Past Sermon

Sermon Title: "Girl Scout Cookies in Church "
Date: March 19, 2006
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  John 2:13-22

February and March are the months you see those cute Brownies and Girl Scouts selling Girl Scout cookies in front of grocery stores and the banks on Second Street.  I heard recently of a troop that required each scout to sell 300 boxes.  At four dollars a box, that’s $1,200 in sales per girl!  Seems like a sizeable assignment for young girls to have to undertake.  I remember my scoutmaster telling us Boy Scouts back in the early sixties, when cookies were fifty cents a box, to always buy some, because the local council and troop got just pennies on the box.  I’m sure the percentage hasn’t changed much even with an eight-fold increase in the price.

Our church has had a long-standing tradition of allowing Girl Scouts to sell cookies in the Concert Hall, as well as Boy Scouts selling popcorn, and local school students selling wrapping paper.  We don’t really want to subject our children to going door-to-door to sell, so we provide a safer environs for it.

But with the increased number they are to sell, sometimes even Concert Hall sales after worship aren’t enough.  Now, I wasn’t at last month’s Board of Stewards meeting, as I was off on my sabbatical.  But I understand someone brought up the request to let Girl Scouts quietly sell cookies here in church during worship.  Not during the sermon, mind you, or even the scripture lesson.  Just during the opening announcements, and the later offertory, to catch the latecomers, you know.  It would all be very subtle too, and all cash so as not to disturb anyone with the sound of checks being ripped out of a checkbook.

After that was approved—remember I wasn’t there, so I had nothing to do with any of this!—I am told that a member of the Business Affairs Commission suggested why not try selling scrip in church the same way?  There are lots of new types of scrip gift cards available—Mimis, Starbucks (sorry, Polly’s Coffee!), all the local theater chains, Macaroni Grill, California Pizza Kitchen.  Not everyone makes it over to the Concert Hall after worship, so why not give them an opportunity to purchase when the most number of people are gathered here in the sanctuary.  Besides, Girl Scout cookies don’t benefit the church’s budget, but scrip sales do!  We get a 17% return on every Marie Callendar’s card sold.

Now, everything I just said about decisions made at that last Board of Stewards meeting did not happen.  We will not be selling Girl Scout cookies or scrip here in the sanctuary during worship.  But those are the best 21st century comparisons I can make to the first century practice of changing money and selling animals for sacrifice in the temple.  We don’t sacrifice animals as part of our worship, you say, so today’s Gospel lesson is some artifact from the past.  Ah, but wouldn’t it be simple for us to substitute selling something else in worship that would be more appealing to our needs today!

In the background to today’s lesson, Jesus, a good and faithful Jew, makes his annual pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem at the time of the Passover.  When he arrives, what does he find—not outside the temple gates, not in the courtyard entrance to the temple, but right up in front, in the very holy-of-holies—but persons converting foreign coins for temple offerings, and sacrificial animals to be sold.

A service was being offered, to be sure.  Local residents of Jerusalem could bring their own turtledoves or lambs to be sacrificed.  But for those pilgrims who had traveled from Nazareth or Capernaum to the north, it would be far easier to buy at the destination.

What Jesus took offense at was where it was being sold.  For us, it would be analogous to selling Girl Scout cookies or scrip gift cards right up here in the chancel, in front of the altar.  It was that close to the ark containing the Torah, the holy writing we know as the first five books of the Bible.

And so Jesus got angry.  He made a whip of cords.  He chased the animals out.  He chased the sellers out.  He overturned the tables of the money-changers.  Jesus was angry.  Jesus was whip-cracking mad.

 -- Mad at the temple being turned into a marketplace.

 -- Mad at the money-changers who had turned a holy obligation into a lucrative profession.

 -- Mad at the Passover pilgrims, who saw the temple as a place to transact a business deal, not to remember God’s holy works and feel God’s holy presence.

 -- Mad at the priests, who had let their love of law and ritual take precedence over their love for God.

 -- Mad at all the pointless sacrifices that caused the temple mount to swim with the innocent blood of dead animals instead of shine with the living Spirit of God.

