We ;love in a culture of frenzy, complaint, and inflated expectations. We complain of the frenzy we ourselves create and to which we acquiesce. In response, we revert to the imagined glory days of a missed past, and some of us look to the future as a pole star of hope.We continue a brief look at some material from the book of the 12, the minor prophets.The people have straggled back home from exile, but the great symbol of the faith the temple was in ruins. It took a while, but rebuild they would. Now they were disappointed. Some hoped for better, and a few remembered its former glory, but I rather suspect that it was burnished by memory.
end times already and not yet, not yet in heaven not yet in the new age of transformation
With Haggai since we do not know the future we work toward it anyway even heaven may be an interim solution haggai deals with disappointment in the present vis a vis the past and the future. In the first chapter the people are told that they have not paid attention to the temple while they were rebuilding, so things have not gone well. So they rebuild a temple, but instead of applauding their results and hard work, it appears to them as nothing. their expectations are disappointed. I’ve been reading the theologian Jurgen Moltmann again, he speaks a good deal about seeing
god’s presence as a key to grasping the faith’s arc through time.The opposite of absence is presence of course. Was god absent with the temple destroyed,? No. Would god be present in the new temple even if it is not as opulent as the one remembered that was destroyed? Yes.
Worship is a gateway to the relam of heaven, a portal where earth and heaven connect, a thin place as celtic spirituality likes to say.For me heaven is being in the presence of god. Like anyone I like to speculate on what it iwill be like, but the hints are few and visionary.Worship is a mindful, attentive movement into the presence of god. God really does not ask all that much in terms of duties, to come to chruch once a week, as the chruch has long interpreted the comman do to keep holy the sabbath.
Jesus deals with the desire to make literal and physical the resurrected bodies of heaven against religious opponents who are laughing at the idea of it as opposed to seeing the older biblical material as dispositive: dead is dead. Maybe we have imported the idea that we would have wings like angels due to the analogy jesus makes in this passage. I don;t think he means that we will look like angels in heaven but he was making a point tha tour phsyical bodies and anture will be transformed.
Jesus was in the group that believed in an afterlife in jewish circles.His questioners are making fun of the notion, so thyte ask their trick question about being married in heaven. Folks who have been widowed and married again may well wonder the same thing. He posits a different type of existence. Based on the resurrection, heaven will have our physical lives continue but in a new key, a new dimension: recognizable as ourselves but transformed.
What hints of heaven do we get in worship? (see lathrop and Saliers) Look at popular culture> MCC In My Heaven (see Ashes and roses Carrie gathering of Spirits Heaven Can wait--What Dreams May Come-Brandy Clark What will keep me Out of heaven)
Maybe heaven will be the one place our expectations iwll not be disappointed.
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