An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Compost, First Fruits, and the Whole Harvest

A sermon on Haggai 1:15b – 2:9; 2 Thessalonians 2:13-17 & Luke 20:27-38 by Nathan Nettleton

This is a church with a past that we can look back on with pride. We are one of the four oldest Baptist churches in this state. We have the distinction of being the church that proposed the original formation of the Baptist Association that went on to become today’s Baptist Union of Victoria. We have been a strong and vibrant church that has made numerous courageous missional decisions over the years, including selling up the original building and relocating to this site when the public housing estate was first being built here in the 1960’s. But as the prophet Haggai said in the first reading we heard tonight, it is easy to get discouraged if we look back and compare the glory days to our present situation. We could look back on days when the Sunday School was five times the size of today’s whole congregation. We could easily find ourselves feeling like Haggai’s hearers who were trying to rebuild the temple after the exile, and who were feeling that all they had managed to build looked like a pathetic little shed compared to the glory of what had come before.

But Haggai neither criticises their efforts, nor offers them cheap consolations by pretending that their new temple really looked magnificent. It didn’t, but so what? “Take courage, all of you, says the Lord, for I am with you. My spirit is among you; do not fear.” And what the prophet says next is equally important. He tells the people that God is promising to do something new and that the treasures of many nations will fill this house with splendour, for “the silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the Lord.” Let’s take note of several things from that. Firstly, God is not asking us to build something better, but is promising to fill what we have built with good things. It is not what we build that really matters, but what God does with it and what God fills it with. Secondly, we are not responsible for filling it either. Everything that will go into it already belongs to God and will be put where God wants it. And thirdly, as if it wasn’t already becoming clear that it is not all about us, the final splendour of God’s home on earth consists of the treasures of all sorts of people and places. We are just one little contributor among many. And so if we are truly committed to seeing God’s glory made known in our world, we need to humbly take our place alongside others and play our little part rather than hanker after the glory days and try to outshine everybody else as though we were supposed to be the only jewel in God’s crown.

The reading we heard from Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians is similarly addressed to a faith community facing hard times. This time it is not so much decline as opposition, but there are still plenty of reasons for them to be feeling vulnerable and fearing for their future. And I want us to take on board two important things that the Apostle says to them in light of these fears. Firstly he says that he gives thanks for this church because God chose them as the first fruits for salvation. This idea of being the first fruits is all too frequently misunderstood as being some exclusive special privilege that elevates us above everybody else. We’re the first fruits, and everyone else is the compost, or some such thing. That’s rubbish. We’re the first fruits, and everyone else is the main harvest would be closer to the truth. There are good reasons to think that there is a rich future ahead of us and that what we are now is nothing but the first fruits, a foretaste of the good things to come. But the point of being first fruits is just that. We are the foretaste that enables others to get a taste of what is on offer and to come in on the blessing that God has in store. We are not blessed above others, but blessed to be a blessing so that others can be blessed through us and gathered into the rich harvest that God is preparing. Can you hear how similar that is to what the prophet Haggai was saying? You’re not the whole story, but if you play your part and make your contribution, then you will be a meaningful and fruitful part of the growth of the kingdom or the culture of God through which all the world will be blessed.

The other thing that I want us to take special note of from what the Apostle says is the advice he gives us for what we should do in the short term. “So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us.” Stand firm and hold fast. I remember the first time I flew in a hot air balloon. If you’ve never done it, the first surprise is how smooth and stable and secure it feels most of the time. But on this occasion, the wind picked up during the flight, and when it came time to touch down, the pilot had to tell us all to “stand firm and hold fast” because the landing was going to be a little faster and bumpier than is really comfortable. The apostle is not promising a smooth ride here, but he does seem pretty confident that this little church, these first fruits, will survive and be a blessing. But in the immediate short term, they may have to “stand firm and hold fast to the traditions” that they had first been taught. This holding fast to traditions is not to be confused with that wistful hankering for the past that refuses to accept that God might call us to change and embrace something new. It is precisely the opposite. If Paul were to word it the other way around, he might say, “Let go of everything except the core of the gospel. Put everything else up for grabs, and discover what new shapes and forms God wants the work of the gospel to take among you now.”

