Sermon for 3rd Sunday in Lent: 8 March 2015

Sermon for Sunday, 8 March 2015

3^rd Sunday in Lent

John 2:13-22

The Rev. Carrie B. Smith

Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, Jerusalem

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

It occurs to me that it might be nice if Lent included the tradition some churches observe in Advent, in which the 3rd Sunday is a “Joy” Sunday. Just a little break, a little relief from the fasting and the solemnity and the penitence.  A little break from the cross. But alas, we are only halfway through Lent, and our Gospel reading for the day continues to challenge us. Again, we will focus on the cleansing of injustice, hypocrisy, and sin from our hearts, from our community, and from our holy places. We are still on the Way of the Cross.

In other contexts – perhaps the churches we grew up in – preachers have seen this morning’s Gospel text as an opportunity to preach on the sins and abuses of the modern institutional church, especially the perceived creeping in of consumerism, secularism, or liberalism. I remember having a heated conversation with a retired pastor who was upset that Girl Scout cookies were being sold by Sunday school students inside the church on Sunday mornings. The story of Jesus turning over the tables of the moneychangers was brought in as Exhibit A, and the argument was made that if cookies were going to be sold in the church at all, they would absolutely need to be a certain number of feet away from the worship space, and certainly would not be permitted in the fellowship hall next to the cookies we were offering for free.

There are plenty of other potential targets for such sermons. One might want to preach on driving out such modern excesses of the church as video screens in worship, or disposable coffee cups…or female pastors. The appeal of this text is perhaps especially strong for those of us from the Reformation tradition, a movement which began with the effort to cleanse the church of excess and abuse of power. And to tell you the truth, it is a bit enticing, to think of standing in the pulpit this morning and channeling my inner Cranky Jesus, verbally tipping over the tables of everything I see to be wrong with my denomination or with the state of Christianity and the church today.

But the problem is, I’m not Jesus (a fact which keeps emerging again and again!) It’s always good to be reminded that though we are his followers, we are not the Messiah, and therefore this Gospel lesson is not a license to unleash our complaints upon the modern church and walk away. One thing the world does not lack is judgmental Christians.

But to take it a step further, not only are we not Jesus, the institutional church is not the modern day temple.

It’s easy to see why there would be confusion about this. It’s natural to read this text today and substitute one holy building for another, to swap one religious institution for our own. And to be fair, there was confusion about what Jesus meant even as he stood amidst those overturned tables in the temple. “Stop making my Father’s house into a marketplace!” he cried. And then, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The crowd naturally thought he was talking about the building in front of them, which had been under construction for 46 years.

But John, the author of this Gospel, insisted Jesus was talking about his own body, which would soon be destroyed and then raised on the third day.

Temple Mount/Al Aqsa, Jerusalem

We have the privilege of hearing this text today just a few minutes’ walk from the site of the temple, which was indeed destroyed in 70 A.D. We know there are those in this city who wish to see the temple rebuilt, and we also well know there are complicated political, architectural, and religious implications of such an effort.

However, as Christians, we have a different perspective. As followers of the risen Christ, we believe the temple has already been raised up in the resurrected body of our Lord Jesus. Furthermore, we believe that we are the Body of Christ in the world today. “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:27) Through the Holy Spirit, the divine resides in and among us, and the temple is now the people of God. “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?” (1 Corinthians 6:19)

Because of the resurrection, and through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, we believe God is on the loose in the world, not bound to a particular place, or to a particular tradition, or to a particular people.

Esther, temple of the divine!

And this means that if we want to worship God, we need to look no further than the person standing before us.  If we want to worship God, then we must treat each person with as much respect and love as if he or she were the temple itself, holy and majestic, the dwelling place of the divine. 

As we read this text today, in Jerusalem, just steps away from the place where Jesus drove out the merchants who were turning the temple into a marketplace, his words challenge and convict us. His words challenge us to consider what it means to encounter the presence of God in our neighbor, rather than in the neighboring building. And his words convict us: Which of our tables would Jesus be tipping over today?

If Jesus were in Jerusalem today, for example, would he be standing at the Temple Mount, or the Holy Sepulcher, or Al Aqsa, railing over the abuse and desecration of holy buildings?

(Actually, he might be! Heaven knows there’s plenty to say about that topic!)

Faced with the reality of moneychangers and others who had moved into the temple, Jesus shouted, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

Faced with today’s reality, including the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the ongoing occupation of Palestine, the recent violence in Jerusalem, the increasing extremism across the Middle East and Africa, and indeed the state of affairs in nations across the world, Jesus’ righteous indignation may sound more like this:

Stop sacrificing human beings at the altars of privilege and access and power.

Stop buying and selling human rights to achieve political ends.

Stop using human bodies as currency, assigning value based on ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and class.

Stop making my Father’s dwelling place – my beloved children – into marketplaces.

Today, it is the temple of humanity which is being desecrated, defiled, and disrespected. This is the same sin, the same idolatry, the same commodification of the holy which Jesus sought to drive out of the temple. Clearly, this is a human problem, one we see happening within every culture, every nation, every religion.

And yes, this is a church problem. The institutional church, and those of us who belong to it, are not exempt from hearing this challenging word, just as the temple authorities in Jesus’ time needed to hear the truth of their implication in a broken system.

Martyred Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero wrote:

“For the church, the many abuses of human life, liberty, and dignity are a heartfelt suffering. The church, entrusted with the earth’s glory, believes that in each person is the Creator’s image and that everyone who tramples it offends God. As holy defender of God’s rights and of his images, the church must cry out. It takes as spittle in its face, as lashes on its back, as the cross in its passion, all that human beings suffer, even though they be unbelievers. They suffer as God’s images. There is no dichotomy between man and God’s image. Whoever tortures a human being, whoever abuses a human being, whoever outrages a human being abuses God’s image, and the church takes as its own that cross, that martyrdom.”

Sisters and brothers, wherever we see our fellow humans suffering because of war, economics, politics, or simple hatred, we see God’s temple turned into a marketplace. As the church, the Body of Christ in the world today, we are called to protect and preserve the sanctity of that temple – which means protecting and preserving the dignity of every human being. There’s no shortage of work to be done in this regard. And indeed, we could be quite depressed about the state of humanity today, and with our seemingly infinite capacity to deny the image of God in each other--from the Armenian genocide 100 years ago, to Selma 50 years ago; from Ferguson last year to Libya last month.

And yet, this same challenging and convicting Gospel text also offers us words of hope. Yes, we are still making the temple into a marketplace. Yes, we are still setting up idols, still ignoring God’s Word, still denying the presence of the holy in the other. We are still falling short of the glory of God.

And yet there are these words from Jesus:

“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

These are actually the most important words in this Scripture passage, for these words tell us who this Jesus really is. These are the words which identify him as the Messiah, the anointed one, the one we’ve been waiting for. These are the words his disciples remembered after the cross and after the empty tomb.

“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” These are the words which tell us how even when we were still dead in sin, God loved creation so much that God came into human time to walk with us in Jesus of Nazareth.

And so we continue to walk the Way of the Cross with Jesus. We continue this journey of faith, asking for forgiveness for ourselves, for our church, and for our world, for all the ways in which we have denied the presence of the divine in the temple of the “other”.

Sisters and brothers, let us continue on this Lenten journey, knowing that though we may fail to recognize the image of God in others, God always sees us as precious, and beloved, and worthy even of the Cross. Amen.