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March 19, 2006
John Auer, Pastor
Scripture:
Exodus 20:1-17, Psalm 19, 1
Corinthians 1:18-25, John 2:13-22
“Contemplaction:
In Jesus the Walls Come Tumbling Down”
By “contemplaction” I mean to combine “contempling,”
including worship, and “action,” including the streets. Faithful action always
grows out of thoughtful contemplation. Faithful contemplation always leads to
thoughtful action. There seems a special connection between Jesus’
contemplation upon the role of Messiah as Satan tempts him in the wilderness and
Jesus’ action upon the told of Messiah when he rides into Jerusalem on Palm
Sunday.
In both Jesus deals with the full range of
economic, political and religious powers at work in our lives and in our world.
He asks, in effect, are we going to keep our faithful responses to ourselves?
Or are we going to put them out where others can see and judge them –
uncomfortable as public faith may make us and them? It’s a question to think
about between now and Palm Sunday. The other gospel writers include this attack
on the temple as part of Palm Sunday. John puts it early in his gospel. The
question of following Jesus into the streets, outside the walls of the temple,
asks us even today, the third anniversary: how do we witness against this war?
There’s a rally across the street at 11 AM, then a march at noon to the Federal
Building, and another rally there at 1 PM.
I am not sure there is any safe and nice and
quiet and hidden way to follow the Jesus who shows us such urgency, even such
anger today. Ralph Drake had to rush Barbara to the emergency room on Friday
with what they thought even then might be a heart attack. They found the
emergency room crowded with many children and kept patiently waiting their turn
and calling no special attention to their needs – as I am sure we can all
identify with!” – until at last they could not help it! We become really
uncomfortable with the thought of causing anyone any trouble, getting in
anyone’s way, keeping anyone else from doing their own thing. I’m afraid it’s a
little like the way the Wolf Pack played the other night – almost as if feeling
sorry for their opponent and letting them go to the basket at will!
Bishop Willimon offers a prayer on these texts
that puts to us the challenge of our Lenten theme -- “The Walls in Our Way”:
“Lord Jesus, come to our church this day. If our front door is locked, kick it
open. If we are too cold or aloof, set us on fire. If our preacher goes on too
long, shut him up. If we talk about everything except what is important, force
us to confront the truth. If we become so concerned about the mere survival of
our church, take it from us and tear it down. If we hunker down behind our
sacred walls, push down the walls and drive us out into the world where you are
Lord of all. “You are Lord of all, including the church. Help us never to
forget that truth even when it hurts. Amen.”
For all the gentleness we would yet bring to the world, is there time for a kind
of anger, the holy impatience Jesus shows here? Against ways we profane
the temple? Putting economic and political interests before our commitment
to God? It certainly puts our “Spring Fling” today in perspective! If we
were trying to prove or to profit ourselves in any way, “Spring Fling” could be
seen as money-changing and sacrifice-selling. But first we are expressing
the gifts of our lives, our talents, and second we are putting all proceeds into
our mission to be this church in this time and place. If anything, showing
our stuff today may be good rehearsal for facing the kind of nervousness and
self-consciousness it takes for us to go into the streets and practice our faith
in public!
Paul commends anything we do that looks like
“sheer silliness,” or sounds stupid to anyone else – like “preaching!”
(You couldn’t pay most normal people to do it!) We are not able to show
“miraculous demonstrations” – Wouldn’t that be a nice problem to face
this peace Weekend?! – or “philosophical wisdom” but only what seems “anti-“
miraculous and absurd! The very absurdity and “weakness” of God! That’s
what we may find in the Fellowship Hall today. That’s what we may find in the
streets.
Jesus this morning is making it plain how public, how prophetic, the gospel, the
“good news,” is meant to be. Just because Jesus rejects the Zealot option
of violent revolution (though there are Zealots among his disciples), and just
because he is not interested in being appointed or elected to high office, to
Caesar’s job, or Pilate’s, or even Herod’s – does not keep Jesus from being
“economic” and “political” in the fullest sense of the terms. He does end
up on a cross between rebels with a placard above him declaring him “King of the
Jews!” Jesus is a master of what may be called “dramatic symbolic action .
. . a walking public drama . . . in the manner of visible and acted truth.”
As Walter Wink may put it in Carson City next weekend, Jesus represents a “new
law” of God made flesh, a law of non-violent confrontation with and
transformation of the “powers that be” in our lives – economic, political,
cultural, social and religious!
I remember a banner in a community center in
Nicaragua that showed the other four sectors of public life as fingers held down
by the thumb of religion! Religion can be a much more powerful force than we
may want to believe. Believing it may require us to express it! Jesus offers
here signs of his life which reveal and point to and even unmask the very powers
that seem so to keep us in place – including above all the powers of death and
damnation the state and the church conspire to lord over us! The charges for
which Jesus is killed are treason and blasphemy. Those charges clearly relate
to these actions he takes toward the temple – whether at the beginning or at the
end of his ministry. There is no question that the one we call “Lord” and
“Savior” and commit to follow is a marked man on the run throughout his public
life and work.
We marvel at how Jesus takes these actions
today, and how his first followers come to remember these actions in
resurrection! Jesus captures imaginations and establishes an irreversible
beachhead for the “kingdom of God” as a worldly alternative to the “kingdoms”
and governments we come to take for granted we can never essentially change.
Jesus this morning defies our cynicism and our despair! The very words we hear
Jesus say to today, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,”
are words brought as evidence for his execution.
These walls that he prophesies falling are not
just any walls but the very center of the life and practice of his people!
