I was not the oldest student in my Divinity School class. There were plenty of second career and late career folks. Sheila, who beat me for the preaching prize, was a grandmother from Brooklyn. Even so, I was well above the average age of my classmates, and frequently marveled at their youthful stamina. Or maybe they were just way smarter and could do the coursework in a fraction of the time it took me. It was all I could do to complete the reading and writing required while working two part-time jobs. They seemed to have time for all that, jobs, a social life, and even must-see TV. And so it was that they faithfully watched the ABC series, Lost, beginning its second season the year I arrived at Harvard.
I knew they were obsessed, but I was long out of Div School, ordained and in my second parish before I came up for air and thought I could devote the time to this re-invention of the complex multi-season mystery. For older folks, think The Fugitive, which premiered in September 1963, but The Fugitive times like a hundred. In Lost, a scene on a television in the background of a completely unrelated scene might hold a clue.
Lost has a cult following among clergy, at least the sort of Mainline Protestant and Unitarian Universalist folks I tend to know. This isn’t too surprising since it deals with questions of good and evil, life and death, the big questions religion tries to answer. The show was a intricate puzzle box, seeds planted that often did not bear fruit for several seasons.
This is not the easy sitcom or self-contained episodic television that dominated the medium as recently as two decades ago. Today, television is no longer the scrawny younger sibling of the movies. With the advent of streaming services and cable series, even more talent is being drawn to the small screen, though that screen is now bigger too, and high definition. It is rightly called the “golden age†of television.
Among the series that currently has my attention is HBO’s Westworld, based on the 1973 film by the late Michael Crichton. Many will remember Yul Brynner’s performance as Gunslinger in that classic, an android in an adult theme park. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Westworld dealt with the question of artificial intelligence.
The current series, which just completed a second season, is the original film on steroids, an order of magnitude bigger both in budget and complexity, a multi-season puzzle box that, like Lost, asks the big questions. What does it mean to be human? What is consciousness? Also like Lost, it contains tons of clues and a timeline that is less than straightforward.
Unfortunately, the internet has a love/hate relationship with this sort of programming, for puzzle solving is now crowdsourced. When thousands of obsessed intelligent viewers compare details and analyze clues in real time, mystery quickly falls away, at least if the script has any internal consistency and logic, and lacking internal consistency and logic, it isn’t worth watching. Westworld fans using the Reddit internet platform figured out season one long before it was over.
This drove the co-creators of the show, especially Jonathan Nolan, bonkers. In fact, the creators trolled those fans just before season two began with a videoclip they promised would contain spoilers for the whole second season. In fact, the clip was just an elaborate rick-roll, an internet insider joke using the words of the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up.â€
In order to thwart the obsessive 1%, Nolan made season two even more complex, added more timelines. He became so focused on that tiny minority of folks on Reddit, that he forgot about the rest of us, the 99% of us that are willing to just watch the show, maybe discuss it over the water cooler at work, but who don’t let it dominate our waking hours, and certainly don’t stay up half of Sunday night in dialog and devate with other fans online. The result of Nolan battle with these folks was a season that was every bit as profound, every bit as well acted, that contained a plot that was compelling, but that was, at least to me, less satisfying. At the end of season one, I knew more or less what had happened without turning to the internet for explanation. At the end of season two, I needed that explanation, needed WaPo and Vanity Fair to tell me what I had just watched, though it probably says something about the cultural impact of a series when both of those publications are writing about the latest episode of a television series. In doing combat with super fans, Nolan may well have destroyed Westworld for the rest of us. He forgot the “why†of his work, or maybe he always had the wrong “why.†A loyal fanbase is great, but to turn a profit, you have to reach the masses.
The prophet Haggai is working in a Jerusalem only slightly less desolate than Westworld after things fell apart. Let’s take a moment to get our bearings.
