Solomon's Temple, Terabithia, and the WTC

A Sermon on Haggai

Haggai is a tiny little book near the back of the Old Testament that is read in church only once every three years in our lectionary cycle – and that’s if you don’t choose the alternate reading from Job. If you’ve never heard of Haggai, frankly I’m not surprised. It is the record of the prophecies of Haggai, who spoke to the Israelites twenty years after they have returned from exile, encouraging them to rebuild the temple, which had been destroyed when Jerusalem was sacked. But today, as we move forward after Sunday’s remembrance of September 11, 2001, I think Haggai might have something to say to us. Haggai writes:

Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing? Yet now take courage, O Zerubbabel, says the Lord; take courage, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; 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. For thus says the Lord of hosts: Once again, 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 treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the Lord of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the Lord of hosts. The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the Lord of hosts; and in this place I will give prosperity, says the Lord of hosts. (Haggai 2:3-9)

There is something breathtaking in opening the Bible and finding that they, no less than we, know the anguish of living with a hole in the ground where a building used to be. Ancient Israel and contemporary America are two very, very different contexts. But as we struggle to find our way forward after Sunday's remembrance of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, maybe this text has something to say to us.

From our point of view, the Jerusalem temple might seem like a strange and archaic institution. My friends in rabbinical school tell me that it sometimes seems that way to contemporary Jews as well. But the temple was at the very heart of the formation of Judaism. This was where Israel’s most sacred objects were kept; it was the place where God was literally believed to live; it symbolized God’s deliverance of the Israelites out of Egypt, God’s covenant with the Israelite people. In 586 BCE, the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem, burned the temple to the ground, and took some of the Israelites into exile for over forty years. Eventually they returned, but even then, things were not easy: they cleared away the charred debris of the old temple, placed the altar, and laid the foundation for the new temple. But there were controversies over who would be in charge of the building, and tensions between the Israelites and the Persian empire. The project stalled. Twenty years later, Haggai stepped in.

In the early part of the book, Haggai rebukes the people for building fine houses for themselves while the temple still lies in ruins. But soon, he becomes warmer toward the people, acknowledging their despair, discouragement, and uncertainty. “Who is left among you,” he asks, “who saw this house in its former glory?” Probably very few people are left who knew the temple before its destruction sixty-six years before. This is a generation that knows the lack of the temple, that knows what its destruction meant for their community, but which has never directly experienced the temple itself – like the children who have been raised in the midst of the “War on Terror,” who never knew a time before color-coded security alerts and “random” TSA screenings and news of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then Haggai goes on to ask, “How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?” I can imagine how meager the temple would look to this community. After decades in exile, remembering the glory days before the Babylonians, after a jubilant return full of hopes and dreams and plans, after losing energy and letting the temple mount lie empty, the site of the temple is a reminder not only of national tragedy, but now also of failure.

My spouse and I live pretty close to the site of the World Trade Center, and I walk past the construction there pretty frequently. Actually, though, I’ve always avoided it whenever I could. It’s crowded, and noisy, and you never know which sidewalks are going to be closed. And I’ve always found it depressing – both because of what happened there ten years ago, and because ten years later, it was still a construction site. Even now, with the new tower going up and the memorial open, I’ve continued to avoid it. I want to imagine that it’s not so bad anymore, and I’m afraid to find out I’m wrong. That might be how the Israelites might have felt about the site of the temple.

This is a people mired in frustration and despair, guilt and exhaustion, staring helplessly at this place which has become a symbol of failure and grief. This is a people trapped by the weight of unrealized dreams. Their vision of the good old days has become so heavy that they don’t know how to move forward. Their nostalgia is blurring their vision. They cannot see possibilities for the future because their focus is firmly in the past. They are stuck. Sometimes we too get stuck as people, as families, as a nation.

We get stuck when we move to a new apartment and don’t know where to even begin turning the pile of boxes into a place of our own. We get stuck when we face the prospect of a job search, and we can’t dream dreams because we are so afraid that we will never find anything. We get stuck when we confront the reality that mainline Christianity as we know it is dying, and we don’t know what the church will look like twenty or fifty or a hundred years from now. We get stuck when we look at a political system that is so broken that we don’t even know where change would start.

