"Wholly Divine" March 11, 2012

Exodus 20:1-17
John 2: 13-22
I wish I could recall all the sermons that I have preached, even more I wish you had listened to them. But I do remember the first sermon I preached in this Sanctuary, one part of which highlighted that in the Reformation the Church declared Jesus to be “Wholly Human and Wholly Divine”, which is to say that you cannot attribute to Jesus powers a human being could not have, not diminish the reality that he is God. I recall a throwaway line in that sermon that I fear in the 20th Century we have emphasized the humanity of Jesus too much, searching for the historic Jesus, psychologizing his teachings, scientifically explaining how the miracles could have happened, that we have emphasized the Humanity of Jesus at the exclusion of his being WHOLLY DIVINE. What does it mean to us that this one who wept, who had compassion, who suffered pain for us, who was born and died and rose again, was God among us?

What would it mean to take seriously that the Scriptures are God's holy Word to us... That the Church is sacred, that marriage is sacred, that this life is a gift from God for us?

John's Gospel is different. John's Gospel begins, where Matthew, mark and Luke end. According to Matthew Mark and Luke, in the last week of his mortal life, as he enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday before the Crucifixion, he cleanses the Temple. According to John's Gospel, Jesus was Baptized by John, and the first miracle he performed was changing water into Abundant Wine, and here within the same chapter, Jesus entered the Temple driving out the Money Changers and Cleansing the Temple. According to Mark, Jesus' entire life was a search for what it meant to be The Christ, the Son of God. According to John, we know who Jesus is, that he was the Messiah from God at the very beginning, and in John we also know that that means he would die and rise again offering us resurrection. NOW knowing, what does turning water into Abundance, and his overturning the Tables in the Temple mean?

The problem with our passages this morning is that they are so very familiar to us. We know Jesus, who welcomed children, healed the sick, and fed the hungry, was so indignant about God's House that he took a whip of chords and drove out those profaning the Sanctuary. We know the 10 Commandments, that they were inscribed on two stone tablets, and placed in the Ark of the Covenant. But what the Commandments were and what they mean, and what difference that is supposed to make for us, those are a different matter, afterall these were laws for people in Israel 6,000 years ago.

The 10 Commandments are not 5 Laws of Thou Shalt and 5 Thou Shalt Nots. The 10 Commandments are not simply the rules God judges and punishes us by. Neither are the Commandments a moral code for finger wagging or hand-slapping. According to John Calvin, the Commandments serve three purposes for us: They cut through our self-deception that we are Good people to name sin.
For us as a community, the Commandments serve like our Constitution, defining what we stand for.
But most, like a lamp to our feet, the Commandments are a guide to living spiritually as God's people.

Does it really matter if we go into the office for an hour on the Sunday? Actually we reward hard work. What harm in a little coveting what we do not have? The advertising industry is based on this. And both Billy Graham and Jimmy Carter have publicly admitted to lust in their hearts. The point of the Commandments is not to establish another set of Laws, especially morality laws that people will want to get away with, but instead to demonstrate a different way of life, a life that leads to different goals. The 10 Commandments are like the lines on the Basketball Court which let the players know what is in and what is truly out of bounds.

Again, as we described last week, these are not rules and punishments suddenly imposed from on high. The 10 Commandments represent a Covenant, With Noah God decided it was too painful to destroy and not forgive, so God hung up the bow. Offering the abundance of creation, expecting nothing. With Abram, God promised land and children and a great name. God invited that if Abram and Sarai and their household would want to be part of this, they must choose to be set apart by circumcision. Here, with Moses, God entered in providing the 10 Plagues on Egypt, Passing Over Israel and through the Red Sea offering freedom, God rained manna from heaven to feed them. After all this, God invited if you want to be God's people, here are the ways of living a sacred life.Why 10, I have always thought it was because we had 10 fingers, so we could remind ourselves of how to live.

So if the 10 Commandments are not about punishments and Laws, but about a plan for living, how do we read of Jesus cleansing the Temple? First, realize that the temple of Solomon had been destroyed. King Herod the Great, puppet king of the Romans, despised by the people, sought to win their respect by rebuilding the Temple. Herod's temple had taken 46 years to build, when Jesus entered, and it was not complete. In addition to all that had been present in Solomon's Temple there was an area for Gentiles. As the Temple Tax needed to be paid in Roman coin, there were tax collectors present. As the law required offerings be animals without blemish, instead of bringing an ox or lamb from miles away and perhaps having it scarred or lame by the time you arrived, animals were raised for sale there in the Temple. While taxes needed to be paid in Roman Coin, Offerings to God could not be bought with coins bearing the image of a Roman Caesar, so you needed to exchange currency. Imagine the sound of Cattle mooing. The sounds of sheep and goats. The sounds of workmen hammering and chiseling stone. The sounds of people haggling over money, all this inside the House of Prayer.

Second, recognize that we read the Bible not as Anti-Semitism, about how terrible those people were, but rather what this instructs us about ourselves. What the Temple leaders had done was to accommodate the needs of the people, making it easier and more convenient to worship. But at what point have we accommodated so much as to lose what is sacred. I would admit to you this morning, this is a hard passage for me, because as a pastor I try to respond to everyone's needs and desires making the church as available and accommodating as people desire. We have become an exceeding open church, performing weddings and funerals and baptisms for people regardless of whether they are members of the church, or any church. But there comes a point, particularly during Lent of questioning how we go deeper in our faith commitment? How does the Church goes deeper? In our earliest identity as a church in this place, we were the Religious Society, accepting responsibility as the Baptized Professing Christians in this place to care for and minister to the needs of others. So what would it mean for us to accept anew the that responsibility for the community?

This is one of the hard passages of the Bible. One where we imagine ourselves with Jesus, overturning every table and driving out those who have made the church a profane marketplace. This is a hard passage because we must question if Jesus would be driving us out, for being too accommodating, making faith too easy and too human.