Sermon Title: "Angry at the Altar"
Date: March 15, 2009
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  John 2:13-22

A few months after moving here in 1987, our family went to see The Glory of Easter at the Crystal Cathedral.  It certainly had its memorable moments.  One was the angels flying about overhead.  They seemed to me left over from The Glory of Christmas.  The Bible reports no singing or flying angels at the resurrection, only ones sitting at the empty tomb.

There were live animals on the stage, goats, lambs, wooden cages containing birds.  Nothing inappropriate about that, given the scene that was about to ensue.  It was the one of which we heard in the Gospel lesson today:  Jesus cleansing the temple.  The man who portrayed Jesus came storming up the steps of the stage, overturning money changers’ tables right and left, scattering poor animals and shooing them away, raging at the men who had been selling them.  Twenty-two years have passed since I witnessed that, and I remember it to this day as the most dramatic depiction I have ever seen of today’s lesson.

The scene that greeted Jesus at the temple during the Jewish high holiday of Passover is not unexpected.  Merchants offered sacrificial animals for sale to Diaspora Jews who had traveled long distances to make their annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  Being able to purchase animals at the temple site instead of bringing them on a long trek was a convenience for these observant Jews.  Likewise, the money changers accepted coinage from any number of distance places and exchanged them for the official coin required to pay the temple tax.

But where they were doing it was the problem.  It wasn’t outside the gates of the temple.  It wasn’t in the temple courtyard.  It was right up here at the altar—the Holy of Holies as that sacred space in the temple was regarded.  That was where God dwelt.

It is interesting to note that all three synoptic gospels place this story at the Passover in the last week of Jesus’ life.  In John’s alone it is up here at the top, at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry.  Less than two chapters into John’s Gospel, there is no easy way to explain Jesus’ rage.  No one has yet said anything against Jesus.  See him standing there, white hot fury, whip in hand, kicking over their tables, squawking birds set loose, slinging their coins.  “Get this stuff out of here, “ he screams.  “You shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade.”

It was the maddest, angriest anyone had ever seen Jesus, before or since.  What happened to the gentle, loving Jesus?  “Let the little children come unto me . . .”

The synoptic gospels, in their accounts, make much of the animal sellers gouging the customers:  charging the equivalent of five dollars for a dove worth fifty cents.  But in John’s version, there is a different emphasis on Jesus’ anger at the altar.  Here, Jesus declares the temple to be “my Father’s house.”  From its opening prologue, John’s gospel focuses on the unique relationship that exists between the Logos/Word and God—Jesus and his Father.

It is the power and intimacy of this relationship that prompts John to subtly change the focus of Jesus’ outrage from the abuse of the temple building (vv. 14-15) to the desecration of “his Father’s house” (vv. 16-17).  Jesus relationship to the temple is unique because it is “his Father’s house,” thus, he has special authority over it.

So too do we acknowledge that while we consider this to be “our” church—and I cringe whenever people call it “my” church, as if I built it and own it—it too, just like that temple in Jerusalem two millennia ago, is really God’s house.

Sure, people need a little help when they worship.  Yes, you can meet God walking in the woods or along the beach or sitting quietly at home.  But in this beautifully-crafted sanctuary, with a magnificent pipe organ, stained glass windows, robed choir and clergy, well, it’s just better this way.  We need the flowers on the altar, the shiny brass offering plates, the red hymnals and blue Bibles to do business with God and to help God do business with us.

You ask do we need such a nice building, such fine musical instruments, this large a choir, not one but soon two ministers again on salary to worship God?  Well, you quite literally pay for what you get.  We do quality worship here and quality costs.  “Take my silver and my gold, not a mite would I withhold…” we sing.  It’s in the hymnal.   (Take My Life and Let It Be, Chalice Hymnal, #609. v. 4)

Yet after Jesus’ outburst in the temple, the authorities asked him by what sign did he do this.  “Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’” (v. 19)  Completely misunderstood by them, as even Jesus’ disciples frequently were in John’s Gospel, they thought Jesus was talking about the physical building, which had taken 46 years to construct. 

Get it?  Who is the temple now?

All our beloved aids to worship, our sanctuary, the windows, the music, even the planning and rehearsing that goes on in advance to make worship meaningful when it happens, all pale in comparison with the new “temple,” the one not built with human hands, not dependent upon human contributions. 

Sadly, sometimes our beautiful places of worship that we have so lavishly, lovingly built and furnished and kept up become a barrier between us and the poor, a barrier to the poor who are beloved by God but don’t know how to return that love in such a beautifully adorned temple.

I have had people say to me, “Oh, I can’t afford to come here to church,” or, even more uncomfortable for me, "I can't afford to go to your church."  There is no checking of your FICO score before you’re invited inside to worship.  Two Sundays ago, we had a possibly homeless man sit in the back pew and sleep throughout worship.  No harm done.  He did look a little startled when the organ burst into the last hymn.  Denise, who spent all of December 2006 sleeping outside on our office porch, and who I ran into on the streets of Ashland, Oregon last summer, is back this month, sleeping in the alcove on the porch outside my office.  She told me Friday while she was sitting down in front of the Post Office that she’ll just be here the rest of the month, or less, and thanked me for letting her stay here.  It doesn’t cost us anything.  Neither person asked anything of us.  And I ask myself what would Jesus do. 

When Jesus himself became the new temple—the one who would be raised from the dead in three days—he made it possible for each of us to become temples in which God could dwell.

Jesus became a “holy place” so that we might each become a holy place.  Jesus became a mercy seat that we might each become a mercy seat.

Jesus visited the temple on several occasions, as recorded in the Gospels.  But by taking God’s “Holy of Holies” out of stone temples—or mahogany paneled walls—Jesus made the encounter with the Divine Presence possible for all people.  The body of Christ made us into the body of Christ community for all the generations of the church.

The Christ who expressed his wrathful anger at inappropriate activities in “his Father’s house” so long ago would probably tell us that what we do here—while worthwhile and satisfying—may not be nearly as important as what we do in his name after we leave this place.