Deacon Terry Gatwood: Master Builders

Sermon delivered on the third Sunday before Advent C, November 6, 2016, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of today’s sermon, click here.

Lectionary texts: Haggai 1.15b-2.9; Psalm 145.1-5, 18-22; 2 Thessalonians 2.1-5, 13-17; Luke 20.27-38.

Grace to you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

I am not a master builder. If any of you ever ask me to help you with a building project I will show you pictures of the home remodeling I’ve been doing for the past four years in our home. They should provide you with at least a little laugh, and also assure you that I’m not your guy.

I’m slow, I not terribly well skilled in carpentry, and even if I know how to do something in the area of building or home improvement you can bet that I’ll stress over it to the point that I talk myself into calling in my dad, father-in-law, or the local handyman. But when I do something a couple of times I do all right. I get used to building the thing and can repeat it over and over again until I’m at least proficient. It’s just getting me past that initial phase where I’m not confident that is the monumental task. (And also, I really don’t like to spend money if I can help it…I was raised by a tightwad, and I tend to be one myself).

The house that my family and I now occupy was once owned by my step-father’s aunt and uncle. I remember what it used to look like before the owners in between us and them. It was beautiful. It was the kind of house that you’d see in a magazine, laid out in full color with gorgeous floors, the plush carpeting that made your feet feel like you were walking on pillows, and woodwork that was void of imperfection and looked like it was just built. The cabinets were a delightful oak, and were like a warm and cozy hug in the country kitchen during those cold months when all you could do was sit inside and sip on a warm mug of the delicious black coffee that filled the whole house with its alluring scent. It was the kind of house that anyone would be happy to call home.

But that was twenty years ago. By the time my wife and I bought it the house just looked sad. It was getting a bit run down, the evidence of a lagging local economy and the inability to keep it in tip top shape. Over the last few years we’ve done what we could do to make it the warm and cozy place that I remember from my childhood. I’m constantly chasing after that vision of what it used to be, and sometimes I get disappointed in my lack of skill and ability to make that vision come to life again.

Much was the case during this morning’s lesson from the Prophet Haggai. The first wave of the exiled is returning from Babylon to Jerusalem. They need a house of worship around which their whole national life can once again be centered. The word of the Lord comes to the Prophet Haggai in the early part of the first chapter, where the Lord remarks that the people have built and are now living in their paneled houses. They have left the Lord’s house in ruins. The people are eating, but never having enough; they are drinking, but cannot drink their fill. They clothe themselves, but can’t get warm. Even their harvests aren’t producing the food that they should. The Lord then commands them to build his house, and to consider their ways. It is God who is causing them to be lacking because they have forgotten to take care of building the house where their lives are to be centered on their God in holy worship.

“Look at this place,” God says to them. “Just look at it. Who is left among you who saw this house in its former glory? How do you see it now? Is it not as nothing in your eyes?”

Solomon’s Temple had been destroyed, and its treasures carried away. What was left was nothing more than a heap of stuff lying around. It must have been disheartening to see the most important house in their lives, the place where the glory of the Lord is to reside among them and where they will offer their worship, simply scattered and broken like a big lego house left by the kids on the living room floor in the middle of the night that has been stepped on by dad in the dark. Just crushed was the building, and likewise their spirits about it.
But God says to them, “Yet now be strong.” He says this three times, “be strong.”

“But what have we to offer here to build something new out of what was left in ruins? How nice can we make this in comparison to that which God once had here for his place?”, they must have been thinking. There wasn’t much hope when one looked upon these ruins and remembered the glory of the Temple which once stood so tall there in Jerusalem.

But God says to them, “Work, for I am with you, declares the Lord of hosts, according to the covenant I made with you when you came out of Egypt.” God reminds them of how he personally instructed them and went with them through that whole arduous journey of fleeing from Egypt, receiving the commandments of the Lord as a safeguard for them to keep the eternal covenant initiated by God for them, and the hardships they endured through the desert years before they finally entered into the promised land. Through it all, God was with them.

