Sermon — March 7, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Readings for the Third Sunday in Lent

Back when we had more free time in the evenings, Alice and I loved watching detective, crime, and spy shows: Bones and Grantchester and Foyle’s War; one of Alice’s family’s favorites is the great BBC miniseries of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. We tend to do better with forensics or old-fashioned detectives than with modern action movies, for a simple reason. There comes a time, in every chase scene, when a poor street vendor’s fruit cart is overturned—either knocked over in an attempted diversion or smashed through by a racing car—and Alice, in this moment, is overcome with distress.

This trope is so common that that it even has an entry in Roger Ebert’s Glossary of Movie Terms, filed under “Fruit Cart.” And every time we see it happen, I see Alice get distracted, thinking about the poor fruit-seller whose Tuesday morning just got ruined, who’s going to have to stand there now and pick up bushels of bruised fruit, with no help, by the way, from the detective.

And while we don’t often have very much sympathy for the moneychangers and animal-sellers, today’s gospel story—what we often call “the Cleansing of the Temple”—is Jesus’ fruit-cart moment. Jesus wants to make a point, and so he goes to the Temple, and drives out the animals, and he dumps out the moneyboxes, and he flips over the tables, and he walks out, leaving all these vendors to clean up the mess he’s made of a random morning during their busiest week of the year.

The moneychangers and animal-sellers, after all, aren’t really doing anything wrong. And if you want to understand what Jesus is doing in this story, I think it’s important to start by talking about what he’s not doing, because the ancient Temple in Jerusalem is quite foreign to our experience of religion.

First: Jesus is not driving out “the moneylenders,” but “the moneychangers.” (John 2:15) People often misquote this verse, but it’s an anti-Semitic Freudian slip. It’s just a way of taking a medieval association between Jews and banking and projecting it onto Jesus’ day with dangerous implications. Jesus isn’t somehow validating alt-right fantasies about Jewish financiers.

I’m sure nobody listening to this sermon thinks he is. You might imagine, though, that Jesus’ issue here is the commercialization of religion, this strange collection of animal-sellers and moneychangers who’ve “made my Father’s house a marketplace!” (John 2:16) We see the same kind of commercialization in our religious world, and many of us rue the fact that Christmas has become all about shopping, or that Easter’s become all about candy. And certainly, Jesus says that his problem is that this commerce is going on inside the Temple; it’s made the house of God into a place of business.

But Jesus is actually saying something even more radical than this.

We shouldn’t imagine that this is like setting up a flea market in the back of our little church at 10am on a Sunday morning, with the clink of coins and the beep of cash registers drowning out our reflective music and pious prayers. The Temple itself was a small building, somewhere around this size, actually, but only the priests entered it. The Temple complex, on the other hand, was huge, a quarter of the area of ancient Jerusalem. You could literally walk from St. John’s to the Whole Foods to the Monument without ever leaving the Temple grounds, so it wasn’t the kind of clash of commerce and worship you sometimes see in paintings of this scene.

More importantly, though, buying and selling animals and changing coins from one currency to another weren’t a commercial replacement for worship; they were actually vital to the functioning of the Temple itself. Worship in the Temple was built around animal sacrifice. Depending on their wealth and how thankful they were feeling (or how sinful they’d been), worshipers would bring a cow, or a sheep, or a dove to the Temple, and give it to the priests, who would butcher the animal and cook it. (A somewhat different skill set from priests today.) In some kinds of sacrifice, the animal would be wholly offered to God, burned on the altar. In other cases, the priests would keep a small part for themselves as their payment and return the rest to the worshipers to share with their families in a festive meal. The priests offered sacrifices in the Temple every day, but ordinary people only came up to Jerusalem to worship on a few major festivals during the year, so worshiping in the Temple was more like a holiday feast than our ordinary week-to-week worship in the synagogue or the church.

So, selling animals at the Temple made worship more inclusive and more equitable. Not everyone, after all, is a farmer; even in an agrarian society like first-century Judea and Galilee, many people were artisans or laborer. Jesus the carpenter’s son and his fishing friends wouldn’t be any more likely to own their own cattle or sheep or doves to sacrifice than you are! So of course, people need to buy the animals to offer, just like you do at the butcher’s counter.

