March 15, 2009

I’d only been a pastor in East Harlem for a few months. One morning, my Co-Pastor asked me if I’d move his car at 11:00 since he was going down town. There was opposite side of the street parking between 11:00 and 2:00.

I got caught up with what I was doing in the church office and suddenly panicked when I remembered about moving the car. Fortunately it was just 2 minutes after 11:00 as I hurried outside.

Standing next to the car was a traffic officer, writing a ticket. I first tried my gentlest, most pastoral form of persuasion, but when that didn’t work I found myself slamming my hand on the hood and yelling something that I’d better not repeat.

It didn’t help avoid the ticket, but it did make me realize that I’d traveled more than miles in going from a small town in northern Maine to living and working in Spanish Harlem.

I was brought up in a household where I very rarely saw people get angry. The open expression of emotion of any kind was frowned upon, but anger was perhaps the one emotion to avoid at all costs. As the oldest of three children, and the only male, this message came through loud and clear.

I’ve gotten more comfortable with my own anger through the years, but an angry Jesus is another story.

What happened to the gentle Jesus with children on his knee or a lamb in his arms?

What happened to the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, that we so often carry with us?

I saw a bumper sticker on Elmwood Avenue a while ago that read: www.Jesus.calm. That’s the sort of Jesus I’m looking for on Sunday morning and I suspect that I’m not alone.

I don’t like an angry Jesus any more than the next person.

But here we are - in the middle of Lent – with a very angry Jesus on our hands.

No where else do we see Jesus this angry. Not that he didn't get angry elsewhere - as Peter discovered when he tried to rebuke Jesus for saying he was going to suffer and die - as the disciples discovered when they tried to keep children from him - and as the religious authorities discovered when they counseled against healing on the Sabbath - but no where else is Jesus this angry.

Matthew, Mark and Luke tell the same story, but they discreetly place it at the end of their gospels. And there, at the end, during the last week of his life, you can understand the rage of Jesus. His disciples hadn’t exactly been quick studies when it came to understanding what it meant to follow a Messiah whose ministry was marked by suffering, self-giving love. His critics had been threatening him for months and trying to entrap him. His rage, at the end of his ministry would be more understandable; the final lashing out of one whose patience had reached its limit.

But here, less than two chapters into John's Gospel, there's no way to explain away Jesus' fierce anger. At this point no one has said a word against him. In fact, everyone's been quite impressed with him, marveling when he turned water into wine at the wedding in Cana. So you can't explain his anger by saying that they've pushed him to the limit, or he's at his wit's end with longstanding frustration. The outburst in the temple, in John's Gospel, is right at the beginning.

We see him standing there, filled with white hot fury, whip in hand, kicking over tables, setting loose birds, slinging coins.

"Take these things out of here" he screams, "Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!"

This was the maddest, angriest anyone had ever seen Jesus before, or since.

But you see the problem isn't only that Jesus is mad, but he's in the temple mad, he's at Passover mad. This scene takes place at Passover, in the temple. Passover

was the great celebration of the liberation of Israel from slavery in Egypt, the highest, happiest, holiest feast of Israel's year.

Passover was the day that God remembered the Hebrew slaves and came for them. The temple was the place where the nation gathered to be close to God. Tens of thousands of people packed the streets of Jerusalem during Passover. And with everyone else quite happy to be there at Passover, quite happy to be in the temple close to God, there's Jesus, whip in hand, kicking over tables.

Elsewhere it's written, "Judgment begins with the household of God "(I Peter 4:17) – and not just then and there, but here and now. Getting angry at Passover then and there would be like Jesus getting angry on Easter here and now.

And if Jesus is going to barge in on people, I'd rather he barge in on Pope Benedict or Joel Osteen, but not here in our church – in our sanctuary.

But here’s where we find him – not somewhere else. Here’s where we meet an angry Jesus - in our temple, in our church, in our sanctuary.

His assault isn’t on the non-believers who are enjoying their second cup of coffee sitting on the couch with the morning paper, or on those already on their way to the Galleria or the Boulevard Mall - his attack is on us - the believers here in church.

The temple is a place where you go to meet God. And preachers are those who help you encounter God.

We help you meet God. That's what I'm paid to do here in my sermons, counseling and teaching. I'm here to provide a service - to help people meet God – to encounter the Holy – to sense the Sacred.

And that's all those merchants were doing in the temple. They were simply providing a service, a crucial service, for worshippers. Roman coins, the only kind used in Jerusalem, couldn’t be used to pay the temple tax or to buy an animal to sacrifice because they were imprinted with the idolatrous image of Tiberius Caesar. You needed shekels.

So, every time you went to worship, if you wanted to offer your money, you had to deal with the moneychangers. And if you wanted to offer God an unspotted cow or sheep or dove, as the scriptures required, you had to buy one from a temple merchant with shekels and not Roman coins.

You see? The table that Jesus over turned is mine! The distant, awesome God, the One Moses met on the mountain had been domesticated, turned into a business transaction. Come, put your money here, invest in the church, and you'll get a little dose of the divine.

