Sermon — April 2, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“‘This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord:
I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds.’
he also adds, ‘I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.’”
(Hebrews 10:16-17)

It sometimes feels as though the days since last April have been not just one long Lent but one long Good Friday. It’s been a year of extraordinary suffering and death. It’s been a year in which many people have felt betrayed and abandoned by the very institutions that were supposed to care for them or their parents or their children; a year of isolation perhaps less intense than Jesus’ deep loneliness on the cross, but a thousand times more prolonged.

But there’s another, less-obvious way in which we’ve had a Good-Friday year, and that is the profound sense that so many people have had of constantly letting someone down. If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to read the New York Times’s “Primal Scream.” In a stroke of brilliance the journalists set up a voicemail box with the invitation: “Are you a parent who’s tired as [heck]? Call us and scream after the beep.” And boy, did people call.

The callers’ emotions range from anxiety to frustration to exhaustion; from despair at the public-health situation and anger at their employers to rage at their spouses and exasperation with their beloved children. But there was one quotation that particularly struck me, because I’ve heard it from others, and felt it myself: “I wish I had the energy to scream. All my energy just goes into getting through every day, until I can go to sleep. I have three kids,” the caller adds for context, “all in virtual schools since March, and work full time. And it just feels like failing, every day, at everything I do.” And whether you’re a parent or not, working or not, I imagine you’ve felt, at some point, that feeling—that you don’t have enough right now, you are not enough right now, to handle all of this.

There is, as the author of Hebrews puts it, quoting the prophet Jeremiah, a law that is written in our hearts and on our minds, a law that is exacting and demanding; a law that allows no wiggle-room and gives no warnings; a law that commands us, to borrow Jesus’ words from the Gospel of Matthew: “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48)

Our society’s form of perfectionism is different, of course, from this Christian perfection; but Christian perfection is equally demanding and equally unattainable. While perfectionism demands that we juggle a dozen glass balls at once and never break a single one, Christian perfection insists that we see the world with God’s eyes and respond to the world with God’s patient love at all times. Jesus commands us, as I noted at our Maundy Thursday service last night, to “love one another; just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 13:34) But this is a man speaking who’s about to give his life for you, and he demands that you show that same self-sacrificial love.

The story of Good Friday is the story of the disciples’ failure to love as Jesus has loved, the story of their betrayal and denial and abandonment in the face of his patient and enduring love. But every day is the story of our failure to love one another as God has loved us. In the new covenant that we’ve received in Christ God has put the law of perfect love inside our hearts and written it on our minds. We love imperfectly, all the same.

But then, “he also adds, ‘I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.’” And what a gift this is. In the very same breath in which God promises to write the law on our hearts, God promises to forgive our lawlessness and forget our sins. “Love one another,” God commands us, “as I have loved you”; “love your neighbor as yourself”; “Be perfect!”— but I won’t remember if you’re not.

It’s a juxtaposition that the Lutheran tradition often abbreviates as “Law and Gospel.” The “Law” is all the burden of expectation and commandment and measurement that holds us to a standard we can never hope to achieve. The Law is a good and inspiring and beautiful thing—“love your neighbor as yourself,” it commands—but for imperfect people, a perfect law is always and impossible thing. The “Gospel,” on the other hand, is the good news, the liberating grace of God, the promise that in our darkest moments, as surely as in our brightest ones—in our most quotidian mediocrity as in our most inspired aspirations—God is there, forgiving us and loving us all the same.

The Good News of Good Friday is not that, with a little prayer and some good old-fashioned elbow grease, you can become a more perfect person. The Good News is that you’re never going to fail, or that your failures aren’t real. It’s precisely that you are, and always will be, imperfect. You can have the closest relationship with Jesus that anyone could imagine, you could have the strongest faith in the world, you could be a saint as holy as Peter himself—but in real life you will inevitably fail, again and again, and again, sometimes three times before breakfast. But God  will forget it, again and again and again, and again and again and again, and again, and again…

This “good news” is profoundly different from the forces that shape our psychology, whether religious or secular. Maybe your struggle isn’t perfectionism, per se. But everyone one of us has been given a law, by our parents or our preachers or our peers, that puts us to shame; every one of us has been taught a standard by which we sometimes judge ourselves a failure. If you never feel like you’re failing, in fact, it may be a bad sign; in an imperfect and unloving world, it’s often been observed, the people with the highest self-esteem turn out to be the sociopaths.

