What’s In YOUR Temple?
Sunday, March 19h, 2006
Lent 3B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
John 2:13-22
The Grizzly River Rampage was just being built when I went to work at Opryland USA, in Nashville, in March of 1981. It was one of the first water raft rides in the region when it opened later that spring. The mechanics of the ride were pretty extensive. There was a central lake, a couple of waterfalls, a tunnel under a mountain, and fake boulders along a particular part of the ride. The action of waves over a riverbed was produced by laying – and bolting in – logs every few feet along the river’s course. The point of the ride was to give folks the sensation of riding a white-water raft, with no guide and no danger of anyone suffering anything other than a good splashing at a couple of spots along the way.
It was my first job, and as a YOUNG 17-year old, I was put in charge of 14 Cuban refugees, serving as both their supervisor and interpreter. At the time, I hadn’t had much experience dealing with the Cuban Spanish dialect, which is full of colloquialisms and slang words that were totally foreign to me, so I spent as much time trying to figure out what they were saying as I did translating it into English for our boss.
We were assigned the task of cleaning up the riverbed and lakebed before the water was actually pumped in and the ride primed. With landscaping and the normal runoff from the surrounding area, the lakebed, which was only about 6 feet deep, was almost a foot deep in watery, smelly, gooey mud.
After some discussion, our supervisor decided that, rather than trying to get a front loader or a mini bulldozer into the lakebed, the best way to remove the mud was by hand, using shovels and a palette with boards closing in three sides, making it roughly into another shovel, one which was suspended by the construction crane already on site, lying almost flat, slightly elevated on the open end, to hold several shovelfuls of mud, which was then lifted out and dumped elsewhere, away from where it might find it’s way back into the ride course. It must’ve been late April at this point, shortly before the Amusement Park opened, and it was already hot and muggy.
Working in the mud and trying not to slip and to maneuver a shovel quickly enough to not lose what was mostly water to begin with, and keeping the palette from lying flat and emptying that watery mud made for some pretty frustrating moments, repeating, seemingly endlessly, the same motions, basically trying to get muddy water onto the palette at a faster pace than it was running off … had it not been for the sheer industriousness of those 14 men, all working together and THEIR realizing early in the process that it was going to be a matter of speed as much as of effectiveness, the job might not have been completed that day.
It did take pretty much all day, but by the end of it we were able to look at a lakebed that only had a thin film of muddy water on it, which would soon be drying into a dusty cover that could be swept up over the next day or two to make way for the ride to be made ready for the first guests.
The first people to ride the Grizzly River Rampage were company executives, who willingly offered to test the ride. What had not been completely worked out was the motion of a loaded raft in the running water, especially if one side of the raft were loaded down with pretty big men. A couple of the rafts caught up against the boulders, and the water rushing behind them swamped them, the channel was only about two feet deep, but the waves poured over the sides, and the riders ended up considerably wetter than they had anticipated.
****
In our passage this morning, Jesus is similarly engaged in clearing out the gooey, clinging refuse of first century Jewish religious worship. While living in Spain, and a couple of times in Chile, I was able to witness pilgrimages to shrines. In both places, there were people who were selling amulets, or pictures. There were mementos, cards, trinkets to commemorate the trip, and in some cases, for the pilgrims to deliver at the place of pilgrimage. I’m sure there was some money to be made by the folks selling the items, but it seemed to have been an acceptable part of the experience. There was perhaps an element of devotion, foreign as it may seem to our Baptist sentiments and views of the practice of faith.
In the case of the money changers and sacrificial animal sellers at the temple, there was apparently a somewhat less spiritual motive to their practice. Corruption had become the order of the day in the temple, thanks to the collusion between the religious leadership and the Roman government. Everyone got a piece of the liturgical pie. Everyone, that is, except the worshippers and pilgrims themselves.
I suppose you could say that they DID end up complying with the necessary requirements for ritual cleansing, but at a cost that made it a less and less frequent event – and in a system built on the need to meet those specific requirements in order to BE righteous enough to reach heaven, the fear of not being able to MEET those requirements was palpable. Judaism became a faith governed by fear and extortion rather than by faith and hope.
Jesus went on his housecleaning rampage as much to clear that fear from the minds and hearts of the pilgrims and worshippers as to actually get rid of the profiteers and racketeers who were taking advantage of them and reaping the benefits from it.
