Lent 3B, 2012

“Saved from Religion”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, March 11, 2012 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Newark, NY

15Making 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. 16He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

One early spring evening, a priest in an urban area was returning to her rectory after a meeting, when a robber, brandishing a gun at her, demanded “Your money or your life.” The priest had very little money on her but as she was reaching into her purse to get her wallet, the robber noticed her clerical collar and dropped the gun, saying, “Oh, you’re a Reverend! Never mind, you can go.” The priest was a bit taken aback by this display of respect for her religious position and offered the robber a candy bar from her purse. “No thanks, Reverend,” the thief replied, “I gave up chocolate for Lent.”

This amusing little story might make us chuckle, but it is also a pointed reminder about the place of religion in human life as it directs our attention away from institutional or outward religious practice and towards an examination of how our religious faith affects the way we actually live in the world. It is the sort of misplaced religious piety exemplified by the thief in the story that Jesus so abhors and it is against that kind of superficial adherence to institutional religious rules that he directs his rage and fury in the scene in the Temple in Jerusalem that we heard in today’s gospel.

Today’s story of Jesus having a temper tantrum in the Temple in Jerusalem is a famous one and is told in all four gospels. In John’s gospel this incident takes place right at the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry, a full three years before his crucifixion. The synoptic gospel writers place the incident during the week before he died, and imply that it was the straw that broke the camel’s back and got him in trouble with the authorities, which ultimately led to his execution. In John’s gospel, this story comes right at the beginning of his ministry, after the story of the wedding at Cana where Jesus turned water to wine. For the author of John’s gospel, this story is yet another incident, like the miracle at Cana that points to Jesus’ identity in a bold and unambiguous way. Jesus’ identity as God’s incarnate Word is explained by the author’s description of Jesus as the new temple of God on earth.

When talking about this particular story, Christians have a tendency to see it as a story in which Jesus is angry because the Temple had degenerated from a place of worship into a marketplace where money was defiling the true worship of God, or religious authorities were extorting the faithful with mercenary and ungodly practices. Scholars believe that what was going on in the Temple on the day Jesus threw his fit was not at all unusual, nor was it necessarily sacrilegious or inappropriate. The Judaism of Jesus’ day was a religion centered in the cultic worship of the Jerusalem Temple. It was customary in the religion of the Temple for priests to offer animal sacrifices on behalf of the Jewish people during major religious holidays. There were several pilgrimage holidays each year, during which time Jews from miles around made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the holiday and while there, were expected to offer sacrifices in the Temple. Passover was one such holiday.

Since Jerusalem was a major urban center and the pilgrims who came for the Passover were often traveling miles to get there, they could not always bring animals with them for the priests to sacrifice. So, in the outer court of the Temple, religious officials would sell animals to pilgrims so that they could make the sacrifice while they were in Jerusalem. Furthermore, since the Jews worshipped only Yahweh and were forbidden by the Ten Commandments and the Torah from worshipping foreign gods or graven images, coins with the face of the Roman Caesar engraved on them were forbidden in the Temple. Therefore, booths were set up so that religious Jews could exchange their secular currency for religious coinage to be used to purchase the animals for the sacrifices.

It was not the buying and selling of animals in the Temple, nor the exchanging of currency in the Temple that upset Jesus. His rage was directed more fundamentally at the entire structure of Temple worship, at the very institutionalization of religion that the Temple exemplified. When he makes reference to himself as the temple that will be destroyed and then raised again in three days, he is making a profoundly radical statement. He suggests that God comes to humankind in him, Jesus of Nazareth, a person who seeks relationship, not through a complex corporate and cultic structure with hierarchies and rules and regulations and rituals and fancy buildings. His action in overturning the tables and driving out the animals was desperately radical because it challenged the very institution that was believed to witness to God and to be God’s residence on earth. Jesus was angry and frustrated because concern for the necessities of institutional life had blinded the people to the presence of the living God in their midst.

Jesus issued a wake-up call to the religious folk of his day, which is as important for us to listen to in the 21st century as it was in the first. When we invite others to join us in our institutional faith we need to be mindful of what they will find here when they come. Will they encounter the living God here, or will they see a corporate entity, more concerned with its own survival than with spreading the love of God to everyone around it? Will they meet people like the robber who gives up chocolate for Lent but steals from people, or will they meet people who are alive with the love of God in their own lives and eager and willing to spread that love around to anyone who comes through the door? In our modern day we have many people, particularly the younger generation, who refuse to affiliate with institutional religion because they consider themselves to be “spiritual but not religious” which often is a code phrase that signifies mistrust in the integrity of religious institutions to be places where people can encounter the sacred. Many of those who so designate themselves have been hurt or turned off by the institutional church because it has failed to meet their spiritual hunger or to connect them in any meaningful way with the sacred.

We humans need our institutionalized forms of religion as containers for God, the living God who is so far beyond our comprehension. For this reason, from the dawn of time, across cultures and traditions, human beings have erected religious structures and engaged in religious rituals and handed down religious stories and practices from generaton to generation. But when the container becomes a substitute for God, then we are in trouble.

God in Christ calls us into a personal and loving relationship with the living God which relationship has no need of buildings or liturgies or priests, or bishops even though those things can be helpful to us. The lively and dynamic faith to which Jesus calls us is not one that gets stuck in rigid moralistic or bureaucratic systems. None of the trappings of our religious tradition or any other will save anyone’s soul or bring anyone closer to God simply by being there. God’s love, God’s grace alone is what brings us from loneliness, isolation, and despair into abundant life. As Christians we experience that grace in the person of Jesus the Christ. Today, Jesus reminds us to be careful not to become so embedded in a given religious system with its rituals and practices that we are no longer open to a fresh revelation from God, which revelation may come from outside that institutional system, through people or events which are unusual, unexpected or downright unorthodox or even shocking. I personally have found my interreligious work to be spiritually enriching for exactly these reasons. I have been wonderfully fed and surprised when I have encountered the sacred in rituals and stories and practices that are very different from my own Christian tradition. God is much broader, deeper and expansive than any one religious tradition can contain.

The Episcopal Church as a national institutional body is beginning to grapple with just this dynamic concerning the appropriate role and function of the institutional church. At this summer’s General Convention in Indianapolis there will be considerable discussion surrounding some proposals to radically restructure the national church, moving away from putting resources into a church bureaucracy and buildings and committees. The Presiding Bishop and her senior staff are inviting the whole church into a conversation that could result in a special convention in 2015, prior to our regular General Convention that year, to completely restructure the national church in such a way as to preference ministry at the local, congregational level and to encourage resources to flow towards mission in local communities, shifting the focus towards nurturing spiritual growth and away from supporting buildings and institutional systems. This entire discussion is fueled by the recognition that our institutional churches are in decline in part because they have preferenced the needs of the institution over the spiritual needs of people in our modern culture. Jesus was on to something in the first century, and apparently, we could use him here to overturn some desks in our modern day churches, both locally and nationally as well.

Jesus calls us Christians to a personal and intimate relationship with God, through him, and in so doing he saves us from religion. In him we are free to live abundantly and love with abandon, making wise use of religious institutions for the wisdom, community, rituals and traditions that they do offer and which do promote spiritual growth and maturity, while not elevating the institution and its rituals to divine status. Jesus focuses us on that important first commandment – I am the Lord your God you shall have no other gods beside me. In Christ we are free – free to live and love God eternally. And that is very good news indeed. Amen.