“My Spirit remains in your midst. Fear not. For thus says the Lord of Hosts: Yet once more, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land. And I will shake all the nations, so that the treasures of all the nations shall come in, and I will fill this house with glory, says the Lord of hosts.”

God has promised these people that their work, no matter how less impressive it would be in comparison to the work done on Solomon’s Temple, will be gorgeous in the Lord’s sight, because it is work that the Spirit of God himself is overseeing and guiding his people to do. And God will show his favor to his people by bringing back into this new Temple his glory, his presence, that he may dwell in the land with his people, and his people with him. Silver and gold, and all the things of the earth, already belong to God, and he will ensure that those things return to where they should be. It will be a beautiful sight in its own right, regardless of what it looks like when one of them remembers the old Temple. “The latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former, says the Lord of hosts. And in this place I will give peace, declares the Lord of hosts.”

God’s people have been called to do the building. Some may not have the skills necessary to build something that will necessarily be awe-inspiring to the untrained eye, but it will be something that God has lead them to do, and God will glorify it all the more because of the faithful work done by his people by the guidance of the Spirit. It will be spectacular, and there peace shall be found.

It is in our Gospel lesson today that we start to understand what this peace is, when the glory of God, which had departed the Temple in Ezekiel chapters 8-11, returns to the Temple in the person of Jesus Christ as he teaches.

Again in this passage some of the Sadducees are trying to tie Jesus up with questions. These Sadducees don’t believe in the resurrection (so they’re sad, you see?) and they ask him to whom a woman shall be married at the resurrection if she had followed the law and married multiple brothers after the previous ones had died. This is the ultimate tricky hypothetical question someone who didn’t believe in the resurrection could ask Jesus. He replies that in the resurrection the situation will not be like it is now; currently there are those who marry and are given in marriage. Yet, in the resurrection life there will be no marrying or giving in marriage. These cannot die anymore, and thus they have no need of marriage in the resurrected life. Even Moses showed in the passage about the bush the fact of the resurrection: “He calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” These three are named, long after their deaths, because God is still very much their God and they are his people. Death is not all there is, for God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him, and all who have died in the Lord look forward to that day when they shall be resurrected unto eternal life in the body, just as happened in Jesus.

Jesus is preaching to them peace, and showing forth the glory of God in the Temple once more. The Lord has not forgotten his covenant with his people, and he still calls his people to continue building his kingdom now. For while death may seem hopeless to those without hope, we have a living hope that God will once again restore us and build us into his eternal kingdom, alive as blocks in his building, with Jesus Christ, the once dead and resurrected, as the chief cornerstone. God is still building us into his people, us here at St. Augustine’s, and those whom he is calling now to join with us in this work of showing forth the Lord’s glory and Gospel to a world who needs it so dearly. And by these efforts we do see people coming into his kingdom because we are building for God a home in our parish where they may come and worship God with us, and receive the same peace of God.

This building that we do is often in the intangibles. We encourage one another; we eat together, pray together, and spend quality fellowship time with one another outside the times of our principle worship services. We share our faith and hope in Jesus Christ by both word and deed. But we also work in the tangibles of building according to the Lord’s call when we help those in need through the discretionary fund, through our own tithing and special offerings, through the homeless bags, feeding the hungry, and many other things. We have seen the vision and heard the call to do these good things to build God’s kingdom here and now.

And we are now beginning to hear the call and see the vision for something else more tangible for Saint Augustine’s. A center of worship and our communal life together. A place where we are rooted and invested within our community, and where the peace of God may be found in Jesus, our Savior and our Lord. Somewhere that is set-aside as God’s house, where we may regularly gather in Westerville to honor and bless our God. No matter what it looks like, with him guiding our work it will be beautiful in his sight, just like the Temple built by those to whom Haggai prophesied.

God is calling us to be builders in many ways. Maybe for some through the ability to construct buildings, others through the ministries they’re already involved in, and others still in ways we haven’t yet thought of or prayed about.

Listen to the Lord’s voice as you read your Scriptures this week, and ask him to show you how you might become a master builder for his kingdom.

May we build something for you in our lives together and let us be strong, our Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.