We need to hear the words, "God chose you. Stand firm; hold fast to what I taught you."
In the waiting times we learn to be quiet and trust. In the in-between times, the moments when we aren't trying for it and least expect it, God's purpose and meaning for us are born. The Zen archer never aims at the target; instead there is only a vague awareness of it, while he concentrates on his breathing. Yet he hits the bulls-eye unerringly. Experienced sailors will tell you that to see a dim light at sea at night, you can't look directly at it. You have to look away, and see it with your peripheral vision, when your eyes are pointed in another direction. Perhaps in life and in the church and with each other and with God we should just stop trying so hard, and wait.
It is November, with the overcast days, too late in the year for sunshine and too early for snow. Perhaps it is the November of your soul, the in-between time, the waiting lane. That's when it is time to stand firm, and trust, and take courage. Stand firm, and in that we may find what we are ultimately seeking.
Alternative Applications
1) Haggai: A Fragile Cathedral: In an age when mainline churches are declining, in an age when the church no longer carries much of a role in culture, in an age when church members are discouraged, what keeps the church going? What builds a strong church? The plight of the Judean remnant who returned to Palestine, and the condition of their rebuilt temple, remind us that the real foundation of all temples is not bricks, mortar, stone, or cedar, but faith in God. When that's lacking, can a church stand? Do we worry too much about church buildings? How does strong faith translate over into majestic, rock-hard, serving cathedrals?
2) Luke: God of the Living: The Sadducees had a stake in disproving the resurrection. It would have been to their political and polemical benefit. But the strongest argument in favor of it is found in Jesus' statement in verse 31. More than anything else, God wants a relationship with people. The preacher might use this to move into the resurrection as the way God claims a continuing relationship with humanity.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
Haggai 1:15b--2:9
The first two chapters in the prophecies of Haggai, which were delivered over a period of five months in the year 520 B.C., are concerned with temple-building. Contrary to the scathing indictments of Israel's worship that we find in the words of the pre-exilic prophets, Haggai, speaking on behalf of the Lord, wants the people of Judah to rebuild the temple of Jerusalem, which has lain in ruins ever since the Babylonians destroyed it in 587 B.C. God's concern in this book is not with ritual as such, however, but with the hearts of his people, who neglect his worship for attention solely to their own welfare.
The people's attitude is perhaps understandable. They form only a struggling little congregation in a subprovince of the Persian Empire ruled by Darius I Hystaspes (521-485 B.C.), and while some of them are well off (1:4), most of them are suffering hunger, cold, inflation and drought (1:5-11). But Haggai's message declares that the people are suffering because they have neglected their covenant relation with the Lord. And the symbol of that neglect is their indifference toward rebuilding God's house of worship.
In 1:12-15, however, the spirit of the Lord stirs up Zerubbabel, the governor, and Joshua, the high priest, to begin with some of the people the reconstruction of the ruined temple. Thus, on September 21, 520 B.C., the foundation of the new building is laid (1:15). Yet, how inglorious that new worship site appears. The old folk look at it with tears in their eyes, because they remember the temple's former glory. In the past, Solomon's temple was resplendent with carved cedar and costly gold, olive wood and cyprus. The golden cherubim spread their wings over the Ark of the Covenant, and a fire burned perpetually on the altar. The tablets of the Decalogue were there, and the pot of manna, and Aaron's rod. But all of the temple treasures are gone now, and the building is a meager replacement for the magnificent structure that preceded it. Indeed, in Haggai's words, the people consider the rebuilt temple to be "much more than nothing" (Hebrew 2:3).
That is perhaps a feeling akin to what we sometimes feel when we consider the inglorious nature of the church in our day. In the past, the Christian church counted for something in this country, didn't it? Its voice was heeded in the halls of government and its ethics set the moral tone for society. Its pastors were leading figures in their communities and its charity established colleges and hospitals and welfare centers. But now? Well, now every major denomination is losing members and its governing boards are rent with internal strife over doctrine and polity. Its teachings have been infected with a hundred secular views, and its message is often one of uncertainty and hesitation, lost amid the lures of other religions or scorned among the highest academic circles. Surely it would be easy to view the church in our time as "much more than nothing."
But to all persons who are discouraged by the seeming weakness of the Christian faith, Haggai's announcement from the Lord sounds loud and clear. "Fear not!" God tells the struggling people of Judah, as he tells his struggling church still today in every situation. "I am with you ... My Spirit abides among you" (2:4-5). God yet keeps his covenant promise to abide with his faithful people. That promise is given in both Old Testament and New. "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:20). "Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age" (Matthew 28:20). "I will not leave you desolate. I will come to you" (John 14:18). God never deserts his faithful people.
And the fact we must remember when we hear those promises is that those words are told to us by the Lord God Almighty, the Ruler of all nature and history. The one who promises to be with us is not some weak little godlet who loves but who has no power to put his love into effect. No. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is, as our text says, the one who overcame the power of the Egyptian Empire to deliver his people from slavery (2:5). He is the one who defeated sin and death by the cross and resurrection of his Son. He is the God who spread out the heavens and flung a million galaxies across their span. And says our text, he is the one who can shake the heavens and the earth to bring in his kingdom (2:6-7), the God who controls the future.