******
There’s a commercial where two people are shopping or eating somewhere, and they get to the point of paying and one reaches in their wallet or purse and offers to pay for it with their credit card from such-and-such bank, the other person makes some comment concerning the interest rate wiping them out. The comment triggers the crashing appearance of a horde of raging, smashing, pillaging and plundering marauders from the dark ages, Vikings or Visigoths, or some kind of barbarians, swinging axes and swords, mallets and balls on chains. They get right up to the person paying, who is completely unperturbed by their storming towards them, and he or she shrugs and says, “That’s okay; I’ve got a such-and-such card”. The entire army of yelling and screaming plunderers comes to a screeching halt and, throwing their arms up in disgust, they turn away and begin to ride or walk off. The announcer comes on and explains that the card has an incredibly low interest rate; the idea is that the interest won’t wipe you out like the mercenaries were getting ready to do, had you HAD a credit card from one of the OTHER companies. The final scene is usually one of those barbarians looking straight into the camera and growling, sounding something like a pirate, “What’s in YOUR Wallet?”
*****
When Jesus was asked about the temple, and what right or authority he had to have done what he did, his answer was, again, one that could be read as ambiguous were it not for John’s further explanation (something which John is known for, which sets him apart to some degree from the other Gospel writers). Jesus’ answer is a blatant foreshadowing of his death. What the people with whom he is talking take as a very concrete reference to the temple in which they are standing, John tells us in his expository paragraph,
That is a hallmark of Johns’, these expository passages, where he comes out and spells out for the reader what just happened. It is one of the things that set the Gospel of John apart from the other gospels.
Something else that sets it apart is the placement of the cleansing of the temple itself. In John, the scene is at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. He has just come from celebrating the wedding at Cana, where he performed his first miracle – the turning the water to wine.
In the synoptic gospels, the other three gospels, the cleansing of the temple takes place in the last week of Jesus’ life, right after the triumphal entry. Scholars have long debated a suitable explanation for that discrepancy. One school of thought, that would try to harmonize the gospels, in other words, merge them all into one continuous narrative, presents the possibility that there were actually two occasions on which Jesus cleansed the Temple. While it IS possible, each gospel only records it as having happened once during Jesus’ ministry. So the question becomes one surrounding the intent of the gospel writer. What was the writer trying to communicate? Was it chronology or theology? Was it more important to tell WHERE Jesus was WHEN or WHO Jesus was?
I would suggest to you that it was the second purpose that far outweighed the first in the minds of the writers of the gospels. It is much more important to communicate WHO Christ is than WHEN Christ was. The gospel word for us today is that, WHENEVER Christ WAS, Christ still IS WHO he is, our Lord, Master and Savior.
Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 6 that our bodies …
******
As we have been noting over the last couple of weeks, we are in the season of Lent, marking the approaching celebration of Easter, but going through the observance of Holy Week, the passion, crucifixion, death and resurrection of Christ. As the gospel writers – ALL the gospel writers – have written, Jesus cleansed the temple in Jerusalem. And in doing that, he redefined what the temple was. In John it is spelled out – “he was speaking of the temple of his body”. If we are to take our cue from Paul, then we need to make the jump from studying this as an historical event that Jesus took part in, to a spiritual event in which we are co-participants with Christ. He is in the process of cleansing OUR temple, MY temple. That is what being a disciple, a follower of Christ, means. Christ finds us cluttered, noisy with the incessant braying of the animals within us and the money changers who are only in it for themselves. His is indeed a righteous anger in light of what we have done, through our brokenness, to the temples that he intended us to be.
The Gospel of Grace is that he invites us to help in the cleansing. It is a free choice we make to open the doors of our innermost selves and let all the garbage out, in fact, we can help with the broom. We’ve all heard the joke – “I gave it up for Lent” – but behind the jest is a genuine desire to sacrifice and reflect on that intention and act of submitting to the Lordship of Jesus Christ – and what we are to be in the process of giving up is what Paul calls ‘die to self’ – we are giving up our brokenness and trading our sorrows for the joy of the Lord.
The question for us today, at Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton, is this: What’s in YOUR temple?
Is it envy? Is it unwillingness to forgive? Is it bitterness? Is it gossip? Is it gluttony? Is it racism? Or is it something darker, something smellier, something you dare not name in private, much less in public? Something that, as fast as you try to shovel it out, it always seems to leak back in – sometimes by drops, and sometimes gushing.
I won’t ask you to name it. I am responsible to name those for myself in front of God. We are each responsible for that act. And it is in the act of naming them that we are – HOPEFULLY – submitting them to Christ’s cleansing action. With some, like the doves, he may just need to wave his hand. Others may take some kicking and shoving to move out.
What’s in YOUR temple?
Let’s pray.
