Sermon: Bless the Lord

Texts: Psalm 145; Haggai 1:15b-2:9

Date: November 11, 2007

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational Church

            I was thinking about our stewardship season when I was making worship plans for November so I combed through all the lectionary texts looking for something that might inspire us to generosity.  When I read Haggai 2:8 I thought, EUREKA!  For those of you without total recall, I’ll repeat it: “The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the Lord of Hosts.”  It lacks subtlety, but it does make a point.

            The prophet uttered those words in the midst of a building campaign.  The exiles had returned from Babylon, but they were having a rough time rebuilding their lives.  After their absence of many years, their houses were in terrible disrepair.  Their gardens had gone to weeds; their orchards, neglected, were not bearing much fruit.  There was a lot of reconstruction to be done. 

            Israelites had been at it, the rebuilding, for around 18 years, and still they were restless and unhappy.  The prophet says to them in the first chapter, “Consider how you have fared.  You have sown much, and harvested little; you eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill; you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm; and you that earn wages earn wages to put them into a bag with holes.” [Haggai 1:5b-6]  What was the difficulty?  Were they not working hard enough?

            The prophet diagnoses the root of the problem.  It is that the temple, the house of worship, is in ruins.  It had been destroyed by the invading military forces many years earlier.  The people had put a lot of resources into their own homes, but had left what was left of the wrecked temple to fall into further disrepair.  “My house lies in ruins,” says the Lord, “while all of you hurry off to your own houses.” [Haggai 1:9]  The Lord challenges the people through the prophet’s words: “Is this a time for you yourselves to live in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins?” [Haggai 1:4]

            I can’t imagine the people heard this word gladly.  They were barely getting by, and now the prophet thought they should pony up a bunch of money and time go and rebuild the temple?  Where were the prophet’s priorities? 

            Exactly the point.  While Haggai no doubt knew it would strain the resources of the community to rebuild the temple, he saw it as a symbolic action.  The people were losing their sense of God as the glue that held the community together without the visible, physical symbol of a place of worship.  They needed the temple more than they knew. 

            Why hadn’t they attended to the temple up until now?  For one thing, the people were discouraged before they even started because they knew there was no way they could restore the temple to its former glory.  Solomon’s temple—the one that had been wrecked--had been a magnificent edifice.  As commentator Dennis Bratcher writes, “Whether or not they are precisely accurate, the traditions remembered an enormous amount of labor involved in the building: 30,000 Israelites cutting and transporting timber, 80,000 stonecutters, 70,000 laborers, and 3,300 supervisors (1 Kg 5:13-18). Even with all of the skilled labor and the resources and wealth of Solomon, it took seven years to complete the Temple, and another 13 years to finish the palace and surrounding compounds (1 Kg 5-6). It had been the edifice of an Empire at its height. There was no way that this small group of priests and dedicated worshippers, perhaps numbering under 20,000, could duplicate that grandeur. At best, they could only rebuild on a smaller scale what had already been built, restacking stones and rebuilding walls.”[1] 

            But building something fabulous was not the point.  The point was to make the House of Worship a priority, even if it could not be as grand as it was before the exile.  The point was to build something that would need everyone’s participation.  The point was to have a structure in their midst that spoke of their faith that God was still dwelling with them in spite of all their hard times. 

            The prophet was trying to teach them that leaving the temple in ruins was a sign that their faith was in ruins.  In their conceptual world, God really did dwell in the Holy of Holies in the temple.  The fact that they were in no hurry to rebuild that Holy of Holies signaled their wobbly faith in God’s real presence.  That’s why when the prophet is urging them to take up this project he includes these words of assurance to the people: “Take courage, all you people of the land, says the Lord; work, for I am with you, says the Lord of hosts, according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt.  My spirit abides among you; do not fear.” [Haggai 2:4-5]  The prophet could assure them that God’s spirit was still with them even without a temple to live in.  But they needed to make tangible their faith in this promise by rebuilding their temple as the centerpiece of the community.

            They needed to do it.  The prophet knew, I think, that sometimes you think yourself into a new way of acting, and sometimes you act your way into a new way of thinking.  Their faith in God’s presence with them may have been wobbly, but by throwing themselves into constructing a place for meeting God they would experience a resurgence in their faith.  It was going to be expensive, sure.  But not nearly as costly as seeing the life of their collective soul ebb away.         

            For the Israelite’s of Haggai’s era, rebuilding the temple was a means of reclaiming their faith and blessing the Lord.  That phrase, “bless the Lord,” shows up a couple of times in the Psalm we read today.  I’ve always found it a little puzzling; seems like blessing is something the Lord does to us, not the other way around.  One of my commentators on the psalms says that the Hebrew word translated “bless” in this context seems to mean to kneel in homage to God.  To bless the Lord is to recognize God’s sovereignty.   That is, when you bless the Lord you recognize and proclaim your belief that God is in charge of this universe in general and your life in particular.  When the Israelites, motivated by the prophet’s urging, rebuilt the temple, their action blessed the Lord; it demonstrated their recognition of God’s presence and leadership.

