United Methodist Church Westlake Village

Hope Is On The Way

• United Methodist Church Westlake Village

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Hope doesn’t float in from nowhere; it’s built, stone by stone, by people who believe God is still with them. We open a season of preparation by reframing Advent as more than countdowns and carols. It’s a deliberate reset, a way of clearing space in our lives and communities to encounter Jesus with fresh attention and a steadier hope.

To anchor that hope, we head into the world of Haggai. After division, conquest, and exile, a scattered people return home and face the rubble of what used to center their life with God. Haggai’s charge is deceptively simple: rebuild the temple. Not to recreate a museum piece, but to rediscover a living Presence. He insists the new can be even better than before because God is with the builders now, just as God was then. That ancient story hits home today as we look at our own “temples” under stress—public trust, shared truth, and the bonds that hold neighbors together.

We talk candidly about the anxiety fueled by polarized media and algorithmic echo chambers, and how easy it is to slip into blaming “they” instead of risking the brave work of “we.” Along the way, we remember modern markers of progress that defy cynicism and point to movement—evidence that change, though uneven, is possible. That memory becomes more than nostalgia; it becomes proof that presence transforms seasons of loss into seasons of rebuilding.

Advent invites us to practice that kind of hope. Curate what shapes your attention. Rebuild a small altar of community with conversation, hospitality, and shared projects. Pray simple prayers that keep you grounded in God’s nearness. If you’ve been waiting for a reason to believe that tomorrow can be “even better than before,” this conversation offers language, story, and steps to begin. If it resonates, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs courage, and leave a review to help others find the message. Your voice helps us build.

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Pastor Darren:

