Sermon for Sunday, June 22, 2008

JESUS THE REFORMER

3^rd in a series on The Uniqueness of the Gospel of John

By

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Scripture:  John 2:13-25

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. ²³When he was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival, many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing. ²⁴But Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people ²⁵and needed no one to testify about anyone; for he himself knew what was in everyone.

We are in the midst of a series of sermons from the very unique gospel of John, the version of the Jesus story that is very different from the first three gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.

What this gospel told us about Jesus last week was that he enjoyed parties and feasts and celebrations. He is not the dour, sour savior of some pictures, but in the Gospel of John he shows up six different times when there is a feast or party. And at the wedding party he attended in Cana, he transformed 180 gallons of water into the finest wine to say that he has come to do something very new and joyful and abundant in our lives.

Today’s story gives us a very different picture of Jesus, a Jesus who is angry and passionate about the misuse of something sacred and holy – angry enough to do violence to the setting of the Jewish temple. This is not the 3^rd grade Sunday school picture of gentle Jesus meek and mild who teaches us always to be nice. Here is how this scene looks in one video version of the Gospel of John.

VIDEO

I happen to like the actor who portrays Jesus in this film very much, and I suspect that for some of us, the image of a passionate and indignant Jesus is a little sobering – especially when he gets most angry with one particular group of people: the religious people and religious leaders! It might even be that he would be most angry with some of us religious folks today if he came to us – more about that later.

The other three gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke contain this very same story of the “cleansing of the temple,” but it is at the end of the story right before Jesus is executed. Only in the gospel of John is it right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Why, do you think?

John has just told us in the wedding story that what Jesus is doing is radically and dramatically new and different—like comparing ritual washing water to the very best wine. Now he gives us his version of Jesus driving the animal sellers and money changers from the courtyards of the Temple. Except in this story, Jesus makes a whip – this is really serious – and turns the tables over and drives the people and the animals away.

The temple was the center of religious and political life of the Jews, and Jesus believed it had become corrupt. The merchants had a monopoly, they were over-charging people, and the priests had turned a good religion into a self serving, abusive bureaucracy that required people to make a sacrifice to get right with God. This story does not mean that we should stop selling donuts or free trade coffee in the foyer. It means that our buildings are first of all dedicated to get us close to God, and if we lose sight of our purpose, we get into trouble – and we may need to have a holy housecleaning, not just in our facility but in our hearts and minds first.

What Jesus does here is what other prophets in the Bible do – he staged a dramatic act to make a point: stop abusing our faith. Let us return to what our faith was intended for.

We had a great discussion in our staff meeting last week about a question that came to us from our last postcard mailing. Someone received the post card (20,000 mailed) and wrote to us about our ID line, our tag line. That ID line is St Andrew Church: Centered in Christ. Grounded in tradition. Progressive in thought. Generous in service. She wanted to know what the line about “progressive in thought” means. We had a great discussion about that in our staff time saying that for us it means open instead of closed, open minded, not fundamentalist, able to think and let think, willing to have doubts and questions instead of swallowing dogma without reservation.

And in the discussion we tried to not use some old tired stereotypes like “liberal” and “conservative” because they don’t capture enough. For instance, I think Jesus was both conservative and progressive. He was conservative in wanting to conserve and preserve the essential core of his religion, the religion that asks for justice and compassion and care for the vulnerable – the widow and the orphan and sojourner. That was the religion of the prophets Isaiah and Amos and Jeremiah. That should be the outgrowth of any healthy religion, Judaism and Christianity. But the Temple leaders of Jesus time had lost that and Jesus was trying to preserve, to conserve, to return to it.

In his return to the core of faith, he was also a “radical” from the original meaning of that word-from the root radix which means “root” – getting to the roots and applying those roots in a new age. He was making progress, being progressive.

Jesus was a thorough-going Jew. He knew his Bible (the Old Testament). He was in worship regularly. He was not, I believe, trying to start a new religion but to call people to the best, the roots, of Jewish faith. He was working to reform but not to start something totally new. There is very little in his teaching that is new or original. In that sense, what he did was what other reformers did after him – call people from the abuses and bureaucratic practices that occur when a movement becomes an institution and loses its mission and purpose and identity.