Now many people point to this passage to prove that Jesus could get angry.  And that is true.  In this week’s Newsweek magazine is a review of Garry Willis’ latest book, “What Jesus Meant.”  In it, the Jesus he sees in the Gospels is seldom the kindly, meek and compliant Savior who made Sunday school so boring, but a mercurial, unpredictable dissident who asserts “an authority as arbitrary as God’s in the Book of Job.”  I am sure the editors of Newsweek paid no attention to the lectionary selection from the Gospels for this third Sunday in Lent, but the picture they chose to illustrate the book review is El Greco’s portrayal of Jesus routing the money-changers from the temple.

I never read this lesson but what I see it dramatically played out as I did nineteen years ago at a performance of “The Glory of Easter” at the Crystal Cathedral.  Jesus came storming up the chancel steps of the cathedral, tossing tables right and left, and letting loose live animals in the cathedral.

As I just mentioned, today’s lesson is popularly interpreted as an example of Jesus’ anger and hence his humanity.  For me, it is just one more bit of evidence that God understands every human emotion we go through because God experienced them through the incarnation of Jesus.

Yet making too much of his anger proving his humanity actually undercuts the power of the incarnation.  The underlying reality of the Fourth Gospel narrative is the words we hear every Christmas Eve:  “The Word became flesh…” (1:14)  Jesus is acting on behalf of his father, the God who sent him, the God whose Son he is.

Therein lies the subtle difference between John’s version of the cleansing of the temple and that found in the other three synoptic (meaning, ‘from the same source’) Gospels.  The other three place it late in their narratives, at the beginning of the last Passover Jesus will ever celebrate.  John puts it very early.  Scholars say it is unlikely that it could have occurred that early in Jesus’ ministry.  What religious leaders would have tolerated for the next three years a man who committed such a confrontational act in the temple?

But the location of the story within the time-frame of Jesus’ life is not the subtle difference.  In the other three Gospels, Jesus calls it “my house.”  In John alone, he calls it “my Father’s house.”  He is declaring himself; he is asserting his own divinity in the very midst of his humanity when he associates himself as being God’s Son within his Father’s house.

Jesus was not a trained, nor professionally educated rabbi.  So it would be as logical for the Jewish religious leaders to confront him as we would question the motives of some stranger who came in here and upset our worship.  “The Jews demanded of him, ‘What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’” (1:18 NIV) 

The sign that Jesus tells was misunderstood by them, as are a whole litany of misunderstood statements by Jesus in John’s Gospel.  “Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’”  They wondered in amazement at anyone’s ability to rebuild the temple which originally took 46 years to build.  But, just as last week we heard the first of three passion predictions from Mark’s Gospel, here is a resurrection prediction from John’s.

Jesus leaves us with two lessons from today’s Gospel.  The first is treating God’s house as a holy place.  The second is his own understanding, and acceptance, of how his life would end, and what purpose he served as God’s Son.

Do you know that the word “holy” “exists in every language and is a common term in every religion?  In Greek it’s hagios, in German heilig, in Latin sanctus.  The Polynesian word is taboo.  When the American and British whalers first made landfalls in the South Pacific, they brought back and introduced the word taboo, commonly interpreted as ‘forbidden.’  But that’s not what the word means.  It means holy.

“The English sailors would land on some Polynesian island and flirt with all the native girls, and when some man would make a pass at a particular girl, they would all freeze up, become indignant, and say, ‘No, no.  Taboo.’  The sailors would go exploring on the island and the natives would show them around happily until they came to some particular mountain or cave and want to go in it.  Then the natives would say, ‘No, no.  Taboo.’  So the sailors though it meant forbidden, but what the natives were really saying was, ‘You can’t go in there.  That’s holy.  You must let that particular girl alone.  She’s holy.’  The primary meaning of holy is ‘to belong to God for His exclusive use.’”

(Homer Rogers, Uncommon Sense:  An Introduction to Christian Belief,

 San Francisco:  HarperCollins Religious, 1989)

In that sense, both God’s house and God’s Son are holy, for they both belong to God for God’s exclusive use.