Assyria, located in the upper Tigris-Euphrates river valley, had dominated the Ancient Near East for a century. It was their cruelty that provoked the vengeful rage of the Prophet Nahum. They were defeated and replaced by another superpower, Babylon. Instead of the ethnic cleansing strategy of the Assyrians, the Babylonians took the elite of conquered nations back to their homeland on the lower Tigris-Euphrates. The first deportation took place in 597 before the Common Era. In 587 BCE, when the Hebrew’s left behind in the vassal state of Judah refused to play tribute, the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, leveling the Temple of Solomon, and starting the second mass deportation.
A significant number of Hebrews remained in Babylon for a generation, until 538, when the Persians in turn conquered the Babylonians. Scripture refers to the Persian king, Cyrus, as messiah, for he delivered the Hebrews from bondage, allowing them to return home. He also ordered reconstruction of the Temple and returned the confiscated Temple vessels to the Hebrew religious leaders. Those Hebrews who returned home found the city and the entire region still in ruins, their homes and property occupied by Hebrews not deemed worthy of deportation, a sort of ancient hillbilly, many in mixed marriages with non-Hebrews, foreigners with their foreign gods, and to the south, the returnees discovered Edomites, condemned in the Book of the Prophet Obadiah, who took advantage of the chaos to creep north. Much of the history of the return is recorded in the Book of Ezra.
By the time the Prophet Haggai comes on the scene, the first group of Exiles have been back for eighteen years, Cyrus has died and Darius is on the Persian throne, but the Temple is still in ruins. A second and larger group of Exiles has returned, including Zerubbabel, the grandson of a Davidic king, and Joshua ben Jehozadak, a high priest in the Zadokite line. This second group provides the critical mass needed for restoration. If they weren’t motivated enough, when a drought hits, Haggai proclaims that it is punishment for the failure to rebuild the Temple, and work is started immediately.
Now, for the record, eighteen years is nothing. I mean, news reports in the last couple of weeks have reminded us that the third runway at London’s Heathrow airport was approved in 1946, and that thing still ain’t built. But they want their Temple.
The first Temple had lasted about four centuries, the rebuilt Temple, dedicated five years after construction began, five years after the prophecy we are reading today, would last almost six centuries. It would reach its gilded best during the reign of the Edomite usurper Herod the Great in the years around the birth of Jesus, but would once again be a pile of rubble in the lifetime of the disciples.
The thing is, just as Jonathan Nolan and other show creators have a love/hate relationship with their most faithful fans, so too do the Hebrew and Christian religious trajectories had a love/hate relationship with the Temple. God never asks for a Temple. It is a human idea. In fact, God is pretty put off by most of the trappings of human religion. Why, God asks, do I need a house when the whole world is my house? Why, God asks again and again through the prophets, do I need your blood offerings? Don’t I already own everything you own, everything in creation? If I don’t have a body, a mouth and a nose, how do you think I eat this stuff?
Jesus boldly predicts that the Temple he knows, the Second Temple, will soon be destroyed, just as the first had been leveled centuries before. The Temple had become associated with greed and corruption. Jesus is trying to reform a religion that had become about the wrong “why,†so they did their best to get rid of him.
Jonathan Nolan has become so blinded by his focus on that Reddit 1% that he has forgotten the 99% that just watches the show. He forgot the “why.†As the priesthood in the time of Amos required more and more sacrifice, ever larger sums to maintain the elaborate and showy cult of the Northern Kingdom, they forgot the “why†of their worship. As the Hebrew elite compromised with the Romans and with Herod to maintain the Temple, the income they derived from the Temple, and their own power, they forgot the “why.†The preacher of the prosperity heresy that solicits for a new $54 million private jet has forgotten the “why†of the gospel. Jesus didn’t die to make you rich.
The Prophet Haggai has forgotten the why, clearly, in his word of the Lord that claims the drought is the result of God’s anger at not having a building. God does not care about buildings. God cares about conduct. God cares about justice. God’s covenant isn’t a building. Jeremiah told us almost a century before Haggai that God’s covenant is to be written on our hearts.
