The Shaking of God’s Presence

Introduction

I must tell you up front that the title (“Already—Not Yet”) you see in the bulletin and the direction that the sermon takes may be only loosely related at best. I had Remembrance Day in mind for the Already: that aspect of the coming of God’s Reign that was inaugurated in the coming of Jesus, the Messiah. We remember what has been. As we remember the heroism and courage of those who have died in service of their country, we remember the even greater love expressed in God’s gift of Jesus, the Son of God, who came and died and rose “for our sin and for our salvation”. I had All Saints Day in mind for the Not Yet: that aspect of God’s reign that still remains to come in fullness with the return of Jesus. As we anticipate reunion with our loved ones who have died, we think of that great crowd of witnesses before whom we run our race.

Then I read the texts again as I attended a conference this week, and the combination of the texts and the conference gave me the direction that we will go this morning. If it fits with my first thoughts above, that will be a gift of God’s grace. So we turn to the texts and ask what they say to us today.

Haggai 1:15b-2:9

In the second year of King Darius, ¹ on the twenty-first day of the seventh month, the word of the Lord came through the prophet Haggai: ² “Speak to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, to Joshua son of Jozadak, the high priest, and to the remnant of the people. Ask them, ³ ‘Who of you is left who saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Does it not seem to you like nothing? ⁴ But now be strong, Zerubbabel,’ declares the Lord. ‘Be strong, Joshua son of Jozadak, the high priest. Be strong, all you people of the land,’ declares the Lord, ‘and work. For I am with you,’ declares the Lord Almighty. ⁵ ‘This is what I covenanted with you when you came out of Egypt. And my Spirit remains among you. Do not fear.’

⁶ “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘In a little while I will once more shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. ⁷ I will shake all nations, and what is desired by all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory,’ says the Lord Almighty. ⁸ ‘The silver is mine and the gold is mine,’ declares the Lord Almighty. ⁹ ‘The glory of this present house will be greater than the glory of the former house,’ says the Lord Almighty. ‘And in this place I will grant peace,’ declares the Lord Almighty.”

In contrast with the prophecy we read last week from Joel, Haggai gives precise specifics: In the second year of King Darius; on the 21^st of July (to use our seventh month); Haggai speaking to Zerubbabel. The generality of Joel allows us to hear prophecy as applying to all of us; the precision of Haggai reminds us that God works in specific space and time with actual people. In Haggai the context is set in Judah among those who had returned from exile in Babylon. Cyrus ordered the return (Ezra and Nehemiah), and Darius continued it. Now Haggai encourages the exiles to proceed with rebuilding the Temple (verse 3). Verses 6 to 9 then describe a shaking of the nations that leads to the rebuilding of the Temple as the symbol of God’s full presence with God’s People.

Note: The NIV says, “and what is desired by all nations will come”, while other translations talk about the treasure of the nations being brought into the Temple. I work with both ideas in my remarks.

The full presence of God’s glory brings in God’s peace—which suggests that we have here a picture of the final consummation of all things. Similar passages in Isaiah and Micah talk about beating swords into ploughshares and the lion and lamb lying down together. These are all images of a peace beyond human understanding.

So we move on to 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17

Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers and sisters, ² not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from us—whether by a prophecy or by word of mouth or by letter—asserting that the day of the Lord has already come. ³ Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. ⁴ He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.

⁵ Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things? …

¹³ But we ought always to thank God for you, brothers and sisters loved by the Lord, because God chose you as firstfruits to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth. ¹⁴ He called you to this through our gospel, that you might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

¹⁵ So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the teachings we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter.

¹⁶ May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope, ¹⁷ encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word.

Paul wrote his letters to the Thessalonians (writing with Silas and Timothy) somewhere around 50 a.d., so that these are perhaps the first books of our New Testament to be written. Chapter 2 focusses one of Paul’s primary concerns in these letters: To respond to those who thought that Jesus had already returned. He says that instead of “the Day of the Lord” (verse 2), they are in a period of rebellion in which the “man of lawlessness” is being revealed. This time of trouble [compare to Haggai’s “shaking of the nations”] has begun, but also still lies primarily ahead.

Note that the verses in the text refer to the future coming of the rebellion and of the man of lawlessness, while I take this period of rebellion to have already occurred. I base my reading on the way that verse 7 speaks of the period of lawlessness as having already begun. This already-not yet quality of the rebellion parallels the already-not yet character of God’s reign.

Verses 13-17 then encourage the Thessalonians to live according to the gospel and the teachings of Jesus, so as to share in “the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ” at the end of all things. That is, as in Haggai the shaking of the nations leads to the establishment of the Temple, which is the body of Christ.

Luke 20:27-38 recounts a controversy concerning the reality of the resurrection.

