Courage
Haggai 1:15b-2:9
Clcik here to view the video, "Courage."
It’s interesting the things we remember, and the things we tend to forget. With the exception of a few books read, or projects turned in, I don’t remember a whole lot of what I learned in elementary school. The thankless part of elementary education is that the lesson plans that teachers labor over are often the vehicle to a deeper kind of learning. Along the way, if we’re lucky, we secure the basics of arithmetic, mastering our times tables. We gain the ability to read at some length. And we evidence passable skill at writing sentences. We might come away with a sense of history and the way science works. But the details of how we gained those things can get fuzzy.
The one thing that I do remember with a great deal of clarity is the slide that we had on the playground at recess. I came of age just as people- specifically, people who worked for insurance companies- were beginning to ask questions about the kind of structures that made up an elementary school playground. Questions like, do metal slides present a burn risk? Or, should there be guardrails? A friend of mind found out the answer to that one the hard way when he fell off the side of our slide and broke his arm. Maybe the reason I remember that playground equipment better than I remember some of my school lessons has something to do with how big it looked compared to anything I had to play on around my own house. I don’t know. Or maybe the memory of these things was cemented by the way that memory was challenged five or ten years later when I returned to find that slide so much less impressive than I remember. Have you had this experience? I mean, it’s really just a simple matter of size ratios, isn’t it? Six, seven, eight-year-olds aren’t very big. They’re certainly smaller than 11, 12 and 13-year olds. So much so that the massive slide you remember being a little fearful of as a first grader looks laughable to your middle-school self. The truth is that very few things are really the way we remember them.
A couple of years ago Malcom Gladwell examined the phenomenon of what are called flashbulb memories. These are memories of dramatic, often traumatic events that we witness. Think JFK’s assassination, or the space shuttle Challenger explosion, or 9/11. They’re called flashbulb memories for the way they seem to sear themselves onto our mind, never to forget when we saw them, or heard about them. And because we say these are unforgettable moments, we’re often quite confident of the things we say we remember. Only, as it turns out, there’s significant evidence to suggest that such confidence may be misplaced. A study was done in which people were asked 10 days after 9/11 to detail what they remembered about the day.
A year later, researchers followed up and found that the participants’ memory for that day was only about two-thirds accurate. Our memories change, like the child who continues to grow while the object of that memory does not.
For seventy years the people living in exile in Babylon and then Persia, clung to their memories of Jerusalem and the Temple. They remembered and talked about the good old days, before being carried away to a foreign land. They waxed nostalgic about the magnificence of the Jerusalem Temple, built by Solomon to house the glory and presence of God. They might have said things like, “things were so much better back there,” or, “things were so much easier back then.” They told those stories, longing to return, and handing both the memories and the longing down to their children, even their children’s children. They made their homes as strangers in a strange land; planted gardens just like God told them to do through the prophet.
But they never stopped longing for the promise of return. They never stopped hoping that God would restore them to the land and everything that had been lost. They never stopped dreaming about when things might go back to the way they used to be. Then came regime change. Just as Jerusalem fell to Babylon, Babylon in turn fell to Persia. And suddenly they were being allowed to go back.
But here’s the thing. As difficult as it is to be in exile- to lose your home- as challenging as it can be to retain a sense of who you are while surrounded by a culture that is completely foreign to you, nothing can compare to the difficulty of returning to what was once home only to find everything you thought you knew is gone. It’s one thing to stand at a distance and think about what you’ve lost, it’s something else entirely to stand amidst the wreckage and contemplate what comes next.
I remember talking to people who traveled to the gulf coast weeks after Katrina. One person who had been volunteering at a work camp observed how quiet everything was- no traffic noise certainly, no hum from power lines, but it was more than that. Finally, he realized what it was.
There was no sound of life at all, even the birds had yet to return. It was a ghostly silence. I remember driving along a stretch of coastline six weeks after the storm. At first it was terrible, a desolate stretch of road with only the remnant of what once stood- cement steps up to a non-existent home, debris hanging in the trees, slab after cement slab that once held beautiful beach front homes. It was all too much, too horrible to take in, until I finally grew numb, until it all blurred together into a single incomprehensible tragedy. How do you rebuild from something like that? Where do you even begin? The answer is slowly, in fits and starts, one home at a time.
When the people returned to Jerusalem that’s just what they did. They slowly rebuilt their city. Until it came time to rebuild the temple. When it comes to rebuilding, most of the decisions and actions that have to be taken are questions of what and how. What are the dimensions, how should we build this? When it came time to rebuild the temple, it was a question of why, a question of whether God could really be trusted; whether God should be trusted. Reconstruction started, then stalled. Some had never seen the temple as it had been and may have wondered if it was worth the effort, wondered if this God who let such terrible things happen was worth the effort. Those that remembered the temple in its former glory may have only been children the last time they saw it. Maybe they wondered how they could ever recover something that loomed so large in their memory. How could it ever be the way it was?
Disappointed and disillusioned, they put their plans for rebuilding God’s house on hold.
But disillusion isn’t always such a bad thing. It is almost always painful, but to lose our illusions can be the very thing that sets us free. It means letting go of the lies we have mistaken for truth, the false memories we’ve rehearsed into reality; whether they are lies about ourselves, about the world, or about God.
For some it is the lie of the good old days, the lie of nostalgia that has us believe that things were so much better in the past, that the church was so much better. It is an easy lie to mistake for truth because we will always gravitate toward the familiar, what we already know, have already seen, already done. For some it is the lie of prosperity, the belief that fulfillment will be found in more, that the church that is thriving is the one with the most people, the most programs, the biggest bang for the buck. And that’s an easy lie to mistake for truth in a world that measures success in terms of quantity over quality. For some it is the lie that it doesn’t really matter what you believe as long as you’re a good person- that faith and the church are an invitation to disappointment and God is no more real than Lady Luck; which is the easiest lie to mistake for truth because when you’re standing in the wreckage the evidence is almost overwhelming.
Disillusionment is hard, but the truth is that it is only when we have had all our mistaken notions of who we are blown away, only when we’ve lost all our presumptuous expectations about who God is supposed to be, that we can finally begin to rebuild our lives and our church into places where we can encounter who God truly is as one who is with us. That is what the prophet means when he tells the people to take courage in that place where they have become discouraged by all the ways things aren’t as we remember, as we think they should be. Because when in our sight our lives, our plans, certainly our church look nothing like they did, certainly nothing like we thought they would, it takes courage.
The word ‘courage’ comes from the Latin root, “cor”, or heart. It takes courage, it takes our whole hearts to trust that the way things are isn’t the way things are always going to be. It takes our whole hearts to trust that what lies ahead of us holds so much more promise than what lies behind us, that the latter glory will be greater than the former.
And the reason why it will be greater is because it has yet to unfold. The reason why it will be greater is that, unlike what has come before, it has yet to happen. What’s done is done. It’s not coming back. That’s not the way the story unfolds. But it takes courage, it takes our whole hearts to go in the direction of what lies ahead of us, what God has in store for us, precisely because it is unknown.
When we take courage and step toward what God is still doing in and around us with our whole hearts, then we discover that what may look for all the world like a ruin is instead the place where heaven and earth meet.