The 1st United Methodist Church of Napa

²I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; ³you shall have no other gods before me.

⁴You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. ⁵You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, ⁶but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

⁷You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

⁸Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. ⁹Six days you shall labor and do all your work. ¹⁰But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. ¹¹For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

¹²Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.

¹⁷You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

¹³The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. ¹⁴In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. ¹⁵Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. ¹⁶He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” ¹⁷His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” ¹⁸The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” ¹⁹Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” ²⁰The Jews then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” ²¹But he was speaking of the temple of his body. ²²After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

"Remember the sabbath day," we hear in our reading from Exodus this morning, "…keep it holy." Such a simple, even liberating, command. As a wise person once advised me, "Remember, Doug, the busier you get the more sabbath time you need." We all need "time out" that we could claim as sacred.

As the creation story told in Genesis has it, the Sabbath came into being only after God had created everything else. In a way, then, the Sabbath marked the natural end to creation, as if on that day a sort of circle closed – since everything else had taken shape in the wholeness that we call the universe. One of the reasons that I love the Hebrew concept of shalom is that it's intimately connected to sabbath time. In Jewish law and tradition the Sabbath has always stood for wholeness, harmony, peace – being so at one with the universe that you come to discover that you really don't need anything. Petitionary prayer, then, isn't part of the Jewish liturgy on the Sabbath because who could possibly need anything on that day that hadn't already been given?

Early last century there was a photograph taken in New York's crowded east side that became famous because of this message. It shows a poor but pious Jew sitting at his sabbath table – which is actually nothing but a stall in a coal cellar – the only home that he knows. On his table are all the loaves of sabbath bread that he needs. He's saved his money all week knowing that at least on Shabbat he can escape from all of the heartache and struggles that have been his other days of the week.^³

After hearing about Jesus' passion for temple-space in our gospel reading this morning, could we Christians ever come to understand, as this pious Jew did, that we are the Temple – that we are holy, sacred, and at the center of God's presence? If we were meant to be that place of healthy experience and creativity, then why have we allowed ourselves to be profaned by the short-sighted, consumer oriented people that we've become? At the heart of this Lenten journey into Easter is learning to reclaim the Christ-like image within ourselves that could resurrect us all. In fact it ought to happen every Sunday – that at least on that day we too are raised up into a new way of being.

Put first things first. That's the message given to us today and begun with the Exodus reading of the Ten Commandments. Shabbat, wholeness, creativity, an experienced life, sabbath rest…God, are presented to us today as the stuff that should matter most in our lives. For those of you involved in our Lenten study, you may remember Marcus Borg's point that our concept of God matters – a lot.^⁴
Commerce, buying and selling, the GNP^⁵, things that either leave us numb or a person of frantic habit instead of a person at peace, must never become absolutes in our lives. The Ten Commandments say at least that, once and for all. All ten of them are really contained in the first one, because most of our problems begin with idolatry: putting something or someone in the place that belongs to the sacred.

The real idols, then, aren't literal sculptured objects placed in niches all around our house for worship. The real idols to which we give our all are false ideals against which we've come to measure our happiness. The super patriot who devotes all of his time and energy to the ideal of a native land purified from the contaminating presence of others that he would name as "alien," is an idolater, and a profoundly deluded one at that, since his "ideal" could only be fulfilled through some version of "ethnic cleansing" – a horrific and blood-stained idol indeed. The "earth first" radical environmentalist who elevates a practically humanity-free ecosphere to the status of sacred space is equally idolatrous: presenting an overly romanticized vision of pure nature while denying the gospel ideal of a creation-connecting love capable of embracing both nature and culture in one harmonious whole. The left-wing absolutist who would drive all tokens of religion from the public square in the guise of an imagined civic neutrality is maybe the worst idolater of all, because the fond illusion of a public space free of any and all symbols is itself an idol.

In all of these cases people have chosen to worship a "purified" creation of their own making instead of the richly complex world as it is: a world of such diversity that we've got to be commanded to cross the space between human and nonhuman and respond to the gift of all life as it's actually been given to us. We may pride ourselves on being less likely to pledge our allegiance to ideologies – like communism or pure free-market capitalism or even to narrowed versions of patriotism, environmentalism or public neutrality. But then we risk having our imaginations even more diminished as we come to adore the smaller idols of personal style, social status, and the lure of gratification through endless consumption of goods and new experiences.

So what are we supposed to do, or what are we not supposed to do, so that we might embrace only the things that are important? In today's gospel lesson Jesus destroys the established pattern and order of life. No wonder the religious leaders were angry at him, demanding some "sign" giving Jesus the right to behave that way – and in the Temple for God's sake!

We ought to know at least a little bit about what was going on here. In Jesus' day a privileged few sold animals that were required for temple sacrifices, and they often sold them at ridiculously high prices. What's more, to insure that their hold on the market was secure, there were animal inspectors who examined all of the animals brought in from the outside to determine whether or not they were "unblemished" (i.e., suitable for sacrifice). Often these inspectors conspired with the sellers so that animals had to be purchased inside the temple area only and at great cost (Is this beginning to sound familiar…?).

The other piece of the pie was taken up by the money changers. They were there to exchange official temple currency for the Roman coins and any others that were in general circulation carried by pilgrims so that the temple tax could be paid. Of course the exchange rate was such that the money changer made a profit in the transaction; why not? But in addition he charged a fee for making change for larger coins that were being exchanged. As you might imagine, the cost for anyone who simply wanted to come and worship was grossly overpriced.