And when we arrive at Good Friday, carrying the baggage of a lifetime of the laws that tell us that we fail, we find a very different story: an innocent God the law says ought to die, laying down his life for us in the ultimate forgiveness of all our lawlessness. There is no day that better shows our human failure to love God than the day on which we nailed God to the cross; there is no day that better shows God’s love for us in all our brokenness than the day on which God died to set us free.

The law that is written on our hearts demands perfection, and we fail. But the Gospel, the good news, is that Christ takes for granted all our failure and imperfection, and he forgave it already long ago. Christ our great high priest has entered into the heavenly Temple and “opened for us the curtain” that separated us from God, making one final offering and sacrifice for sin. All our sin—all the burden of the shame of our imperfection—to paraphrase one of my favorite hymns, “has been nailed to the cross, and we bear it no more—praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!”

We don’t have to be perfect. So then, what do we do?

Like all good writers, the author of Hebrews concludes with a list of three strong verbs: “let us approach,” “let us hold fast,” “let us consider.”

“Let us approach with true hearts in the assurance of faith.” (Heb. 10:22) Let us come before God, in other words, not distracted by the anxiety of our imperfection, but reveling in the vastness of God’s love. In worship and in prayer, at home and at work and in the church, let us rest in the assurance that God knows and loves us in all our imperfection, that God forgives us in all our failures.

And “let us hold fast to the confession of our hope.” (Heb. 10:23) In the stormiest days of our lives, when the wind and the waves of world events or family feuds or our own minds threaten to sink our little rafts, when all we can do is to utter that “primal scream” into the void of a voicemail box, let us hold fast to the anchor of our hope; let us remember God’s promise of resurrection, God’s promise to transform the world into the kingdom of God’s love. For “the one who’s made the promise is faithful.”

And “let us consider how to provoke one another,” not to irritation or to anger, but “to love and good deeds…encouraging one another all the more.” (Heb. 10:25) Let us remember, in other words, that the story of sin and redemption, of Law and Gospel, of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, is not a private or a personal story; it is our story, a story we live together. Our shame isolates us from one another. Let our forgiveness draw us closer to one another. We need one another’s encouragement; we need one another’s provocation to love. We need one another’s hope when we are hopeless; we need one another’s prayer when we cannot find the words to pray.

So, imperfect as we are, let us approach God in the assurance that comes from faith; let us hold fast to the confession of our hope; and let us provoke one another to ever-greater acts of love, remembering always that when our faith fails, God is faithful; when our hope fades, God is hopeful; when our love for God is dim, God’s love for us shines more brightly than we can imagine—even on the darkest day of his life. Amen.

Sermon — April 1, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Sermon — March 28, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

When I was in college, I did a summer internship in Governor Patrick’s Office of Constituent Services. At its best, this meant helping connect people to the right state agencies to solve their problems, or even getting them on the phone with a real person from, for example, the RMV Ombudsman’s Office. At its worst, this meant being the low-ranking punching-bag fielding random Bay Staters’ complaints about their governor. In retrospect, it wasn’t bad preparation for the priesthood.

I’d received a grant, so I was the only intern there full-time, which meant I had some special privileges. For example, on most I got to open all the mail that had been sent to the Governor, to be sorted and handled appropriately. And it was a special delight that hot summer that I got to do it in a cool, quiet room by myself, away from the constantly-ringing phones. (I just tried not to think about the fact that this was so I didn’t expose anyone else if any of the envelopes contained anthrax.)

On occasion that summer—but more often when I was filing older correspondence down the hall—I’d run into a very strange envelope, containing two things: first, an outraged letter protesting the disgusting fiscal policy of “Taxachusetts,” coated in a fine, brown dust; and second, the source of the dust, a single bag of tea.

You may have thought it was a rumor, but I can assure you that in the early, chaotic days of the grassroots Tea Party movement, there were in fact people mailing bags of tea to their elected officials in protest of taxation. And sometimes we filed them for posterity.

