Now take courage
Two themes stood out for me when I looked at the readings for this evening (Haggai 1:13-2:9 & 1 Cor 3:10-17) – the first was courage and the second, building, and I want to think a little bit about those themes…
The reading from the Old Testament prophet Haggai starts a little way into the book – what we’ve missed is the command from God to rebuild the temple. This is addressed to a group of people who’d returned from a long exile and perhaps naturally, they began to try and build a good life for themselves – economic times were difficult but they worked hard to make a comfortable lifestyle.
But while they were doing this, they actually ignored the fact that their Temple was in desperate need of rebuilding. Today we might look at things a bit differently, but the Temple represented something, or was supposed to represent something, bigger than any of our churches.
Lots of us get attached to particular churches. They can be places with all kinds of memories attached to them, and sometimes places where we just feel most comfortable with God. But the Temple was more – this represented God’s presence amongst the people.
So a Temple in ruins represented in many ways a breakdown in the people’s relationship with God – in effect they were more concerned with making themselves comfortable rather than building their relationship with God.
And this surely has lessons for us too – the lesson is about how easy it is to go about our lives, putting God in a special compartment, when he invites us to let him into every part of our lives…
We continue to celebrate Easter and on that first Easter Day history was transformed. Light had won over darkness, life over death, hope over despair, love over hate… The resurrection of Jesus is good news for a world that sometimes isn’t listening.
But it’s easy to shift the blame as well – the world isn’t listening is a great excuse for us not to do more, but Jesus made it clear that faith is for sharing, that his message of Good news is for everyone, and that places a responsibility on us as well… A responsibility to make a decision as to whether we accept the invitation to follow him, and, if we do, then what that means in our lives, because actually Jesus doesn’t allow the option of putting him into a separate compartment and getting on with the rest of our lives without him.
Following Jesus means trying to be like him – loving people, serving people, sharing a message of hope and peace and invitation, inclusion and welcome…. And that has to speak to us as a church today, and the church is you and me. We are called to share a message in words and actions.
And that isn’t easy – too often as churches today we’ve accepted a message that we’re not as relevant as we once were, that decline is probably inevitable, that people just aren’t interested in the way they once were, that our churches offer nothing for younger people – the list can go depressingly on and on…
And then we’re reminded again of Easter – of new life overcoming death, and we remember that into a world where there is inequality and conflict, into a world where there is greed and self interest, a message of hope and peace and love is desperately needed….
This isn’t simply a message to be nice to each other – but a message that calls us to work on true love even when it’s hard. A message to look out for people that we might occasionally think aren’t very nice, or people who we think could do a bit more to help themselves… We are not to be those judges. The command from Jesus is to love, to love with no conditions…
And that really is tough, and perhaps that’s why as churches we often seem a bit quiet. We’re a little bit doubtful that our voices will be heard if we speak of this message of incredible love, if we offer an invitation for people to listen to the good news that Jesus is offering to everyone…
And there are words from this reading from Haggai (2:4) that speak to us powerfully. It says, ‘Yet now, take courage’ and a little bit later in the same verse, ‘for I am with you says the Lord.’
The church today has a duty to be courageous, to proclaim and live a message that the world desperately needs to hear. We have to be that church.
Easter reminds us of the relevance of the message we offer, Easter reminds us of God who loves so powerfully, Easter reminds us that however dark a situation may sometimes look, there is always hope.
And so back to the readings – Haggai tells the story of how people neglected God and built their lives without him and our reading from Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians (3:10-17) is also about building and about building on the foundation of Jesus and again that is a great lesson for us.
We can have courage in the message we offer when we build our lives and our churches on the firm foundation of Jesus. It seems so obvious that we would do that – after all we come to church, we recite the creeds where we say we believe in God who does all kinds of incredible things so powerfully, but then we sometimes try to exist without him for much of our lives…
If we try to do that it won’t work – there is no compartment we can construct that is big enough to hold God. We are invited to build our lives with Jesus as the firm foundation, courageously living out the gospel message or neglecting him – it’s a stark choice, but not a threatening one.
Again, we can think of the church sometimes – and just occasionally it’s not really as vibrant and lively and joyful and exciting and welcoming and loving as we hope. But that isn’t God – God who offers us an invitation to enjoy what the bible describes as fulness of life. God, who in Jesus, showed extravagant love for us and invites us to share that love with others.
The author Leo Buscaglia wrote of what he called a "misery dinner." It was the night after his father had come home and announced that he would have to go bankrupt because his partner had absconded with their firm's funds. Leo’s mother responded by going out and selling some jewellery to buy food for a grand dinner. Other members of the family didn’t understand it at all but she replied that "the time for joy is now, when we need it most, not next week." Her courageous act rallied the family.
It seemed a stupidly extravagant act from the woman in this story, but it did something powerful to the family. When we look at some of the stories Jesus told his followers and others we are given lessons in extravagant love – think of the lost sheep and the shepherd going off to find the one and leaving the 99 behind. Wouldn’t it have been better to accept that the shepherd has lost one and move on ? That’s not God’s way.
What about the parable of the Good Samaritan – the Samaritans and the Jews really hated each other but whilst supposedly good people walked by the injured man, it was the Samaritan that helped, putting aside divisions and prejudice.
And one more, what about the Prodigal Son – he’d taken his inheritance and gone off and spent it on all kinds of wild things and when he had nothing he went home where he was met not with a telling off or with some sort of punishment, but with open arms….
Those arms are the arms of God that call us to be with him, to walk with him day by day, to be courageous in our living out and sharing the love and good news of Jesus with everyone… As we continue to celebrate Easter, let’s never think that the Christian message is one that has little relevance for our communities today, but confidently and powerfully help to reveal a message of good news, of love and welcome for everyone. And let’s work for, pray for and believe that our churches can be full of people praising God and helping to shape our communities, our nation, and even the whole world.
To finish with the words of Haggai, ‘Yet now take courage… for I am with you says the Lord.’ AMEN
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