Animals that were going to be offered also had to be healthy and uninjured. If you bought an animal at home and brought it with you on a journey through the Judean hill country to the Temple, it might get hurt along the way, and you’d be unable to offer it and stuck with the bill. Selling animals in the Temple was almost an insurance policy, protecting people from having to carry that financial risk themselves.

And what about changing coins? Well, the answer’s in your pocket. Pull out a random coin  or bill from your wallet, and you’ll probably see a human face. Ancient coins were no different, almost always stamped with the image of the current ruler. But if you were paying attention to the first reading this morning, you might remember that the Second Commandment specifically warns against creating images of people or animals. “You 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…” (Exodus 20:4) Because ancient kings were regularly treated as divine, it would have been blasphemous to bring a coin stamped with the image of the king into the Temple. The money-changers were there to help you exchange ordinary, idolatrous coins for those that could be used in the Temple, and keep you from violating the Second Commandment.^[1]

To make a long sermon short: the vendors whose proverbial fruit carts Jesus overturns are not bad guys in this story. They’re not distracting people from worship, but making it possible for everyone to participate. They’re not exploiting the poor, but protecting them from financial risk. They’re not displacing religion with commerce, they’re helping people follow God’s commandments.

It’s too easy for us to say that when Jesus drives out the animal sellers and the money changers, he’s purifying or “cleansing” worship in the Temple. He’s doing something more to his people’s worship. He’s stopping it altogether.

You might be surprised to hear that the Christianity, Judaism, and even the Bible itself have mixed feelings about what we call “worship,” this ritualized offering of praise and prayer to God. On the one hand, God gives elaborate instructions in the Torah on precisely how to offer various kinds of sacrifices; on the other hand, no sacrifice has been offered since the Temple was destroyed two thousand years ago. Neither the Old nor the New Testament seem to imagine the weekly worship that we’re used to, nor do they give instructions on exactly how to do it. Time and again, the ancient prophets criticize the people for focusing too much on worship and not enough on ethics. Even the early Christians were sometimes accused of being atheists for their refusal to offer worship to the gods of their own time, and the absence of something their contemporaries recognized as worship.

We even see this in the story of the Ten Commandments. When God first calls Moses, he tells him, “When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” (Exodus 3:12) And after each of the plagues, when Moses speaks with Pharaoh, he doesn’t simply say, “Let my people go!” It’s always, “Let my people go, so that they may worship [God].” (Exodus 8:1, 8:20, 9:1, 9:13 et al) So when Moses has finally freed the people, and he’s parted the Red Sea, and they’ve escaped from slavery, they arrive at the mountain and they prepare to worship God, but they don’t know what to do. “Then,” Exodus says, “God spoke all these words” (Exodus 20:1)—and the first thing God tells them on the mountain where they’ve been told to worship is not how to pray, or which animals to offer and when, but how to live as free people in relationship with God and one another. And all of a sudden you realize there was a pun all along, because the Hebrew word that means “worship” also means “serve,” and to “serve God” doesn’t only or even necessarily mean to “worship” God in the sense we usually mean.

“Destroy this temple,” Jesus says, “and in three days I will raise it up.” (John 2:19) Bold claim. For forty-six years, the finest builders in the land have been renovating the Temple Mount. Destroy it, and you’ll rebuild it in three days? But he’s speaking, of course, about himself. When Jesus walks the earth, the Temple is not “the house of God,” the place where God dwells. It’s him. It’s not the regular offering of sacrifices in worship at a particular building that’s the point; it’s relationship with Jesus. To pick up the Ten Commandments again: God’s answer to how the people ought to worship is that what’s primarily important is not how we worship, but how we live in relationship with God and one another.

And thanks be to God for that.

