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Overturning the Tables
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis June 13, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Amos 5:14-24 John 2:13-22
The overwhelming pomp and circumstance, the sense of occasion and high ceremony melding church and state in the week just past, prompted me to ask anew after the God we intended to worship in the midst of twenty-one gun salutes and “Amazing Grace” …prompted me to think again not about the relation of church and state, but about the relationship between religion (the ways we devise to relate ourselves to God) and revelation (the ways God has chosen to be in relation with us). Specifically, it was civil religion’s inability to discern the difference between worship that is rank idolatry and worship that bows down before the living God in humble gratitude that pushed aside the usual question and begged another. Watching as religious ceremony was so seamlessly put to use by the state, listening as ministers from our own theological tradition paraded across the screen talking about themselves, I found myself wondering if the God revealed in the One who overturned the tables that day has anything to do with the God whose name is so blithely invoked, from sea to shining sea, by his church in this day. No doubt we enter this sanctuary of a Sunday morning seeking to be addressed by God's Word in Jesus Christ, a Word which—if it is God’s and not our own--inevitably disturbs and disrupts our settled lives. Yet the truth be told, we more often expect of the church a home where “seldom is heard a discouraging word.” Such is a key to the seamless melding of feel-good religion and nationalism. We have come to this place to hear a reliable word, a comforting word, a confirming word, mediated uncritically through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. After all, so much has happened in our lives since last we were gathered. There are always the headlines, the distant reports of assassinations and car bombings, the questions of inflation and of rising interest rates ever before us, corruption creeping closer to city hall and a President laid to rest. More to the point of our daily lives, we have managed another week at the office with a modicum of integrity, made it a few days close to the end of the school year, overseen the lives of our children for yet another week and, by grace alone, have kept them from falling, as far as we know. We have paid the bills, done the wash, taken out the garbage, filled the car with gas, gotten the groceries, done the dishes. No doubt we are in need of a word which will send us back to those tasks renewed, awakened, aware of our true situation in some eternal sense. We have come, in other words, for a little religion, for a reliable word which will strengthen, secure, and ground our lives in the God we have come to expect. Likely those ancient characters had gathered in the temple court on that day long ago with the same sort of expectations. This was not just any day, but the beginning of Passover. "Observe the month of Abib, and keep the Passover to the Lord your God; for in the month of Abib the Lord your God brought you out of Egypt by night. And you shall offer the Passover sacrifice to the Lord your God from the flock or the herd, at the place which the Lord will choose and make his name to dwell there." It was what Moses had decreed centuries before, and therefore was what God’s chosen people had been doing for centuries since. A cynic would say that it had become nothing more than a ritual devoid of meaning. But a believer would contend he had come to the place chosen by the Lord, where God in fact dwelt, in order that God's saving acts might be remembered and God's saving presence made known in their midst. What, then, has religion to do with revelation? Or to put it more specifically, what had the temple to do with the Messiah? Or to put it directly, what has the church to do with Jesus Christ? “Revelation," said Karl Barth, [God’s choosing to be known by us] "does not link up with human religion which is already present and practiced. It contradicts it…." It contradicts it. When Jesus came to the temple mount, he saw people doing what they thought they were supposed to be doing in relation to God--religion already present and practiced. Laws and rituals, prescribed and handed down generation after generation, had become part of the air they collectively breathed. In one sense, there was nothing wrong with what they were doing, except that it misunderstood the nature of the relationship between God and God’s creatures. In another sense, it couldn't have been more wrong because belief in the practice itself had closed them off, blinded them, steeled them against the revelation of the Living God. They were so busy doing what they were supposed to do, bargaining for the perfect lamb to be laid upon the alter, that they failed to look up and behold the true Lamb of God, even Jesus Christ. They had come on that day to practice their religion, to which the revelation of God is utter contradiction: "And making a whip of cords, he drove them all, with the sheep and the oxen, out of the temple; and he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables." Again writes Barth, "From the standpoint of revelation, religion is clearly seen to be a human attempt to anticipate what God in…revelation wills to do and does do…In religion [we] bold and bar [ourselves] against revelation by providing a substitute, by taking away in advance the very thing which has to be given by God." How? There are so many ways religion seeks to manage God's revelation. This is the only real question raised by The Da Vinci Code, the question of whether the Apostolic Fathers controlled the canon—what books ended up