In times of change and new directions, there are dangerous temptations on either side of this wisdom. One is to hanker after the past and cling tightly to everything so that nothing new is possible. And the other is to let go of everything and end up with no anchors, no foundations, no firm sense of who we are and who we belong to and whose kingdom we are a part of, so that, as Paul puts it elsewhere, we are easily tossed to and fro by every trendy new idea and slick sounding teaching. Our desire to stand firm between these competing temptations is one of the reasons that what we are about to do here tonight is so important, and it links these ideas from these readings.

In receiving these new Visiting Pastoral Overseers, we are asking them to help us hold that line, and we are recognising that one of the reasons that they are better placed to help us do that is that they come to us from outside and their perspectives are not coloured by being too immersed in the same little circles that we live in. Thus they can represent the voice of the wider church and the traditions passed down from the apostles and speak truth to us when we can’t see that we are veering dangerously towards one peril or the other. As servants of God’s mission in other spheres, their occasional presence and ministry among us will help remind us that we are a part of something much bigger than ourselves, and that our mission and ministry here will only bear healthy fruit for the kingdom as long as we offer it humbly as one contribution to all God is doing and don’t get carried away with either thinking that we are everything or thinking that we are no longer anything. Thus we will seek to keep these three informed about what is going on among us and invite them to hold us to account in the name of the wider body of Jesus Christ.

Before I finish, I want to suggest, perhaps surprisingly, that the story we heard about the Sadducees debating with Jesus over resurrection and marriage also has something important to say into this time and this occasion. You see, the debate was not really about marriage and whether or not there is sex in heaven. It was actually about our fears of death and the hold those fears have over us. Which is why it links straight back to these other readings about communities of faith who were afraid that they might be in terminal decline. You see, the Sadducees had a point. The whole point of the law requiring a man to marry his brother’s childless widow was that people weren’t expecting a resurrection and so the only way you lived on was through your offspring, so the very existence of the law was all about answering our fear that if we died childless, all trace of us would be lost forever. Therefore, said the Sadducees, this God-given law assumes there is no resurrection.

Jesus is almost guilty of avoiding the basic logic of their argument, but not because he’s floored by it. Rather it is that its whole thrust is so alien to his perspective. Its whole thrust is built on a foundation that assumes that death is the fundamental reality and that avoiding death is the thing we are most on about. We know we are alive only if we are not dead. But in Jesus’ view of the world, death barely registers and you can be not dead and yet still a million miles from being truly alive. And just like those communities looking back and despairing over the lost glories of their past, and those looking forward and cowering before the perceived dangers and threats, churches whose whole energies and perspectives become dominated by the need to avoid their own demise are anything but alive and fruitful. There is a great freedom that comes with knowing that God’s purposes are bigger than us and that even if the first fruits are only good to be composted, the full harvest never depended on us. When I was first called to be pastor here, the search committee said that the church could only employ me by spending its savings, and that there were enough savings to last for five years, so if things hadn’t turned around and become sustainable within five years, we’d be closing down. And the wonderful thing about that was that it wasn’t said with a sense of fear or despair. It was said with a kind of hope-filled and reckless abandon that spoke wonderfully of their recognition that the work of God didn’t hang on the success or failure of this one little fruit. They could throw everything they had at the future and trust the outcomes to God.

We are not called to cling to what we were in the past. Nor are we called to simply stave of our own death as long as we possibly can. We are called to offer ourselves for the life of the world, to offer ourselves as first fruits, as one little part of the whole, and to trust God to do what God will do. And what God will do is ever about life, and life in all its fullness, so in grateful union with those who journey with us and keep us fruitfully connected to the wider life of God, let’s throw ourselves into it and rise to new life to the glory of God!

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