Nancy E. Petty

Pullen Memorial Baptist Church

November 11, 2007 – Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost

Text: Haggai 1:15b-2:9

Take Courage and Work

In the midst of unstable times politically, economically, and religiously the story of the prophet Haggai is one of courage. His message is straightforward: to all the people he speaks God’s word saying; Take courage, work, and give witness to the presence of God among God’s people. Maybe you are wondering, as I did, who this prophet is that speaks such a daring word in the midst of such trying times.

            Little is known about the man for whom the book of Haggai is named. No family name or other information is provided in the book of Haggai or in the only other place where he is mentioned, the book of Ezra. His name seems related to the Hebrew stem, hgg, which means “make a pilgrimage.” The absence of a family name suggests to some scholars that Haggai had family connections that would have been problematic for the prophet if they were publicly known. Other scholars believe that the absence of a genealogy is a deliberate means of focusing attention on the divine authority by which the prophet spoke. Regardless, for whatever reason, Haggai, like Amos, Habakkuk, and Obadiah before him, is not provided with a lineage.

            Efforts have been made to develop some kind of biographical profile for Haggai based on other details in the book. Early Jewish and Christian sources assumed that Haggai was a man at least seventy years old. On the basis of his use of agricultural images, he has also been identified as a farmer who never left Palestine. Other biblical experts portray him as one of those persons who returned from the exile determined to lead restoration efforts and overcome the lethargy of those who had escaped exile and remained in Judah. In truth, all such efforts to identify Haggai remain speculative for there is really not sufficient evidence within the book to draw a biographical sketch.

Probably the only thing that can be said for certain of Haggai is that he was remembered as a prophet with authority. Unlike the professional prophets prevalent before the Babylonian exile, whose false optimism had been so harmful to the nation (think modern-day Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson), Haggai presented a message of hope grounded in the hard reality of a destroyed land. For that, Haggai is best associated with the long tradition of classical prophets raised up by God to proclaim God’s word to Israel.

Why is that information so important for us? Because the word spoken from God’s true prophets is timeless. While Haggai, the prophet, was speaking to a particular people in a particular time, his message knows no boundary: take courage, work, for God is with you. Today, are there any other words that we need to hear more? Take courage, work, for God is with you! Do we as a nation, as a people living in unstable times politically, economically, religiously, and spiritually not long to hear one of God’s prophets—woman, man, young, old, rich, poor—rise up with authority and integrity and proclaim the message: take courage, work, for God is with you? Haggai’s word from God is not just for his people in his day; it is for you and me and the church—this church, Pullen Church. So, if we are to take this prophet’s word as a word for us—in our times and for our times—what does it mean to take courage? What specific work are we to be about? And how do we stay centered in the affirmation and promise that God is with us? I’ll share with you my thoughts but it is my hope that you will value these questions enough to find time to ponder them within your heart and mind outside of our time this morning for they deserve our continued attention.

            Maya Angelou says that, “Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.” Winston Churchill says that, “Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” And Eleanor Roosevelt says that courage is “doing the thing which you think you cannot do.” When I think of courage, I think of hope—the kind of hope we are called to as people of faith; that thing in our lives that guides us into the places where we have not yet been, and into becoming the people we have not yet become. To me, this kind of courage—the willingness to not be content with the way things are, not to long for things as we imagine them once to have been—is what the prophet Haggai meant when he said, “take courage.” The people to whom Haggai spoke God’s word had seen and lived the hardest of times. Just out of exile they must have still felt beaten down and all too familiar with the awful and hard that is a part of life and this world. As some among them started rebuilding the Temple, others became nostalgic for the past. They wanted the Temple of old—the look, the feel, the way it had been. To them, things weren’t looking the way they had remembered. They wanted to go back to a way that was no more and truth be told couldn’t be again. They longed for a place and time in history that didn’t exist.

If we are honest with ourselves, we acknowledge that there is no good place in history to which Christians can turn. Those who live by the faith of nostalgia or some sentimental history, some imagination of the good old days or the good old times, or some time, any time other than this time, are not seeing clearly. They are seeing only a partial picture, and refuse to see that the gospel is not about returning to an old way of being. For people of faith, having courage has always been about being prophetic; speaking of the time to come, of things that are not yet, of places we have not yet been to, of people we have not yet become. For sure there is courage in speaking the bold word of truth about what is and the prophets were assigned to that task as well. But to have courage, to take courage, is looking ahead with imagination and confidence that God is doing a new thing in our midst. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “courage is doing the thing which you think you cannot do.” It is taking the risk that moves you into unknown territory. Sometimes that risk may be taking the next step that drops you off the edge of the cliff and sometimes that risk may very well be taking a step back from the edge of the cliff. Much of the time, though, it is whichever of those requires you to do what feels unfamiliar and the hardest; that which challenges us to step outside our comfort zones of past memories and ways of living and being in this world.

