Mike Cope 5-24-26

Good morning, friends.

I so want to begin by saying, turn your Bibles to Zechariah, but I'm afraid it would derail the whole thing.

Zechariah is wedged into the shadows of the Old Testament between Haggai and Malachi, but it kind of punches above its weight.

It begins with eight wild crazy visions. I sometimes call it the shrooms section of the Old Testament. It's kind of psychedelic, but I want to begin by reading the third vision to you today. And then we'll pray and ask God to speak afresh to us through that old vision, Zechariah 2.

Then I looked up, and there before me was a man with a measuring line in his hand.

I asked, where are you going?

He answered me, to measure Jerusalem, to find out how wide and how long it is.

And while the angel who was speaking to me was leaving, another angel came to meet him and said to him, run and tell that young man Jerusalem will be a city without walls because of the great number of people and animals in it. And I myself will be a wall of fire around it, declares the Lord, and I will be its glory within.

Let's pray together.

O God, we give you thanks for this ancient text.

We pray that it may speak afresh to us today, that our eyes and ears may be open to your glory around and within.

And toward that end, O God, please pour through me now the gift of preaching in Jesus. We pray and we all say Amen. So we call this time post exilic.

Israelites have been carried away. They've been in a foreign country, and now for the most part, they're back. It's about 500 years before the birth of our Savior. Things got off to a start, but then they slowed down because these people are struggling and impoverished. Not all is going well.

There's a lot to do when you come back from the kind of devastation they faced. And as they came together, some of them had long memory where nostalgia was slowing things down. Because even as they contemplated continuing to build the temple, others were saying, this is nothing like Solomon's temple. That the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem is not going to be what it was. It's not like the good old days.

And as you know, nostalgia can be energizing or defeating depending on how one approaches it. Shel Silverstein was mostly right. The saddest thing I ever did see is a woodpecker pecking at a plastic tree. He looks at me and friends says he, things ain't as sweet as they used to be.

And I think everybody here who pays attention between the decades has some sense of that.

I spend my time traveling and being with church leaders and churches around the country. And one of the things I see most often is a lack of hope because of memory, because so many people remember a time when their church was much bigger than it is right now. And in their memory, those were the times of evangelism, the times of discipleship, the time that growth up and to the right meant that God was in the middle of them and blessing them.

The first big study of our group, our denomination, Churches of Christ, is starting to roll out. First one in 17 or 18 years. And the numbers are not heartening. Of course, we're not the only group, as you well know. Almost every group is smaller than it was, say, in the 80s and the 90s.

In response to that, there's always somebody trying to play a different narrative, like, oh, it's better today. There's been an uptick. Churches are rising again and so on. And the numbers just don't show that, of course, anecdotally, here and there, yes.

But it's a funny thing to try to go on when memories are haunting you a bit.

Did we do something wrong? Are we going the wrong way? Is God not blessing us?

And then on top of that, my friends, some continue to bring their burdens to church. And it feels like you're dragging weights and luggage of losses and griefs and failures.

And you come and here is where Zechariah steps in, along with Haggai. They're contemporaries. Haggai is the guy with the plan. Haggai's blowing reveille. He's blowing.

It's time to get up. It's time to get up. It's time to get up in the morning. And he's got a plan. He's got a plan for Zerubbabel, for Joshua, for the remnant of all of Israel.

And his plan is, quit taking care of just your own stuff and finish the temple of God. And by the end of Haggai, you find out they did just that. His plan was working. Zechariah doesn't have so much a plan as dreams. He's not reveille.

He's reverie. He's imagining. He's contemplating. He's speaking. And there's a place for both of those.

But there's something special about dreams that speak to the people of God. I think about, would we still remember Martin Luther King if he had said, I have a plan?

No. He might well have had a plan. But he lingers on in our imagination because he had a dream.

So Zechariah comes with these eight dreams.

