A New Day: Placing Our Past

I had such a strange emotion the other day. I was in my room and one of my favorite TV shows came on…normally the theme music makes me happy. But this time it was different.

But this time I had just been watching clips on my phone about all the horror of Ukraine. And just feeling a good bit of the weight from the last couple years…and this time when I heard that theme song it didn’t bring about the usual feeling of pleasure but it made me sorrowful.

It made me sad because I wished that it was 2011 holding my newborn daughter, playing with my 3 year old son, chilling in our basement, getting ready to have small group—where we’d have several friends comes over and play pool…I wasn’t worried about a pandemic, we’d just moved into our first home, I hadn’t yet experienced some of the difficult stuff we experienced within the last decade, things seemed way more simple.

But here is what is funny. In 2011 if you’d have asked me how I was doing I very well might have said… “Man, I wish we could go back to 1989 when my biggest concern was the fracturing relationship between Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Randy Savage.” Those were the good ol’ days.

And some of y’all are laughing at me thinking—1989? How about 1969. Or 1959. Those were the good ol’ days. And some of you are thinking—y’all are all old. I’d just like to go back to 2-3 years ago when I was only 8 or 9 years old.

That’s the way nostalgia works. We’re always able to kind of gloss over things in the past and making them much better times than what they were. We don’t feel the weight of the problems we felt back then. It’s kind of like Andy Bernard (from the Office) said at the end of the show.... “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”

There is a similar thing happening in the book of Ezra. The people had been exiled for many years. The temple had been destroyed. But in Ezra they have returned to their land. And they have started laying the foundation of the temple. But you need to know that there are some elderly people there on that day when they lay the foundation—ribbon cutting ceremony—all the young ‘uns celebrating. But they remember when they were kids…they remember the old temple…and when they see the foundation stones of the new temple...

Well, listen in to see what happens:

Ezra 3:8–13 ESV

Now in the second year after their coming to the house of God at Jerusalem, in the second month, Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel and Jeshua the son of Jozadak made a beginning, together with the rest of their kinsmen, the priests and the Levites and all who had come to Jerusalem from the captivity. They appointed the Levites, from twenty years old and upward, to supervise the work of the house of the Lord. And Jeshua with his sons and his brothers, and Kadmiel and his sons, the sons of Judah, together supervised the workmen in the house of God, along with the sons of Henadad and the Levites, their sons and brothers. And when the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord, the priests in their vestments came forward with trumpets, and the Levites, the sons of Asaph, with cymbals, to praise the Lord, according to the directions of David king of Israel. And they sang responsively, praising and giving thanks to the Lord, “For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever toward Israel.” And all the people shouted with a great shout when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid. But many of the priests and Levites and heads of fathers’ houses, old men who had seen the first house, wept with a loud voice when they saw the foundation of this house being laid, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping, for the people shouted with a great shout, and the sound was heard far away.

Sermon Introduction:

So why am I taking a little break from Luke? I think God has put a couple two-three messages on my heart that we will call A New Day. It’s really about being faithful in this moment where God has us in the life of our church, and faithful in where God has us as individuals.

But first, I think we need to do a bit of work here in Ezra. We need to Place Our Past. We need to look here at Ezra and wrestle a little bit with the tears of the elders....

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v8-9 The names here do matter a bit. It’s placing this into actual history. And Zerubbabel was a good dude and many thought he was like a Messianic figure…you can see more about him in Haggai and Zechariah. And after a bit they thought the same of Jeshua, (or Joshua) the high priest, who also became a major leader. What we are meant to see here in this section is the unity of the people. They are all on board with this project. It’s a high point.

They’ve come back. They are rebuilding. Things are getting restored.

But that’s easy work, right? You could take a poll back then… “So, who would like to remain in exile?” That’s not going to get very good approval ratings. “So, who would like to remain on lockdown, have COVID protocols, cancel church services, have high gas prices, be in a war, have to fight your neighbor for a couple ply of TP,?” Again…it’s not too difficult to have unity here. Who wants to rebuild? Who wants things to get back to normal?

And so they get busy with the project. They start laying the foundation…we’re gonna rebuild this thing.

v10-11 They’ve got the foundation laid. Celebration time. That’s what verse 10 is telling us. But it’s telling us a little more…priests in their vestments, trumpets, Levites, sons of Asaph, praising the LORD according to the directions of David....what this is doing is tying it back to their history.

