Pastor Darren: Yeah, we're talking a little bit of hope today, and our passage uses the phrase, the days are surely coming, says the Lord.
Pastor Darren: Are those comforting words for you?
Pastor Darren: All right, because they're supposed to be comforting.
Pastor Darren: The days are coming.
Pastor Darren: They are on their way.
Pastor Darren: You know, God is coming.
Pastor Darren: God's going to get things set right.
Pastor Darren: So be hopeful.
Pastor Darren: Be hope-filled for gosh sake.
Pastor Darren: And in that spirit, we're getting ready for Advent, right?
Pastor Darren: Advent, that the four Sundays that lead into Christmas Eve, the season of preparing and getting ourselves organized and maybe even building something up so that Christmas Eve, the birth of Christ, means something.
Pastor Darren: So this series is going to be living into that spirit just a little bit, anticipating it.
Pastor Darren: So I hope that you are up for a series that essentially a season of preparing for a season of preparing.
Pastor Darren: We're preparing to prepare, friends.
Pastor Darren: All right.
Pastor Darren: I hope you're ready for that.
Pastor Darren: The hope is that Christmas itself can mean much, much more.
Pastor Darren: Advent, Christmas Day, more than just the cultural pieces that we work with, right?
Pastor Darren: The presence, the family, the food, uh, but that it means something more substantial.
Pastor Darren: That's our hope.
Pastor Darren: Uh, it's also our season of deepening in our understanding of who Christ is and what it meant that Christ came to be with us.
Pastor Darren: So I hope that you are ready for that journey.
Pastor Darren: And now that I've got you all geared up, let's dig into some Old Testament for some hope.
Pastor Darren: Who's ready?
Pastor Darren: All right, all right.
Pastor Darren: Me and Gary are ready.
Pastor Darren: All right, the rest of us.
Pastor Darren: All right, here's how we're gonna start.
Pastor Darren: What I need is your list of your top ten prophets.
Pastor Darren: All right, top ten prophets.
Pastor Darren: Let's start with number 10.
Pastor Darren: Who's your tenth favorite prophet?
Pastor Darren: Jeremiah?
Pastor Darren: Okay, why are you ranking him so low?
Pastor Darren: Oh, he's just he was always whining.
Pastor Darren: Is that what you said?
Pastor Darren: I mean, a poor guy.
Pastor Darren: It was there when the temple gets torn down, right?
Pastor Darren: He has a reason to be disappointed and all that.
Pastor Darren: Top five prophets?
Pastor Darren: We do we have our favorites?
Pastor Darren: I'm kind of joking.
Pastor Darren: I know not everybody is deep into their Old Testament prophets.
Pastor Darren: We start with the gospels, we do some Paul, uh, you know, maybe we get into Genesis, but after that it's uh so how about a favorite prophet?
Pastor Darren: A prophet you like?
Pastor Darren: Yeah, Gary?
Pastor Darren: Isaiah, right?
Pastor Darren: Isaiah, a lot of his uh uh prophecy is what we understand to be the coming of Christ, and so we do a lot of it at Christmas time and and in Advent time.
Pastor Darren: You know, some people like Daniel in that lion's den.
Pastor Darren: Uh some people have fun with Jonah, uh, some people are deep, deep people like a Job.
Pastor Darren: Heavy, heavy.
Pastor Darren: All right, yeah.
Pastor Darren: Anyway, uh today we're talking about a prophet we don't generally get into, Haggai.
Pastor Darren: Have you read Haggai?
Pastor Darren: All right, all right, then this will be good.
Pastor Darren: Hey, the good thing about Haggai, really, really short.
Pastor Darren: You know, you can get it done in 10 minutes, maybe 15 minutes.
Pastor Darren: So, in order to understand Haggai, you have to know some history, you have to know some ancient history.
Pastor Darren: And I know how much you love ancient history, he said sarcastically.
Pastor Darren: And so, in order to get that history out, I have made some slides and I'm giving myself three minutes to get it all out.
Pastor Darren: Are we all agreed that's fair?
Pastor Darren: Three minutes of ancient history is okay.
Pastor Darren: I can do this.
Pastor Darren: All right, I'm starting now.
Pastor Darren: All right, we're gonna start with the United Monarchy.
