Imagine with me:
it’s an ordinary Sunday, we’re in the middle of church, and someone comes in and starts yanking hymnals out of the pews, tosses the silver communion vessels off the altar, maybe grabs the program out of your hands, and stands up in the front and shouts “cut it out! Stop making my house a program, a museum, predictable!”
You don’t need cups and plates to commune with God!
You don’t need to know what’s happening next, to get comfortable with the prayers!
Maybe even: “You don’t need to be in a building at all!” and starts chasing us all out. “You don’t need a church! You just need God!”
Go ahead and imagine that this is someone you know as a good and trustworthy religious leader – not from this congregation, but someone whose reputation you know, and at least kind of like.
For some of us, a good example might be Michael Curry, our Presiding Bishop – a man with good and comforting and wise and humorous words, who makes American Episcopalians all look good when he goes on TV (or gets invited to preach at a British royal wedding).
Imagine someone like that tossing everything in this place on a Sunday morning, uninvited.
Some of us might be gleeful.
Others might be very upset; angry, or distressed, or afraid.
Many of us would be uncomfortable – uncertain how to react.
I don’t know how many of us, though, would take note and quickly decide that this is, for real, the “Second Coming” – the return of Jesus, the coming of God to directly and personally govern the world as we know it, once for all.
I don’t know how many, if any, of the various people going about their worship business in the court of the Jerusalem Temple would have decided – on the basis of shouted words while table tossing – that what they were seeing was the prophesied return of the Lord, of God, to reign over the whole earth.
But that might be what John wants you and me to notice in the story we read today.
Folks deeply immersed in scripture will point out for us that “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace” is very possibly Jesus’ callback to the prophet Zechariah, who tells God’s people that when God comes to Jerusalem and the Temple to begin a reign over the whole earth, on that day “there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord of hosts.” (Zech 14:21)
That impression might be strengthened for us by John’s notes that when Jesus challenges the religious authorities to “destroy this Temple and I will raise it up in three days”, Jesus is “speaking of the temple of his body”.
Put those clues together, and this story that looks like a one-person protest movement, a violent demonstration against corruption, or some kind of performance art, also – maybe more so – looks like a public – but confusing – announcement of Jesus’ divine identity, a “sign” to herald the arrival of God fully present, living outside the sacred, safely contained and mostly inaccessible, innermost rooms of the Temple.
But I have to admit, if it were happening to me, around me, instead of in the pages of a book I have time to study and re-read, I would probably have missed it.
I would probably be somewhere in the range of uncomfortable and uncertain (torn between a little bit of glee and a little bit of anger), and it would not occur to me quickly that this might be a celebration of the closeness, the accessibility, the miraculous touchability of God, while all the things that make worship accessible, practical, and functional are thrown around.
The other gospel writers who tell of Jesus tossing around tables in the Temple set up the story to suggest that Jesus is trying to get rid of some corruption that’s found its way into the market that makes worship accessible, practical, and functional for the Jewish people of first century Palestine.
John, however, depicts Jesus as driving away not so much corruption as the functional accessibility practices themselves.
God’s law calls for the sacrifice of unblemished livestock as part of affirming our relationship with God, and keeping that relationship on a good track.
Jesus is driving all the livestock out of the Temple altogether.
God’s law against idolatry – against giving worship or worth to the images of “other gods” – prohibits the holy use of Roman coins which call the image of the emperor divine.
Jesus appears to be pouring the holy, acceptable, unimaged Temple coins onto the floor right along with the unholy Roman coins.
As far as I can see, he’s not dumping corruption, he’s dumping all the things that made it convenient or practical for God’s people to follow God’s laws about worship.
Everything Jesus is knocking around in that Temple marketplace is a manifestation of good intentions, of faithful effort to make keeping the worship laws functional and accessible. Maybe even to keep it nice, and feeling special.
The analogy isn’t perfect, but our own programs and books and nice vessels for communion – maybe even our practices of communion itself, with tidy, convenient ways to eat and sip – are all things we’ve created, over the years, to make following Jesus’ directions to eat his body and blood functional, practical, and accessible.
This is, I think, overall a good thing. God wild and raw and unpredictable is hard for most humans to handle. (God goes out of God’s own way, in Jesus, to make that raw, wild, often terrifying fullness of God more accessible to us, touchable and conversable instead of mind-boggling and full of the impractical terrifying exhilaration of free fall.)
But I suspect that neither Jesus, nor God Creator or Spirit, wants us to settle for the managed presence of – or controlled and practical access to - the direct, vibrant, and utterly real fullness of God.
I wonder if – in the middle of Lent, this season where we pay extra attention to aligning our selves and daily habits with the holiness of God, to getting right and balanced in our relationship with God – I wonder if this story might suggest some tossing around of the habits of our own lives. Not to cleanse corruption, necessarily, not to fix a wrong, but to challenge our habits of leaning into prescribed and predictable ways to access God.
To shake ourselves a little bit into acting and living as if God is right here, showing up in our faces raw and wild and touchable and chatty, invited or (mostly) not.
I wonder if there’s something you or I could toss – for a week, for the rest of Lent – a habit or a tool you use, or we use together, to make your worship of God, your practices of faith, more convenient or practical or predictable than wild and raw and in your face.
I know that I tend to depend on music – hymns, chants, instrumental listening – to invoke a sense of being in the presence of God. (To be honest, the silent processions we do here in Lent throw me every time.) What if, even outside of our services, this Lent, I stopped playing or singing music to get myself into the mood of prayer, and instead relied on the confidence of Jesus tearing up the Temple – the insistence of God on being present in uninvited, unpredictable ways, outside the spaces I count on to help me notice the presence of God. What if I started praying during the morning news, or while I’m clearing my email inbox (places God’s insistent presence feels awkward and unsettling), instead of when I can light a candle and sing or listen?
What if one of you set the devotional booklet you depend on aside, and used silence to listen for where God is challenging or comforting you; or – if you usually use silence to pray – what if you set yourself up to pray in a place of busy noise, for a short while?
I don’t know what it is for each of us – but there’s probably something in your worship and prayer habits that you’d be unsettled if God threw away (or something unsettling that Trinity omits or tacks on in Lent). What if you spent some time this week, this month, trying to treat those inconveniences, discomforts, surprises as an announcement from God that God is fully, insistently, already here, getting in your face, our faces, with a demand to be recognized, not managed, to rebuild us in three days, broken or not, to sweep us up, unsettled, but ever closer to the raw, wild, glorious, unnerving and amazing heart of God?
I don’t know what happens then. But it might be amazing to try.
Before anyone tries to throw our livestock, hymnals, or chalices out the window.
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