We’re getting back to the glory days, y’all. Remember they had hung up their instruments while in exile. They couldn’t play anymore. The sadness was too great. But here they pull them out of storage, dust them off, and have a big celebration. And it’s a celebration which would have been familiar to the saints of old. They are singing the Psalms again—and singing them the way they remember.

Nostalgia is kicking in.

“Shouted with a great shout when they praised the LORD, because the foundation of the house of the LORD was laid.”

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His love endures forever. Music has a way of transporting us doesn’t it. Hymns can take you back to an old revival service. 90’s worship can take you back to a time. It’s amazing what praising can do. There is power in those things…it’s a way of tying our stories together. It’s causing us to remember. Maybe the present isn’t so different from the past.

It can do something else, though. Nostalgia can get out of its banks and turn into bitterness about the present. This feels like the good ol’ days…but it isn’t the good ol’ days…it’s a different day. It’s a different moment. With different expressions of faithfulness required. And when it doesn’t square up...

v12....We’re jolted here. many of the priests, levites, heads of house, old men....those who had seen the first house…this is what Ezra wants us to see…they wept with a loud voice when they saw this being laid.

Though many shouted for joy…they wept.

We have to wrestle with this. We need to hear this cry. Is it tears for joy? I don’t think so. I don’t think the way this is written Ezra wants us to see some people shouting for joy and some people weeping for joy. It’s meant to be a contrast.

But why are they weeping. Is it sadness? Is it bittersweet? Is it something like my experience with hearing that familiar theme song…where something which should elicit joy hits a funny chord in your heart and you start to weep instead because it somehow makes you think of lost years, lost time, what could have been, etc.?

I don’t know what motivated every drop of tear on that day. It was probably a mixture of things. But I can say one thing with confidence from the Scriptures…what was a motivating factor for the weeping was “who had seen the first house”. It was comparing the present to the past. It wasn’t going to be as big or as magnificent as the first temple.

And for some that likely elicited feelings of shame. It was their rebellion—their parents rebellion which causes the destruction in the first place. They had been eating the bitter fruit of exile on these years—they are now back, it’s a new day....but it isn’t the old day.

How do we know this is going on for one, listen to Haggai 2:3

Haggai 2:3 ESV

‘Who is left among you who saw this house in its former glory? How do you see it now? Is it not as nothing in your eyes?

Listen to Zechariah 4:10

Zechariah 4:10 ESV

For whoever has despised the day of small things shall rejoice, and shall see the plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel. “These seven are the eyes of the Lord, which range through the whole earth.”

And those guys prophesied 16 years after this moment in Ezra. 16 years. What is happening there? Haggai and Zechariah have to come on the scene to tell the people to get to work—from this day forward they started experiencing some opposition and they stopped building. And I can’t help but think that the tears of the elders weren’t also a moment of discouragement. We can’t get back to what we once were…why bother?

You see nostalgia won’t give you strength in the moment because it’s muscles are in the past. It’ll buckle.

My day is up. My time is over. That was my moment. But that’s not truth. I was called to be a faithful dad to my toddlers when they were toddlers. Now I’m called to be a faithful dad to my 11 and 14 year old. I was called to be a faithful associate pastor in Southern Indiana and now I’m called to be a faithful pastor in Neosho, MO.

Whatever you had going on at 50 is different than what you have going on at 80. It calls for different things, and different faithfulness. And the same is true if you are 15 years old today. You are called to be faithful with who you are, what you have, and where you.

But look what happened in Haggai. These dudes got a little bit of theology and a calculator and developed this great excuse for why they couldn’t move forward. It’s not time to build the temple, they said. It’s not time to move forward in advancing God’s kingdom.

But they stuck their hands in their pocket, put their energy and their cash toward their own projects, and said “it’s not time to build the temple”. It took God using Haggai to say, “Consider your ways…is it time for you to build your own house but leave mine in shambles?”

That’s what discouragement can do. It can cause us not to live in the moment in which God has given to us. Mourning that the present isn’t the past can be crippling. The past can cripple us—that’s true of a good past and even more true of a traumatic past.

So what do we do with this text? What do we do with these tears of the elders…if we’re the weeping elders or if we’re the ones shouting for joy. How do we respond?

We need to place our past

It’s okay to be realistic about where you are. I think it’s quite alright that I’m sad whenever I try to run and I don’t move quite like I used to. And yes, I’m 40, I don’t know anything yet. It’s okay to be realistic.