Pastor Darren: You probably have heard of King David, right?
Pastor Darren: He's sort of famous from the Old Testament.
Pastor Darren: Well, he was an effective king, which is probably why a lot of our Old Testament is committed to his story and his writings in the Psalms.
Pastor Darren: He created a lot of stability in the kingdom, and his son came behind him and did the same kinds of things and was able to really get something grounded, right?
Pastor Darren: So you're seeing David and Solomon, right around 1,000 leading up to 931 BCE.
Pastor Darren: By the way, BCE before the Common Era.
Pastor Darren: A lot of folks are using those words instead of BC and AD.
Pastor Darren: So they get it started.
Pastor Darren: It's a pretty healthy time for the Jewish people.
Pastor Darren: All right, next slide.
Pastor Darren: Then after Solomon dies, they get into some division.
Pastor Darren: Sometimes nations will divide.
Pastor Darren: I don't know.
Pastor Darren: You'll hear about it sometime because it's certainly not happening today.
Pastor Darren: Divided kingdom starts happening right after Solomon's death.
Pastor Darren: We end up with a northern kingdom which is called Israel, right?
Pastor Darren: And then we have a southern kingdom called Judah, and you can see kind of where they set up camp, each of them.
Pastor Darren: Judah is where uh David and Solomon were, though.
Pastor Darren: And it was a much more stable uh kingdom than Israel became.
Pastor Darren: And you'll learn here in the next slide that eventually, after some years of coexisting not necessarily well, uh the Assyrian conquest comes, and the Israel part is taken over.
Pastor Darren: And when they take over, these Assyrians they take all of the resources, not only uh the stuff, but they take the people.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: So you can imagine if if we were conquered and then they took all of our smart folks, all our people who are innovating, and they were just gone.
Pastor Darren: And now we were trying to figure it out.
Pastor Darren: Not too much later, although longer than you might think, the second kingdom goes down.
Pastor Darren: Judah is destroyed.
Pastor Darren: And in the midst of that, the temple that Solomon had built, this massive temple that was a she was a beauty.
Pastor Darren: This is what we understand.
Pastor Darren: Really did a good job on the temple.
Pastor Darren: It gets broken down really uh just in the conquering and uh the desire to quash the Israelites, the desire to quash the Jewish people.
Pastor Darren: And so even more exile happens at that point.
Pastor Darren: The Babylonian exile, you may have heard of in some Bible study and all that.
Pastor Darren: And so all of their resources, all of their intelligence, all of their innovation again gets taken away.
Pastor Darren: And then there's just this period of the Jewish people living oppressed, those who were taken away lived in oppression in that way, and then those who were left left in, you know, to be sad in a sense that their country had been conquered and that all their people had been, or so many of their people had been taken away.
Pastor Darren: Then finally, in the next slide, the uh uh Babylonians are overtaken by the Persians, and Cyrus, the king, Cyrus the Great, offers to let the Israelites go back home.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: So they get back home and they're given permission to resettle and to figure themselves out.
Pastor Darren: And part of that resettling is that they're gonna build the temple again, a second temple.
Pastor Darren: This is where uh Haggai comes in.
Pastor Darren: He is a prophet who is doing his ministry at the time of them resettling and looking to rebuild what they had, rebuild that temple.
Pastor Darren: I think we can skip that last slide.
Pastor Darren: Oh, dang it, 355.
Pastor Darren: Oh, I'm one minute over on that thing.
Pastor Darren: Yeah, yeah.
Pastor Darren: When you're having a blast.
Pastor Darren: Not too bad, though.
Pastor Darren: Four minutes?
Pastor Darren: You know, you can eat oatmeal one morning, right?
Pastor Darren: Ay, ay, ay.
Pastor Darren: All right, yeah, this last slide.
Pastor Darren: That's a little more of the history that takes us into the time of Jesus.
Pastor Darren: But the point is, Haggai, this is when he is doing his ministry.
Pastor Darren: This is when he is preaching uh his message from God.
Pastor Darren: And we assume he was pretty effective because the the uh um the temple does get rebuilt.
Pastor Darren: And part of his uh technique, well, and I talk about the title of my message here today is even better than before.
Pastor Darren: Because that's kind of how he preached about building that second temple.