²⁷ Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question. ²⁸ “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. ²⁹ Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. ³⁰ The second ³¹ and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. ³² Finally, the woman died too. ³³ Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”

³⁴ Jesus replied, “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. ³⁵ But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, ³⁶ and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection. ³⁷ But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ ³⁸ He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.”

Linking Luke’s account of the controversy of the resurrection with the first two passages, one notes that the internal religious debates between the Pharisees and Sadducees shook the Jewish people so that the living God was revealed to them. God is indeed the God of the living and not of the dead—God of the Jewish People in Luke’s Gospel and our God as well, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the God of our time and all people in the world today. We will not say more about this controversy, but move to a synthesis based on this idea of “shaking”.

Synthesis

There are many pieces one could explore in these passages. “The God of the living and of the dead” is a theme worth pursuing, but we leave it aside today. The theme of the “man of lawlessness” (or the “man of sin”) is also of interest, a figure I take to be roughly synonymous with the anti-Christ, a recurring character in human affairs rather than simply a figure at the end of time. I take this figure to be someone who presents himself/herself as a follower of Christ and at the same time undermines God’s reign by acting completely against God’s reign—you can fill in names that fit the description yourself. Again, I leave this theme aside to return to Haggai’s words about the shaking of the nations so that the desire of all nations shall come.

Shaking

Haggai 2:6-7 states: “This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘In a little while I will once more shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. I will shake all nations, and what is desired by all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory,’ says the LORD Almighty.”

Paul puts it in 2 Thessalonians 2: “Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.” Note that I understand Paul to be pointing at what they saw around them—not to say that therefore now the end is here, but to say that the end of all things has begun (what we have called the “already-not yet”). The letter as a whole makes it clear that the return of Christ has not come. We are to live in anticipation of the End, but not to assume that it has occurred.

Common to both of these is the theme of shaking—the sense of chaos and threat that is common to our day as well. In “The Messiah” Handel combines Haggai with Malachi 3, thus: “Thus saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts: Yet once a little while and I will shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. And I will shake all nations; and the desire of all nations shall come. The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to His temple, even the messenger of the Covenant, whom you delight in; behold, He shall come, saith the Lord of hosts. But who may abide the day of His coming, and who shall stand when He appeareth? For He is like a refiner’s fire.”

The Old Testament uses this theme repeatedly—that God shakes, purges, refines us in order to bring about what is good in us (the desire of all nations). Thus the hymn, “How Firm a Foundation”, suggests a purging and refining action to that fire: “When through the fiery trials they pathway shall lie,/ My grace all sufficient shall be thy supply./ The flames shall not hurt thee, I only design/ Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine.” The hymn writer goes beyond Isaiah 43 (his source for the image of the fire), but captures accurately the sense of this idea through Scripture.

The Contemporary Scene

This brings me to our experience in the present. We sense the shaking of the nations, from a rattled economy to political fears, from unstable regions where violence prevails to the reality of personal loss. I think of a friend whose mother just died: She and her husband are plunged into grief and loss without warning, shaking their world to its core. When C.S. Lewis died, his old friend Tolkien said, “So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age—like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots.”

This is the way of our world. No matter how secure we feel at any point, threats lie around the corner and we can find our world shaken to its core. When that happens, we find out what we truly desire; we find out what is “the desire of the nations”—or at least what it is we most desire. What is “the desire of the nations”? In Haggai it is the Temple, the symbol of God’s presence. In our world, it is the presence of God the Creator, who comes to us in the person of Jesus, the Son of God. I speak as a Christian, and I know that those who are not Christians will not agree that I have expressed their desire. They may be right. I can only say what I believe to be true.

David Garrison has written a book on this theme title, A Wind in the House of Islam: How God Is Drawing Muslims Around the World to Faith in Jesus Christ. He states that in the years before 1900 there was perhaps one effective movement of Muslims into Christian faith. In the 1900s there were perhaps 10 such movements. In the first 12 years of this century there have been, by his count, at least 69 such movements. His web page states (http://windinthehouse.org/):

In this new global study, Dr. David Garrison reveals that the first Muslim movement to Christ did not occur until the 19th century, more than 1000 years after Muhammad’s message first echoed from the minarets of Medina. This first movement was followed by a further 10 Muslim movements to Christ in the late 20th century. But something now is happening. In the first 12 years of the 21st century, we have already seen more than 60 new Muslim movements to Christ!

Leaving aside questions of how he defines a movement, it is clear that across the Muslim world God is shaking the nations, and some people within these countries are discovering Jesus the Messiah, Isa al-Masih.

I encourage you both to read the stories and to increase your own interaction with Muslims and other immigrants in Canada. I warn you also that they bring us the temptation to respond with a sense of triumphalism. We may cheer as if we are playing a game of football and our side just scored a touchdown. That kind of response undermines “the desire of the nations”. This is not a game, but an intense search for meaning and power to live in our world. We are being shaken, and God wants to bring us closer to Jesus, God’s Son—to reveal Jesus within us.