in the Bible—not on the basis of the gospel, but on the basis of institutional power and authority. Closer to home, we step aside from what it might mean for our households really to trust the disturbing, disrupting presence of the Living God and rather choose to expose our children to religion so they can decide whether or not to practice it as adults. As members of this society who are also Christians, we surely expect our religion to confirm our nation's values more than we hope to be claimed by the God who, in every age and on every shore, calls into question the nation, the society, the “values” we have come to trust more than we trust the Living God. Nothing has changed, in other words, since Jesus entered the temple and overturned the tables. At the end of the day, still we find ourselves so caught up in religion, so zealous in maintaining the institution as we have ordered it, that we miss the Christ whose presence contradicts the church we have come to be. "Zeal for thy house," forewarned the psalmist, "will consume me." They were words remembered by the disciples, we are told, on that day when the tables were overturned…words that can be taken to mean zeal for the practice of our religion will consume the One who came to reveal to us the Living God. So it did. So it does. Perhaps, then, the signs of the presence of the Living God in this place, in the Presbyterian Church today, in the Christian church in general, are to be found not in some carefully orchestrated return to peace, unity and purity, nor in some seamless melding of religious and national identity, but are given in the church’s very struggle and discord and discontent with the Christ who contradicts it. Imagine if Jesus had not entered the temple that day, if God had not chosen to be revealed in Him: the observance of Passover would have gone on without notice, money would have been changed and livestock sacrificed, priests would have said the right words and congregants done the proper things. All would have returned to their homes assured that their actions and words and prayers had been received by the God they had set out to worship. But Jesus did enter in and overturned the trappings of religion that the Living God might be made known. “The incarnation,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer [to whom I seem to be turning a lot these days!], “does involve a claim to a space of its own on earth….A truth, a doctrine, or a religion need no space for themselves. They are disembodied entities. They are heard, learnt and apprehended, and that is all. But the incarnate Son of God needs not only ears or hearts, but living men [and women] who will follow him.” It would be as if Jesus came into this sanctuary while we were saying the Lord's Prayer together--the one he taught us to pray, the prayer scripture tells us to pray--and shouted, "Shut up, for God's sake!" He comes to the very place and practice wherein we are sure we have it right, where we are certain that we have hit upon the one true thing, where we have assured ourselves that God is made glad by what we do and the way we do it. He comes always to that place as contradiction, as an annoying person, said Harry Emerson Fosdick. Annoyed, we respond just as the Jews in the temple responded that day: "What sign have you to show us for this?" they asked and so do we. In other words, what right have you, by what authority do you come in here and question our practices? Turning the tables, we think smartly, religion becomes its own authority and demands of revelation a sign. Says Jesus to our questions, "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up." The theories concerning the meaning of those words are legion, but if we might take them very simply, Jesus says to us two things: first, destroy this human institution and God will give it new life. It is as though, in his presence, our anxiety about the survival of the church only serves to reveal an absence of trust in what God can do and is doing in the very ferment. Second, he says, by the authority of your religion, crucify me, destroy me and in three days, God will triumph over death itself. Silence the One in whose life God’s love has been revealed, but God will not be silenced. In spite of the practice of your religion, God will come to you. What incredible words of promise! But no! What an incredible threat. "It has taken forty-six years to build this temple," we say. Literalists, always literalists! We say to this contradictory Lord, do you know how much we have put into this church, the dollars pledged, the hours given, the sacrifices made to maintain this institution which, in turn, upholds all the institution we hold dear: marriage and family and nation and a way of life we love and God does too. It says in scripture. How dare you do something, say something, be something that would question our ordered lives! But he did and still he does: "...making a whip of cords, he drove them all, with the sheep and oxen, out of the temple; and he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables."What, then, is the gospel proclaimed to us now driven out by such a text? What is the Good News for the church in a passage that would seem to threaten the church’s life? Strange, but I think the gospel is simply that God bothers, in Christ, to overturn the tables at all. The good news is that God is finally a God who will not leave us to our own devices or orders or values. The grace is that, in spite of the meanness and the pettiness, the self-complacency and self-justification of the church, God enters in and, with the tables of religion upended, the church is made to live and to die and be raised up again by the gospel turned on herself, by Him in whose flesh the God who is God has come to us at last! It is gospel enough! Thanks be to God! |