And I so love this one because I like to measure stuff. I like a Stanley tape measure. I like an odometer. And because I do a lot of work in California, I like a seismograph.

I like to measure stuff. When it's time to fix things, I have three steps. Step number one, get my tape measure. Measure twice, cut once. Step two is get my toolbox.

Step three, call Dickie Porsche, because I'm not going to fix it. But I know how to get ready. I love to measure things.

I. I love my Garmin watch. I'm Forrest Gump. I just started running when I was young. I can't quit. And so I'm addicted to this Garmin watch.

We Garmin watch wearers, we like to know exactly what it says. I love the T shirt that says on the back, if you find me face down, pause my Garmin, then call 911, because we want to know how far did we get before we dropped? And if you ever see a runner and they're just kind of doing this, that's because they said they were running four miles, but they're at 3.98. And if we said four, we mean four.

I like to measure stuff.

Of course, that didn't mesh well with my vocation of choice of being a preacher. It's hard to measure stuff.

I'm all the time talking to ministers, and they've got this way at the beginning. As you know, we are in a series on the Gospel of John. I hope you've read the text in preparation for today, and I also hope if you missed last week's sermon, you've gone back and looked at it and. And I have to tell them, 99% did not read the text. Getting ready for today.

80% don't know you're in a series on John, and nobody went back and watched the previous one. It's stuff that's hard to measure.

And measurements, metrics are tricky anyway.

CT Nguyen, a philosopher, has written a fabulous new book called the Score. And in it again and again, he makes the points that metrics don't measure what really matters most of the time. They measure the stuff that's easy to measure. And he begins with the idea of games. You play games, and the point of the game is, is to have fun with friends and build community.

But have you ever played with somebody who forgot? That's the point.

You're playing Monopoly, and the next thing you know, it's like larger than life. Those people who will not give you an extra loan from the game, they will not swap you properties. They're going to take it to the very bitter end till somebody cries and leaves, mad.

But metrics, he talks, for example, about education. I'll walk delicately here. But he picks on law schools and says, somebody decided that the successful metric was how many applications did you get and how many did you deny.

Now, education is notoriously difficult to measure, right? Because things like curiosity and creativity and community and service, those are a little hard to measure. But applications, well, we can measure that. And so law schools have devoted sections of their admissions devoted to getting people who in a million years would not be admitted get them to apply because it helps, according to that metric. Or he speaks about trafficking, the notorious problem of human trafficking in this country.

But he points out, once again, it's hard to measure the stuff that really matters. And so we measure what's easy to measure. And we decided what's easy to measure is arrests.

Now, in a study of Southern California, what we found is that if you really pour money into arrests, arrests will go up. But it doesn't solve the trafficking problem. If anything, it goes up. What helps with the trafficking problem is dealing with poverty and homelessness. So they tried that for a while, but guess what happened to arrests?

They went down because it was less trafficking, but it was a failure because the metric went down. And so there we are, social media, same thing. Enragement drives, engagement. So words like kills and hates and destroys, that gets the traffic flowing. We can measure that, but it may not be what we want, what we need.

Well, here we are in Zechariah.

We're here and the guy wants to measure.

But here comes the Lord speaking through the angels, saying, wait, stop the metrics for a minute.

We are speaking here about the kingdom of God, about the presence of God and the glory of God can't be thrown through your metrics.

He's got his Stanley tape measure all ready to mark it off. Probably somebody told him what Jerusalem used to be like. Neo said, let's put the Stanley tape measure away and just for a moment, let's think about the glory of God. Maybe the wall around Jerusalem is bigger than you can imagine. And the wall is not brick and mortar.

The wall is God as a fire.

And not only that, not only is God around you, protecting you, but God is within you. The glory of God is inside.

What a needed word that may be?