Not that rebuilding the Temple was a completely bad thing. Almost everything the Hebrews understood about themselves, the idea that they had a special relationship with the creator of all that is, that they had a divine promise of nationhood, all of this had been challenged, had not weathered well the relentless assaults of Assyria, Babylon, Egypt. Work on the Temple gave the returning exiles a shared purpose, a common cause that was even able to take in some of the remnant that had been left behind. It connected the Hebrews, the returning Elite and the disheveled and dispossessed yokels, with their story as a people. The Temple was the site of great festivals, high holy days. The courts of the Temple were supposed to be set apart, a soundscape of prayer and hymnody. Solomon’s Porch would provide a gathering place for the first Christians. The Hebrew people would not be an independent nation again for two and a half millennia, but Jerusalem, the Temple, provided a spiritual anchor, a sense of identity, and even after the Second Temple too was gone, this great project pushed by Haggai, even after they were scattered across the globe, “next year in Jerusalem†was still on their lips, still in their hearts.
Reconstructing the Temple was not a bad thing, really, but like the idols of old, the Hebrews would become the servants of the very thing they themselves had built, no different than the ancients who worshiped idols constructed with their own hands. The apparatus of the Hebrew religion, the building and the staff and the ritual, would consume more and more of their resources, would become the “why†rather than the means to the “why.†For the “why†was not to lock God up in a gilded cage, to be fed with the smoke of holocaust offerings. The “why†was to be a people who were righteous and just, who owed fealty to no one but Yahweh, who kept covenant. This is why the Jews and then the Christians would be such wretched Romans, really, for their first loyalty was not to king or country, but to God. The Temple was not there for the Temple, and the Temple was not there for God. The Temple was there for the people of God as a reminder of God and as a place to focus on God, who was not a building, not molded from clay or cast in gold, but who the Hebrews themselves had taught us, could not be depicted with a graven image.
The Temple as a gathering place, as a space apart, marked as sacred, eyes drawn upward by the height and sound pointing the soul toward the transcendent, this was good and holy. The pompous and demanding priesthood, weighed down by a bit more gold in every generation, to match the growing splendor of the building, not so much, not so good, not so holy.
All this work, Haggai, Zerubbabel, Joshua, Zechariah, all this preaching and effort, even the dubious prophecy, it wasn’t bad or wrong. But institutions do this. They forget their “why,†and the weight of the building becomes a gravity all its own, sucking in more and more energy.
Or maybe that is just the intake of Jesse Duplantis’ new private jet, luxury because God makes the faithful rich and the sinful poor. I’m sure glad it doesn’t work that way…
Not quite two thousand years after Jesus’ prediction came true and the Temple was destroyed, it has not been rebuilt. In local communities, church after church faces other forms of destruction, conversion into condos and homes, into brewpubs and concert halls. All too often, those who still own grand and beautiful buildings have become the servants of outside groups that use the space, or little more than glorified rental spaces for events. Other modern temples sit empty most of the week, occupied by a remnant scattered far apart in pews that were built for ten or a hundred times as many as now show up.
They have forgotten the “why.†The building serves the mission of the church. The church does not serve the building. The mission is to change lives through the good news of Jesus, good news not only in what he taught, but also in how he lived, courageously. Good news in how he died, and how death did not win. The building is here as a school of discipleship, as a place to organize as a community that lives by the mantra of Micah 6:8, that does justice, that loves kindness, that walks humbly, the same humility Zephaniah promised us last week.
The ancient Hebrew faith had become about the building and the religion, not about God. So much of Christianity in America has become about idolatrous worship of the nation, about false comfort and false promises. No wonder those buildings are going the way of the First Temple, of the Second Temple, not one stone left on top of the other.
The building survives when the heart is right, when we remember our “why.†God does not need stained glass or a magnificent organ, and the Lord knows that there is nothing to be gained from sitting in pain.
May we remember our why, the why of our building, the why of our gathering. We are a kingdom people, a called people. We would be building, not buildings, but love in action in God’s world. Amen.