“Take courage, all you people of the land,” God says through Haggai, “work, for I am with you, according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt. My spirit abides among you; do not fear.” Haggai invokes the Exodus, the story of the Israelites’ liberation from slavery in Egypt, not because the past was better, but to remind them that this is a community which has experienced change, which has been through hardship, and that God has been present with them through it all. God was with them before the temple was built, and God was with them when the temple was standing, and God is with them now. They do not need to rebuild God’s house so that God can abide among them. Haggai reminds them that God’s spirit is with them already, present with them, moving and consoling and inspiring them. Being assured that God is present with them, that God’s spirit is abiding among them in the here and now, frees the people to look toward the future. The temple mount can be a place for visions and plans again, not just a symbol of loss and tragedy.

On Sunday, I watched the coverage of the tenth anniversary of 9/11. As I wept with people who remembered their loved ones – investment bankers and custodial workers, firefighters and police officers, men and women, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others – lost in that tragedy, I wondered what it would look like for us to move forward? What would it mean for us to have real healing? What dreams would we dream? What would we build?

The film A Bridge to Terabithia tells the story of a ten-year-old boy named Jess with a gift for art. His family doesn’t encourage his talent, but he makes friends with a new neighbor, Leslie, who not only encourages his artwork, but helps him to develop his imagination. They like to swing on a rope across a creek and play on the other side, in the imaginary land of Terabithia. Through their friendship, Jess is transformed; he gains self-confidence, grows as an artist, starts to envision new possibilities for himself. But one day, while Jess is at an art museum, Leslie tries to go play in Terabithia, falls into the creek, and dies. For some time, Jess is withdrawn. He doesn’t want to play, or do artwork, or talk to his family or his friends or his teachers. He spends all his time on the other side of the creek, guilt-sick, grief-stricken, and inconsolable. His family tries to reach out to him to no avail. Finally, when his sister nearly dies trying to cross the creek herself to reach out again, he realizes that he needs to find a different way to deal with his grief. He starts to collect materials – wood, rope, nails. He works hard, although we don’t know quite what he is up to. In the final scene, we see what he has done: in memory of Leslie, he has constructed a bridge across the creek, a bridge to Terabithia.

Abiding God, present with us in grief and in healing, make your presence known to us today. Give us courage to dream dreams and build bridges. Amen.

Daughters of Jerusalem

Last month, while traveling in Israel, I was wandering around the Old City. I didn’t have my bearings yet, but I happened to notice one of the stations of the cross: Station Eight, Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem.

A great number of the people followed him, and among them were women who were beating their breasts and wailing for him. ²⁸But Jesus turned to them and said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. ²⁹For the days are surely coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.’ ³⁰Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’; and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ ³¹For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?”

I paused, and prayed.

Then I decided to try to find the next few stations of the cross. On the way, I saw an open building with Russian writing on the door – the Church of St. Alexander, overseen by the Russian Orthodox Palestine Society. My guidebook said it was worth a look, so I went in.

After paying my donation (5 or 10 shekels - $2-3), I was told that in order to go any farther, I would need to put on a wrap skirt for the sake of modesty. I was wearing jeans. They were neither tight jeans nor skinny jeans. I tied a wrap skirt over them. What else could I do?

The church preserves some incredible ruins, including a massive city gate and the tiny Eye of the Needle next to it. A Russian Orthodox nun ceaselessly muttered prayers at the altar, standing in her stocking feet with a water bottle by her side.

I took some pictures, but I couldn’t focus. I was too angry. Angry at a world where women’s bodies -- my body -- are seen as problems to be covered up and controlled. Angry that my denim-clad legs are assumed to be an affront to the God who made them. Angry on behalf of the women whose cultures demand that they dress in long sleeves and full-length skirts and head scarves in the middle of the summer. Angry at the growing realization that my pilgrimage to Jerusalem would be marked, every single day, by men (always men) examining my clothing to decide whether I would be permitted to enter the places where Jesus ate and preached and was tried and tortured and crucified.

