what's the point?

What’s the point 030815

Exodus 20:1-17   John 2:13-22

Imagine… I cracked a whip right here in the center aisle….reason you need to imagine is I couldn’t find one at the tack shop and the other places I’d find one you wouldn’t want your pastor to enter……But if I cracked a whip right here and now, i’d have your attention wouldn’t I? Someone told us this week that the crack of a whip is the sound barrier being broken……. Maybe that’s what Jesus was doing….shake them up, get their attention, point out that something’s wrong here, and some barrier needs to be broken!

The writer of John’s gospel has this as one of the first public things Jesus does, and it’s a doozy!  Most of us are very uncomfortable with this whip wielding Jesus; we like him meek and mild and loving us to bits.  For those who didn’t much like what Chris said last week about the radical Jesus and carrying the cross, hold on, cos it get’s just as uncomfortable this week.  In this story it’s clear that Jesus comes to upset the status quo, not out in the big wide world, not in the fields of poverty, but right there in the heart of religion.

What’s his point?  His point is that they’ve forgotten the point.  They’ve become very comfortable with their religion, turned it into something that serves them and their economy, and forgotten their primary purpose.  
The temple had been built originally as a place for God to live, a place where the people could go to worship and encounter the divine……gradually over the centuries it became an institution, a system even, for obeying the rules, following the rituals, and lining the pockets of all sorts of people who profited from the system.

The temple, or religion, had become the servant of the people, a symbol of the status quo, and God had become the so-called reason for it all…..hmmmm

For this gospel writer, God is present and visible in Jesus, and through his life and death and resurrection, God is made known everywhere, not just in the temple.  God’s presence doesn’t require a temple,  God’s presence isn’t limited to a church….Jesus is letting God loose in the world!

Likewise today, Christianity as a religion, church as an institution, has been co-opted into the service of the people—its all about what we can get out of it.   It has been nationalized and privatized at the same time (I know that seems like an impossibility, but think about it.

  Christianity as religion has been coopted by nationalism at the expense of community, coopted by patriotism at the expense of peace, by politics at the cost of relationships.  I know this is true of other religions too, but that’s not a reason to avoid looking in the mirror.  And this has meant that the church as the face of a religion, has lost its meaning as an instrument of God for love and justice.  We have forgotten our primary purpose, the point of having faith as followers of Jesus.

Just as Jesus protested what the Temple had become, I hear him protesting what the Christian religion has become, cracking the whip that gets our attention and saying, “what’s the point?   Remember WHY you’re doing what you are doing”

Jesus wants us to experience faith, to experience God first hand….as a reality, not as a religion.  To reclaim our purpose as a community to be a place (not necessarily limited to a building)….to experience God….. to ask questions…… to find an antidote for the dis-ease of “our 1000 channel, multisensory hyperactive world” as one author I read this week calls it….a place to practice Sabbath, the centre of the 10 commandments we read today….

I suspect it’s no accident that this is the middle commandment, to practice Sabbath….for it looks back to the relationship with God that is primary (vertical) and forward to the relationships with others (horizontal)……it is that  practice that helps us renew that experience of God (vertical) so we can experience God horizontally in our ministry of life, living cross-shaped lives that we’ve talked about for three weeks now. 

 Praising and serving God doesn’t just happen in church, it happens in our every day vocations:  teachers are ministers in classrooms, youth are ministers in school and on the ski slope, accountants are ministers in offices, homemakers are ministers in family care.  God let loose in our world!   That’s the point, that’s the purpose….not just doing programs and sitting on committees in church…..one blogger this week said that our gravitational pull as faith community is outward, not inward.   How we spend each day, our time, our money, reflects our faith….it’s the reality of faith experienced.  God is out there, beckoning us from this training ground out to the main thing—as our mission statement says: to bring God’s love to all the world.

May we hear the crack of the Jesus whip breaking our sound barrier and getting through to our lives.  Amen.