Sunday, March 19h, 2006
Lent 3B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
John 2:13-22
13 The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. 15 Making 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. 16 He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” 17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” 18 The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he was speaking of the temple of his body. 22 After 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.
The Grizzly River Rampage was just being built when I went to work at Opryland USA, in Nashville, in March of 1981. It was one of the first water raft rides in the region when it opened later that spring. The mechanics of the ride were pretty extensive. There was a central lake, a couple of waterfalls, a tunnel under a mountain, and fake boulders along a particular part of the ride. The action of waves over a riverbed was produced by laying – and bolting in – logs every few feet along the river’s course. The point of the ride was to give folks the sensation of riding a white-water raft, with no guide and no danger of anyone suffering anything other than a good splashing at a couple of spots along the way.
It was my first job, and as a YOUNG 17-year old, I was put in charge of 14 Cuban refugees, serving as both their supervisor and interpreter. At the time, I hadn’t had much experience dealing with the Cuban Spanish dialect, which is full of colloquialisms and slang words that were totally foreign to me, so I spent as much time trying to figure out what they were saying as I did translating it into English for our boss.
We were assigned the task of cleaning up the riverbed and lakebed before the water was actually pumped in and the ride primed. With landscaping and the normal runoff from the surrounding area, the lakebed, which was only about 6 feet deep, was almost a foot deep in watery, smelly, gooey mud.
After some discussion, our supervisor decided that, rather than trying to get a front loader or a mini bulldozer into the lakebed, the best way to remove the mud was by hand, using shovels and a palette with boards closing in three sides, making it roughly into another shovel, one which was suspended by the construction crane already on site, lying almost flat, slightly elevated on the open end, to hold several shovelfuls of mud, which was then lifted out and dumped elsewhere, away from where it might find it’s way back into the ride course. It must’ve been late April at this point, shortly before the Amusement Park opened, and it was already hot and muggy.
Working in the mud and trying not to slip and to maneuver a shovel quickly enough to not lose what was mostly water to begin with, and keeping the palette from lying flat and emptying that watery mud made for some pretty frustrating moments, repeating, seemingly endlessly, the same motions, basically trying to get muddy water onto the palette at a faster pace than it was running off … had it not been for the sheer industriousness of those 14 men, all working together and THEIR realizing early in the process that it was going to be a matter of speed as much as of effectiveness, the job might not have been completed that day.
It did take pretty much all day, but by the end of it we were able to look at a lakebed that only had a thin film of muddy water on it, which would soon be drying into a dusty cover that could be swept up over the next day or two to make way for the ride to be made ready for the first guests.
The first people to ride the Grizzly River Rampage were company executives, who willingly offered to test the ride. What had not been completely worked out was the motion of a loaded raft in the running water, especially if one side of the raft were loaded down with pretty big men. A couple of the rafts caught up against the boulders, and the water rushing behind them swamped them, the channel was only about two feet deep, but the waves poured over the sides, and the riders ended up considerably wetter than they had anticipated.
****
In our passage this morning, Jesus is similarly engaged in clearing out the gooey, clinging refuse of first century Jewish religious worship. While living in Spain, and a couple of times in Chile, I was able to witness pilgrimages to shrines. In both places, there were people who were selling amulets, or pictures. There were mementos, cards, trinkets to commemorate the trip, and in some cases, for the pilgrims to deliver at the place of pilgrimage. I’m sure there was some money to be made by the folks selling the items, but it seemed to have been an acceptable part of the experience. There was perhaps an element of devotion, foreign as it may seem to our Baptist sentiments and views of the practice of faith.
In the case of the money changers and sacrificial animal sellers at the temple, there was apparently a somewhat less spiritual motive to their practice. Corruption had become the order of the day in the temple, thanks to the collusion between the religious leadership and the Roman government. Everyone got a piece of the liturgical pie. Everyone, that is, except the worshippers and pilgrims themselves.
I suppose you could say that they DID end up complying with the necessary requirements for ritual cleansing, but at a cost that made it a less and less frequent event – and in a system built on the need to meet those specific requirements in order to BE righteous enough to reach heaven, the fear of not being able to MEET those requirements was palpable. Judaism became a faith governed by fear and extortion rather than by faith and hope.
Jesus went on his housecleaning rampage as much to clear that fear from the minds and hearts of the pilgrims and worshippers as to actually get rid of the profiteers and racketeers who were taking advantage of them and reaping the benefits from it.
