Grounded in Love -- Psalm 1, Haggai 1:15b-2:9 (22nd Sunday After Pentecost)
- Scott Clark
- 2 days ago
- 10 min read
About a year ago, I preached a sermon on the rubble we make of our world.[1] I had visited Dresden, Germany, and seen photos of the destruction after World War II, and what they had rebuilt. In worship that Sunday, I noticed that making rubble of the world is something we do – down through history. We looked at photos of bombed out Dresden, bombed out England, Gaza, Ukraine – bombed out synagogues, and churches, and mosques.[2]
It’s been a year since then, and you may be able to think of ways we continue to see that – as a people – ways we continue to do that. The destruction continues in Gaza and in Ukraine – now off the coasts of Venezuela, perhaps Nigeria is next. We might conjure images of wrecking balls and bulldozers, in this country, advancing on the East Wing of the White House, and on our institutions, and on the systems that support the most vulnerable in our midst. We tend to make rubble of our world.
In this morning’s Scripture from Haggai, the people are standing in the rubble of their world, and the prophet Haggai offers them this word... this word of encouragement.[3] We’re in that big story that we talked about last week, the story of exile and return – and this Sunday, we’re in the return part. Babylonian armies have swept in, reduced the city and the Temple to rubble, and taken a good portion of the people into exile. An even larger portion of the people has remained on the devastated land, scraping by as best they can.
The exile lasts some 70 years... until the next Empire sweeps in... this time Persia. Persia conquers Babylon. And the Persian emperor Cyrus decides that it’s best to let the people of Israel and Judah go home: They will be more productive for the Empire there. And so they do. Go home. They stagger home. And it’s not what they had thought it would be. The rubble, after 70 years, seems somehow worse. They start to rebuild, brick by brick, but life is not the same. The world is not what they expected or hoped it would be.
And Haggai gets it, so he does what prophets do, and says some true things: Who among you remembers life before the rubble? There are some there that do. They remember the city and the Temple. This isn’t that is it, is it? Haggai says. They’re trying to build a Temple with the rubble, but as Wil Gafney says it is a “shabby successor” to the old Temple.[4] The pain is still real, and Haggai names that – he says it plain.
Each prophet has a message appropriate to their day. As one writer says, Haggai’s is “a message of hope grounded in the hard reality of a destroyed land.”[5] And so Haggai speaks this word from God: Take courage. Three times Haggai says it. This is what God says: Take courage, Zerubbabel. Take courage, Shealtiel. Take courage, all you people. Work. Rebuild. For I am with you. I will shake the heavens; I will shake the earth; I will shake the nations, and I will fill this house with splendor. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine.
(Now it did occur to me that a truly odd and awful stewardship sermon could result from reading that verse carelessly: Here’s what God says – the silver is mine, the gold is mine. No.)
The hope that God is offering here – the real, abiding hope – as the people stand in the rubble of their world is this: Take courage, and work, for I am with you. The one who can shake the heavens and the earth and the nations – I am with you. I will provide what you need. We will do this together. Remember the manna in the wilderness – every morning enough for that day, and then the next. Take courage, and work. We will rebuild this together.
“The latter will be greater than the former, and in this place I will give prosperity.” Now, I find that translation baffling – I will give “prosperity.” That word that’s been translated “prosperity” here and in other translations – the Hebrew word is shalom. If folks know any Hebrew word, they know Shalom.
What does shalom mean? That’s right – peace, and wholeness.[6] And then, yes, prosperity perhaps, in the sense that the people will thrive. But peace, wholeness. Take courage, and work, we will rebuild this together, we will rebuild shalom. The latter will be greater than the former because you will live in peace and I will make you whole.
As we sit with this story, with the people starting to rebuild out of the rubble, with this word of encouragement, and shalom, and new life, I want to invite us to consider the two images that this morning’s Scriptures offer, along with our theme for this season: Grounded in Love.