Because the Temple has lain in ruin for near two thousand years. This building has been closed for most of fifty-something weeks. Our worship has been disrupted more completely than Jesus’ table-turning ever could have done. And we miss it dearly, and we long to return. (And I’ll have an announcement for you in a few minutes on that.) And maybe we feel like fruit-sellers whose carts have been overturned, depressed at the prospect of cleaning it all up and rebuilding the ordinary.

Because God, Jesus seemed to say, does not live in the Temple. He’s walking among you. God does not live in the church; he is among us. We say that the Church is the Body of Christ; but that does not mean that the church is the Body of Christ. What I mean to say is that the Church—you—are the Body of Christ; the church—this building—is not. Jesus has ascended, and now it is in you and through you and among you that God walks the earth. And just as the ancient Israelites wondered how to worship God and were given the Ten Commandments, it is with your very lives that you worship and serve God—in your relationships with Jesus and with one another. So may we all live our lives with “God’s foolishness [which] is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness [which] is stronger than human strength.” (1 Cor. 1:25) Amen.

^[1] Raymond, E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII, The Anchor Yale Bible. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 115.

“Hoping against hope, he believed…” (Romans 4:18)

Can somebody on Zoom finish the expression for me: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, ______”?

Well, you all know it! But Abraham certainly did not. And we know this for two reasons. The first is that Abraham didn’t speak modern English, so if you said this to him, he’d just be confused. But the second reason is that this is not Abraham’s first time having this particular conversation with God. And in fact, it won’t be his last.

One of the limitations of our lectionary is that you only ever get a part of the story, and that’s fine; nobody wants to sit here and read the eleven chapters of Genesis that it takes to tell the story of Abraham and Sarah. In Lent, I’ll be following our Old Testament readings as they move forward in history, starting with Noah last week; but there’s not enough time during these six weeks to read the whole Old Testament, so we get just a taste of each phase: first Noah, now Abraham, then next week on to Moses and beyond. We lose something when we take these snippets. It’s not just that we lose the context or the bigger picture. It’s that we lose the Biblical characters’ sense of exasperation in waiting for God to do something, for once. And when Abraham finally falls over laughing at the end of this reading from Genesis, that’s exactly what he’s feeling: exasperation and disbelief. Because this is not the first time God’s made a prediction to Abraham, and not one of them has ever happened yet.

The very first thing that happens to Abraham in the Bible is that God appears and makes a promise. It comes out of nowhere, right at the beginning of Genesis 12, with no introduction at all: “Now the LORD said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great…’ So Abram went, as the LORD had told him…[and he] was seventy-five years old.” (Genesis 12:1–2, 4) So Abram and Sarai go, and wander where God leads. They go down into Egypt; they come back up into Canaan; but still nothing seems to have happened.

And then God appears again; God makes the promise again. God appears to Abram in the dry land where he wanders and tells him that his offspring will be as numerous as the dust of the earth, uncountable in number. (Gen. 13:16) And God goes away, and Abram lives his life, and wages war with great kings, and still he has no children. So God appears to Abram yet again and says he’s offering Abram a great reward, but Abram asks simply, “What will you give me, for I continue childless? …You have given me no offspring.” (Gen. 15:2-3) God takes Abram out into the desert at night and tells him that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars of the sky and the dust of the earth (Gen. 15:5). And nothing happens. Another year, another divine appearance, another promise still unfulfilled.

Now, Abram and Sarai are getting a bit old for child-rearing—by which I mean, they’re their eighties and nineties—and no child has appeared. It seems that God won’t follow through on the promise. So Abram and Sarai take things into their own hands. They come up with a horrifying scheme that’s the inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale—Abram will conceive a child with Sarai’s slave Hagar instead, and so the child, Ishmael, will be his son. This, they think, must be what God intends. And Ishmael is born, and unsurprisingly, there’s family drama.

And then finally, twenty-five years after the first appearance, when Abram is ninety-nine years old, God appears again, in this morning’s reading, and promises to make him “exceedingly numerous.” (Gen. 17:2)

And Abram is speechless. Can you blame him?

