Sermon 3/14/21
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Sermon Lent Week 4 2021
Series: Community
Title: Community of Justice
Scripture: John 2:13-22, Jesus Cleanses the Temple
The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money-changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’ His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’ The Jews then said to him, ‘What sign can you show us for doing this?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ The Jews then said, ‘This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?’ But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.
Today we come to week four of Lent and week four of our series on Community. So far we have explored what it means to be part of the Community of Creation, to be bound together as a Covenant Community and to work towards building the Beloved Community. Today we are going to reflect on our high calling to establish communities of justice that reflect the right relations God desires for all of God’s people.
I want to start with a little exercise. Close your eyes and imagine Jesus.
When you picture Jesus in your mind, what do you see?
Jesus as a shepherd carrying the lost lamb back to the fold?
Jesus teaching the crowds or laying hands on someone to heal them?
Jesus in a boat calming the waves or walking across the water?
Jesus breaking bread or washing the feet of his disciples?
Jesus on the cross?
Ok, you can open your eyes.
I would venture to guess that most of us when we draw close to God in prayer and contemplation (something we are encouraged to do during this season of Lent) imagine scenes of Jesus as a wise teacher, compassionate healer, merciful redeemer. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that few to none of us picture the Jesus described in today’s passage from John. The prophetic and angry Jesus overturning the tables in the temple.
Yet if we want to truly understand this Jesus we follow and seek to be his community on earth, we must do our best to pay heed to what Jesus is trying to teach us.
Let’s take a moment to imagine this scene together. It is the festival of the Passover. Jews have travelled from far and wide from their homes in the countryside to come to the city of Jerusalem to celebrate and observe this important religious festival. The city is packed with people and at the center of it all is the temple buzzing with activity. The faithful have travelled all this way with family members and sometimes animals in tow to fulfill their obligation before God. This obligation includes presenting an unblemished animal to the priest, and paying the temple tax. Because it could be difficult to acquire an unblemished animal or travel a far distance with one, stalls had been set up at the temple for the convenience of the worshippers to purchase an animal on their arrival. Also located at the temple were tables where families could exchange their currency for shekels, the only coin allowed for payment of the temple tax.
Jesus arrives at the temple, witnesses the chaotic scene, leaves, makes himself a whip of cords and goes back where in dramatic fashion he drives out the animals, overturns the tables of the money changers and dumps out their coins. Leaving the crowds and religious leaders stunned and likely irritated. They basically say as much, Who are you to come in here and disrupt everything? “What sign can you give us?” - translation - By what authority are you doing this?
As disturbing as this Jesus was to the onlookers that day, it can also be disturbing for us to encounter this Jesus in our scriptures. (Kate and I met and struggled together about how to explain this story in a Children’s Sermon). We prefer the companionship of the gentle and compassionate Jesus. This angry and disturbing Jesus disrupts our peace and comfort -
But that is not necessarily a bad thing.
What was Jesus so fired up about?
This story is told in all four Gospels - so it clearly had a significant impact on the collective memory of the early followers of Jesus that they all recorded the incident. In the other 3 Gospel accounts in Matthew, Mark and Luke they include a detail that John does not which might help us make more sense of Jesus’ actions. In their accounts Jesus follows up his comment about his father’s house being a house of prayer with an accusation - “but you have made it a den of robbers!” (Matt 21:13, Mark 11:17, Luke 19:46). These accounts seem to imply that there may have been some dishonest and exploitative economic practices going down in the courtyard of the temple. All those transactions were not on the up and up.
Tradition of Prophets
One of the most important ways to make sense of Jesus’ words and actions in the temple, is to compare it to the words and actions of the prophets.
Many people, including those of his own day, interpreted Jesus’ actions as further proof that he was sent from God. He was acting and speaking in a way that echoed the prophets who came before him. Mighty prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos who were given special messages by God to serve as a wake up call to God’s people.
These Messages were often disturbing and upsetting.
Pointing out the ways the people had forgotten God, neglecting true worship of God.
One of the most common accusations leveled against the people had to do with the relationship between right worship of God and the practice of justice
Examples: I hate your feasts and take no delight in your solemn assemblies - (Jeremiah 6:20; Isaiah 1:11–15; Amos 5:21–23)
Why is God angry with the people’s worship?
If we look at the verses surrounding these three occurrences, we begin to get a clearer picture of what God is so angry about.
Jeremiah 5:27-29 - their houses are full of treachery; therefore they have become great and rich, they have grown fat and sleek. They know no limits in deeds of wickedness; they do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy. Shall I not punish them for these things? says the Lord, and shall I not bring retribution on a nation such as this? -
Amos 5 - You trample the poor and push aside the needy at the gate (Amos 5:11-12), Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate;(Amos 5:15)
Isaiah 1:15-17 - even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.
Like the prophets before him, Jesus came to shake people out of their complacency, to point out where we have gone wrong and to point us back in the right direction.
It is not enough to simply worship and make our confessions for the ways we have harmed and neglected those who are suffering - although it must always begin there. I am struck by all of the action verbs in that last passage from Isaiah “cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow”. Cease, Learn, Seek, Rescue, Defend, Plead.