Pastor Darren: It is going to be even better than before.
Pastor Darren: And how did he get this message across?
Pastor Darren: Well, some of it was nostalgia.
Pastor Darren: He said, Some of you were around when the other temple was here.
Pastor Darren: You remember how great that temple was, that thing we got built with God, and it was this glorious thing.
Pastor Darren: Well, guess what?
Pastor Darren: God is still here.
Pastor Darren: God is still working with us to build this temple, this new temple.
Pastor Darren: And because God's with us, this next one's gonna be even better than the one before God, because God was with us then, and God is with us now.
Pastor Darren: So it's an interesting passage in my mind, this passage for us given today's context, because we don't necessarily have a fallen temple.
Pastor Darren: We aren't a people who got conquered and then taken away and then are now getting to come back and try to figure things out.
Pastor Darren: And even if our church here got destroyed and taken down, we wouldn't necessarily see that as a weakness from God, right?
Pastor Darren: That wouldn't say to us, oh, God must be really weak.
Pastor Darren: That temple got broken down, God should have protected it.
Pastor Darren: We would think, oh no, something else happened.
Pastor Darren: We weren't doing our work to take care of the building, or we just uh there was a journey that was happening here that we weren't really taking that we should have.
Pastor Darren: But we wouldn't blame it on God if that fell.
Pastor Darren: But we do live at a time in which our positivity, our hope for the nation, maybe even for the world, is a little bit in check.
Pastor Darren: Our anxieties about the future of the world, our anxieties about our own nation are a little bit high.
Pastor Darren: Maybe it's because of our commercialized news, maybe it's our politicized news.
Pastor Darren: It just, it's always bombarding us with the things that make us afraid, the things that make us anxious or angry, right?
Pastor Darren: And we just we get them coming to us all the time.
Pastor Darren: Why?
Pastor Darren: Because that's what we watch, and that's what they want to give us, are the things that get us to watch.
Pastor Darren: Maybe that's why we're anxious.
Pastor Darren: Maybe it's social media, these little uh echo chambers that we fall into, all right.
Pastor Darren: And obviously older folks aren't always in there as much as maybe younger folks, but let's not kid ourselves.
Pastor Darren: We're in those echo chambers too.
Pastor Darren: That's information, the way it gets delivered to us, it's almost unavoidable.
Pastor Darren: So I would argue that our sense of hope for the future is a bit hindered these days.
Pastor Darren: And what's even more interesting or maybe disappointing is the sickness that we have of the they, right?
Pastor Darren: If only they would do this, everything would be fine.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: We rarely kind of look and think, we don't use that word we.
Pastor Darren: We need to.
Pastor Darren: It's always about they.
Pastor Darren: And I wouldn't want you to hear me saying, oh, it's really us, we're our own problem.
Pastor Darren: We aren't truly the whole problem, but we never get anywhere when our conversation, when our communication is using those words they, you, you're not getting it done.
Pastor Darren: That's kind of what we live in a little bit.
Pastor Darren: And even more complex for us, maybe even more uh pessimistic, I would say, is we largely disagree on who the they are.
Pastor Darren: If only they would do this.
Pastor Darren: Well, one group has their version of they, and then the other group are probably those they, and they're gonna got their their think they are the they.
Pastor Darren: You get what I'm saying.
Pastor Darren: We are all kind of pointing and pointing, pointing.
Pastor Darren: So I wouldn't say we have a temple per se, but a metaphorical temple, maybe, as a people, as a country, as a nation.
Pastor Darren: And we're a little concerned for this temple.
Pastor Darren: A lot of people would say it's kind of crumbling.
Pastor Darren: We'd have different uh beliefs about why it is crumbling.
Pastor Darren: And in the midst of that concern, that anxiety, we really aren't creating the uh um the environments, the arenas for us to have good communication to solve some of the things that we're concerned about.
Pastor Darren: So when we're talking about a temple following or falling, there is a way the passage might be talking to us.
Pastor Darren: There may be a passageway into this passage as we talk about the temple of our existence in our community, maybe being at threat a little bit or concerning a little bit.
Pastor Darren: And hey guy's message this is the turn.
Pastor Darren: Hey guy's message is to encourage us.
Pastor Darren: Hey guy's message is to give us hope.
Pastor Darren: And what is that message?