Jesus was crucified naked.

I wept for the daughters of Jerusalem.

Sermon: Lost in Translation

A Sermon for Pentecost
Acts 2:1-21

There are two ways for an American to order dinner in France, writes the humorist David Sedaris. The first way is to learn the proper conjugations for all the verbs and the correct genders for all the nouns, to study idioms and social customs until she or he is able to understand the menu and correctly use the conditional tense which is considered polite when requesting a meal. The second way goes like this: “I… WANT… A… STEAK.”

I’ve heard a lot of jokes like this: self-deprecation by Americans who are ashamed that so few of us are fluent in any language but English. I used to agree – how arrogant, I thought, to go to a foreign country and expect everyone to speak English! But my perspective changed a few weeks ago, while I was in Israel with the story of Pentecost on my mind. My husband and I sat down to eat in a little restaurant in the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem. At the table next to us was an Italian family. And I discovered that when an Italian family eats at an Armenian restaurant in Israel, they use English to communicate with the waitress.

We are fortunate to live in an era in which English is the lingua franca, the shared language that people use to communicate with one another in cross-cultural situations – even when an Italian family is speaking with an Armenian-Israeli waitress. When everyone speaks a little English, it makes it easier to buy and sell things, to give directions, to order food or make a little small talk. But when Israelis and Italians and Germans and Argentinians are communicating with one another in grammar-school English, a lot gets lost in translation – it can be hard to communicate nuance, or emotion, or humor; the sentences are as simple as possible, and figures of speech are avoided altogether. The English that tourists speak to one another is practical, but it doesn’t have much soul.

That is not so different from the situation of the people in today’s story from Acts. The disciples are in Jerusalem after witnessing Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. Jerusalem is filled with pilgrims celebrating the Jewish festival of Shavuot. Shavuot, which takes place fifty days after Passover, just as our Pentecost takes place fifty days after Easter, is timed to coincide with the “first fruits” of the growing season, and it celebrates the giving of the law on Mount Sinai. So every year in Jerusalem, people would come from north and south, east and west, to bring their first fruits to the temple. There were a few different ways people might be able to speak to each other: perhaps some of them would be familiar with Latin, the language of the colonizing Roman empire; the Aramaic spoken in the region might have sounded familiar to them as the language of scripture and liturgy. Most likely, though, they would have communicated in Koine Greek. Just like English is the lingua franca of our era, Greek was the lingua franca of Jesus’ life and the early church. It allowed the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection to be written down and shared; it allowed the Apostle Paul to communicate with Corinthians and Ephesians and Galatians. Nowadays, when we don’t understand something, we say, “It’s all Greek to me,” but in that day, Greek was the language that allowed for communication across cultural boundaries.

I wonder if the way we talk about God in church can sometimes be a little bit like a lingua franca? Something brings us here, to church on a Sunday morning – perhaps a profound experience of God, perhaps a sense that there is something happening in our lives that we cannot quite understand, perhaps a desire for a deeper spiritual life. It can be hard to put words to what is happening with our hearts and minds and souls, hard to describe what it is about the story of Jesus that draws us in and gets us up on a Sunday morning. But here in church, we’ve found some language that lets us share a little bit of what God is doing in our lives. We use hymns and prayers and scriptures; we speak of sin and grace and salvation. We use terms that would sound very strange to someone who wasn’t familiar with Christianity: we talk about kingdoms and mustard seeds and tax collectors. Sometimes it really works for us – we walk out of church saying YES! Other times, it doesn’t quite connect. Something has been lost in translation. Our communication about God isn’t always perfect, but we make do. Drawn together by a God who is too big for words, we have found a way to speak to one another about it – our lingua franca; our Greek. With a little bit of religious education, we can talk to one another about God and we can all understand it.