Of course, we’re Bostonians here, and so whether or not we agree with the modern Tea Party, we all know what the symbolism of the Boston Tea Party means: patriotism, rebellion, resistance against unjust taxation; political values that can be evoked, however comically, by a single bag of tea.

And so, while you may not recognize the symbols themselves, you might be able to understand what Jesus is doing when he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey and the people wave their palms. It was a symbol that the people in the crowd would have recognized, as surely as we recognize the symbolism of a Tea Party. They had heard the ancient words of the prophet Zechariah, repeated over and over during the long years of Greek and Roman occupation. “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!” Zechariah proclaimed. “Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” (Zech. 9:9) There’s nothing glorious about a donkey, of course, any more than there’s something rebellious about a bag of Lipton tea. But the people celebrate because of what it means: the return of the king.

As Jesus begins to ride into the city on his humble mount, the people respond with even more symbols. Some spread their cloaks on the ground to protect even this humble steed’s hoofs from becoming dirty, as they’d done for newly-coronated kings in the days of old. (2 Kings 9:13). Others cut branches from alongside the road and waved them as they’d done in patriotic parades and military triumphs for generations, (1 Macc. 13:51; 2 Macc 10:7) the hadas and aravah and etrog—the myrtle and willow and citron—and most of all, the lulav, the leafy branches of the date palm. Okay, we mostly talk about the palms, but these were the four species of leafy greens used in the festival of Sukkot, a huge national celebration. Along with the menorah, they were the most recognizable symbols of Jewish national identity in Jesus’ day, a millennium before the Star of David was created. These were such cherished national symbols that the armies fighting for Jewish independence in the century after Jesus’ death stamped them onto their coins alongside phrases like, “For the Freedom of Jerusalem.”

So when the people see this charismatic teacher riding into the city on a donkey like Zechariah’s long-imagined king, they react with the most powerful symbols they can. They shield his feet like a newly-crowned ruler. They wave their leafy branches like so many colorful flags. They cry out, “Hosanna!” (Aramaic for, “Save us, we pray!”) “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Mark 11:9–10)

Even the Roman regime couldn’t miss the point. Here was yet another pretender to the throne—so the Romans would think—another man hungry for power, claiming descent from David through some murky paternal line, gathering a band of rebels to seize the royal city.

But it’s not going to mean what they think.

There are many parallels between the prophecies of Zechariah and the life and death of Jesus. Zechariah imagines an “anointed one” (4:14) who is accused by Satan, (3:1) a royal “Branch” who will “command peace to the nations” (3:8, 9:10). A king whose life will be valued at thirty pieces of silver thrown into the treasury, (11:12-13) and on whose great day of triumph “there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord.” (14:21)

But the thing that distinguishes Zechariah’s vision from all the palm-waving rebels to come is that it’s not a human being who will return to rule as king. The kings have failed. “Render true judgments,” Zechariah says God has commanded them, “show kindness and mercy to one another; do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another. But they refused to listen, and turned a stubborn shoulder.” (Zechariah 7:9–11) “Thus says the LORD,” Zechariah proclaims, “I will return to Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem.” (Zech. 8:3) “I will encamp at my house as a guard,” says God, “so that no one shall march to and fro; no oppressor shall again overrun them, for now I have seen with my own eyes. Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you!” (Zech. 9:8-9) Lo, your king comes—not some long-forgotten descendant of an ancient king, not some guerilla leader from the desert hills; the Lord Godself is coming to reign.

In the church I grew up in, we didn’t do this whole weird “Passion Sunday” thing. Jesus entered the city in triumph on Palm Sunday. He was betrayed in darkness of Maundy Thursday. He was put to death on Good Friday. They’re completely separate events. Why roll them into one? This strange Episcopalian “Passion Sunday,” I thought at first, must just be a compromise. We know that most people won’t show up on Good Friday, but we don’t want them to skip straight from the triumph of Palm Sunday to the triumph of Easter, without Jesus’ suffering and death in between; and so we move the passion from Good Friday back to Palm Sunday.