That is my closing word to you. Embrace the shaking of the world around us and of our own inner worlds as part of God’s work to bring to completion our desire to know God better. Paul prayed for the Thessalonians, and I pray for you: That God will teach you to know him better, to love him more fully, and to serve him with your whole hearts, until the Day Christ appears.

Grace Bible Church

6 November 2016

Aim for Heaven and Earth Will be Thrown In

Introduction

Today is All Saints Day. Traditionally this is the day on which we remember all those saints who have already entered into Heaven, as each of us also hopes to do at the end of this life. “For all the saints” is the natural hymn to sing at this time of year—one that always affects me deeply since we sang it at my mother’s funeral. “O blest communion, fellowship divine,/ We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;/ Yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine./ Alleluia! Alleluia!”

Each of our Scriptures this morning directs our thoughts towards Heaven, and invites us to live today in light of Heaven’s glory. We walk together through the texts, and then look for their implications today.

Isaiah 25:6-9. In this great passage from Isaiah 25 we see the Messianic Banquet, where all wrongs are made right and all evil is destroyed. Chapter 24 pictures the coming of the end. In the midst of people worshipping God (24:14-16) Isaiah sees the coming doom, judgment in which no one has any hope at all.

Hear the first three verses of Isaiah 24: “See, the Lord is going to lay waste the earth and devastate it; he will ruin its face and scatter its inhabitants—it will be the same for priest as for people, for the master as for his servant, for the mistress as for her servant, for seller as for buyer, for borrower as for lender, for debtor as for creditor. The earth will be completely laid waste and totally plundered. The Lord has spoken this word.” This withering scorching judgment brings in God’s reign, pictured in the Great Banquet at which God’s people feast and death and disgrace are destroyed forever.

The Marriage Supper of God pictured here became a basic image in Jewish and Christian thinking. In Luke 14 Jesus eats at the table of a prominent Pharisee. One of the people at the meal said, “Blessed is the one who will eat at the feast in the kingdom of God.” In reply, Jesus tells the parable of those who make excuses and are excluded from this feast, and those who come in to take their place. The story serves to remind its hearers that all history is consummated in joy in God’s presence, but not all people will take part in that joy. In Revelation 19 (read at All Hallows Eve in the church’s year), John pictures the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. Again, it is the feast at the end symbolizing the joy and completeness of God’s victory over evil and God’s reign over eternity.

So Isaiah gives us this picture of joy and victory, but only after reminding us of the reality of evil and despair in this world. I think I see what Isaiah wants us to hear: The reality of the Great Banquet gives meaning to the present. God gives us the ability to live in the present in the reality of God’s reign, in spite of the evil and terror around us.

Revelation 21:1-6a. As the book of Revelation comes to an end, we see the destruction of evil in chapter 20, bringing about the New Heaven and new Earth in chapter 21. Just as Isaiah 24 pictures judgment and Isaiah 25 shows the joy that follows, Revelation 19 pictures judgment, and Revelation 20 pictures the joy that follows. The New Jerusalem shows us all wrongs made right and all evil destroyed. As with the Messianic Banquet, we can live in the present in the reality of the consummation of good at the end of all things.

Hear the text again:

¹Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. ² I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ⁴ He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

A question from verse 1: What is the sea that now disappears? The Sea is the area in front of the throne—so in Revelation 4:6, leading to the line in the hymn: “Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.” Here it is simply a bowl-like area before God’s throne. But the sea has another meaning as well.

In Revelation 13:2 the beast comes out of the sea. This image goes back to the beginning of creation, when everything was formless and void, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of “the deep”. The deep can also be the sea—that primeval chaos out of which God brought all of creation in order and peace.

In this second sense, the sea is a constant source of danger and of the power of evil. Then we read verse 1: “There was no longer any sea.” The source of evil and danger is itself done away with. Not only are sin and sorrow overcome, but their source is gone, and in its place we see the New Creation where God’s people live forever with God. So we come to the gospel reading.

John 11:32-44. We could observe many details from the story in John 11, such as the way that Mary and Martha responded to their brother’s death. They showed an almost unshakable faith that Jesus could have helped their brother, but they do not seem to see that he still can. “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” But Jesus is here now, and Lazarus is dead.

Jesus’ response to Lazarus’ death shows both his humanity (“Jesus wept”) and his divinity (“Lazarus, come out!”). In this action showing his intimate union with the Father, Jesus makes the final end of all things a present reality. He raises Lazarus from death.

The miracle raises many questions. What kind of life did Lazarus receive? Presumably it was simply his old physical life continued, so that he had to die all over again. Dying once is hard enough; he had to do it twice! Where was he during those four days? Was he with God, or in some kind of limbo, or what? The text doesn’t answer such questions, and they are not the point of the story.