******
There’s a commercial where two people are shopping or eating somewhere, and they get to the point of paying and one reaches in their wallet or purse and offers to pay for it with their credit card from such-and-such bank, the other person makes some comment concerning the interest rate wiping them out. The comment triggers the crashing appearance of a horde of raging, smashing, pillaging and plundering marauders from the dark ages, Vikings or Visigoths, or some kind of barbarians, swinging axes and swords, mallets and balls on chains. They get right up to the person paying, who is completely unperturbed by their storming towards them, and he or she shrugs and says, “That’s okay; I’ve got a such-and-such card”. The entire army of yelling and screaming plunderers comes to a screeching halt and, throwing their arms up in disgust, they turn away and begin to ride or walk off. The announcer comes on and explains that the card has an incredibly low interest rate; the idea is that the interest won’t wipe you out like the mercenaries were getting ready to do, had you HAD a credit card from one of the OTHER companies. The final scene is usually one of those barbarians looking straight into the camera and growling, sounding something like a pirate, “What’s in YOUR Wallet?”
*****
When Jesus was asked about the temple, and what right or authority he had to have done what he did, his answer was, again, one that could be read as ambiguous were it not for John’s further explanation (something which John is known for, which sets him apart to some degree from the other Gospel writers). Jesus’ answer is a blatant foreshadowing of his death. What the people with whom he is talking take as a very concrete reference to the temple in which they are standing, John tells us in his expository paragraph,
“21 But he was speaking of the temple of his body. 22 After 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.”
That is a hallmark of Johns’, these expository passages, where he comes out and spells out for the reader what just happened. It is one of the things that set the Gospel of John apart from the other gospels.
Something else that sets it apart is the placement of the cleansing of the temple itself. In John, the scene is at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. He has just come from celebrating the wedding at Cana, where he performed his first miracle – the turning the water to wine.
In the synoptic gospels, the other three gospels, the cleansing of the temple takes place in the last week of Jesus’ life, right after the triumphal entry. Scholars have long debated a suitable explanation for that discrepancy. One school of thought, that would try to harmonize the gospels, in other words, merge them all into one continuous narrative, presents the possibility that there were actually two occasions on which Jesus cleansed the Temple. While it IS possible, each gospel only records it as having happened once during Jesus’ ministry. So the question becomes one surrounding the intent of the gospel writer. What was the writer trying to communicate? Was it chronology or theology? Was it more important to tell WHERE Jesus was WHEN or WHO Jesus was?
I would suggest to you that it was the second purpose that far outweighed the first in the minds of the writers of the gospels. It is much more important to communicate WHO Christ is than WHEN Christ was. The gospel word for us today is that, WHENEVER Christ WAS, Christ still IS WHO he is, our Lord, Master and Savior.
Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 6 that our bodies …
“Are a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.”
******
As we have been noting over the last couple of weeks, we are in the season of Lent, marking the approaching celebration of Easter, but going through the observance of Holy Week, the passion, crucifixion, death and resurrection of Christ. As the gospel writers – ALL the gospel writers – have written, Jesus cleansed the temple in Jerusalem. And in doing that, he redefined what the temple was. In John it is spelled out – “he was speaking of the temple of his body”. If we are to take our cue from Paul, then we need to make the jump from studying this as an historical event that Jesus took part in, to a spiritual event in which we are co-participants with Christ. He is in the process of cleansing OUR temple, MY temple. That is what being a disciple, a follower of Christ, means. Christ finds us cluttered, noisy with the incessant braying of the animals within us and the money changers who are only in it for themselves. His is indeed a righteous anger in light of what we have done, through our brokenness, to the temples that he intended us to be.
The Gospel of Grace is that he invites us to help in the cleansing. It is a free choice we make to open the doors of our innermost selves and let all the garbage out, in fact, we can help with the broom. We’ve all heard the joke – “I gave it up for Lent” – but behind the jest is a genuine desire to sacrifice and reflect on that intention and act of submitting to the Lordship of Jesus Christ – and what we are to be in the process of giving up is what Paul calls ‘die to self’ – we are giving up our brokenness and trading our sorrows for the joy of the Lord.
The question for us today, at Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton, is this: What’s in YOUR temple?
Is it envy? Is it unwillingness to forgive? Is it bitterness? Is it gossip? Is it gluttony? Is it racism? Or is it something darker, something smellier, something you dare not name in private, much less in public? Something that, as fast as you try to shovel it out, it always seems to leak back in – sometimes by drops, and sometimes gushing.
I won’t ask you to name it. I am responsible to name those for myself in front of God. We are each responsible for that act. And it is in the act of naming them that we are – HOPEFULLY – submitting them to Christ’s cleansing action. With some, like the doves, he may just need to wave his hand. Others may take some kicking and shoving to move out.
What’s in YOUR temple?
Let’s pray.
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