Pastor Darren: Well, hey, God is with us.
Pastor Darren: God is with us.
Pastor Darren: I wonder I wonder if we believe that message.
Pastor Darren: Do we believe that God is still with us?
Pastor Darren: Well, amen.
Pastor Darren: We got some people of faith out there.
Pastor Darren: Good, good, good.
Pastor Darren: And sometimes, even when we believe it, then we have the next question.
Pastor Darren: Okay, well then how?
Pastor Darren: Where is God?
Pastor Darren: What is God doing?
Pastor Darren: How do we know that that's actually happening?
Pastor Darren: And I was wrestling with that this week, and uh I happened to be listening to a podcast, and it had uh former president uh Barack Obama on there.
Pastor Darren: Um, I don't want to get into politics, so I will just say I hope that uh we can all respect a good human being and a good representative of being a human being uh that led our country for a while.
Pastor Darren: But I remembered my story with Barack Obama, especially when he got elected.
Pastor Darren: I remember that evening just feeling kind of elation, not necessarily because of what he was going to be standing for or what he might do, but because I still had memory of environments of some pretty significant prejudice, discrimination.
Pastor Darren: I remember looking in a history book when I was in middle school and seeing a really horrific picture.
Pastor Darren: I'll let you guys guess what kind of picture it might have been about prejudice and discrimination, and being shocked that the picture came from 1968.
Pastor Darren: For me, I was alive in 67.
Pastor Darren: It was so easy to say, oh yeah, we were prejudiced, but it was in the past.
Pastor Darren: And then I had to go, oh shoot, that wasn't that long ago, and it wasn't just bad words or anything, it was it was well, it was murder.
Pastor Darren: And I remember sitting there in 2000, well, it would have been uh well 2008, but then the parade in 2009 thinking, well shoot, we we've moved.
Pastor Darren: We've gone in what some might call a generation, generation, maybe two generations, from giving ourselves well, you what you might say is legal discrimination to a point where somebody from that discriminated community was now by a vote allowed to be president.
Pastor Darren: To me, I in my heart, in my spirit, I was celebrating that because it meant to me that we'd we'd taken a journey, a pretty significant journey.
Pastor Darren: And to me, I like to think that God was with us on that journey.
Pastor Darren: We can believe that God is with us in our challenges because God was with us in our previous challenges.
Pastor Darren: God walked with us through this journey from legal discrimination to electing a president from whom we discriminated from group we discriminated against.
Pastor Darren: And God was with us on that whole journey.
Pastor Darren: It was a journey that started, by the way, not in 1968, but way back when when one cultural group decided it had permission to grab people from another cultural group, to kidnap them and enslave them, allowing themselves to believe that their race was better than another race.
Pastor Darren: Can you imagine the darkness that has to go on in someone's mind to allow them to treat people like that?
Pastor Darren: And on that day in 2008, we had this moment of saying, okay, we have moved.
Pastor Darren: God has walked with us.
Pastor Darren: There is hope in that.
Pastor Darren: Even the darkness that our country has had in slavery, we were able to rise above it, at least to the extent that we have today, and hopefully even rising above it more and more.
Pastor Darren: We know God is with us because God has been with us.
Pastor Darren: From our passage today, God was with us in the time of kings when everything was going pretty good.
Pastor Darren: King David's writing Psalms and uh really informing generations about the relationship with God.
Pastor Darren: God was with us in that time of division, Israel and Judah, when we were living uneasily with each other, despite all being people of the Jewish faith.
Pastor Darren: God was with us in that time of being conquered.
Pastor Darren: When all of our resources, all of our intelligence was taken away, when we felt hopeless and powerless and vulnerable, and God was with us in that time of rebuild, of getting that temple going again.
Pastor Darren: This is the hope that that we hold as Christians.
Pastor Darren: This is the hope that we look to a time of Advent for.
Pastor Darren: What are we doing during Advent?
Pastor Darren: What is it we wait for?
Pastor Darren: We're waiting for this presence, this hope to be made real in the birth of God's Son, whom God sends that we might know God intimately, and that we might know a deep, deep hope for ourselves and our world because of that relationship.
Pastor Darren: I invite you on that journey in this pre Advent to Advent.
Pastor Darren: Amen.