Emotions run high around building projects. Zerubbabel discovered that. He wanted to rebuild the temple. The Babylonians had torn down Solomon’s temple. But now, under the Persian Empire, King Cyrus told the Jews they could go back and rebuild their homeland. Zerubbabel the governor made the temple a top priority.
But this stirred up powerful emotions for people. In Ezra 3, it said: “When the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the LORD, the priests, dressed in their robes, stood by with trumpets, and the Levites, the descendants of Asaph, stood by with cymbals to praise the LORD as prescribed by David king of Israel.” Then they let loose with music and singing. “All the people shouted loud praise to the LORD.” At the same time, the older priests and leaders started weeping loudly. They had seen the previous temple. Everyone had a hard time telling apart the sounds of weeping from the sounds of the praising.
Zerubbabel and his leaders had neighbors, who said: “We’ve sacrificed to your God even before you got here. Let us build with you.” But Zerubbabel and the others said: “No, you don’t really believe in our God. We’ll build this temple on our own.” So, those neighbors started undermining the project any way they could.
Within such a short time, a building project sent Zerubbabel and his team through an emotional rollercoaster of excitement, sadness, discouragement, and frustration. Zerubbabel must have thought more than once, “I’m exhausted. This project is a mess. It hardly seems worth it when we won’t come close to Solomon’s temple.”
This brings up another building project; a modern one, the project of building you up. That project is also exhausting. It also takes a toll.
When Paul wrote about building you up here, he did not mean “you” as a lone individual. Listen to all the plurals in this verse. “So then, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of God’s household.” For his project, God wants to use more than one building block. He calls us: “fellow citizens with the saints and members of God’s household.” If there’s one thing teenagers crave (or if there’s one thing any of us wants), it’s to be included. You don’t like missing out. You don’t like being unaware or on the outside when your peers make plans.
Quite often, people get excluded from a friend group because they excluded themselves. Have you ever seen a little child alone on a playground while the rest of his classmates cheerfully shoot hoops or kick a soccer ball? If you go up and ask that kid why he’s by himself, he might say: “The other kids won’t let me play with them.”
So, you investigate. Maybe you ask other kids or the victim himself and you find: he’s not such a victim. He calls it a foul when anyone so much as looks at him funny. Or he has controversial ideas for improving the game and now he wants to be in charge like a hotshot. You could tell his classmates to put up with and include him, but you can hardly fault them when you find out what a jerk he’s been.
It’s like that also with bigger kids and adults. Some of us like to do nothing except complain all the time about how rotten the world is and how sinful the people are in it. But like the kid who ruins the game by calling fouls all the time, the whistle-blowers basically get what’s coming to them when no one enjoys their company.
Or, like the kid who hogs the ball or makes new rules for the game, don’t let it surprise you if you get excluded for trying to be a trend-setter. Christ did not make it his Church’s job to be on the cutting edge of anything. If
you act like your life’s goal is being different from conventional wisdom, you’re not really listening to fellow believers and you’re asking them to treat you like someone foreign to them.
Even if you haven’t done anything to exclude yourself, getting excluded was your status with God. There have been girls who gave birth and put the infant in a dumpster. In ancient Greece, people put an unwanted child in the woods to die. In some countries, parents will let a child starve to death in a crib if they think they can’t afford it.
We know God’s mercy so well we might feel it makes sense that God took us in. That’s what we would do. But in the real world, it does not automatically make sense that a powerful person would take pity on some dying little wretch. God also had every reason to ignore us.
After we got engaged, my wife did student-teaching out of state. She made friends there with other teachers and their families. I visited her and one evening we went to a party at one of her new friends’ house. Imagine how I felt. I didn’t know them. They all got along without me. They had no reason to include me. My fiancée didn’t want to spend the whole night babysitting me. I felt doomed to spend the evening alone.
But some of the guys didn’t let that happen. They included me in a game. They didn’t have to. I didn’t have much in common with them. I struggled to make conversation. But they didn’t let that stop them. They taught me the rules and coached me how to play. By the end, I had new friends, but also a sense of family.
That’s what God described for you here. He made you a fellow citizen with the saints and a member of God’s household. Jesus didn’t just bring you into the party. He made the party enjoyable for you.
This is why we say the Church is not a building. It is people who trust Jesus saved them. Forgiveness does not depend on your good deeds. So too, building the Church does not depend on your good deeds.
At a recent conference, a pastor talked about a young woman he served in Canada. She was the least likely person to become Christian. She had hard questions about God. She had openly homosexual family members. She attended a college that spewed anti-Christian messages. When the pastor offered her classes to join his church, she had her schedule swamped. She needed to testify in a trial against one of her high school teachers. Also her former high school started defaming her on social media because they sided with the teacher.
There was no reason for her to keep taking Lutheran instruction. Yet, the pastor told us she did continue his classes and she remains a faithful member of that church to this day. Paul wrote in verse 21, “In him the whole building is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord.” We trick ourselves into thinking we are the builders. We convert unbelievers for Christ. Paul relieves that pressure when he says the whole building grows…in the Lord.
The Church is not a campus in Racine or Caledonia. Shoreland is not the Church. The Church is a gathering of believers in Jesus, which meets at Racine and Caledonia and Shoreland campuses.
Since the Church is not the buildings, but the people, let’s expect God to keep bringing in people. He promised that in verse 22. “In him you too are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.” He keeps adding building blocks to the structure, new friends.
We can expect more from God. The true Church is people. God knows people cannot gather in Wisconsin during January outside. They’d be too distracted to hear his Word. He knows projected enrollment at Shoreland next year is too big for us to attend chapel or religion classes without getting distracted by the tight space.
Let’s expect God to care about visible buildings. They are not the Church, but we can trust God to provide solutions when it comes to things like our parsonage or our early childhood center. We can rely on him to build the physical structures we need. He’s already done that by giving a generous purchase of land to Shoreland. He’s already done that by letting WLS buy a building for expanding our classroom space.
He’s already doing the most important building. He gave us Jesus the cornerstone along with apostles and prophets who wrote about Christ. He already built you into his Church by baptizing you and he keeps cementing your place with Holy Communion. He keeps stacking up new members that he joins to his Church. So, we can count on him to give us the visible buildings where the Church gathers too.