And it’s okay to celebrate the past. There likely are some things that were better in the past than they are now. Like McDonald’s french fries. There are some things improved within our society—there are others that aren’t.

It was okay for these elders to be realistic with the moment. The Ark wasn’t there. The temple was smaller. They had been placed in exile. There really where things to mourn. And likewise you’ve got things to mourn. We talked awhile back about having lament.

It’s okay to lament. That’s part of what helps us to place our past. I think we need to learn to grieve not only things like death but also to grieve the years that the locusts have eaten. We need to be able to learn a healthy lament for those times when our hopes were dashed. To be honest about the pain of those moments. And to be honest about how they still shape us.

We need to be able to share our stories. And place our stories. That’s especially important for trauma. Be able to share you story with someone else and begin the process of reframing it. Of properly placing it.

One of the best illustrations I’ve heard of this imagine that your brain is like a storage facility. And you’ve got memories and they scroll along this conveyor belt and you place them...”Oh, that’s in my good memory vacation section. Oh, that’s in my strawberry pie section, that one is in my sad lost the baseball game section.” But what trauma does is it comes on that conveyor belt and we don’t know how to place it. We don’t exactly have a “death of a spouse” or “death of a child” space in our brains. And so we don’t know what to do with it…so we just sit it on the ground or we put it in the wrong place.

And when that happens it starts to impact other things. It’s been said our bodies keep score. I am simplifying this a bit…but what happens when we get triggered…start feeling something and we don’t know where its coming from…you find yourself in a rage—or just shutting down—and you look back and are like “what just happened”. What is happening is that your body is feeling the same way it did at one of those misplaced moments. There is something in that moment that is making you want to place it where those trauma boxes are…it’s feeling similar...

So what is the answer? It’s to place our past. That is a little of what was happening I think to those in Ezra’s day. There is something about this smaller temple that is causing them to mourn. It’s bringing their minds back to the smell of smoke as a child, to the old temple being burned to the ground, to parents and grandparents being taken away. To seeing horrific things at the hands of the Babylonians.

And so that experience taints what should have been joy in this moment. That’s why it is important for us to place our past.

Because there are some moments where our joy should be louder than the weeping. We don’t want to forget the story that God IS writing. We cannot be guilty of forgetting the small things. Which is the seocnd thing.

2. We need to live in the moment

For those who had not seen the former temple this was a moment of sheer joy. Why? Because this was the only moment they had like this. I think there is much that is meant to “receive the kingdom as a child” and I think this is one of those things. Kids are experiencing things for the first time…they have an exhilarating ride down the big hill on their bike because they’ve not had their knees skinned yet.

What would it mean to receive the kingdom this way? It would mean that you live in the joy of the day. It means to see opportunities and God’s hand where others see discouragement.

Think of the difference between the joyous shouts and those weeping on that day. God has given us this place. We are worshipping in our own land. We are going to have a temple. God is with us. We are fulfilling history. God is keeping His promises.

It isn’t as big as the first one. The first one should have never been torn down. We should have never lost our land.

Which one is true? It’s kind of both isn’t it…but not really. One is the voice of cynicism…it sounds true but it’s not the voice of hope. It’s the voice of truth without goodness…and that’s not ultimately true. Because it misses what God is doing in this moment. It despises the small things.

This temple isn’t as good they say…is that true? Well maybe from one perspective. But listen to this from Haggai:

Haggai 2:6–8 ESV

For thus says the Lord of hosts: Yet once more, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land. And I will shake all nations, so that the treasures of all nations shall come in, and I will fill this house with glory, says the Lord of hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, declares the Lord of hosts.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, would set foot in this temple. Yes, glory like we’d never seen would be in this temple. Don’t despise the small things. Live in the moment God has given you...

But one last thing…we do need to listen to the tears of the elders.

3. We need to listen to the tears of the elders

C.S. Lewis once said, "Our life-long nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation."

There is truth in that longing and in those aches. Things have been lost. And those tears are a reminder that even the greatest of days is tainted. Because we aren’t fully home yet.

BUT...

Jesus is doing something. He is doing something in this very moment. That is true in the life of our church, that is true in our individual lives.

So what is your response this morning to what God is doing? Tears of the elders (there may very well be a place for that—take your lament to God, and have him place your past). Joy? A mixture?

...

what is God calling you to do?

Do you have a relationship with Jesus?

Give him that hurt?

Give him that joy...