There’s this trope that I love in Biblical narrative when someone is really at a loss for words. God appears out of nowhere, and speaks to Abram for the first time: “I am God Almighty; walk before me” and so on, for a whole speech. And Abram says nothing. And then when God speaks again in verse 9, which our reading skips, the narrator says, “And God said to Abraham…” And again, Abraham says nothing. And then God speaks again, and the narrator says, “And God said to Abraham.” (17:15) Instead of writing it as one long speech, the narrator keeps pausing, as if to leave a space for Abraham to fill—but he can’t! There’s nothing to say. It’s as if you had a screenplay:

GOD: I am God Almighty (and so on and so on…)
ABRAHAM: …
GOD: As for you, you shall keep my covenant (and so on and so forth…)
ABRAHAM: …
GOD: As for Sarah your wife, (etc., etc.)

And Abraham falls on his face, laughing. “I’m a hundred years old! Sarah’s ninety! I have a son—Ishmael—isn’t that what you wanted me to do?” “No,” God says, “but Sarah will bear you a son…”

And God goes away. And—by the way—still no baby appears until God returns one more time, finally ready to make good on the promise.

“I am God Almighty,” God says, “walk before me, and be blameless.” (Genesis 17:1) Abraham has walked a long way before God in these twenty-five years. But he’s certainly not blameless. “Walk before me,” you might translate it, “and be perfect.” But nobody in the Bible, let alone in our world, is perfect. And anyone who’s been following along with Abraham’s story knows that he’s far from perfect.

Paul, to be fair, gives him a lot of credit. Abraham “did not weaken in faith,” Paul writes to the church in Rome, “when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead… or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb… No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God.” (Romans 4:19–20)

“No distrust made him waver.” Okay, even setting aside the moment where he falls on his face laughing at God’s fourth attempt to make this promise, this isn’t quite true, is it? Abraham and Sarah assume God’s plan won’t work, and make a troubling arrangement with Hagar instead. There’s a lot that could be said about this exploitative relationship, but Abraham is far from “blameless.” In a more-trivial way, Abraham and Sarah are each so exasperated with God’s tardiness that, in separate stories, each one laughs in God’s face. They’ve been living with this promise for a quarter-century, and nothing has ever changed. Why should this time be any different?

But in some deeper sense, even in speechless disbelief, Abraham believed God, “and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” (Romans 4:3)

 “Hoping against hope,” Paul writes, “he believed.” (Romans 4:18) After three empty promises, with no change in sight, he believed. Speechless and laughing in disbelief, nevertheless in some sense he believed.

The word “believe” is a remarkably unhelpful translation of the verb Paul uses here, writing in Greek. “Belief,” to most of us, is a kind of thinking; if you believe a prediction, it means you think it will come true; if you believe in God, it means you think that God exists. But that’s not exactly what the Bible usually means by “believe,” and so you’ll sometimes hear this word translated as “trust,” so that “Hoping against hope, Abraham trusted God.” By the end of this story, though, it doesn’t really seem that Abraham has much reason to trust God’s promise. I’ve always thought that another translation is helpful. The verb for “believe” or “trust” is closely related to the word for “faith,” and it means not just “faith” in our religious sense, but “faithfulness.”

And that, perhaps, is one thing we can say. Abraham may not have believed in God’s promise. Abraham may not have trusted God to follow through. But Abraham, without a doubt, was faithful to God; and indeed, in the end, God turned out to be faithful to Abraham. God calls Abraham to blamelessness; but Paul praises him for faithfulness. And that, I think, is good news for us.

If you haven’t been shaken by doubt in the last year—if you haven’t lost faith, if you haven’t been left speechless, if you haven’t fallen on your face laughing in exasperation with your family, your government, or your God—then I want whatever you’re eating for breakfast, because I, for one, have done all those things at least ten times. But here I am: still married; still your pastor—still, by the way, never having taken up arms to overthrow the government!— sometimes laughing in disbelief; sometimes full of mistrust; but faithful even when doubtful; hoping against hope even when filled with despair.