The point is clear enough. Jesus let his followers see for a brief moment something of the glory that Isaiah describes in chapter 25 and John the Revelator describes in chapter 21. John and Isaiah point to the end and say: See what God has prepared for us? Jesus brings that wonderful vision into the immediate moment and tells us, “It starts now!” To put it another way, we live in the present with the reality of God’s reign, through God incarnate in Jesus, who brings God’s reign into our daily lives.

The Text in our Present Experience

Take one item from the year’s news. ISIS has taken territory in Iraq and Syria, bringing hundreds of thousands of people under its control. The result for women in ISIS-controlled territory is bad, and the fate of men forced to join in the fight is no better.  Last Christmas I got into a discussion with a close friend about how to respond to the threat that ISIS poses. He was clear in his response. We must use military force to stop them as soon as possible. They are beheading innocent people. We must stop them! My heart feels the agony with my friend. Here is great evil abroad in our world, and we have to deal with it. The trouble is that we end up using the methods of those we oppose, determined to defeat them quickly.  As we fight them, we become like them.

This pattern is not reserved only for great international events, but is played out in almost every relationship we have in our daily lives. When someone attacks us, we find ourselves fighting back with attitudes and actions that do not fit the way that Jesus has taught us to live. I have experienced those conflicts from the inside, and I have felt the stab of pain that comes when a brother or sister proclaims that you have attacked them—and now they will defend themselves.

The hurt that Mary and Martha felt when their brother died (and that Jesus shared with them) is the same hurt that we experience so often in this world. Like Mary and Martha, we may know that all such things will be healed in Heaven, but we hurt now, and we need help now.

Into that hurt Jesus comes with this glimpse of and experience of the New Earth and the New Heaven. We receive a glimpse of Heaven, and we receive also the strength to live today in the light and reality of Heaven.

Aim for Heaven

This is the reason that I have used this title: Aim for Heaven, and earth will be thrown in. These words come from the musical, “For Heaven’s Sake”, but let me give you the words as C.S. Lewis wrote them in Mere Christianity.

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next… It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither (p. 134).

Some people accuse Christians of being “so heavenly-minded that we are no earthly good.” We are told that Christianity is the opiate of the people (Marx’s idea: that religion calms people down so that they do not fight against the injustices of this world, allowing capitalist governments to continue to rule unjustly). We are told that talk about Heaven is bad because it teaches people to accept bad things here because we will receive our reward in heaven—the idea of “pie in the sky by and by”.

Lewis responded to these charges by pointing out that our ultimate goal in life actually tells what we will live for now. If we aim at earth, trying to fix things that are wrong using whatever means come to hand, we lose both Heaven and earth. But Jesus gives us new life, with the possibility of living by the light of the resurrection. Paul calls this kind of life, “walking in the resurrection” or “walking in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). We die to self, and we live to Christ.

When I was in college, I spent one summer working for a tree trimming and lawn care company. At first I helped with the trees, pulling away the branches that had been cut out of the tree. Then they sent me up the tree for the first time, and I cut out my first branch. I cut out the wrong one, a major branch instead of the small one growing out of it! They transferred me to mowing lawns, so I spent most of the summer mowing lawns—at the height of the season, starting at 7 am and going until dark. Long days, up to six days a week.

I learned a lot about mowing lawns. One of the first and most important lessons was to make the lawn look neat. I was taught to mow in straight lines, horizontally one week and vertically the next week. Straight lines are harder to do than you might think. You watch the line between the cut and uncut grass, but when you look back, you find that you have wondered off the straight and narrow. Your lines start to look a little bit like the morning after the night before.

So they taught me a trick that ensures straight lines. Any farmer who has plowed a field knows the trick. Although you have to watch the ground just in front of you, your goal is in the distance. You look at some object beyond the end of the lien you are about to mow, and walk steadily towards it. If you remain focussed on that goal in the distance, you will walk in a straight line. If you focus on the obstacles near at hand, you will go astray.

That’s the idea. Keep your eyes fixed on the banquet at the end. Remember the new life God has given us, which already flows inside your veins. Live that new life. Even though the people around you press you to respond with the anger and attacks that fit the turmoil around us, you keep watching Jesus and walking towards him. And as Lewis says, you will make more of a difference than you can guess.

Aim for heaven and earth will be thrown in,

Aim out beyond the now and near;

Aim for forever, and there will come a day

When you find forever is here.

…

If you would save your life,

Then you must choose

To give away your life,

For what you lose—

Out at the end of time is what you win.

Oh aim for heaven, aim for heaven, aim for heaven,

            And earth will be thrown in.

Grace Bible Church

1 November 2015: All Saints Day