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Cleaning House
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 8, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill II Chronicles 29 John 2:13-22
Though it is small comfort these days, we are not the first generation to think Hezekiah’s order to clean God’s house had to do with carrying out a certain segment of the congregation: “The old woman stood with eyes uplifted in her Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes,” begins Alice’s Walker’s “The Welcome Table”, “high shoes polished about the tops and toes, a long rusty dress adorned with an old corsage, long withered, and the remnants of an elegant silk scarf as headrag stained with grease from the many oily pigtails underneath. Perhaps she had known suffering…But for those who searched hastily for ‘reasons’ in that old tight face, shut now like an ancient door, there was nothing to be read. And so they gazed nakedly upon their own fear transferred; a fear of the black and the old, a terror of the unknown as well as of the deeply known…. “Some of them there at the church saw the age, the dotage, the missing buttons down the front of her mildewed black dress. Others saw cooks, chauffeurs, maids, mistresses…Those who knew the hesitant creeping up on them of the law, saw the beginning of the end of the sanctuary of Christian worship, saw the desecration of the Holy Church, and saw an invasion of privacy, which they struggled to believe they still kept. “The reverend of the church stopped her pleasantly as she stepped into the vestibule. Did he say, as they thought he did, kindly, ‘Auntie, you know this is not your church?’…The young usher, never having turned anyone out of his church before, …went up to her and whispered that she should leave… ‘Go ‘way’ [she muttered] in a weak sharp bothered voice…It was the ladies who finally did what to them had to be done. Daring their burly indecisive husbands to throw the old colored woman out they made their point…This done, [they] folded their healthy arms across their trim middles and felt at once justified and scornful. …They sang, they prayed. The protection and promise of God’s impartial love grew more not less desirable as the sermon gathered fury and lashed itself out above their penitent heads.” “Carry out the filth from the holy place,” decreed King Hezekiah to the Levites and priests assembled in the public square. “Take these things out of here,” roared Jesus in a story read traditionally on Easter eve at the purification of candidates in preparation for their baptism. What is it, exactly, are we to carry out from the holy place these days? For what reason, just now, might Jesus be cracking the whip? What belongs and what is an abomination? What stays and what goes…or more to the point, since there are no longer doves to sell or rams to sacrifice, who is in and who is out on a Sunday when we meet to elect officers? What is supported and what is not as we gather to receive a budget designed to change our money into ministry and mission for Christ’s sake? If you’re out, you are definitely not in when it comes to offering your gifts at the altar! But on whose authority and to what good end: that those of us left might fold our healthy arms across our trim middles and feel at once justified and scornful? Define filth. Define purity. In these times when many a true believer “knows the hesitant creeping up on them of the law, sees the beginning of the end of the sanctuary of Christian worship, sees the desecration of Holy Church and fears the invasion” of sacred institutions by secular values, perhaps the ushers should be instructed on how to carry certain people out who already are or rather the reverend could be expected, pleasantly, in the vestibule to keep the gate. Alice Walker’s story of the old black woman thrown out of a white Protestant congregation in Georgia finds us shaking our heads with deceptive ease. Fifty years ago, I dare say, we would not have been so quick to judge. Fifty years from now, what righteous heads will shake over our watch? One generation’s faith, it would seem, is another generation’s filth, is another generation’s faith. One community’s devotion is another’s desecration, is another’s discipleship. As long as proof-texting continues to be the order of the day in such matters, we have these two texts before us, dealing directly with the cleaning of God’s house. Curiously, neither has to do with removing people. Both have to do with straightening out our theology, an exercise that requires brain and not brawn. No doubt, Hezekiah, king of Judah, had a mess on his hands. Only years before he had begun to reign, Assyria had defeated Israel and taken the people captive. Now Judah faced the same fate. As the Chronicler looked back, the reason was clear: Ahaz, king of Judah, did not do what was right in the sight of the Lord, to put it mildly! At the beginning of his reign, he cast images of Baals and made offerings in the valley where child sacrifice was practiced; he made his sons pass through fire according to the abominable practices of the nations—meaning the Gentiles; he sacrificed and made offerings on the high places on the hills and, says the Chronicler, “under every green tree.” At the end of his reign, he worshipped the gods of the kings that conquered him, then gathered the utensils of the house of God and cut them in pieces. He shut up the doors of the temple and instead made himself alters in every corner of Jerusalem. At