Because on one hand, we're all too susceptible for feeling guilty about numbers. That we know how to measure, but budgets and attendance and things like that. In Andrew Root's brand new book, BAAL and the Gods of More, he says, we rode the wave of 3% GDP for 100 years. Churches of all stripes went up with it, and now that it's down to 1 or 1.5%, it affects everything. So the temptation today is the same temptation that was there long ago and that has turned to, to baal because BAAL is the God of fertility.

God will give you, BAAL will give you more. BAAL will multiply what you cannot find just by trusting in God.

Zechariah says to people, you have your failures and your hesitations, your doubts, your griefs, but this is a God story.

God is around you and God is within you, which is the essence of what church means. We're a community of saints for sure, but we're a community of saints in whom the presence of the risen Christ remains. That's who we are.

These are the good old days, my friends. God's alive and working in us and through us, and as always, despite us at times. In the next vision, at the end of chapter three, he'll say, you know what time it is? It's a time when all of your neighbors are going to come and ask if they can sit under your own fig tree.

That's kind of a funny expression, except it's a biblical one. Back in 1 Kings, chapter 4, to describe the zenith of Israel's history in the days of Solomon, it said, and everybody sat under their own vine and under their own fig tree. It's a sign of the fullness of the presence of God. The prophet Micah in the 8th century BC said, the times are coming when God will restore all things and everyone will sit under their own fig tree. And.

And have you ever read that odd passage in John chapter one, Nathaniel makes a confession about Jesus and it's based on, you knew I was sitting under a fig tree. Really? He knew you weren't sitting under a fig tree? So he's the Messiah. Seems like a low bar, except that biblically, we're tapping into all of this language and Zechariah is telling defeated people that the presence of God in this agrarian society, everyone will be under their own fig tree.

Everyone's neighbor will be welcomed there.

And then in the next vision, the fifth vision, God has to say, don't despise the day of small things, because that could be the problem. Our metrics are looking for big things, for big trends, for big curves, and. And this Comes in and says, watch for the small things.

And that's where careful observation of what God is doing among us is so important.

Those don't get picked up on metrics, but row by row, individual by individual, there are stories here of what God is doing in us, through us, and despite us.

The glory of God fills this place. It is the fire around us, and all are welcome within. It's an expanding fire. All, all are welcome. All are invited, each to sit under their own fig tree.

That is to live in the presence of the glory of God.

Last week, that's why I always love Senior Sunday. You hear these stories that trickle out.

Feels like we ought to just be paying for Camp Barnabas. It sounds like to me, it's like, that's our discipleship center. But as they told these stories, you think, huh, didn't know that. Maybe you taught somebody when they were in third grade and thought, nah, not gonna happen.

But he's not done yet. And then they come and tell about this journey. I heard recently a big organization announced less than 5% of churches are involved in discipleship.

Oh, we love our metrics.

But what if your metrics are just the ones easy to measure? It's not what I see at all.

Fleming Rutledge, longtime preacher, has been voiceless almost for the last seven or eight years as she cares for her aging husband with dementia. But she kind of came out a couple of weeks ago with a statement that felt prophetic to the church, saying she keeps hearing about the demise of the church with all the political division that cuts through. And she said, yes, but there are stories everywhere that show that the people of God can move beyond that.

She told about her little church.

Kind of left a sinner. Pretty much all left a sinner except this one old veteran. He argued with people in Bible class, and he argued with them in small groups, and he argued with them in the foyer, but they were still a church. They were still the people of God.

And then he came down, stage four cancer near the end of his life. And one of his old buddies, another veteran, somebody who locked heads with him over political stuff all the time, his friend came to visit him in the hospital to pray for him. He saw up on the screen, just by default, CNN's playing no sound.

And he met his friend, prayed for him, wished him well, and on his way out, grabbed the remote, turned up the volume, switched to Fox News and left.

Would you stand, please?

Oh, dear friends, may our eyes be open, may our ears be listening, may our spiritual antenna be attentive. And may we live with hope and joy, knowing that God is around us and within us. Go in his name, Amen.