Rt. Rev. Drew Smith Sermon
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The Rt. Rev. Andrew Smith, Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford CT
Third Sunday of Lent, Year B
Exodus 20:1-7, Psalm 19, 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, John 2:13-22
Last Sunday George Chein preached about how we might live as Christians with other peoples. Today’s lessons have something to say about how we as Christians might live together with God. And to specific things that can seriously get in our way. The Jerusalem Temple was the stunning marvel and central focus of Judaism in Jesus’ day. The Temple compound Jesus knew was enormous, built on the city hill where one thousand years before David had decided God’s House would be, although David was not to build it. That was the work of Solomon, the son who succeeded him. That first Temple too was magnificent for its day, but was destroyed completely in 586 BC by the Babylonians, and then about seventy years later it was rebuilt, a less splendid temple, but on the same site under Ezra and Nehemiah near the end of the sixth century. But the Temple of Jesus’ day outshone them all. Begun by Herod the so-called Great, It was built on a humongous raised mall created by building up from the valleys to extend the mountain top, and it covered an area — say from I-84 and the Aetna, to Broad Street to Collins Street west of Asylum Avenue to Sigourney Street.
Raised high, sheathed in marble, capped in gold, reached by monumental staircases, the Temple dominated the city. It was God’s House. Not that God wanted a house. Scripture is clear that the Temple was David’s idea, so our God could keep up with the other gods, all of whom had significant houses. God had been perfectly happy with a tent during the days of the wilderness. What a distance God had come from those tent days. Talk about moving on up! After more than forty years of construction: colonnades, courtyards for foreigners, for women, for men, for priests, a sacrificial altar as large as a house. Precious wood and hammered gold and marble everywhere. And there, the Temple itself — beyond magnificent in its vertical splendor. The glory of the Temple was but to reflect the gloriousness of God. The Temple was the center for pilgrimage for Jews living all over the world, for it was, on earth, God’s House: one Temple Row. It was the place for sacrifice, for offering tithes, for teaching and learning, for worship and ceremony. Chambers for meeting, for the Sanhedrin, underground vaults, for example, housing for the priests and Levites.
And it had become big business. All those pilgrims had to be housed, and fed, which must have been chaotic in festival times. Hordes of people had to be managed and overseen on the Temple Mount. Tithes had to be paid at the Treasury in Temple currency, so there was a thriving business of changing money. Herds of animals without blemish had to be provided for the required sacrifices — and so breeding, raising and selling perfect specimens was a huge business. Even today in the ruins is evidence of the enormous enterprise that the House of God had become.
Whatever happened to the simple Tent of Meeting in the desert years? Maybe Jesus wondered that — when, according to John, early in his mission, he first went to Jerusalem as an adult and entered the Temple Mount:
The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. 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. He told those who were selling the doves, "Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!”
Imagine the scene. (This story appears in all four gospels — it was a central gospel account.) No “sweet Jesus meek and mild” here. His actions were an outrage. His disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for your house will consume me.” (Psalm 69:9) The Temple authorities challenged him: What gives you authority to do this? Jesus came back at them:
"Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, "This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you build it in three days?”
(We know) he was speaking of the temple of his body. How had it gone so wrong? A danger to faith. A word that comes to me is, ‘DISTRACTED.” That may seem like a “lite” word for what had happened in Jerusalem — but it does describe being dragged apart, pulled off the track, if you will. Over the years, centuries, whatever, the people, the priests, the chief priests, the Levites, the Sanhedrin, the whole enterprise had become something different from what God had intended — simply, as it was in the days of the tent, meeting with God. Jesus in his zeal — anger? — recalled the warnings of the prophets: “My House shall be called a house of prayer for all people: Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father's house a marketplace, a den of robbers!” (cf: Isaiah 56:7, Jeremiah 7:11)
The ways of the world that addict us to patterns of self-interest and values of wealth, splendor and prestige, had pulled the Temple away from the intimate saving relationship God wants and intends for God’s people. Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up, he said. That vision was filled in spades. Less than forty years later, the Temple was destroyed, by the Romans, not a stone left on stone, all burned and thrown as construction debris down into the valleys below, to this day never to be built again. Jesus was raised up in three days, himself the new way to God, the Christ. And the Church: the body of Christ, ourselves the Temple of the Holy Spirit. Behold what we are.
Sometimes I worry that we too forget, or become distracted, from the intimacy, the relationship, the meeting which God seeks. We too do not meet God in the simplicity of a tent, but in great buildings built to rival the grandest of secular structures. We call them “God’s house.” (And how they drain our resources.) And the Church adopts temple language, even in our first hymn this morning: the disciples’ supper table becomes an altar, the disciples become priests and apostles, high priests (I am one). And the Church resorts to the very practices Jesus condemned — buying and selling (parish fairs) — and others — charging fees, investing for profit, gambling, sponsoring lotteries — to mark and support its life.
Yet, as it was with the Hebrews in the desert, what God simply wants is to meet us. And teach us to love as God loves. It’s no mistake that the first of the commandments given to Moses talk of our relationship to God, with love, above all else. As it was with Jesus with his disciples in the Galilee, the Decapolis, Judea, God wants to walk with us — or rather for us to follow and walk with God — so that we can learn and live and pray and love as Jesus taught us. And for us to come to God, to offer our worship. Without being distracted. It’s Lent, a time in which we look at ourselves, — each of us individually, and all of us as a congregation, part of the Body of Christ, look at our life and activities and learning and witness, our good works, with a critical eye. Shouldn’t we, in every thing, ask ourselves, over and over, constantly, the question, “In what we are planning and doing, are we seeking above all to meet together with God?” And, “How can we do that more fully, better?” The Jerusalem Temple is long gone. The risen Christ still lives. We are the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit. Through us, may God’s glory and mercy. whose foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, whose weakness is stronger than human strength, may God’s glory be shown, not with monuments of marble and gold, or brick and stone and wood, all of which erode and decay, and fall down. Rather may God’s glory and merciful love shine because above all else we seek simply and always, wherever we are, to meet God in Christ. And as we do, may our lives will so shine, radiant, with the divine presence and love, that God will be made plain, glorious, for all the world to see.