Knowing what we do, now, about Jesus, his response to this exploitation shouldn't be much of a surprise. It was the injustice of it all that enraged him, maybe even more so, because what was at issue was injustice in the name of religion. This is the Jesus we're to believe in. This is the Jesus you and I are to follow. If Jesus really is "a metaphor of God,"^⁶ as Borg wants us to understand, then not only are we able to see the true nature of the sacred in that man from Nazareth, but then you and I are invited to see what our own lives might be like if we were to follow in his footsteps. If such prophets as Isaiah, Amos or Micah – let alone Jesus! – were suddenly to appear in our midst, what might they have to say about the corruption in high places, the indifferent ways in which the sick, the poor, and the elderly are treated?^⁷ Wouldn't these prophets be standing with those who protest against the war in Iraq and against the hypocrisy, the disinformation and deliberate falsehood that keep us there?

A contemporary Hebrew prophet, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, never lost his capacity for outrage. During the years of our entanglement in yet another ill-conceived war, the war in Vietnam, Heschel spoke to a Stanford University ethics class. It turned out that a friend of one of the students in that class – both of whom were Jewish – was producing napalm. The student asked Heschel what she should say to him. Barely able to control his trembling, Heschel replied:

Go to him and tell him that if he continues making napalm he forfeits the name of Jew. Go to him and tell him that if he continues to create such things he forfeits the name of human being. Go to him and tell him that if he continues to be part of such inhuman destructiveness he sins against creation and the Creator. Go to him and plead with him to repent and ask for mercy while there is still time to do so.^⁸

The temples that we build, the temples that we are, the safe images that we construct of God and of ourselves, are often destroyed by a seemingly chance event like this one at a lecture in a university ethics class. When a tragedy hits us where we live, though, or when things no longer seem to fit together anymore, we often get offended and demand a "sign," some kind of justification for the ways in which the tables of our lives have been turned upside down. Maybe the fact that things do not seem to fit anymore is itself the sign. The sacred nature of reality deconstructs every idol we can put up; and once we've been remodeled we're never quite the same again, thank God. The final result is not a diminishment but a re-creation of who we were meant to be in the first place.

Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks….It's in language that's not always easy to decipher, but it's there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.^⁹

Or, as a quote on a poster that I saw once at a retreat center says it: "When your heart speaks, take good notes."^¹⁰

In the scripture lesson not read today, Paul reminds the Christians at Corinth that "the message about the cross is foolishness," but, in the end, far wiser than any wisdom that we've ever displayed through the years.^¹¹ What do you suppose we profess as Christians – particularly those of us here and now walking the journey through Lent – that the so-called "wise" of this world would (and do!) consider foolish? Is it possible that we blend in too well?

It seemed so clear after the covenant with Moses on Mt. Sinai, how God was to be worshiped. There were commandments and they were specific: no false gods, no taking the one God's name in vain, keeping the Sabbath…. And, of course, the commandments that expressed the community of Israel in the treatment of others could be summed up by Jews simply as "love your neighbor as yourself." It shouldn't really be a surprise to us that, given time, these commandments ballooned into 613 prescriptions to be followed in order for one to achieve holiness. It's no surprise to me that The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church has gotten decidedly thicker over the years!

So Jesus' action is shocking as well as confusing; and unlike the account of this incident in Mark, Matthew and Luke,^¹² Jesus in John's version doesn't accuse the buyers and sellers and money changers, who are there to expedite the sacrifices of the pilgrims to the temple, who are guilty of cheating or stealing. He just drives them out, objecting to their use of temple space (probably the outer courtyards) as a market place. What were the Jews to think? What did Jesus mean? Why was he attacking such a sacred tradition?

Then, as now, we're being confronted, haunted, by the same question: "Who or what do we worship?" Do we truly cherish and respect – do we worship – the things that are sacred in life, or have we turned yet again to idols?

1 The Ten Commandments were an independent tradition brought into this larger theological and political scheme of the covenant. It was the end result of generations of reflection. So whether these commandments go back to Moses or not is open to question. They were formed very early on in Israel's history. And while they don't cover every situation, they do reflect an early ordering of what the people considered important: their relationship with God (commandments one through four) and their relationship with each other (commandments five through ten). For this reason they became foundational for the nation of Israel.

2 The so-called "cleansing of the temple" incident is reported in all four gospel accounts. But John has taken the core of this tradition and reworked it for his own theological purposes. He describes for his readers how Jesus fulfills the Hebrew Scriptures and is the Messiah: the old covenant has been replaced by the Christ who establishes the new covenant. So some two generations after Jesus' death John uses the tradition to set up a challenge between Jesus and the Jewish establishment. He places this incident near the beginning of Jesus' ministry – not near the end as the others have – as an explanation of why he, John, believes that Jesus was killed.

3 Lawrence A. Hoffman, "Welcoming Shabbat: The Power of Metaphor," in Liturgy: The Lord's Day (Washington, D.C., The Liturgical Conference, 1989), pp. 20-21.

4 Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity (HarperCollins Publishers, New York, N.Y., 2003), p. 61.

8 Robert McAfee Brown, in Saying Yes and Saying No (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1986), pp. 54-55.

9 Op. cit., Marcus Borg quoting Buechner from an interview in The Christian Century, p. 73.

11 1 Corinthians 1: 18a and 25a – a wisdom, however, that we've seen replicated in the likes of others, like Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa or The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.