That is what has happened many times since Jesus – other passionate reformers looked at their faith and saw a need for reform and return to the first purpose. That is not only what Martin Luther did in 1517 by challenging the most powerful institution in the world – the Catholic church – risking his life by making a Bible available for every church member to read, it is what others did before Luther. St. Francis of Assisi looked at the church 300 years before Luther and saw too much luxury and excess and chose to give up his family wealth and live a life of simplicity and service and humility and compassion. Francis was a reformer.

It is the same kind of reform that caused John Wesley to criticize the bureaucracy he saw in his Anglican church and begin to start small groups who met weekly to study and pray and serve others – that movement was called “Methodism”.

This need for reform and getting back to how a group got started happens in business as well. When a business thrives and grows, the temptation is to lose some of the original purpose and to abuse or misuse what worked so well at first. It is the kind of reform I believe that Starbuck’s founding genius Howard Schultz has been trying to institute the past few months when he wrote a memo saying we have lost what made us so effective at first and here is how we need to return to our roots and our core values and core habits – give up some things we have done and go back to what we started with.

Any movement, any group needs to look inward and come back to its purpose from time to time. That is what I believe Jesus was so fervently trying to do with the religious bureaucracy he was confronting because he had seen that religion, like anything else, can be misused and abused.

We have even studied a book about that misuse and abuse of faith three years ago. The book is When Religion Becomes Evil by Dr. Charles Kimball, who teaches at Wake Forest University. He says religion fails the test when it teaches blind obedience, when it says that only one religion can tell us anything about God, when it excludes any other way of knowing God except for its path.

This perversion of faith is what caused Jesus to physically throw the monopolistic merchants out of the courts of the temple. This perversion is, in my opinion, what is behind a very controversial billboard here in downtown Denver that has gotten some press coverage recently. The billboard has a quote from the John Lennon song Imagine.  “Imagine no religion.” I believe that the people who sponsored that billboard have seen what Jesus saw: religion as only a corrupt force, religion that is more condemning than gracious, more exclusive than inclusive, more about right dogma than about service to others, more about serving the religious leaders than about serving the people, more about judging than about grace and mercy.

It is that distorted and unhealthy and rigid religion that Professor Marcus Borg told about in his book The Heart of Christianity. He says that every year in his religion classes at Oregon State University half of his students have not had any experience in a church, so the only images of religion they have come from the media and from some of the fundamentalist leaders that Senator John McCain rightly labeled 8 years ago as “agents of intolerance.”

Dr Borg says he asks those persons in his classes who have no religious background to write a short essay giving their impression of Christianity. He says they consistently use five adjectives to describe Christians: “literalistic, anti intellectual, self righteous, judgmental and bigoted.” I understand why they see church folk that way – not so much in this church, I hope, but I have seen that myself. It is easy for us to become that way also: to just be good Pharisees and not be as welcoming as Christ was. Jesus saw that corrupt religion and that is why the people Jesus had the most conflict with, the most trouble with were the religious folks. It might still be true today!! He was just so welcoming, so accepting, so gracious – except for people who were unwelcoming and ungracious!!

The story in the gospel of John gives us a Jesus who was not afraid of controversy and conflict. He reminds me of the statement by English writer John Ruskin who said in the 19^th century, “I like controversy. I don’t mind getting in hot water. It helps keep me clean!” Jesus got into hot water with the religious bureaucrats often and this story in chapter 2 of John is only one example. 

If you and I are followers, not admirers but followers and imitators of Jesus, are we as passionate as he was? Are we willing to do what he did – confront people who are doing the wrong thing and ask them to change? My friend Janet Forbes, senior pastor at our sister Methodist congregation St. Luke’s church two miles away, asked us this week if we are willing to be indignant about some things, to practice the opposite of the Nike slogan and instead of saying “Just Do It,” be willing sometimes to say with Jesus passionately “Just Stop It!” Stop practicing prejudice. Stop spreading falsehoods. Stop practicing bigotry in the name of religion. Stop…you can fill in the rest.

What are you passionate about in the way that Christ was? What are you willing to make a sacrifice for?  Or let’s close with a more uncomfortable question: if Christ were looking at each of us and even looking into our hearts and lives, what one thing would he want to start doing some holy housecleaning on to help us keep growing more fully toward God? 

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