That was a long list and a tall order in Isaiah’s day. It is no less so in our own day.
Everywhere we look, we see differences in wealth, power, and status. Some groups have higher status, greater privilege and more power than others. In this unequal social system, there is often unfair treatment directed against certain individuals or social groups. Can be based on age, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ability/disability. If there is any doubt in anyone’s mind about the widespread problem of social inequality and social injustice, I encourage you to dig into the research.
One example I came across was conducted by a researcher in Wisconsin.
A researcher sent pairs of college men to apply for 350 entry-level jobs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. One team was African American, and one was White. The teams had identical resumes, except for one difference—on each team, one of the men said that they had served 18 months in jail for drug possession. Guess what the results were? Not surprisingly, men without a prison record were 2 to 3 times more likely to receive a callback from the job. However, there was also a significant racial difference—white men with a prison record were more likely to be offered a job than African American men who had a clean record.
This study highlighted the injustices in hiring practices. But even after equally qualified people are hired, injustice and inequality persist in how people are paid. A quick look at the US Bureau of Labor statistics reveals chart after chart of wage inequality for women and people of color. (https://www.bls.gov/) This unequal treatment extends to all areas of our society: Education, Housing, Health Care, Public Safety, Exposure to environmental Hazards. Basically all of the key supports that we all need to live healthy lives and fulfill our potential. They are guaranteed for some but denied to others.
The damage done by severe inequality was brought home to me in a powerful way in 1998. Clark and I had just completed our graduate studies, gotten married and were looking for our first full time jobs. He needed to find an Episcopal Church where he could serve as a deacon for a year before becoming ordained as a priest. Being in Chicago, he was fortunate to find a multi staff congregation that needed a Youth Pastor in a wealthy suburb. I wanted to find a job as a social worker that would give me an opportunity to learn directly from my clients. So I took a position as a caseworker at a homeless shelter on the southside of Chicago that was run by Catholic Nuns. As you can imagine, the disparities between the community where I was working and the community where Clark was working were dramatic to say the least. At times it felt like two different worlds.
Clark worked in Hinsdale where the household median income is $200,000. I worked on the southside of Chicago were the household median income is $36,000. His church had a boutique gift shop that sold expensive jewelry. Driving to work every day I passed numerous pawn shops where people could sell their jewelry to pay their bills.
Hinsdale is an affluent suburb of idyllic tree lined streets, lovely homes and a quaint downtown. A favorite pastime for children was to ride their bikes downtown and go to the deli for a snack. The neighborhood where I worked was block after block of run down and abandoned houses, neglected parks, dilapidated schools, where shopping was limited to mom and pop corner stores. The homeless shelter where I worked had been converted from an old school. We had a tiny playground out front. But after the local drug dealers started frequenting it to conduct their business, we had to make it off limits for the children. The women I worked with were intelligent and capable and wanted desperately to find a good job, a safe place to live and to make a better life for their children. But it was clear that their children were going to have to overcome mountains of obstacles to achieve their dreams while the children in Hinsdale were being chauffeured along the road to success by virtue of their zipcode.
The systems of injustice and inequity are deeply entrenched in our society and we will have to go to great lengths to overturn them. But overturn them we must.
The Temple: Jerusalem - Christ - Community
WHY does the church need to be involved in combating social injustice?
To put it very simply in the words of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
“Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.”
It all comes back to what it means to be a Community of Jesus followers. To truly grasp the kind of community God is calling us to be as followers of Jesus Christ, we need to go back and look one last time at today’s scene of Jesus in the temple. What we learn about community from this passage is both incredibly exciting and pretty daunting.
You may recall that following the disruptive incident in the temple, a conversation takes place between Jesus and the authorities. He says some strange and puzzling things about the Temple.
History of the Temple
The first temple was originally constructed to be a house for the holy tabernacle, a dwelling place for God. (under King David)
In Jesus’ day the temple was still understood to be the dwelling place for God
When asked to justify his actions at the temple and offer a sign Jesus says simply:
“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
After his death and resurrection the followers of Jesus understood these three days as representing the death and resurrection of Jesus. So that the temple was replaced by Jesus' body, which became the dwelling place of God.
But what is the manifestation of Christ’s body on earth? - but the church.
The early Jesus followers described their community as the “body of Christ”
Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God. (Eph 2:20-21)
You and I my friends, FCC Wadsworth, we are the holy temple, the dwelling place of God, the community of Christ’s body.
Conclusion
Lent is a time of self examination, but today Jesus calls us to examine not only our personal lives but the life of our community. Is our community a temple of God, the God of compassion and justice? Is our worship pleasing to God? How are we actively involved in:
ceasing to do evil, learning to do good; seeking justice, and assisting the oppressed?
If we aren’t sure what we are being called to do as God’s community of justice, let us come together as a community and ask God to show us the next step. We should be prepared for it to be disruptive to others but also to ourselves.
Jesus continues to enter our individual and corporate lives and interrupt business as usual. His actions are intended to “put things right” (FOTW, p. 54)
This is not a bad thing:
“A church that does not provoke any crisis, preach a gospel that does not unsettle, proclaim a word of God that does not get under anyone's skin or a word of God that does not touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed: what kind of gospel is that?” - Oscar Romero