Yeah, we're talking a little bit of hope today, and our passage uses the phrase, the days are surely coming, says the Lord. Are those comforting words for you? All right, because they're supposed to be comforting. The days are coming. They are on their way. You know, God is coming. God's going to get things set right. So be hopeful. Be hope-filled for gosh sake. And in that spirit, we're getting ready for Advent, right? Advent, that the four Sundays that lead into Christmas Eve, the season of preparing and getting ourselves organized and maybe even building something up so that Christmas Eve, the birth of Christ, means something. So this series is going to be living into that spirit just a little bit, anticipating it. So I hope that you are up for a series that essentially a season of preparing for a season of preparing. We're preparing to prepare, friends. All right. I hope you're ready for that. The hope is that Christmas itself can mean much, much more. Advent, Christmas Day, more than just the cultural pieces that we work with, right? The presence, the family, the food, uh, but that it means something more substantial. That's our hope. Uh, it's also our season of deepening in our understanding of who Christ is and what it meant that Christ came to be with us. So I hope that you are ready for that journey. And now that I've got you all geared up, let's dig into some Old Testament for some hope. Who's ready? All right, all right. Me and Gary are ready. All right, the rest of us. All right, here's how we're gonna start. What I need is your list of your top ten prophets. All right, top ten prophets. Let's start with number 10. Who's your tenth favorite prophet? Jeremiah? Okay, why are you ranking him so low? Oh, he's just he was always whining. Is that what you said? I mean, a poor guy. It was there when the temple gets torn down, right? He has a reason to be disappointed and all that. Top five prophets? We do we have our favorites? I'm kind of joking. I know not everybody is deep into their Old Testament prophets. We start with the gospels, we do some Paul, uh, you know, maybe we get into Genesis, but after that it's uh so how about a favorite prophet? A prophet you like? Yeah, Gary? Isaiah, right? Isaiah, a lot of his uh uh prophecy is what we understand to be the coming of Christ, and so we do a lot of it at Christmas time and and in Advent time. You know, some people like Daniel in that lion's den. Uh some people have fun with Jonah, uh, some people are deep, deep people like a Job. Heavy, heavy. All right, yeah. Anyway, uh today we're talking about a prophet we don't generally get into, Haggai. Have you read Haggai? All right, all right, then this will be good. Hey, the good thing about Haggai, really, really short. You know, you can get it done in 10 minutes, maybe 15 minutes. So, in order to understand Haggai, you have to know some history, you have to know some ancient history. And I know how much you love ancient history, he said sarcastically. And so, in order to get that history out, I have made some slides and I'm giving myself three minutes to get it all out. Are we all agreed that's fair? Three minutes of ancient history is okay. I can do this. All right, I'm starting now. All right, we're gonna start with the United Monarchy. You probably have heard of King David, right? He's sort of famous from the Old Testament. Well, he was an effective king, which is probably why a lot of our Old Testament is committed to his story and his writings in the Psalms. He created a lot of stability in the kingdom, and his son came behind him and did the same kinds of things and was able to really get something grounded, right? So you're seeing David and Solomon, right around 1,000 leading up to 931 BCE. By the way, BCE before the Common Era. A lot of folks are using those words instead of BC and AD. So they get it started. It's a pretty healthy time for the Jewish people. All right, next slide. Then after Solomon dies, they get into some division. Sometimes nations will divide. I don't know. You'll hear about it sometime because it's certainly not happening today. Divided kingdom starts happening right after Solomon's death. We end up with a northern kingdom which is called Israel, right? And then we have a southern kingdom called Judah, and you can see kind of where they set up camp, each of them. Judah is where uh David and Solomon were, though. And it was a much more stable uh kingdom than Israel became. And you'll learn here in the next slide that eventually, after some years of coexisting not necessarily well, uh the Assyrian conquest comes, and the Israel part is taken over. And when they take over, these Assyrians they take all of the resources, not only uh the stuff, but they take the people. Right? So you can imagine if if we were conquered and then they took all of our smart folks, all our people who are innovating, and they were just gone. And now we were trying to figure it out. Not too much later, although longer than you might think, the second kingdom goes down. Judah is destroyed. And in the midst of that, the temple that Solomon had built, this massive temple that was a she was a beauty. This is what we understand. Really did a good job on the temple. It gets broken down really uh just in the conquering and uh the desire to quash the Israelites, the desire to quash the Jewish people. And so even more exile happens at that point. The Babylonian exile, you may have heard of in some Bible study and all that. And so all of their resources, all of their intelligence, all of their innovation again gets taken away. And then there's just this period of the Jewish people living oppressed, those who were taken away lived in oppression in that way, and then those who were left left in, you know, to be sad in a sense that their country had been conquered and that all their people had been, or so many of their people had been taken away. Then finally, in the next slide, the uh uh Babylonians are overtaken by the Persians, and Cyrus, the king, Cyrus the Great, offers to let the Israelites go back home. Right? So they get back home and they're given permission to resettle and to figure themselves out. And part of that resettling is that they're gonna build the temple again, a second temple. This is where uh Haggai comes in. He is a prophet who is doing his ministry at the time of them resettling and looking to rebuild what they had, rebuild that temple. I think we can skip that last slide. Oh, dang it, 355. Oh, I'm one minute over on that thing. Yeah, yeah. When you're having a blast. Not too bad, though. Four minutes? You know, you can eat oatmeal one morning, right? Ay, ay, ay. All right, yeah, this last slide. That's a little more of the history that takes us into the time of Jesus. But the point is, Haggai, this is when he is doing his ministry. This is when he is preaching uh his message from God. And we assume he was pretty effective because the the uh um the temple does get rebuilt. And part of his uh technique, well, and I talk about the title of my message here today is even better than before. Because that's kind of how he preached about building that second temple. It is going to be even better than before. And how did he get this message across? Well, some of it was nostalgia. He said, Some of you were around when the other temple was here. You remember how great that temple was, that thing we got built with God, and it was this glorious thing. Well, guess what? God is still here. God is still working with us to build this temple, this new temple. And because God's with us, this next one's gonna be even better than the one before God, because God was with us then, and God is with us now. So it's an interesting passage in my mind, this passage