The first image is a tree. Psalm 1 gives us this image of a tree, a tree planted by streams of water. We spent a summer with the Psalms so we know that these Psalms are the poetry and songs of a people.[7] The psalms rose up – they were written over time – over centuries – as the people lived life with each other and with God. We think that the Book of Psalms – this songbook of the Bible – was put together, assembled in the form we have, during the time of exile – during the time of return. And they put Psalm 1 first. To ground the whole thing.
Psalm 1 is a wisdom psalm. It speaks of a way that leads to destruction and a way that leads to life. The people know the way that leads to destruction. They have lived that out. But Psalm 1 grounds them in the way that leads to life. Think of the folks living in the rubble, rebuilding out of the rubble, hearing this psalm, singing this psalm: Blessed is the one trusts in God, night and day, they are like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season, and whose leaf does not wither. Everything they do.... thrives. Think of that tree sinking down its roots – by streams of water – grounded in God, grounded in love. The people sing, and they remember to ground themselves there.
And so Haggai says: This is what God says: Something will rise up out of this, and we will rebuild it together.
The second image is the image of a neighborhood. What the people are rebuilding here, in this Haggai text, is a neighborhood. The word “neighbor” comes from the Old English – and it means “near dwellers” – the folks who dwell in the midst of you, with whom we share a world and a life. In her book, Grounded: Finding God in the World, A Spiritual Revolution, Diana Butler Bass suggests that neighborhood is a place we find meaning, and belonging, and life.[8] Neighborhood is, she writes, where we “gather beyond family ties, live close, and choose to share resources” and life. We “create a habitable space in common effort with others.”[9] It’s not just buildings and systems for sharing things like water and power and such; neighborhoods are where we build “ecosystems of relationships between people – a shared experience of the natural world” and human life together.[10]
The concepts of neighbor and neighborhood are central to the ethical systems of most world religions.[11] At the core of ours is the command of Jesus and the Hebrew Scriptures to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Neighborhood – healthy, thriving neighborhood – where neighbors live like that – is a space where we are grounded in love.
Now, “neighborhood” in American life may not be what it once was – as we have become more mobile, as families don’t live as physically close, as the demands of jobs, and our ever-present screens have strained old ways of connecting, even as they have created new.[12]
But I think of neighbors I have known. I grew up in a military family, so I’ve lived in more than a few neighborhoods.
· From early memory, I think of our next-door neighbors when we lived in Florida. This week, I remembered a bizarre story of the time a mole – you know, the rodent – a mole got into our neighbor’s house, I think their cat brought it home – and our two families mobilized to get the mole out of their house. It was mainly my Dad and a bunch of screaming kids.
· In Maryland, our next-door neighbors were Cuban – and the two boys, a couple years older than me, taught me how to make toast with a little bit of olive oil, over the burner of a gas stove. Do not try this at home – but it was cool.
· When we moved here, I remember our neighbors on Belle Avenue, one of whom had cancer. When she finished her treatments, she invited us all over to thank us for our support by saging us – burning sage as a blessing. We knew we weren’t in Alabama anymore.
· I think of my Mom’s neighbor in The Villages in Florida who lent my sister and me her house, down the street from Mom and Dad. The neighbor moved in with a friend and she gave us her house – so we could help care for my Dad.
· I think of our neighbors now. We have lived there 15 years now, and we still don’t know everyone on the street. But especially during the worst of COVID, we got to know our next-door neighbors. Our neighbors have three girls, and their backyard conversation was the soundtrack of our lives. We howled like coyotes together – do you remember when we did that for a few weeks? I know which one of the girls has a coyote howl that sounds like a chicken. They are the neighbors who took care of things when a tree fell on our house while we were away on vacation. And on the other side, our neighbors are from Ukraine, and we are getting to see their little boy grow up.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, writer Rebecca Solnit became fascinated by how people respond in natural disasters.[13] In interview after interview, she learned this: In those first moments after disaster strikes, it’s not FEMA – not the first-responders – who are going to dig you out of the rubble. It will be your neighbors. Without fail, she found, it will be your neighbors.
