Introduction: Haggai,
another one of the twelve minor prophets, was active during the rebuilding of
the second Temple. He began his ministry about 16 years after the return of the
Jews to Jerusalem (c. 520 BC). The work on the Temple had been halted as a
result of some conflict between the Samaritans and the Judeans, but thanks to
prophets Haggai and Zechariah, the project got going again.
Haggai 1 – It is
the year 520 – August of that year – the most precise
date of any biblical writing. As long as the Temple of the Lord lies in
ruins, nothing will go well.
“You hoped for rich harvests, but they were poor. And when
you brought your harvest home, I blew it away. Why? Because my house lies in
ruins, says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, while all of you are busy building
your own fine houses” (1:9).
God will inspire the leaders and the people to get to work
to rebuild the Temple. The high commissioner of Judah and the high priest
listen to Haggai.
Haggai 2 – A
little later in that same year, the Lord sends another message through prophet
Haggai. “For Yahweh . . .says this: A little while now, and I am going to shake
the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. I will shake all the
nations and the treasures of all the nations shall flow in, and I will fill
this Temple with glory” (2:6-7).
From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through
Quakerism -
“What Did I Say?”
Part 1
Given the difficulties and
questions that are inherent in the Quaker notion or doctrine of “continuing
revelation”, difficulties I have discussed at some length, it is not lightly
that I turn now to the insights I came to feel that God was opening in me. The
famous Fox quotation Friends used to capture the spirit of what continuing
revelation was about—“You will say
Christ sayeth this, and the apostles say this; but what canst thou say?”—this was
something I felt challenged by too.
What I came to see after some
years as a believer and a Friend was that I was doing this same thing with the
words and writings of early Friends that they criticized people for doing with
the Scriptures. I was not paying as close attention or giving as much weight to
the insights God was opening to me personally. What was it God was trying to
open in me? What did I have to say about faith, about the redemption story I
was part of, about the condition of the church, about the things God wanted us
to deal with in our world—the kinds of things early Friends had been called
upon to address in their day?
What ultimately got me to realize that I did have something to say was
the teaching I had the opportunity to do beginning in 1985 and the encounter
with Scripture that it forced me to. I was asked to take over the Quakerism
course my husband had been teaching for a year or so in the Middle School of
the Friends School where he worked. Nothing
clarifies like teaching. No matter how much you thing you know about
something, you never really know it until you learn to teach it—especially
until you learn to teach it to the young. The point of the course was to teach
seventh graders about the basic beliefs and values of Friends, such as why it
was “unQuakerly” to be mean; why lying or cheating could easily get you
expelled from the school; why we wanted students to dress simply and without
eccentricity; why they were never ever
permitted to wear army fatigues or military gear to school, even on Halloween;
why we never permitted lotteries or
chance drawings of any kind at school functions; why community service was such
an important part of school life; and why we all sat in complete silence for
thirty or forty minutes each week at the Meeting House on the off chance
someone would have something to say “from the Spirit”.
Had I been asked to teach adults, I would no doubt have gone straight
to the Quaker texts I loved and have quoted so extensively in these chapters. But
my students were only twelve years old, and most had had little exposure to
religion of any kind. They would never be able to understand Fox or Penington
or Barclay—a lot of adult Quakers had trouble with the seventeenth-century
English they used, not to mention their theology. Since all of Friends’
original beliefs and principles rested on biblical foundations, it made sense
to use the Scriptures directly and to supplement them with my words to describe
the way Friends had interpreted the critical texts. Something about just having
to use my own words brought me into the concepts more, so that I really saw
them in a clearer way.
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