Rise Up

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Please pray with me as we prepare to hear your holy word. Still our hearts and minds speak to us through the Scriptures. Let your truth be clear, your wisdom understood and your voice recognized. May your spirit illuminate the Word and may stir our hearts through faith, obedience and deeper love for you. In Jesus name we pray. Amen. Today's Scripture Two passages. The first one is Ezra, chapter five, verse one and two. Now the Haggai the prophet and Zechariah son of Edo prophesied to the Jews who were in Judah and Jerusalem in the name of the God of Israel who was over them. Then Jerubbabel son of Shealtiel and Yeshua son of Jozareth set out to rebuild the house of God in Jerusalem and with them were the prophets of God helping them. The second Bible passage is Second Corinthians chapter 4, verse 6. For it is the God who said light will shine out of darkness who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God and the face of Christ. This is the word of the Lord. [00:01:38] Speaker B: Good morning everybody. I am so honored to be here with you today and to worship with you again. It is extra special as today is World Communion Sunday and it reminds us that we are all in God's big amazing family. Will you join me in prayer? Let's pray. Loving God, thank you for bringing us here this morning that we might hear your word. I ask, oh God, that I would decrease so that you might increase so that your word and your will would be made known to us, your people here today and all God's people say Amen. Well it is an honor to be here with you today. It is hard to believe that this month, October brings us to 10 months post Eton and Palisades fires and I think I love it when things work out this way. Pastor Matt contacted me and said this is where we are in the sermon series and I think it is so apropos for us to reflect on this passage in particular from Ezra that reflects on the building, the rebuilding of the temple in in Jerusalem. And just for a moment I want to ask us to reflect on this incredible irony that we have a preacher whose house of worship burned down preaching at another preacher's church whose house burned down, both of whom we are all in cities and congregations that have suffered great loss this year. I love this sermon series of Ezra that Pastor Matt is taking you through because this is a not so often read book in the Old Testament tells a story about both challenges and life anew in God's care. So we pick up in the context of the Israelites coming back to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple. But they so many obstacles that had arisen for them. And the rebuild of the temple had been stalled and stalled again and stalled again. It is agreed, historically, that almost 10 to as much as 16 years had passed in the delay of the rebuilding. And as a pastor of our church in the Palisades, we are walking through this very same process. And I can tell you that it has been tremendously challenging and discouraging. So God's people had returned to a ruined and decimated Jerusalem. But through encouragement and through the words of wise people people, they established the decision to rebuild the temple. And if you continue reading further in this passage, you will see that this chapter contains a letter, a letter that the Persian governor of that region, a letter that he writes to the king to report on the building of the Temple of Jerusalem. And this letter is actually challenging whether or not the Israelites actually could build. The letter questions whether they have the right to build. And the letter is sent challenging their authority to do so. And you can read in this chapter the response from the Israelites. They write back and they say, we are the servants of the God of heaven and earth, and we are rebuilding the temple that was built many years ago, one that a great king of Israel built and finished. They fire back with a strong and confident response. So this passage in Ezra is recalling a time when the Israelites were reminded, they were reminded vividly of their calling as God's people. And they were reminded of God's promises in their lives. And we can see in the writings, we can see that there is a clear development not only of resilience, but a transformation of their spirits. After the fires that we experienced in January, many of us were left and have been left with so many questions and huge crossroads in our lives. After the fire, we were faced with questions that were and continue to be daunting. And they were questions like, do we rebuild or not? Am I too old to rebuild? Do I have enough money to rebuild? I still get calls every single day with our folks who are struggling with these questions. Sometimes the question is simply, what do I do? But regardless whether you have been personally affected by the fires or not, all of us, all of us, all of us have undergone some type of trauma in our lives. We have survived pain, perhaps injustice, perhaps marital strain, divorce, the pain that we see our children encounter. We have seen financial hardships, relationships that have suffered physical and psychological pain. We have all undergone challenges, trials and trauma in our lives and in the aftermath of pain, we may be asking ourselves the same question. What do I do? What is the secret sauce to life? How do we survive injustice, challenges, pain, heartache that we encounter in our lives? After all, isn't it just common sense that discouragement is a part of living? Aren't disappointments just part of the human experience? If you've ever asked somebody, have you ever been discouraged? Isn't that just like asking them, have you ever been human? We've all been disappointed in life for one thing or another. In fact, I would say that disappointment is quite rampant in life, isn't it? Whether it's small things like a meal that you were looking forward to that went wrong, or a movie that was hyped up that didn't deliver, or a really bad date, or a job that ended up being a dead end, or the big, huge, unexpected turns in our lives that leave us discouraged and disappointed. So what does it mean to encounter discouragement? I think part of the definition of discouragement is a dis spiritedness. So how do we deal with the discouragement and move forward after we have been dispirited? This is the story in Ezra. So while we take a minute and reflect on the trials and the challenges in our lives, I'd like to pause a little bit this morning to think about a little bit about this spiritual world that we live in, this realm that we are called to live in while we are in the present. The spiritual world isn't something later on. We have to live in it now as believers and as believers in the living Christ we all straddle and we hover between these two worlds, the real physical world and this spiritual world in our here and now. And navigating both of these worlds at one time can be challenging at times. One of my mentors, Dr. Richard Flory, who is a sociologist at USC, he said, Once said this. He said, thriving. Thriving is a constant process to thrive physically, emotionally, spiritually. It is a constant process. We don't just get to a place and then we're there. It is a constant process that we have to be engaged in. And many of us realize that life is indeed constantly changing. It's moving, it's evolving. Very few things stay the same, nor should they. But when we encounter pain and hardships, how do we not deny, ignore, or gloss over what has happened and yet move ourselves successfully into the future? How do we come together again and rebuild? And I mean this in a metaphorical sense, how do we rebuild ourselves spiritually? How do we Thrive spiritually. Somehow. Somehow we have to have a fresh encounter with. With God's promises. Part of the secret sauce to living is that God shows us how to live with the future in our hearts. And this is how we move through the spiritual world. In this physical body, we trust in God's power every day. Brothers and sisters, you may already know this, but the temple was finally completed 70 years after its destruction. 