long last, he died and his son succeeded him. Hezekiah’s problem was not an accumulation of dust and dirt, but was the residue of idolatry. His first order of business was to open the doors of the temple and repair them. As we know, that is more easily said than paid for! Then Hezekiah summoned the Levites and the priests to carry out the filth. No doubt, there were statues of gods and discarded remains from previous sacrifices, alters erected and ritual paraphernalia laying about…all this as well as items that had been consecrated for the worship of Yahweh now completely desecrated and useless. The only thing to do was to begin from scratch: haul out the idols and then make every inch of the temple ritually clean for the worship of the Lord. Finally all was ready. The king assembled the important people and into the cleansed house of the Lord they marched, along with seven bulls, seven rams, seven lambs and seven male goats for the sin offering. Soon blood was flying across the altar of the Lord. In a sense, the cleaning up operation had now begun in earnest. With the proper blood spilt, the priests were acting to make atonement—to make things right again, to clean up the people’s relationship with God. Finally, the Levites struck up the music so that everyone could make a joyful noise while the final burnt offerings were sacrificed. Apparently God was pleased, for the Chronicler tells us repeatedly how good and right and faithful Hezekiah was in the sight of the Lord. He had them doing it by the book once again! Presumably, when Jesus comes on the scene, what Hezekiah had restored so faithfully, the worship of God that had been ordered just right, was still in full swing. The people were selling cattle and sheep and doves in order to sacrifice them as offerings to God. The money-changers were simply there to exchange the currency of foreigners into money that could be used for the ministry and mission of the temple. And whereas the synoptic gospels place this story at the end, as though this were the reason for his death, John intend to tells us from the beginning that the dwelling place of God was no longer a temple made with human hands where people played at religion, but was somehow in the flesh of him who has come to dwell with us. “Take them out of here,” says Jesus of the very things Hezekiah had carried in. Suddenly, the crowd knows the hesitant creeping up on them of grace, sees the beginning of the end of the sanctuary of temple worship, sees the desecration of the Holy, the abandonment of the dwelling place of God on earth, and so fears the invasion of their sacred institution by one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. There are two distinct ways to understand religion, noted one preacher and Reformed exegete, not now in relation to our Old Testament lesson, but turning us toward the New: two ways, he says, in which religion has shaped the common life. “One is priestly; the other [as Brigid so thoughtfully proclaimed last Sunday] is prophetic. Both appeal to transcendent faith and moral values, but each has a very different orientation. In the priestly variety, religion is used in a way to comfort people, to assure them of their institutions, to assert the righteousness of the national purpose and destiny…This,” he says in sum, “is the religion of prayer breakfasts.” This is what had become of the religion of Hezekiah. What once was a bowing before the living God with fear and trembling, with the loud clashing of cymbals and the blowing of trumpets in praise, had now become the norm, standard practice, thoughtless routine and worship of a way of life rather than of the Living God. When religion is at its height [as was the case in this country in the 50’s] or when, in the depths, the foundations begin to shake, the priestly understanding comes to the fore to circle the wagons with appeals to transcendent faith and moral values. “Over against this kind of religious attitude,” our exegete continues, “stands the prophetic version. The prophetic religious tradition, in which Jesus’ cleansing of the temple [can be placed], invokes values, ideals and faith that stand above the behavior and practice of any one group or nation. This is the religious tradition that calls into question all human institutions and tests them against God’s demand for justice and righteousness.” In response to Jesus’ command, of course, the priestly types shout for a proof text: “What sign can you show us for doing this?” Jesus simply gives them himself. John places this at the beginning because he already knows the end, knows that no signs or reasons or even the reality of God’s Word made flesh will be able to counter the brawn of religion authority under the threat of God’s grace. “The old woman stood at the top of the steps looking about in bewilderment…. Suddenly…she looked down the long gray highway and saw something interesting and delightful coming. She started to grin, toothlessly with short giggles of joy, jumping about and slapping her hands on her knees. Soon it became apparent why she was so happy. For coming down the highway at a firm though leisurely pace was Jesus…. She would have known him, recognized him anywhere…. All he said when he got up close to her was ‘Follow me,’ and she bounded down to his side….They walked on, looking straight over the treetops into the sky, and the smiles that played over her dry wind-cracked face were like the first clean ripples across a stagnant pond.” Thanks be to God. |