Service on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/100064617886792/videos/1110320731105489 and YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8oVefu6PfI
It seems like life times ago when I was a very young person, I was part of the organizing team for conference-wide youth ministry and one of our significant tasks was to create and plan events. No, I haven’t run across this in the United Church of Christ the same way I did in the United Methodist Church. It seemed like in the Methodist Church everything was an acronym, like there was an event we called YAC–it was Youth Annual Conference.
We were planning an event that we called Wildfire, that’s it, it was just called Wildfire. Today, I have no memory of what it was about or for. But I do remember halfway through the meeting, someone announced that figured out how to make Wildfire an acronym. Or maybe an acrostic. Again I don’t remember, but it just seemed like the most ridiculous thing that could be done and absurdly unnecessary. No, not everything needs to be made it to something more.
But it happens all the time, it’s like that. It happens in all kinds of groups. It happens in religious communities. It happens in churches. We light candles at the beginning of service because it reminds us of God’s light, of Jesus being the light of the world. And some religious communities have incense that they use during service. It is because it reminds us of the offerings that rise up to God, and our worship that rises up to God. But here’s the thing, It’s my understanding that the reasons we have candles is because most of Christian history didn’t have electric lighting, and the priests needed to be able to see. And that the reason for the incense is because for most of the history of the church, people didn’t have regular cleanliness habits, and they didn’t smell good. These are very practical reasons to have candles and incense… that then theological reasons were… plopped on top. Very very practical, turned spiritual.
That seems like what was happening in the temple that day of Passover when Jesus stopped by. Passover was one of three pilgrimage festivals, Jewish people would travel from all over the known world to offer their sacrifices and celebrate the Passover. Some would travel for a hundred, or hundreds of miles to get to the temple. And when they arrived they needed to have a flawless animal, pristine. Now, imagine walking by foot for 100 miles being as careful as you can to keep the lamb from tripping or being hurt and… it does. Something happens. Now, what?
So it became a very practical solution to a very real problem that made worshiping in the way they were called to, difficult to impossible.
They needed to be able to flawless animals for the worship of Passover. And they needed to be able to travel. It really only makes sense to have a place where you can buy the animal you need.
This one of the few stories that is found in all four gospels, but in Matthew, Mark, and Luke they are found at the end of the story of Jesus life, right after Jesus parades into Jerusalem. One of them even says that the temple merchants were thieves, swindling the people in their need.
That isn’t what our author of John says. Nothing anyone is doing is named as evil, or against anyone else. It’s that the House of his Father has become a house of commerce. It’s the existence of the economic system in the temple that is the problem, no matter how practically necessary it is.
Travelers would show up looking for a way to offer their sacrifices and find nothing, no way to bring their animal to the priests as directed, by God, in their Scriptures, their word, the writings.
Speaking of writing, My great aunt turned 102 this year. She, she sister, and my grandmother were committed letter writers, even to this day, Leola still writes to us, even as they are much shorter.
The thing with these letters, whether long or short, they often start with one word perfectly straight, then things go… askew. It’s possible to just keep writing and not pay attention to the line on an angle. Or, you might notice and decide that you might as well keep writing on the angle, or, do you stop and start over, try and make line straight, drawing attention to the previous mistakes. What do you do when something is askew?
Jesus was big mad, but not the flair of anger that wells up and passes, not rash, unfocused anger. He went to the temple, left, braided a whip, and then came back.
What he did, turning the tables and running the animals out of the temple, would have been incredibly disruptive. For at least part of the day, worship at the temple would have come to a complete halt.
It would be nice to have the version of the story where they were swindling the people, or at least inflating the prices for the travelers on the holiday weekend. But the story doesn’t say that. Instead, this place that was meant to be where God lived, that was a light to all the nations, where everyone could gather in worship, was using the only space that Gentiles were allowed in to sell animals. This place that was meant to be where God lived on earth, was built directly in view of and ultimately under the foot of political power. This house of God for the worship of God had become a place of convenience. This place that was meant to be God’s house, became used for everything else.
It had gone… askew.
And they just kept writing and couldn’t see it.
And they needed to see it or the whole word would be off.
I have been thinking this week what those tables that need turning might be. It’s easy to point our fingers elsewhere, but do we have some?
Because there are reasons to be big mad in this world, there are injustices and boundaries and swindlers and evil, and there are reasons to be bid mad and turn tables. That’s what Rev. William Barber does when he stands before the people and places of power advocating for the poor, and the marginalized, and the sick, reminds us to love. He’s angry. But this is the anger that can walk away, make a plan, reveal the world askew and call us back to line.
And I think it matters in these walls, to ask the honest questions of are we following the path we intend to follow. Have our practical needs overwhelmed our call to worship? Are there things, ideas, that have overwhelmed our mission to feed the hungry, cloth the naked, heal the sick, liberate the oppressed?
I’m not going to answer these questions for us. But, we can pay attention to the places we go, the stories we hear, the institutions we love and wonder, and question, and draw a new line toward the world and way we want to live.