But really, this isn’t it at all. The reason we move so quickly from the royal procession to the excruciating passion is not that nobody’s going to come to church on Good Friday. It’s that this is what it looks like when God is king. The Roman soldiers don’t realize what they’re doing when they clothe him in imperial purple and twist together a crown, when they kneel in mock homage and proclaim him “King of the Jews.” (Mark 15:17-19) But when the patriotic crowd has faded in to the background, when the disciples have hurried into hiding, when even Peter has denied knowing Jesus and turned away, it’s left to these sarcastic soldiers to attend his coronation, to crown him with thorns and enthrone him on a cross and leave him to die, beneath the inscription naming his crime: “The King of the Jews.” (Mark 15:26)

And they’re right. Because it’s this moment of self-sacrificial love that shows what it means for Jesus to be king. He’s not there so that the ordinary folks’ coats get dirty to keep his shining stallion’s hoofs clean. He’s there to kneel at their dirty feet, and wash them with his own hands. He’s not there to gather an army to overthrow the Roman state by force, a path of violence that could only and historically would only lead to disaster. He’s there to give himself alone to spare his people from destruction. He’s not there to scheme against his family, turning royal against royal as he clings to the throne in old age. He’s there to ascend into heaven, handing power to his followers a mere forty days after he rises from the dead.

He’s there to show us another way. He’s there to give us the power to rule, and to do better than we had before—not to “devise evil in our hearts,” as the kings of old, not to “oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor,” but to “show kindness and mercy.” Not to seize power as the kings and queens of our own lives, but to enter into citizenship in his heavenly kingdom.

So I invite you to join me, this Holy Week, as Jesus establishes his kingdom of love; to see him, in all the shame and pain of his last days, in all the glory and triumph of his resurrection—so that we might know what it truly means to say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!” Amen.

Sermon — March 21, 2021

The Rev. Greg Johnston

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)

When I was in high school, I was a fairly serious runner. The remarkable thing about running is how objective progress is. I could still rattle off the progression of my mile time or my best times on our home cross-country course or exactly how fast I ran each 400-meter repeat during a particular workout ten years ago. And while I was never the fastest guy on the team, I was pretty good. More importantly, though, cross-country and track became my life. The people I ran with were my closest friends, and—as an unusually-boring and responsible teenager—I ended up being appointed a captain for all three seasons of my senior year.

So I loved running, and I wanted to continue in college, but I was much too slow even to walk on to Harvard track and so I joined the Greater Boston Track Club instead. They were serious, mostly post-college guys, and I trained hard. I ran something like seventy miles a week around the Charles River, honed my speed with massive track workouts, and by the end of the year I had shaved my mile team down by a whopping four seconds—from 4:40 to 4:36.

Runners have sometimes observed that that level of training can leave your body in a state that’s almost like sickness. My toenails were constantly turning black and falling off from the repetitive motion. The smallest cold tended to give me a long-lasting, chesty cough that only went away when I was running. I was never injured or exhausted—my performance stayed high—but my body was in something like open rebellion.

Then I got hurt. On a twenty-three mile hike through the Presidentials in the White Mountains with two friends, I tweaked a muscle in my hip. My legs, you have to remember, had been finely tuned to run almost endlessly on the flat, paved paths around the Charles or Fresh Pond, or on the springy rubber of a track, not to scramble up a mountainside. But the only way to make it back to our camp was to keep walking, and so I did. By the time we made it home, I found that I could hardly run, and started cutting down. I tried, for a few weeks, to run less—just forty or fifty miles a week, give it a rest—and soon had to stop entirely and try to recover. I took some time off from the track club and rested. After six months or so, I was able to run again casually, but in a very different way. I’ve never again joined a team or a club. I’ve never again trained so hard I can’t shake a cough. And I’ve never, in the last decade, run a race.

“Very truly, I tell you,” Jesus says, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24) I love this saying because it’s so obviously true in a literal sense. The question is not how to interpret what he says, but how to apply it to something other than an actual grain of wheat.