Maybe they sang Psalm 145 as they worked, cutting the trees and reshaping the scattered stones.  It’s certainly an inspiring piece of poetry.  Psalm 145 calls upon the people to do three things, extol/exalt God, bless God, and praise God.  All of these actions communicate the recognition of God’s sovereignty.  The psalmist writes a beautiful hymn of praise for the sovereign God, lifting up God’s many fine qualities: goodness, compassion, graciousness, mercy, love, generosity, power, justice, righteousness, and kindness. 

              The Rabbis of old thought this particular psalm was so important that it should be recited three times a day.  It was a relatively easy one to learn to recite because it is an acrostic—in Hebrew, each verse begins with a different letter of the alphabet.  But they didn’t direct the faithful to recite it for that reason.  They taught that at its heart it has the verse par excellence describing God’s grace.  That is verse 16: “You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing.”  One was forbidden to recite this mechanically.  If you accidentally did recite it unmindfully, you were supposed to go back and do that verse again, paying attention, meditating on what it means.  “You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing.”

The Rabbi whose commentary I read translated it a little differently: "You open Your hand, giving contentedness sufficiently to all living beings."  I find that translation more helpful than the NRSV’s because I think it’s unwise to teach that God will satisfy the desires of every living thing.  I mean, think about it—our desires can be terribly unhealthy, selfish, bloated.  But if God gives contentedness sufficiently to all living beings, that’s a real blessing.  And contentedness is something we definitely lack in our neck of the woods.

            Was a lack of contentedness something the Israelites in Haggai’s day suffered from?  Remember what the prophet said to them: “You eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill; you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm; and you that earn wages earn wages to put them into a bag with holes.”  I don’t know whether those folk were truly impoverished or whether they were dissatisfied.  But I can say with confidence that a restless sense of dissatisfaction characterizes many of us.  I don’t think it’s all our fault; we’re trained by our commercial society to be dissatisfied.  Our sustainability class curriculum this past week pointed out that we are bombarded with about 3,000 advertising messages per day which play on our insecurities.  B. Earl Puckett put it right out there 40 years ago when as the head of the Allied Stores Corporation he said, “It is our job to make women unhappy with what they have.”[2]

            As you well know, sellers of all kinds of material goods have had smashing success in the U.S. of A.  One of the little factoids in our sustainability book reports that “Since 1950, Americans have used more resources than everyone who ever lived before them.”  Wow.  One self-styled prophet in New York says we’re headed for a “Shopocalypse.” 

In America, Commerce is King.  Every time we buy one more thing we don’t need—something I’m sorry to confess I do on a regular basis—we are affirming that commerce is king, paying homage to the gods of consumerism.  We are blessing the current economic order with our rampant spending.  We are offering our praise to the advertisers who enticed us, extolling the inventors of products we didn’t even know we needed. 

            Suppose deep in our souls we want to exalt, bless, and praise God instead of all that goes “Ca-Ching?”  I think we really do want to bless the Lord more than the hamster wheel of buying and selling.  We want to acknowledge God as our provider and our savior and our guide.  How can we do it, when we are caught up in this insatiable economy? 

            One beautifully counter-cultural thing we can do that is suggested in Psalm 145 is to meditate on the wondrous works of God.  And once you are lost in wonder, love and praise over the unsearchable greatness of our Creator and what God has created, proclaim and laud God’s works, celebrating God’s abundant goodness.  Loudly.  Give thanks.  Be grateful.

            Giving is another way to bless the Lord in our economy.  When we refuse to worship the Almighty dollar, emulating God by opening our hands to let go of some of what we have, it becomes a symbolic action.  Giving becomes a means of blessing the Lord.  When we give financial support to the church, just like the Israelites of Haggai’s day, we declare that God is a priority, that we care about something besides our “paneled houses.”

            Would I be saying this to you if we were not in our season of decision about financial commitment to the church for next year?  Would I say it to you if we didn’t need a dime from you?  Yes.  Generosity is a spiritual principle, an essential part of healthy spirituality.  This is particularly true in a culture where the rival gods to the true Sovereign of the universe are literally idols of silver and gold. 

            As it happens, we do need your financial support in order to stay in ministry for our 126th year.  You know that.  I’m not going to beg, whine and wheedle because you are sensible people who know that you have an essential part to play in building up our house of worship.  I am going to invite you to think of your giving as a statement of faith in the God who provides for us with great compassion and love, an elegant sufficiency of all that we need from this fruitful earth. 

            Bless the Lord.  When you give out of your silver and gold to this church, bless the Lord.  I am confident that when we do this, God will return a blessing to us: the blessing of contentedness.

[1] http://www.cresourcei.org/lectionary/YearC/Cproper27ot.html

[2] Choices for Sustainable Living  Northwest Earth Institute, 2005 p. VI-4