But in our Pentecost story, the miracle is not that the disciples speak in a language that everyone can understand – that would have been easy enough. They could have spoken Greek. No, the miracle is that through the Holy Spirit, each member of the crowd hears the good news in their own mother tongue. The biblical account lists an astounding number of regions – Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and the list goes on. These are people from modern-day Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and more – pilgrims from all over the known world. Every single one of these people, the story says, hears the good news in their own language – the language that their parents spoke to them in childhood, the language that they use to soothe an infant or joke around with a friend, the language in which they whisper to their wives or husbands. Maybe you believe in literal miracles – that the Parthians actually heard words in Parthian – or maybe you hear this story metaphorically. Either way, I think it has something vital to say to us today.

It is not always enough, this miracle story seems to suggest, for us to struggle along in our lingua franca. That will do most of the time, but God wants to speak to us in our own language. I think that this story of pilgrims hearing the good news in their own language can lead us to think about how we hear God’s voice speaking to us in the languages of our hearts. Maybe for some of you, God speaks to you in your own language when you are far away from this city, walking through some beautiful wilderness and admiring the beauty of creation. Maybe for some of you, God speaks to you in your own language when an achingly beautiful piece of music fills you with awe. Maybe for some of you, God speaks to you in your own language when you play with a child or grandchild. Maybe for some of you, the voice of God speaks through poetry or in silent prayer or when you’re gardening. This story reminds us to listen for the voice of God, not just in the shared language that we speak in church, but in the deepest language of our hearts – whatever that is for each of us. This story of Parthians, Medes and Elamites reminds us that God’s word for us speaks to the heart of our being, speaks to us deeply and intimately, in ways ordinary and extraordinary, in burning bushes and quiet conversations.

And maybe it does more than that. Maybe, when we think about this story and how it connects to our lives, we’re not only the Parthians and the Medes and the Elamites. Maybe, friends, we’re the disciples. Perhaps this story invites us not just to hear God’s voice speaking to us in our own languages, but to speak in ways that allow God to speak through us. Perhaps this story invites us to speak boldly, with actions and words, about the love of God we have experienced in our own lives, to witness, as the scripture says, to God’s deeds of power. That might mean letting God speak through you when you tell family and friends about why you go to church and what your relationship with God means to you. But it could be other things, as well: it could mean letting God speak through you when you offer a kind word or a listening ear to someone in distress. It could mean letting God speak through you as you give of your time and talent at a food pantry or a youth center. It could mean letting God speak through you as you share your gift for music or art or writing with your church or your community. It could mean letting God speak through you when you speak up against hurtful comments or jokes based on racism or sexism or homophobia. The story of Pentecost tells us that the Holy Spirit can speak not only to us, but through us.

Last summer I worked as a chaplain at a hospital, doing an internship that fulfills one of the requirements for ordination. In my first few days, I visited a patient named Rosa who had just had a hip replacement. Rosa’s English wasn’t so good, and I speak no Spanish at all, but we managed – she showed me her rosary and her picture of the Virgin Mary, and I smiled and nodded. I was very new at chaplaincy, and very unaccustomed to praying with people, especially in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the hospital, but I offered to pray with her, and I stumbled through a prayer for her healing, and then asked her to say the Lord’s Prayer with me. Rosa’s recovery was difficult, with complication after complication, and as my internship went on and I grew in confidence, Rosa’s discharge date was pushed back and back and back. I kept visiting her, and we kept stumbling through those conversations and those prayers. Eventually, it was the last day of my ten-week internship and Rosa was still there. We stumbled through one last conversation as I tried to explain that it was my last day, and then I said, “Let’s pray.” And she said, “This time, I pray.” And she began to lead me through first the Hail Mary and then the Lord’s Prayer in strong, clear Spanish. I realized how much it meant to me for this strong and faithful woman to give me the gift of letting me be her chaplain, and I realized that she was now chaplaining me through the difficult task of letting go and saying goodbye. It was Rosa who spoke those prayers that day, and she said them in Spanish. But in that moment, it was as if God was speaking to me in my own language. And if that was not a Pentecost miracle, I don’t know what is. Thanks be to God. Amen.