“Faithfulness” is not about being perfect. It’s not about being blameless in everything you do. It’s certainly not about believing at every moment. If this were what it meant to be faithful, Paul would never have praised Abraham as he did. Faithfulness isn’t about never failing; it’s about what happens when you inevitably fail, it’s about how you repair what is broken and restore what has been lost. Faithfulness is failing, again and again, and returning, again and again. It’s about waiting, and watching, and hoping, for as long as it takes, for the promise of the future to become the present.

And if we only have the faith of Abraham—the faith that takes missteps, that flags and fails, that waits and waits and waits through endless days, that hopes beyond hope—that’s all God asks for.

When Alice and I got married at Christ Church Cambridge, we had our reception in the parish hall, because not only are we two little church mice, but it only cost $75/hour to rent, which is about $15,000 cheaper than anything else for a wedding reception in Harvard Square. So we spent our whole budget on food and photography and a big guest list, and we put out some cocktail tables with nice tablecloths, and nobody could see the scuffed-up floor we were dancing on anyway.

It was the perfect plan. Except that our wedding was on July 11, and the parish hall was not air-conditioned, and we’d have a hundred-fifty-something guests. So when temperatures broke into the high 80s during the week before the ceremony, I found myself on the phone with the church’s architect, who was working on renovation plans for the parish house, trying to figure out exactly how many of the air conditioners we’d bought at Ocean State Job Lot we could plug into exactly which of the walls without overwhelming the church’s mid-20^th-century electrical systems. It was a little crazy, but we identified the circuits, we figured out a plan, we drew up a diagram, and we were all set.

And so it was that the mother-son dance began that night, in a room that felt warm but not hot, full of friends and family and two delighted newlyweds and three large air conditioners. And as my mother and I began to dance, in a sweet moment we would forever cherish in our memories, all of a sudden: silence!, as the AC kicked back on, tripping a circuit breaker and cutting off all power to the DJ, who had set himself up, despite our careful planning, in the wrong corner of the room.

This happened two or three more times during the night before we figured it out. We unplugged that air conditioner, and while it did get a bit hot in the parish hall, it was still the most fun I’ve ever had at a wedding.

As much as a tripped circuit breaker or a blown fuse might be annoying to a homeowner or a room full of wedding guests, they’re incredibly important. An electrical circuit, after all, can only carry a certain amount of load. If you draw too much power, the actual wires in the circuit can begin to overheat to a dangerous point. So any reasonable system has fuses or circuit breakers built into it, something that will blow or trip and interrupt the circuit before the load stresses it too much and it becomes dangerous. Because, it turns out, your wedding is much more fun if you ruin the mother-son dance than it is if you burn down the church.

And that, according to the Book of Genesis, is why we have rainbows.

Think back to our Old Testament lesson from Genesis this morning. This passage comes at the very end of the story of the Flood, after God’s destroyed everything on earth except for Noah and his family and the ark full of animals.

God seems to regret the decision a bit, because almost immediately after Noah and his family touch dry land, he promises never to do it again. He calls this a covenant, which means a binding agreement or a treaty, but you’ll notice that it’s unconditional; it’s binding only on God. “I establish my covenant with you,” God says, “that never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” (Gen 9:11) This is good. But any of us who’ve made New Year’s resolutions or chosen Lenten disciplines know that they’re hard to stick to, and God does too; so God, with excellent self-knowledge, sets up a kind of automated reminder: “I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant…and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.” (Gen 9:13-15)

God doesn’t promise never to become angry with humanity again—God knows none of us can control our emotions like that—but God does set a sign. God sets God’s bow in the clouds. And so every time God brings a storm, and the winds rage, and the waters threaten to overcome the earth again, God sees the rainbow, and remembers the promise, and it’s like a circuit breaker for God’s anger, a sign that God’s rage is about to spill over into destruction, and it trips some circuit within God’s mind, and it defuses the situation, and God remembers not to destroy us again.

Now, this is not how rainstorms or rainbows work, according to modern meteorology. Indeed, there’s disagreement between the authors of different books of the Bible about God’s temper: our reading for Ash Wednesday from the Book of Joel, for example, claims that God is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.” (Joel 2:13) So if you’re uncertain about this notion of an angry God needing a reminder not to destroy us, as I think most of us are, you’re in good company. I’d invite you, though, for the next few minutes, to see God’s circuit-breaking rainbow as an image of what Lent can help us learn.