Herod the Great had just refurbished and expanded the temple. United Methodist
pastor Bill Wylie-Kellerman wrote way back in 1980, “It stood on the Jerusalem
skyline like the World Trade Center!”
How I still wish we had taken more time to reflect upon the world’s perceptions
of that trade center as the seat of American cultural religion. The
decisions made by our leader’s post-9/11 were meant to rush us from such
thoughtfulness. We even were told a sure sign of our faith in our leaders and
system would be to go back to our shopping as usual! Some would argue that
marketplace and mall serve as religious settings for us. Shopping is how
we worship. We buy and sell images and idols we hold of and for ourselves.
We trade in self-serving illusions that
everything, everyone has their price! Everything, everyone can be commodified,
costed out, charged for, consumed – just as surely as Jesus finds sellers and
exchangers doing at the heart of Jerusalem! This war, like all wars, is good
for the business of someone! More and more functions of the military are
contracted to private interests. Those interests have many ties to war
officials. Whoever has the capital, the accumulation of enough wealth, controls
all our transaction, taxation, and trade. Wylie-Kellerman goes on to call the
temple “the economic mainstay of a city whose primary business was religious
tourism!”
Passover, in today’s gospel and during Holy
Week, “was the commercial equivalent of the Christmas rush!” Talk about hotel
space in Reno/Sparks – during Passover Jerusalem’s population “doubled or even
quadrupled! As many as 18,000 lambs would be slaughtered as sacrifices” – not
to mention the routine sliding-scale sales of cattle, sheep, and doves – whom
Jesus sets free! Moreover, imperial Rome let the temple collect its own tax –
which we may see as similar to tax-exemptions for churches! The state tends to
buy our silence and our complicity. I want to fight our special assessments
(for “retrace,” police protection, now the “Spirit” bus, sometime for flood
control) as unfairly singling out some religious institutions of the city. But
I do not want to compromise our right and responsibility to be free to challenge
the city and state, publicly and prophetically! We can well imagine the
“kickbacks” to Herod and Pilate! The temple was like bank! It issued credit
for loans, kept accounts of indebtedness.
Wylie-Kellerman says appointment to the position
of high priest used to be lifelong and solitary. In Jesus’ time “it was all but
a political patronage job! Appointed by Pilate and subject to purchase and
bribe!” We hear of high priests coming and going at will and of Annas called
“high priest that year.” Sadducee party loyalists, like parties
entrenched in power today, represent large corporate landowners “who’s economic
interest in the status quo made them backers of the “Pax Romana” military
order.” Is there a “Pax Americana” military order around the world today?
Backed by huge transnational corporate interests and the officials they own?
Don’t blame the military for our war policies. Don’t buy the argument we lack
of loyalty to our troops by demanding to bring them home! They are not making
decisions to fight this war, to occupy this neo-colony. In fact, we hear
military leaders questioned many strategic decisions made in deference to
ideology, but then sucked it up and obeyed when they were not heard. And it is
the Sadducee party that brings Jesus to trial and to death.
The good news is, according to Wylie-Kellerman, after Pentecost -- after the
resurrection reaches its Jubilee consummation and a new kind of community is
born of sharing with those most in need – Jesus’ followers find courage to take
to the streets again, and to head for the temple to preach resurrection!
They return to ‘the scene of the crime!” Again and again, as they are
arrested repeatedly!
Sisters and brothers, in context, being arrested
may be a religious act! A visible means of the grace of God to save us and set
us free, to heal us and make us whole – no matter what our witness and service
to God may cost us! Those in power of both church and state keep warning the
early church not to preach “Jesus.” But they will not quit on confronting the
temple! Judgment begins with the household of God! Those who never knew any
better, who never made promises of faith and commitment to God, are not so much
accountable for their actions as we are for ours! We are the ones
who make God our promises!
How are we to blame others who never claim Jesus to be the Messiah for them --
when we who do so claim still act as if we never saw or heard of him? When
we still act as if he never came, or comes only in some distant future?
Notice how before God gives Israel the law, God reminds all, I am the LORD your
God, who brings you out of bondage! “You shall have no other gods before
me!” First freedom, then law. If we stop struggling to be fully free
from whatever keeps us down, whatever holds us back, from justice and from
peace, then we allow the gods of church and state -- economics, politics and
religion -- to come between our God and us! The Jesus of this “contemplaction”
upon the walls of the temple goes to his death with nothing to show for God but
the cross. The gas chamber and the electric chair of his day. And
isn’t that enough, Paul asks us to ask ourselves? Isn’t the cross enough?
For Jesus and for us?
Here is how Bill Wylie-Kellerman ends his reflection upon this gospel – “Jesus’
risk is one with its consequences. His submission to death is a faithful
public act which is one with the temple action. In fact, it is in the
cross that Jesus’ confrontation with the powers (spiritual, economic, political)
is finally realized, revealed, and resolved.” As we consider the call to
such non-violent symbolic action of resistance and disobedience in our own lives
here at this church, we cannot help but ask Jesus the very real questions we
face in ourselves.
Let us close our eyes and meditate on his
questions as we close-- “Why does Jesus have to be so confrontational? Won’t he
turn people off? Does Jesus really want to communicate? Isn’t this violence
against property? Couldn’t Jesus stand outside the temple and get his point
across just as well? Why doesn’t Jesus work within the system, go through
Pilate or the [Council of Sadducees]? Or even become high priest? Wouldn’t he
have a greater impact from a position of public power? Why does Jesus risk his
life and freedom? Think how much more good he could do staying in Galilee
quietly preaching and healing. After all, you can’t do ministry while [marching
in the streets], sitting in jail or hanging on a cross.” Can you? Can I? Can
we? . . .
Amen.
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