11-12-95	Trick Questions	Haggai 1:15b-2:9

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17

Luke 20:27-38

Those of us who are still in school, and those of us who have ever been to school (and I believe that this includes just about everyone here), have experienced a teacher who constantly wanted to show the class who was boss. This was the teacher who actually felt good when he or she found a way to point out a mistake that a student had made. I know of one student who had something like this happen to him very recently. He was taking a history test and had really studied for it. And when he got to the part of the test with questions that were to be answered "true" or "false," he answered them correctly, except rather than write out the whole word, "true" or "false," he used "T" or "F". And when the teacher graded the test each of these was marked wrong because he had not spelled out the whole word. As a result, he flunked the test. And he was really disappointed and felt that he'd been had by a teacher who used such trick questions and little "gotchas" like this just to make up for her inferiority complex.

Certainly, we have all had such "gotcha"experiences as this, maybe while driving through a speed trap in a little town on a busy highway, or while reading the fine print on a health insurance policy that we thought was a pretty good deal when we first signed up. Indeed, you have to be pretty clever to avoid these "gotchas" and trick questions in life, if you can avoid them at all.

Our Old Testament lesson from the book of Haggai probably started with a trick question. But, in order to understand the question we need to look at what had happened to the Israelite people in Haggai's time. First of all, in 587 B.C. the beautiful temple that had built by Solomon had been destroyed and the people of Israel had been uprooted from their homeland and taken in one great march to live in Babylon. And there they lived for 50 years until Cyrus, the new emperor, permitted the Israelites to return home. And so, indeed, thousands upon thousands of Israelites left Babylon and returned home to Israel, only to find non-Israelites living where they had once lived. Nevertheless, they reinhabited their land, rebuilt their cities, including their once great city of Jerusalem. And there they lived for twenty years rebuilding without putting very much thought into rebuilding the temple. Certainly, if anyone raised the question about building the temple they were told, "It will cost too much!" And there were those who believed that they really didn't need a temple, anyway. But, with time, a significant number of God's people began to believe that rebuilding the temple was something they had to do; that things wouldn't be right in Judah until they did it. And so a building and finance committee was established to do what was necessary to get the project going. And the people of Israel were asked to contribute to the cause. But you can imagine the response. The times were hard. People were having a tough time making ends meet. And so they asked, "How much should we give for this project? How much do you want us to give?"

And in a very real way, that is a trick question. Any time someone tries to tell someone how much they should give to the Lord's work the person who does so finds him or herself being turned into a villain very quickly. If someone were to tell any of us sitting here today how much we should give to the church, we might feel violated or insulted. We might even quickly come up with a hundred reasons why the suggested amount would be too high. Or some might even be insulted because the suggested figure was too low. So, if you want to get someone into trouble really fast, just get them to answer with a dollar amount the question, "How much should I give?" What a trick question, what a "gotcha" that would be.

Haggai, on the other hand, was no doubt a clever person. As people asked him the question, "How much should we give for that building project on the house of God?" rather than giving them an actual monetary figure, he simply told them, "The Lord declares that the silver is mine and the gold is mine."

How ingenious! Rather than telling the people how much they should give Haggai simply reminded them of an eternal truth. In effect, he told them, "Everything you have belongs to God, anyway. Your silver and your gold is God's, no matter how you spend it; and you can't take it with you when you die. It all stays here for someone else to spend after we're gone." So, what we give to the work of the Lord depends to a great deal upon how serious we are about serving the Lord. Or, as Jesus said, "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be, also."

So, as we look at our own giving and wonder if it is enough, just remember that everything you have is God's, anyway; that none of us would be here, today, if it wasn't for the grace of God. Or, as a chorus in the United Methodist hymnal states: "All things come of thee, O Lord; and of thine own have we given thee." Or, as another perhaps more familiar chorus goes, "We give thee but thine own, whate'er the gift may be: All that we have is thine alone, A trust, O Lord, from thee."

So, as Haggai was faced with a trick question, whose answer would be wrong no matter what, Haggai turned the tables by refusing to answer the question and raising another one instead.

Sometimes that's the only way to deal with a trick question. Sometimes people ask the trick question knowing that the person who answers it is going to be wrong, no matter what. They may ask the question of an authority figure, hoping that they may look more impressive than they really are by making the authority figure look like a fool. And, certainly, more than a few well meaning, hard working pastors, including this one, have occasionally fallen into that trap.

Our Gospel lesson for today has an example of a trick question, an attempted "gotcha", that the Sadducees had prepared for Jesus. The Sadducees were the first century equivalent to the Moral Majority of the 1980's. Their very name, "Sadducee," comes from the Hebrew word Zadduk, meaning "righteous." So, the Sadducees believed that they, among all the people of Israel, were "the righteous ones." They were sure that they had everything in their theology all figured out; that they understood the Scriptures more thoroughly than all the others. And because of this they held a position of power and wealth. But, then, along came Jesus. And as they heard Jesus teaching they realized that because his words questioned their teachings he was a threat to their power and wealth. They realized that their glory days would be over if Jesus' teachings ever took root in the lives of the people. And so the Sadducees came up with a trick question, a gotcha, that if he answered it would make Jesus look like a fool.

And the question began with a quote from the Law of Moses that states if a man dies and leaves a widow, but no children, it is the duty of the man's brother to marry the widow so that she may have children for her deceased husband. Then they cite a hypothetical situation where there is a family with seven brothers. The first brother marries a woman and then dies, childless. The second brother and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. Finally the woman died too. And here's the trick question: "Now then, at the resurrection of the dead whose wife will she be, since the seven were all married to her?"

This was a "gotcha" question that would make Jesus look bad no matter how he answered it. The Sadducees were hoping that Jesus would say something like, "Well, the woman would be married to all of them." If he said that he would put himself in the position of making the Law of Moses look like it was contradicting itself by promoting an illegal form of polygamy. Or, if Jesus said, "Well, the woman would be married to the first brother," he could be criticized for making the Law of Moses look as though it was contradicting itself by promoting adultery. They figured that no matter how Jesus answered the question they would be able to silence Jesus by making him look bad.

But, Jesus didn't answer the trick question in any of the ways the Sadducees thought he would. Instead, he said, "The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are raised from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage." And then he went on to promote the concept of eternal life, saying, "Even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord 'the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.' He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive."

What a marvelous way to circumnavigate a "gotcha!" If only all of us could be as wise as he was as he dealt with those who thought they had so much to protect, so much at stake, that they felt they needed to resort to such conniving and unloving treachery!

Both Haggai, as he concerned himself with raising money to build the temple, and Jesus, concerned with spreading the Gospel, faced the opposition of those who really had a stake in the status quo – in leaving things just as they were. But in whatever it may be it is, no matter what the treasured institution may be, no matter the problems are that we use as an excuse, God surprises us with a totally new and different light that changes everything.

I'm reminded of a hymn in the old Methodist Hymnal:

Sometimes a light surprises

The Christian while he sings.

It is the Lord, who rises

With healing in his wings.

When comforts are declining,

He grants the soul again

A season of clear shining

To cheer it after rain.

We too often treasure our handicaps and limitations, for they too easily become excuses for not doing more for the Lord, even for continuing in our same old patterns of abuse and hurt and insensitivity. But Christ has come to give us more, even to turn our world up-side- down. It is with this in mind that we may be inspired by Paul's words in our Epistle lesson for today, "May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope, Encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word." Amen.