70 years. That's a long, long time. That's more than a generation. It's two, three generations. And the greatest tool. I look at that number, and I think that's a long time. The greatest tool that is used against us to rebuild ourselves after trauma. The greatest tool against our thriving is discouragement and dispiritedness. But friends, we have to remember. We have to remember that God does not change. Of course we do. Our lives change. They evolve. They move in directions that we do not expect. But God does not change. And we have seen God's presence throughout time and that God is always steadfast. That is a promise that has been made to us. That is a reality. We can bank on that. So maybe our question and our challenge is this. How do we come through any kind of trauma? A wiser and a stronger person, not just a resilient person, but a person who has been transformed, a person who has grown and is thriving. Trauma, any kind of trauma, whether it is an illness, a child who is struggling in your family, financial crisis, a horrific fire, a horrible death. Trauma has the ability to shatter a person's understanding of the world. And their perspective of can crumble and decimate everything that we thought we believed in. Perhaps you find yourself in a place in your life where you may be doing great today. Or perhaps we find ourselves in a place where we need some hope. Perhaps we're in a place where we are experiencing some kind of loss. The loss of a relationship or our health, or a dream. A place where some corner of our life might feel a little crumbly. Ezra 5 is the same story. It tells a story of discouragement and difficult challenges and then a fresh new hope in the living God. It was a time when the Israelites were reminded of their calling as God's people. And it was a reminder of God's promises in their lives, promises that are given to us as well in the here and now. And they felt support and hope and sustenance. Do you remember their words as they wrote back? We are the servants of the God of heaven and earth. And here is the direct connection for us, just as the Rebuilding of the temple of Jerusalem required hope and resolve and perseverance. After it had been destroyed, God's people found hope and, and resilience and transformation through this experience. And much later, much, much later, Jesus came to this world to establish a new realm and continues to remind us that Jesus is the rebuilder of our lives. Just as the temple of Jerusalem had been destroyed and then rebuilt, Jesus meets us. Jesus meets people in the ruins of their lives, not at their peaks. Jesus met people when their lives were crumbly. The woman at the well, the leopards, Mary and Martha. Right after Lazarus had died. Jesus continued to deliberately meet people in pain and distress and help them envision a new life. They envisioned a new life with Jesus. Rebuilding our lives from any kind of trauma takes resilience and faith. And faith is simply. Faith is simply the active and mindful decision to make the choice to believe that Jesus walks with us. That's all that faith is. It's not complicated. And maybe that's part of the secret sauce that we have in hand. Jesus is the new temple. He said it himself in the book of John. Destroy this temple and I will build it up in three days. And now, brothers and sisters, we too are God's temple. And Jesus is always rebuilding us, sometimes more quickly on other days than others. And thank God. And so through Ezra, we witness this rebuilding. And today we continue to hear this promise. And we resume the rebuilding of our spirits. And we rest in these promises that have been given to us. And we see these promises that we have witnessed. So Ezra 5 is actually a turning point of a people, a people who have been scattered, a people who have been traumatized, a people who have been destroyed by life. Discouragement was always chasing after them. And the reality is that discouragement may always play a role in our lives one way or another. We can't escape it, whether it's our vocation or our children or our relationship, our or our finances. But as the people of God, we have the ability to look at the faithfulness and look at the perseverance of God's work despite circumstances. And we can find encouragement in the recollection of all the people who have faced tremendous challenges, who've gone before us. I've been doing so much studying and reading after the fire about what it means to survive trauma. And in my learning I found that there is a distinct difference between what they call resilience and this term that's out there called post traumatic growth. Resilience might mean the ability to withstand something that has happened and Even perhaps the ability to. To bounce back after something tragic has happened. But post traumatic growth talks about not just this sense of resiliency, but positive changes and transformation that can come after trauma. It's growth when someone can emerge with a new sense of purpose, a new outlook on life. And so resilience helps us to recover. But growth, in growth, we have the ability to be transformed. And most definitively, part of the secret sauce is that we do this in community. We cannot do it as successfully alone. You know this because you are here this morning, sitting in community. You are committed to it. And we remember this especially on World Communion Sunday, when we're bound together with brothers and sisters across the world. So, friends, whenever we find ourselves in a spiritual pause where our lives might be a little bit paralyzing, we can remember that we don't walk alone. And we're reminded of the words of Paul when he wrote to the Corinthians, we don't lose heart. Outwardly, we're wasting away, but inwardly we're being renewed. In other words, we don't give up. We don't give up. Even though our bodies are getting worn out on the outside, we're being renewed and made stronger every day. So, friends, on the days when we feel extra crumbly and the world around us feels unjust and crumbly, even in the shadow of our deepest wounds, we know that in God's immutable essence that Jesus does not leave us, that he walks with us, and that in walking with one another, we are made whole. So let's rise up. Let's rise together, not as the unbroken, but as the Beloved, held by the One who heals and makes us whole. Let it be so. Amen.