The Joy of Liberation: A Sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord. Amen.

 

Jesus comes to Jerusalem after the wedding at Cana for the Passover festival. He goes to the Temple, which was considered the site of God's presence for devout Jewish people. The temple in Jerusalem is the quintessential sacred place. In ancient Israel, it was thought to be the place where the special presence of God dwelled on earth. Hence its name: “House of Yahweh.” As Solomon says, he built God a dwelling place, a home where God will live forever.

 

Even though the temple was the center of Israelite life, because of its very sacredness, the general Populus had access only to its outer courts. Even the clergy did not circulate freely within the building, and the inner sanctum, the holy of holies, was off limits to all but the chief priest, and to him only on one day a year. At festival times, pilgrims would flock to Jerusalem and to the precincts of the temple to come close to the dwelling place of God, to bring offerings and to receive blessings.

 

What Jesus sees there, on his arrival, rather than a holy place dedicated to the God of manna-sharing and justice-doing, is what he calls a "marketplace," a place where vendors are being allowed to take advantage of regular people's devout, sincere religiosity.

 

You couldn't use Roman coins in the Temple because they had a "graven image" of Caesar on them, who was considered a god by the Romans. So you had to exchange them for Temple coins that had no image. But that exchange cost you a fair sum. Then, with the Temple coins you could purchase animals for sacrifice in the Temple, with which you could make thank-offerings to God or offerings for forgiveness.

 

Jesus has no trouble with the sincerity of ordinary people wanting to make devout gratitude offerings or forgiveness offerings to God. What makes him crazy is the insane amount of profit being made on these transactions - and that all these profits are heavily taxed by the Romans, as everyone knew.

 

So, a great part of this money was flowing into the Roman occupation machine, oppressing his people, making them poor, making them hungry, making them sick. And Jesus loses it.

 

Jesus overturns the money changers’ tables in the temple and proclaims that if the temple itself were destroyed, he could rebuild it in three days. The text itself clues us in to the meaning behind Jesus’ words – the temple is Jesus’ body – but the religious leaders, as always, miss the dramatic irony. They scoff at Jesus, explaining that the temple has been under construction for forty-six years. How could anyone rebuild it in three days?

 

The temple was undeniably the locus of religious joy for the Israelite people. It was the place where they could worship their God under their own rules, in their own language, and, at least to some degree, free from the control of the imperial culture that occupied their land. It was also the entire center of their worship life, the location of the beating heart of their faith. There was only one temple, and no other place could approach its significance.

 

Still, leaders who cite a decades-long building project reveal a deep level of institutional inertia. The temple’s course has been set for generations. The plan is made, the mission set, and the people are following through. From one perspective, this looks like absolute faithfulness to the mission: carry out the commitments of the previous generations and do so according to the blueprints they have made. From another perspective, following the previous generations’ plans also means living with the concessions and accommodations they made. Efforts to undo mistakes or to rethink assumptions will come at an increasing cost.

 

While none of our modern church buildings remotely approach the singular importance of the ancient temple, we know what it means to find joy in the spaces we call our own. When congregations break ground on new building projects, they do so with great hope for how their new facilities will center their communities. Worshipers decorate church buildings with great care, often filling them with dedicatory vessels, memorial plaques, fine woodwork and metalwork, lovely ceramics, and beautiful banners. The impulse is faithful: we do these things to share our joy for what God has done among us. We return to these physical spaces to reconnect our current experience to the past joy we have found there.

 

These sacred spaces are places where we can feel especially close to God, places where we feel we can communicate with God, through worship, ritual, and other types of prayer. As places where heaven and earth meet, where God is made manifest, sacred spaces attract people who seek blessing, healing, and forgiveness.

 

But we also know how the burden of church buildings, construction projects, and worship spaces can, at times, entirely drain the joy from our communities. We know the extreme costs required to renovate old buildings for accessibility to people of all abilities. Perhaps we live with buildings that are too large, whether previous generations built too optimistically to attract a larger crowd or because the crowds that once filled those buildings are gone. How liberating might it be to not have to worry about the building?

 

Perhaps we grapple with too much old stuff at church – stuff that has lost its meaning to us but that we resist throwing away. It’s possible to recognize that all these buildings, things, and traditions used to give our worshiping communities life. We can simultaneously recognize how much they stifle current growth and budding creativity. To rediscover our joy again, we may need to be reminded that joy can live and grow in a place, and it can feel connected to a physical space, but joy is never defined by any one location.

 

I suspect that Jesus encounters something like this when he confronts the money changers in the temple. In this moment, Jesus shows us the glee of destroying the customary accommodations that have burdened us with history, stifled our worship, and masked our mission. How the people must thrill to see Jesus overturn greed in God’s house! How they must marvel to realize they are not required to meet such expectations to worship God. How many powerful people Jesus must cross when he demands a different road. They may have come to believe their joy is inseparable from the places where they’ve fostered it, but Jesus wants to unbind their joy from these limited expectations.

 

How thrillingly dangerous it is to smash what binds us! How quickly could we rebuild for the future, if we only followed the God who can reconstruct and resurrect the dead? How much joy could we rediscover in our spiritual lives if we remembered that we are a church that celebrates Jesus, not a church that celebrates brick and mortar?

 

Amen.

Resources:

Barn Geese Worship

Pastor Michael Kurtz, First Lutheran

episcopalchurch.org