The Reformed Church of Locust Valley Pentecost XXIII November 11, 2001 Haggai 1:13-2:9
“Don’t Despair”
Just before midnight on the 12th of August, 2000, two US submarines and a Norwegian seismic research institute registered two powerful explosions in the Barents Sea. At the same time, Russian naval monitors failed to receive the required reporting signals from the submarine Kursk. Early the next morning, the Russian cruiser, Pyotr Velikiy (Peter the Great) found a ship on the bottom of the sea. It was the Kursk. It was discovered that, despite the explosions, at least some of the crew survived. They were tapping out signals – in particular the SOS, for the next two days.
It took over a week for a rescue operation to get to the Kursk, deep in the cold murky ocean. On August 21, Norwegian divers finally entered the ship. It was full of water and all the crew, 118 sailors, were pronounced dead.
But 23 of these men had survived the original sinking, at least for a while. One of the survivors was 27 year old Lieutenant Captain Dmitry Kolesnikov. As he was waiting to die, he wrote a note to his wife. The two words he wrote to her were displayed next to his coffin at his funeral – “Mustn’t Despair.”
I don’t know if you have ever come close to death. I have had a few near misses on the roadway. Most of us have. The closest I ever came to dying for a period long enough to think about it was a time I went swimming very early in the season in Lake Michigan when the water was cold enough to cause sensible people to stay on shore. There was a sandbar a hundred yards or so off the shore and in very choppy water I struck out for it. But when I had been swimming far enough that I should have been able to touch the sandbar with my feet and couldn’t, I turned around to get my bearings from the shore and discovered that a current had swept me along the shore to a point where there was no sandbar between me and Wisconsin and I was farther out than I should be. I had friends on shore, but they were nowhere to be found. It was up to me to make it back….or not. You find new strength when the odds start piling up against you. I made it back to shore after a long, exhausting swim – very cold, very tired, very humbled and hopefully much wiser not to try such a fool thing again.
Mustn’t despair.
We have had a terrible reality check in this country.
We have been attacked on our shores. Yesterday I looked at a picture of New York City before the terror attacks and for the first time in my life, I said to myself, “Look how vulnerable we were.” Before, I would look at those pictures and think, “New York, New York, You’re a hell of a town, the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.” NYC is a powerhouse. It is the financial capital of the world. It is a dynamo. It is both muscle city for its financial importance, and cultural capital of the United States. But now it is something more – it is a wounded giant. It has a wound in it. I haven’t been to Ground Zero, but I listen to those who have, and they all say the same thing – the pictures on TV cannot convey the magnitude of the damage. And we wonder about the future.
We hear more and more reports of anthrax. The first thing we do when we hear about a new case of this dreaded disease is to make a mental calculation how far it is from us. Florida? We’re safe. Trenton, NJ? It takes forever for an automobile to get here from Trenton, maybe the same is true for disease spores. New York City? Am I biting my nails?
And we wonder about the future. We remember the good old days when NYC was safe and anthrax was a problem for veterinarians.
Mustn’t despair.
The people of Israel, too, looked back on a happier and more secure time. Disaster had struck them and they were facing a very doubtful future. In 586 BC, their powerful enemy, the empire of Babylon had struck them – conquering their land, deporting their best citizens, destroying their city, and demolishing the Temple in Jerusalem.
For nearly fifty years they lived in Babylon as exiles under the authority of their hated enemy. They were angry and bitter. “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” they cried. They faced each day mourning the loss of what they loved – their homeland, their farms and businesses, their way of life, their Temple. No doubt on many a dark and worrisome night, someone among them sat down and full of doubt and fear wrote, “Mustn’t despair.” All the while deep inside, despairing.
But something totally unforeseen happened. Cyrus, King of Persia conquered Babylon and in 538 BC one of the very first things he did was to send the Jews back to Judah, with his blessing, and encouraged them to rebuild, even rebuild the Temple.
It was a miracle!
The people went back to Palestine, and jump-started their lives there. It seems there may have been an effort to get the Temple work done. But as time moved on, the Temple was not finished. The people lacked the energy and the commitment to make it happen.
So God raised Haggai who undertook to get things going – urging Zerubbabel the governor, and Joshua, the High Priest, to lead the people in the work.
Then the work got going. And finally the Temple was completed.
It is easy to get in a rut.