for us given today's context, because we don't necessarily have a fallen temple. We aren't a people who got conquered and then taken away and then are now getting to come back and try to figure things out. And even if our church here got destroyed and taken down, we wouldn't necessarily see that as a weakness from God, right? That wouldn't say to us, oh, God must be really weak. That temple got broken down, God should have protected it. We would think, oh no, something else happened. We weren't doing our work to take care of the building, or we just uh there was a journey that was happening here that we weren't really taking that we should have. But we wouldn't blame it on God if that fell. But we do live at a time in which our positivity, our hope for the nation, maybe even for the world, is a little bit in check. Our anxieties about the future of the world, our anxieties about our own nation are a little bit high. Maybe it's because of our commercialized news, maybe it's our politicized news. It just, it's always bombarding us with the things that make us afraid, the things that make us anxious or angry, right? And we just we get them coming to us all the time. Why? Because that's what we watch, and that's what they want to give us, are the things that get us to watch. Maybe that's why we're anxious. Maybe it's social media, these little uh echo chambers that we fall into, all right. And obviously older folks aren't always in there as much as maybe younger folks, but let's not kid ourselves. We're in those echo chambers too. That's information, the way it gets delivered to us, it's almost unavoidable. So I would argue that our sense of hope for the future is a bit hindered these days. And what's even more interesting or maybe disappointing is the sickness that we have of the they, right? If only they would do this, everything would be fine. Right? We rarely kind of look and think, we don't use that word we. We need to. It's always about they. And I wouldn't want you to hear me saying, oh, it's really us, we're our own problem. We aren't truly the whole problem, but we never get anywhere when our conversation, when our communication is using those words they, you, you're not getting it done. That's kind of what we live in a little bit. And even more complex for us, maybe even more uh pessimistic, I would say, is we largely disagree on who the they are. If only they would do this. Well, one group has their version of they, and then the other group are probably those they, and they're gonna got their their think they are the they. You get what I'm saying. We are all kind of pointing and pointing, pointing. So I wouldn't say we have a temple per se, but a metaphorical temple, maybe, as a people, as a country, as a nation. And we're a little concerned for this temple. A lot of people would say it's kind of crumbling. We'd have different uh beliefs about why it is crumbling. And in the midst of that concern, that anxiety, we really aren't creating the uh um the environments, the arenas for us to have good communication to solve some of the things that we're concerned about. So when we're talking about a temple following or falling, there is a way the passage might be talking to us. There may be a passageway into this passage as we talk about the temple of our existence in our community, maybe being at threat a little bit or concerning a little bit. And hey guy's message this is the turn. Hey guy's message is to encourage us. Hey guy's message is to give us hope. And what is that message? Well, hey, God is with us. God is with us. I wonder I wonder if we believe that message. Do we believe that God is still with us? Well, amen. We got some people of faith out there. Good, good, good. And sometimes, even when we believe it, then we have the next question. Okay, well then how? Where is God? What is God doing? How do we know that that's actually happening? And I was wrestling with that this week, and uh I happened to be listening to a podcast, and it had uh former president uh Barack Obama on there. Um, I don't want to get into politics, so I will just say I hope that uh we can all respect a good human being and a good representative of being a human being uh that led our country for a while. But I remembered my story with Barack Obama, especially when he got elected. I remember that evening just feeling kind of elation, not necessarily because of what he was going to be standing for or what he might do, but because I still had memory of environments of some pretty significant prejudice, discrimination. I remember looking in a history book when I was in middle school and seeing a really horrific picture. I'll let you guys guess what kind of picture it might have been about prejudice and discrimination, and being shocked that the picture came from 1968. For me, I was alive in 67. It was so easy to say, oh yeah, we were prejudiced, but it was in the past. And then I had to go, oh shoot, that wasn't that long ago, and it wasn't just bad words or anything, it was it was well, it was murder. And I remember sitting there in 2000, well, it would have been uh well 2008, but then the parade in 2009 thinking, well shoot, we we've moved. We've gone in what some might call a generation, generation, maybe two generations, from giving ourselves well, you what you might say is legal discrimination to a point where somebody from that discriminated community was now by a vote allowed to be president. To me, I in my heart, in my spirit, I was celebrating that because it meant to me that we'd we'd taken a journey, a pretty significant journey. And to me, I like to think that God was with us on that journey. We can believe that God is with us in our challenges because God was with us in our previous challenges. God walked with us through this journey from legal discrimination to electing a president from whom we discriminated from group we discriminated against. And God was with us on that whole journey. It was a journey that started, by the way, not in 1968, but way back when when one cultural group decided it had permission to grab people from another cultural group, to kidnap them and enslave them, allowing themselves to believe that their race was better than another race. Can you imagine the darkness that has to go on in someone's mind to allow them to treat people like that? And on that day in 2008, we had this moment of saying, okay, we have moved. God has walked with us. There is hope in that. Even the darkness that our country has had in slavery, we were able to rise above it, at least to the extent that we have today, and hopefully even rising above it more and more. We know God is with us because God has been with us. From our passage today, God was with us in the time of kings when everything was going pretty good. King David's writing Psalms and uh really informing generations about the relationship with God. God was with us in that time of division, Israel and Judah, when we were living uneasily with each other, despite all being people of the Jewish faith. God was with us in that time of being conquered. When all of our resources, all of our intelligence was taken away, when we felt hopeless and powerless and vulnerable, and God was with us in that time of rebuild, of getting that temple going again. This is the hope that that we hold as Christians. This is the hope that we look to a time of Advent for. What are we doing during Advent? What is it we wait for? We're waiting for this presence, this hope to be made real in the birth of God's Son, whom God sends that we might know God intimately, and that we might know a deep, deep hope for ourselves and our world because of that relationship. I invite you on that journey in this pre Advent to Advent. Amen. Amen.