In this Haggai Scripture, what the people are rebuilding is a neighborhood – an ecosystem of belonging – a life, together.
In that book, Grounded: Looking for God in the World, A Spiritual Revolution, Diana Butler Bass writes about neighborhood as she reflects on how religion in the US and around the world has changed – how fewer folks align themselves with any religion – with the old structures.[14] She notices – in thinking of how we might be church in the world – of how more and more folks find God present in the world – in our everyday experience – in our “natural habitat” and in our “human geography” – in spaces like... neighborhood. We find God there... here. It’s actually, I think, a return – a return to deep and time-honored spiritualities and traditions – of noticing the presence of God – the nearness of God – like we have been doing with that theme “(Not So) Ordinary Days” – we experience God in the here and now.
So, how might we do that here? How do we do that here? Sink our roots down like a tree planted by streams of water. Ground ourselves in love. Help build a neighborhood. A world of shalom.
In our neighborhood, we have the church, and our preschool, and the Cedars, and all the groups that inhabit these buildings through the week, with music, and recovery, and learning. There’s Wade Thomas School across the street, and the seminary across that street. There are our neighbors at St Andrew Presbyterian and in Marin City – our neighbors throughout the presbytery – throughout the PCUSA. There are neighbors arriving every day. Neighbors around the world, whom you have worked alongside in Palestine, and in Afghanistan. There are neighbors around the world who see, with us, the climate unravelling we have caused together, and those who don’t, a shared longing for a planet healed and whole – a shared longing for a world where our children – where all children can thrive. So many neighbors we have yet to meet and know.
In that sermon last year... on the rubble we make of the world... we spoke of “developing capacities to live faithfully in ever-emerging new realities.” Last year, we imagined what that might look like in this ever-changing world. Here we are, a year later. What has that looked like – in our lived-experience – over the course of this past year? This past year where we have encountered change beyond what we could have imagined.
Think of our experience of the community fridge,
and the guest room,
our life of caring for each other, our shared advocacy for justice,
all the life we have shared.
Have we developed capacities to live faithfully in ever-emerging new realities? What has that looked like over the past year? Our neighborhood. What might that look like in the coming year – in the coming years? As we continue to ground ourselves in love. Grounded in love, in God and with God, what are we growing here? What are we building here?
For the people of Haggai’s day, the world wasn’t what they expected. And so Haggai said – This is what God says: Take courage. Take courage. Take courage. I am near. Let’s get to work. I will shake the heavens, I will shake the earth, I will shake the nations. Remember the manna in the morning. Enough for each day, and then the next. Something will rise up out of all this – like a tree planted by streams of water – a neighborhood where everyone can thrive – a world of shalom, God says, C’mon, let’s build it together.
© 2025 Scott Clark
[2] See id., which includes these rubble images.
[3] For background on this text and the Book of Haggai, see W. Eugene Marsh, “The Book of Habakkuk,” New Interpreters’ Bible Commentary, vol. vii (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996), pp.707-725; Kenneth n. Ngwa, “Habakkuk” in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), pp. 204-205; Wil Gafney, Commentary on Working Preacher at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-32-3/commentary-on-haggai-115b-29
[4] See Gafney, supra.
[5] See Marsh, p.708.
[6] See Marsh, p.724 (explaining shalom as “a rich term that includes restoration of health, cessation of hostility, and enrichment of individual and community life”).
[7] See https://www.togetherweserve.org/post/the-songs-we-know-by-heart-psalms-121-23-pride-sunday-4th-sunday-after-pentecost
[8] Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World (A Spiritual Revolution) (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2015).
[9] Id. pp.196-97.
[10] Id.
[11] See id. pp. 197-199.
[12] See id. pp. 201-205.
[13] Interview with Rebecca Solnit. Krista Tippett, On Being podcast, 12/14/2017, https://onbeing.org/programs/rebecca-solnit-falling-together-dec2017/
[14] See Butler Bass, pp. 3-26.
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