And so he tells the people in Haggai's time that the era will come when all nations will bring their treasures to worship him, and he will establish shalom -- all abundance, all goodness, all peace -- on the earth. This God of ours holds the destiny of the world in his hand, as he holds the destiny of his church and of you and me. And so his command in our text for the morning is, "Work, for I am with you" (2:4). Never be discouraged by what you see or experience or suffer. Never turn from clinging in faithfulness to the Lord. For his Spirit abides among us, and with him, all things are possible.
Job 19:23-27a (Lutheran Option)
In a sense, this famous passage from Job strikes the same note that we find in the Haggai text discussed above, that despite all appearances to the contrary, God will bring good out of a seemingly hopeless situation.
Job, as we all know, is a sufferer -- perhaps the symbol of all sufferers on this earth. He has lost his wife, his children, his home, his friends, his good name, his health and his fortune. He has been reduced to a lonely figure, sitting on a garbage pile, scraping at the festering sores that cover him with bits of broken pottery. And Job cannot understand why. If anyone has been a good man, Job has deserved that title (cf. ch. 29). He has walked, he testifies, in the light of God, with the friendship of God upon his tent. He was esteemed by all in his community because he did so many good deeds toward the poor and widowed and fatherless. He opposed unrighteousness at every turn, and stood for nothing but justice in his society. But despite his sterling character and actions and unfailing piety, God has seemed to turn against him and reduced him to nothingness.
The magnificence of Job, however, is that he will not give up on God. It seems to him that God has given up on him, but Job will not return that attitude. Instead, he clings to his faith in his Lord, and he believes, despite all his suffering, that God is good. In our text, therefore, Job declares that after his death, he will meet God face to face -- the God who has seemed to hide from him -- and he believes that he will finally see that God is nevertheless on his side.
This is one of the few passages in the Old Testament in which life after death in the company of the Lord is affirmed. There are a few other hints of that in the Book of the Old Covenant -- in Psalm 73:24 and Isaiah 25:8, for example. And in the very late second century B.C. Book of Daniel (12:2-3), the resurrection from the dead is clearly set forth. That immortality is only hinted at here in the earlier Book of Job. But Job's faith is such that he is sure, as the author of Psalm 73:24 is sure for example, that death will not destroy his relationship with his God. His faith that God is nevertheless good will be confirmed.
The question for us is, of course, if we can affirm the same truth. No matter what happens to you, can you declare that God is good? Can we make that affirmation when we suffer and are in pain, when we lose a child or a loved one, when everything seems turned against us and hope is but a futile dream, when all our world has crashed around us, and there is nothing but darkness in the future? In the depths, can we believe that God is on our side and wishes us nothing but well? Job did. And so did our Lord Jesus Christ, as he agonized in Gethsemane and then died in pain upon the cross. Christ believed that beyond his death God was nevertheless in charge and would vindicate him. And that vindication found its glorious confirmation on Easter morn. Cling to that faith, good Christians, and never let it go, for God is indeed all goodness, and he will never, never desert us.
PREACHING THE PSALM
Psalm 145:1-5, 17-21
The concerns of this psalm are "the mighty acts of God." For the self-understanding of the ancient Hebrew community, it was typical to look at the mighty acts of God in the past and in the present, and therefore to learn to trust him. For us today, recalling the mighty acts of God are not empty commemoration of historic events. They infuse life into something that might otherwise be only dead memory.
The entire psalm is an acrostic poem. In the Hebrew, there are 21 lines, each beginning with the next letter of the alphabet. Thematically, one logical breakdown of the text is:
* verses 1-7: the greatness of God,
* verses 8-13: the graciousness of God,
* verses 14-21: the goodness of God.
For no good reason that we can see, the lectionary omits verses 6-16 from the reading. We commend the entire psalm to you, especially since this is the only time it appears in the current lectionary.
Here are some preaching possibilities:
1) Verse 4 reminds us of the obligation of each generation to pass on to the next one the story of God's mighty works, reminding us of the old saying that "Christianity is always only one generation away from extinction." It is not just commemoration this verse calls for, but the teaching of the next generation, handing down both faith and memory. This means we must translate God's deeds into how we live. If we miss that, memory will be useless. Also, by reciting what God has done, we become part of those mighty deeds.
2) This psalm is an excellent example of how language can become a vocabulary of praise, a medium of extolling the character of God. The psalmist here uses language artistically and yet always meaningfully. Psalm 145 gives us occasion to talk about the marriage between praise and content. For some, "praising God" seems to mean only uttering his name or mantra-like phrases ("bless God," "only you are worthy," and so on), and we would not discount that. But here the psalmist demonstrates praise that says something, that recites the mighty acts of God that the present generations may be heartened.
3) A special emphasis of this psalm is the public declaration of what God is doing for his people. He is not a static God, but one who makes himself known through his ongoing deeds. As soon as we insert the element of time, it becomes necessary to proclaim God in the actuality of historical events. We need to tell how God has dealt with humankind in the past because those dealings are not only "past" but are our bloodstream now. We must make God's great deeds known to free him from the obligation to again and again establish himself.