            In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in a chapter titled, “Seeing,” Annie Dillard quotes at length from a book called Space and Sight by Marius von Senden. It is about the first people in the world to undergo successful cataract surgery. All blind from birth, they suddenly received their sight and then were interviewed about what they saw. Their stories are strange and moving; they describe a world we no longer see, describe it the way a newborn or an alien might upon seeing it for the first time. One girl interviewed, though she could not distinguish objects, gazed at everything around her, saying over and over again, “Oh God! How beautiful!” But not everything was beautiful for some of the patients. Unable to judge distances, they reached out for things a mile away, or cracked their shins on pieces of furniture they perceived only as patches of color. The world turned out to be much bigger and more complex than they had thought. A fifteen year old boy demanded to be taken back to the local home for the blind, where he had left his girlfriend behind. “No, really, I can’t stand it anymore,” he said. “If things aren’t altered, I’ll tear my eyes out.”

I’ve never been blind so I can’t know what it was like for that fifteen year old boy. Maybe I, too, would have begged to return to the dark; to live in the safety of what was known instead of living into the courage of seeing things different. I wonder if Haggai’s word, “take courage” suggests that to live as people of faith with courage we must live risking seeing the good along with the awful, the hard along with what is easy—in ourselves, in everyone we meet, in the world. Is it easy to have such courage? Nowhere in the bible or elsewhere can I find that living with courage is easy. To the contrary; it might very well be the hardest of all virtues. And Maya Angelou might just be right that without it we cannot practice any other with consistency—kindness, truth, mercy, generosity or honesty. Haggai’s word invites us to ask ourselves, “When was the last time we took on such courage—courage that moves us into places we have not yet been, to become people we have not yet become?”

Before I leave courage, I want to say one more thing. Often I hear people equate having courage with having faith as though they are one in the same. When faced with tough decisions I hear others say and have said myself, “We’ve got to have faith. If we just have faith…” Good people of deep faith have faced tough decisions and hard life circumstances and things have not worked out. The single mother living in low-income housing, working three jobs, possessing more faith than this entire community will still have to face her child not living through a life-threatening illness because she can’t afford adequate health care. And that woman does not live in some far away country but rather just down the road on South Street. It may not be her faith that gets her through but rather her courage; the courage to do what she didn’t think she could do—to wake up each day and begin again. Both faith and courage have their places but they are not the same. Haggai didn’t say to the people, “take faith.” The word of God to Haggai for the people of God was, “take courage.”

The second part of Haggai’s message to the people was simple: work. Their work was to rebuild the Temple and therein witness and give testimony to God’s presence in the world. While the work of rebuilding the Temple was critical for the community, God’s intention went beyond the repair of a destroyed temple. God desired to bestow blessings and such blessing would come as the people went about the task of rebuilding not just their place of worship but their community. This story teaches us that we must never lose sight of our purpose as God’s people. Indeed, there is work to do—whether it is building places of sanctuary and worship, or building Habitat houses, or gathering for equal rights, or speaking out against slaughter houses that require human beings to work in inhumane conditions, or to pray without ceasing for peace in our world, or to risk our safe places among our friends in favor of speaking a prophetic word about caring for creation—our purpose is to give witness and testimony to God’s presence in the world. It doesn’t matter which part of the work you give yourself to. What does matter is that our work, whatever it is, gives witness to God’s presence in the world. God’s word from the prophet Haggai is this: “Take courage, all you people of the land, and work. For I am with you.” Haggai’s word reminds us that the work of God’s people always points beyond the present moment to the continuation of God’s work in the world. Whatever we do on this corner of Hillsborough Street, whatever risk we take, whatever courage we display, whatever work we do, whatever thing we do that we didn’t think we could do should never be more important than our commitment to giving witness to God’s presence in the world. And here is the good news: we, as a community, need not be discouraged when we struggle to know what our work is, for God is with us just as God was with the people of Haggai’s day. Thanks be to God!