This is a story about Jesus with what I call the ‘cringe factor’. It makes me a bit queasy too. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, lover of the poor, healer of the sick, comforter of the afflicted, loses it. A temple temper tantrum.
And this makes me cringe a bit because I wonder if we’ve domesticated Jesus. We’ve forgotten that he was a man with a mission he was passionate about. And whatever else we might be in the church, we’re not really big into passion for God’s mission. We’re into being gentle Christians, meek and mild, wave riding not wave making.
If we were, the building would be overflowing and we’d be meeting in malls and coffee shops and halls of justice all over the place…..or something.
Funny thing about passion though. There’s plenty around.
(yoga mat)
My friend Jenny does yoga. She goes several times a week. She tells me there are people there who go every day, and pay big bucks for the privilege of sweating in impossible positions.
All because, she says, it’s become the new church…it centers them, makes them feel good and gives them inspirational messages, and counts as ‘spiritual but not religious’ lifestyle.
This is a culture that seeks personal escape from the toxicity of life, and a soothing of stress. Much as some of us seek from church.
To spend the kind of time and money one does on yoga, from which one gets good benefits, speaks of passion.
To spend the kind of time and money we do on gym memberships, kids’ sports teams, extracurricular activities for children, which may have much more destructive results, speaks of passion.
But faith? Spiritual growth? Church? The Jesus way? Not so much.
I read a letter to the editor recently that said this:
I don’t think most people realize how much their thinking has been influenced by advertising and other media. We have become obsessed (read passionate) with having the latest clothes, toys, tech stuff, etc.
Our values…are upside down. The need to have so much stuff has made us financially insecure at best. Caring for others has been reduced to giving money to charity. Caring for our kids is about giving them stuff and filling their time. (Feb. Sojourners)
So I cringe when I realize how far I – and the institutional church – have come from the passionate enthusiasm of Jesus for the reign of God.
That’s why the Temple temper story makes me cringe.
The temple was the religious institution of its day. And it had lost its central focus. People’s enthusiasm for religion was really for the rituals, the trappings, and the religion – not for the God at its centre.
This is why yoga and the ‘spiritual but not religious’ culture is so alive today—for we—the church-- have become religion, not faith. We’ve become an end in ourselves, the church, and not the means to the end, which is ‘thy kingdom come on earth’
One commentator on this text said that the temple institution had “settled into comfortable behaviours that enabled them to meet institutional goals” (Feasting on the Word) Cringe.
You see the Temple originally was supposed to be about God’s Presence—it was where God lived. It was especially holy as the place you went to be near the Divine Presence, and to get right in your relationship with God. But the trappings –all legitimate and lawful—had become the point instead of the Presence. Instead of becoming an instrument of the good, the institution, then and now, had become the good itself.
as today’s reading from St. Paul comments(I Cor.1:21 we didn’t read), God saw that didn’t work, and had to try something foolish instead—like unleashing the Divine Presence into the world in a human being, Jesus.
And that turns things upside down, like those temple tables, hoping to get the world right side up. Jesus wreaks holy havoc in order to reclaim sacred space.
Where is our sacred space? For sure it can be right here. But if God is unleashed into the world in Jesus, who’s not here, where is the Divine Presence? In “the Body of Christ”. The church. You and me. Us.
WE are the sanctuary of the holy.
As we move into months of discernment and self-examination as a congregation, we need to regain some passion, turn over some tables, get out of our settled comfortable behaviours, and become
God’s sanctuary, not as a building or institution, but as the Divine Presence, unleashed.
It sounds a bit unsettling I know. And I know some of you are cringing because whenever there’s change I hear something like:
My whole life is unsettled and topsy turvy I need the church to be safe and stable…
Right?
But the church is not yoga. It is not just a place to get your needs met.
The church is the body of Christ, a passionate transformative presence….a place to be empowered to meet the needs of an upside down world, and a movement, not an institution….a movement that, like yoga, will make us sweaty and put us in impossible positions and get us passionate and enthusiastic 7 days a week.
if the divine presence is within us, that’s a safe and secure foundation no matter how upside down life gets.
If WE are the sanctuary of the divine presence, that’s the right side up.
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