As someone said to me a while ago, "I think church is a lot like a filling-station. I come here on Sunday empty. Then I get filled up with spiritual energy to make it through the rest of the week."

This makes me the filing station attendant. This isn=t a self-service operation. I'm here to help people meet God - to help provide the spiritual energy to get through the week. And this is Passover, even if it is the third Sunday of Lent. You're supposed to be passing over from death to life, from enslavement to those things that lay claim to your life that prevent you from worshiping the true, living God.

And we've made the temple into a market place - a kind of spiritual Broadway Market or Elmwood Village. Get up - get dressed for church - open the hymnal - sing the songs - pray the prayers - say hello to God and go home.

And it just made Jesus mad. It just made him very mad.

The anger of Jesus reminds us that the God we come here to meet can't be contained within the walls of our building or within the rituals of our worship.

The anger of Jesus reminds us that we can't come to church simply to pay our respects to God and expect to meet the One in whom we all live and move and have our being.

The anger of Jesus confronts us with a Gospel that doesn't so much fill our needs and answer our questions -- as it questions our answers and challenges our definition of our needs.

The anger of Jesus forces us to finally find sanctuary in God alone - in God’s love for us and for the world.

Rather than go to www.Jesus.calm this morning we’ve gone to www.Jesus.angry and found a God whose essence isn’t found in the rituals of our religion but in the depth and breadth of God’s love.

As God said through the prophet Hosea, “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” (Hosea 6:6)

That’s the banner across the homepage of www.Jesus.angry .

Rituals had become a barrier rather than a bridge to knowing and loving God.

"Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!"

The word in Greek for marketplace is "emporium." Random House defines "emporium" as a large retail store. Stop making this House of Worship into a large retail store, whose list of goods and services is designed to attract the most business and enhance the church's bottom line.

As we work to grow our congregation and expand its ministry our Still Speaking God has something to say to us today – something like – “Create bridges rather than barriers for all those wanting to grow in their knowledge and love of me! Don’t dilute the central importance of worship as an opportunity to encounter my presence! Don’t minimize the magnitude of my power in your midst.”

The Bible reminds us: "Offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire" (Hebrews 12:28-29).

Too often it has become too easy to replace reverence and awe with low expectation and familiarity. The consuming fire has been domesticated into a candle flame, adding a bit of religious atmosphere, perhaps, but no heat, no blinding light, no power for purification or renewal.

Without making a whip of cords, the writer Annie Dillard, manages to overturn the tables that are set up carefully in many churches when she says: "Why do people in churches seem like cheerful brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the Catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?"

"The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill the Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews for the sleeping God may wake some day and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return."

The anger of Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem nearly 2,000 years ago forces those of us who find ourselves in God's House today to look for sanctuary not in our building nor in the rules or rituals of our religion, but in the compassion of the gentle, angry carpenter from Nazareth who would become the Living Christ of God.

As we’re doing this year, we’ve often invited members of our congregation to share their faith with us in worship during Lent. As Mike did last week and as Thunder has done today, people have spoken passionately using their own words and their own lives to reveal how they’ve come to know and love God – how they’ve come to find sanctuary here - not in this building nor in the rules or rituals of our religion - but in the love of God revealed in the presence and power of Jesus Christ.

I think especially of Marianne’s father, Woody Rathman, sharing his faith with us several years ago during Lent. There’s been no one in our congregation, either before or after Woody, who had a bigger place in his heart for this building. No one devoted more time or energy to its maintenance, repair and improvement than Woody Rathman. So when I asked him to share his faith, I half expected him to start talking about the parts of the building that needed painting or the way he planned to make some improvement without spending a nickel.

But instead, he began talking about sitting next to Jesus during the Last Supper, as one of the 12 disciples, in a passion play down at Shea's some years before. He was silently playing his part, looking into the face of the man playing Jesus, when suddenly he was washed with the warmth of God’s Spirit and overwhelmed with the love of Christ for him.

Sitting there, at the Last Supper, in front of hundreds of people, with tears streaming down his cheeks, Woody knew where he finally found sanctuary - and it wasn't in the church structure that he’d devoted himself to for so many years. It was in the Living Christ whose love for him was stronger even than death.

Rather than go to www.Jesus.calm this morning we’ve gone to www.Jesus.angry. There’s a link on this Web Site to another Web Site. It’s the one Woody Rathman found himself visiting many years ago on the stage at Shea’s – the one Jesus had in mind when he said, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up."

"Three days?” came the response. “This temple has been under construction for 46 years and you’ll raise it up in 3 days?”

But he was speaking of the temple of his body and not the structure that stood around them.

He was speaking of the sanctuary found in him – in the love of the Living Christ.

Later, a lot later, when he'd barged forth from the tomb and kicked in the doors of death - when he passed over to victory – his disciples remembered what he'd said that Passover in the temple.

The only sign he gave them then and the only sign he gives us now is that of his death and his resurrection.

The only temple he left them and us to enter is the one found in the Living Love of God.

This is the only sanctuary we’ll ever need.

We find it by following the link from www.Jesus.angry to www.Jesus.Christ.

Amen!

Note: This sermon draws on material in Pulpit Resource, January-March 1994, by William Willimon.

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