Day in day out you go to work. It’s the same routine. The same train. The same drive to work. The same hassle getting everyone where they have to be. Carting the kids to school, to the club, to the gym. It seems like an endless cycle. You want your life to add up to something, but wonder.
Does life sometimes seem like a grind?
Prices go up and up. They never stop. We are always working to slay the inflation dragon. There are not fewer challenges in raising a family, there are more than ever. And constant vigilance is demanded – not just with what our kids are doing in the evenings when they are away from us, but on the Internet and subject to many temptations. And now are added, of course, the worries about terrorism. I heard someone on the news the other night say something then add, “Now that we’re at war again.” At war again – history has a way of getting our attention.
Sometimes it seems we face an uphill struggle.
So we go back to an ancient time and ask, “How did they do it?” And the answer is – God.
God says, “Yet now take courage, O Zerubbabel, says the Lord; take courage, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the High Priest; take courage, all the people of the land, says the Lord…(Haggai 2:4)”
And why? Why can they take courage? Why can you take courage when you look at another sink full of dishes and hamper full of laundry and once again the dishes were not brought to the kitchen? Why can you take courage when you open the mailbox and there is, count them, not one, not two, not three, not four, but five bills, and “Hey, didn’t I just pay the Mastercard last week?”
Why? Five words, “For I am with you.” “For I am with you, says the Lord. According to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt, My Spirit abides among you, fear not.”
If your Temple is in ruins, and you wonder how ever you will rebuild it…what Temple has fallen, and you are on the brink of despair? Your marriage? Your parenting? Your job? A friendship? Your health?
If your Temple is in ruins, and you wonder however you will rebuild it – only one thing matters – God is with you. That is enough. And that is everything.
The answer is God. Whether you are dying in the dark, dark cold of sunken submarine under the foamy waves of the Barents Sea, or struggling with the meaning of your life in Glen Cove or Bayville or Locust Valley, the answer is God. God who has made a personal promise to you.
Mustn’t despair.
In 1789, George Washington proclaimed a National Day of Thanksgiving. Some were opposed to it. There was an intense argument about it in the colonies. Many felt that the hardships of a few Pilgrims hardly warranted a national holiday. Later President Thomas Jefferson scoffed at the idea of a Thanksgiving Day.
But you and I will sit down to our turkey, with a day off from work, thank you very much, due mostly to the efforts of a woman named Sarah J. Hale. Sarah Hale was an editor of “Boston Ladies Magazine.” She wrote editorial after editorial. Sarah waged her campaign for forty years. For forty years she pursued her obsession until at last, in 1863, President Lincoln, as you know, proclaimed the last Thursday in November as a national day of Thanksgiving, and we’ve been eating turkey and stuffing, and lighting little Pilgrim candles ever since, and I for one, am grateful for that!
Righteousness always triumphs. But sometimes we have to wait for it. Waiting for it is not an excuse not to work for it.
What is worth it to you? What is worth the effort and the waiting? You define your life by the things you work and wait for.
There is more to Haggai’s story.
When the Temple was finally done, it was a disappointment. It wasn’t as grand as the Temple the Babylonians destroyed. Some of the people who saw the new, “inferior” Temple, had been around to see the first Temple before it was demolished. You can imagine what they said: “Hey, this is nothing. You should have seen OUR Temple. Now that was grand. Why in our day, the parking lot was always full, and you should have seen the stained glass! And our choir…what a treat!”
But not so now. Things WERE brighter and more successful then.
And hearing this, God makes a new promise. “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 (you may recognize these words from Handel’s “Messiah.”); and I will shake all nations, so that the treasures of all nations shall come in, 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 (2:6-9).”
Now note, please what happened. These words were fulfilled in the building of Herod’s Temple – as magnificent a structure as was ever built. But it is gone too now. God gave them a new Temple – and that Temple is Jesus. In Jesus we now worship. And in Jesus we find splendor greater than the world’s most vast treasury of jewels and gold. In Jesus is life, and that abundantly.
God gave himself, again, in a way Haggai and all his contemporaries could not have imagined, God coming in human form and living among us, to teach us, die for us, save us, fill us with life.
Mustn’t despair.
What did Lieutenant Captain Dmitry Kolesnikov have in mind as he prepared to die in the submarine Kursk which settled to the bottom of the heartless sea and became a tomb, as he prepared to die and wrote, “Mustn’t Despair.” I don’t know. But I know they are good words. And they are words God speaks to you and to me.
See what’s around us? See where we are now? The best is yet to come.
Fred D. Mueller