Of course he’s talking, on one level, about himself. This is Jesus’ final public teaching in the Gospel of John, and his final days are drawing near. But Jesus’ death, he seems to say, is not the abrupt and unfortunate end to a ministry that could’ve lasted for years. Instead, Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension are the culmination of his ministry. In the larger, mythological sense, the coming days will be the climax of the struggle between Jesus and all the forces of evil. “Now is the judgment of this world,” he says; “now the ruler of this world”—which is to say, the power of sin and evil and death itself, sometimes personified as “Satan”—“will be driven out.” (John 12:31) In a more tangible, historical way, it’s the moment where Jesus stops being a local teacher and becomes a global figure. The story starts with “some Greeks” coming to see him, meaning “some Gentiles,” some non-Jews, a symbol of Jesus movement spreading from his own people to the whole world. And indeed, Jesus says that “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (John 12:32) It’s as if to be seen by all the people of the world, to draw all the people of the world to himself, Jesus needs to be raised up into the heavens. And in the simplest historical sense, Jesus is right. It’s not the brilliance of his teaching that spreads his movement around the world; it’s the incredible news of his death and resurrection.

So on one level, Jesus is talking about his own death here. If he lives to a ripe old age and passes away, a wise teacher, he remains one man. But if, at the right moment, he is sown in the ground, he will spring forth and bear much fruit. His small movement will spread and grow; his own body will become the seed for the Body of the Church. But even to say this is to lead inevitably to a second level of interpretation, because the Church, the fruit that grows from that grain, must also in turn “fall into the earth and die.”

I don’t mean this in the numerical and statistical sense that people mean when they say that “the church is dying.” I mean something less linear, more cyclical. Like a field of wheat, the Church is always somewhere in a process of rebirth. Our traditions and our ways of worshiping and talking about God grow and ripen, and then fall. If we plant them in fertile ground, they sometimes spring up and bear new and invigorating fruit. If we try to hold onto them, we’re left with a single husk of desiccated grain. We go through constant transformations and reformations, large and small, and there’s something appropriate about the image of the grain of wheat. When we’re trying to understand where God is leading the Church, we don’t need to make it up from scratch; we’re sowing the seeds of the past and watching for growth. Nor do we make changes out of envy of other traditions or denominations; we know that we’re a field of wheat, and that wheat doesn’t need to become blueberries to bear fruit. It probably goes without saying that during this long year, people have been planting seeds left and right, and there’s hope in that—we have a real chance to see where new life will grow. But there’s also grief. There are things about the way that church used to be that have died to plant those seeds.

Of course, there’s another level at which we need to apply what Jesus says. We need to apply it to ourselves. “Those who love their life,” he says, “lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (John 12:25) This is a hard verse to translate without giving the wrong impression. He’s not talking primarily, I don’t think, about “life” in the biological sense; the word he uses is psyche, “soul” in Greek. The “soul” is not the breath of life, the biological reality of life; it’s the form of life, the seat of the values and priorities that give shape to our lives. In a sense, it’s even close to the “way of life.” So you could almost paraphrase this, “those who hold their way of life dearly destroy it, and those who disdain it guard it for the age to come,” and that starts to move us back toward the grain of wheat.

Like grains of wheat, like the Church, we constantly go through cycles of growth and stagnation and rebirth. Different parts of our lives are constantly in different places in an unending cycle of bearing new fruit and withering away. It takes wisdom and discernment to know which is which, and it takes courage to let go of the seeds and plant them in the earth. It sometimes means giving something up that once nourished you, taking some of those grains of wheat and letting them die in the earth to seed new life. Because if we hold on too dearly to our present form of life, even as everything changes around us, we may well be destroying it.

One version of what it meant for me “to be a runner” is long gone. It died there somewhere halfway through a hike. It was one of the most important things in my life, but I know now that it was not feeding me. The cost was too high: the sleepless anxiety before a race; the obsession with measuring myself to the tenth or a second and the hundredth of a mile; the gruesome physical effects. But that grain of wheat fell into the ground and bore fruit, in a new form; not identical with the old plant, but a new life for the same species.

I don’t know what the equivalent is for you. I don’t know what’s changing in your life. I don’t know what seeds you’re holding in your hand, and wondering—consciously or not—what to do, whether to hold on or let them die. Sometimes there are things that have been at the core of our identities that we need to give up on to keep living our lives. And that can be hard; any change is hard, especially no, when so much has already changed. But God does not change. And God’s promise to be with us and love us doesn’t change. So I pray, in the words of our collect for today, that God may grant us to grace to love what God commands and desire what God promises, “that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Amen.

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.