I grew up in a Congregational church, where we didn’t really give things up for Lent; that was something Catholics did. I know many of you, who grew up in the Catholic Church, probably have given things up (or been forced to give them up!): chocolate or soda, meat on Fridays, maybe alcohol when you were older. Depending on how much guilt and shame was pumped into this, you may be one of the many people who gives up Lent for Lent, especially this year. But I want to suggest a different way of looking at this “giving up,” one that was news to me when I heard about it and may be new to you.

Lenten fasts are not about fasting from something bad, about picking one of your vices and trying to give it up permanently. We should do that all the time, although if there’s some destructive pattern in your life that you need to give up, Lent, as a season of repentance, is a perfectly good time to start. Nor is Lent just about taking on a good thing, though that’s also a very admirable practice. Again, we should do good things all the time, although, again, Lent’s a perfectly good time to start something new and good. Fasting is something a little different—it’s not giving up a bad thing forever, or taking on a good thing; it’s giving up a good thing for a certain time. Fasting only exists in relationship to feasting, and that’s why Lenten fasts only run Monday through Saturday; every Sunday is a feast of the resurrection, a miniature Easter in the midst of Lent.

So why give up an innocent luxury like chocolate or reality TV for Lent? I don’t think it’s because pleasure or enjoyment are bad; they’re not. I don’t think it’s some way of making amends for our sins; that’s Jesus’ work on Good Friday, not ours in Lent. Nor is it a way of punishing ourselves through deprivation; that’s not necessary to receive the kind of unconditional love God offers us. I think the reason to give something us is to help us learn where to put our circuit breakers.

Let’s say that I give up something for Lent. I will be tempted, over and over again, to indulge. And it’s a useful exercise to try to understand just when that is. Say I’ve given up Facebook for Lent. It’s not the end of the world if I give in to that temptation for some mindless scrolling. That’s why we fast from relatively-innocent things! But if I give in again and again, I may start to notice some patterns. It’s easy for me, on a Friday morning at 11am, if I’ve got my sermon printed and I had a good night’s sleep, to resist virtually any kind of temptation. But when I am hungry, or angry, or lonely, or tired; when I am feeling unloved, or scared, or frustrated, my willpower is weak, and I just might lose my battle with temptation.

You’ll likely find that the same things that weaken your willpower to resist those small temptations of Lent are the ones that lead you to real sins: the same moments of hunger or boredom or exhaustion in which I might turn to the News Feed are the ones in which I might turn to gossip, or be snippy with my spouse, or any one of a number of much worse patterns of behavior. But studying those moments and learning from them is an opportunity to set your rainbow in the clouds, so to speak; to set reminders and guardrails, to install fuses and circuit breakers in your life that stop you from heading down that road, to set switches that flip when your circuits are overloaded and force you to power down for a moment.

I know that these days, that’s easier said than done. It’s hard to find ways to unwind or decompress when you can’t just go out meet a friend or go off on a retreat. It’s hard to flip the breaker on a fight with your spouse when you’ve been stuck at home together for eleven months. It’s even harder to break out of the circuit of loneliness or worry when you’ve been stuck alone all year.

But it’s the most important thing any of us can do. It’s hard to learn the signs that you’re overloaded, and even harder to wire the right circuit breakers into your life. But it’s nowhere near as hard as realizing you’ve burned your house down all around you.

God has learned to do this pretty well, it seems. After all, we’ve all seen storms. We’ve all seen rainbows. But God has never again destroyed all life on earth with a flood. So may we learn, this Lent, with whatever little temptations we try to resist, how to take care of ourselves so that we can resist the big ones; and may God, to paraphrase the psalm, “guide [us who are] humble in doing right, and teach his way to [we who are] lowly,” (Psalm 25:8) so that we may have the grace to grow into the shape of God’s patient and forgiving love. Amen.