This sermon was preached on March 8, 2015 at Grace Episcopal Church. The texts for this sermon were: Exodus 20:1-17, 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, John 2:13-22, and Psalm 19.
On Thursday morning, the lights in the office started flickering strangely. Carol, our church administrator, and I had just enough time to exchange a look before the fire alarms began blaring. Thanks to twelve years of public schooling, my reaction to fire alarms is very well ingrained. I mentally ticked off the rules in my head: no time for coats and bags, leave everything behind, walk calmly to the nearest exit, don’t reenter the building. When I was little and frightened of the scary noises, the fire drill instructions were like a promise. Follow the rules and everything will be fine.
Today’s Exodus passage presents perhaps the most iconic rules of Western civilization. The Ten Commandments. A foundation of stone for the Israelites stand on in the desperate confusion of the desert wilderness. Inflexible, solid. Follow these rules and everything will be fine.
But rules forget things like compassion and mercy. The legal guidelines for fire safety don’t mention how it feels to watch toddlers from our childcare center stumble confused into the cold, sniffling and shivering. As our childcare director checked off names and counted heads, and the teachers shepherded lines of children quickly up the drive, Noah turned to me and said, “It’s time to break the rules.” So we headed back inside the building and grabbed as many coats and sweaters as we could find, loading our arms with piles of warm cloth to be wrapped around small bodies.
It’s a lesson Noah’s been trying to teach me for a while now. Rules are good, but they have their limits. In the face of visible suffering and need, some rules start to become barriers. Rules help us make sense of the world, up until the point they get in the way of our experience of God and our experience of loving others. Discerning where rules protect and guide reconciliation with others and where they prevent connection is an ongoing, messy process.
Part of this process involves uncovering unnecessary rules of our own invention that we’ve unconsciously added on top of God’s. Today’s Gospel in particular forces me to confront the constraints I place on my relationship with God, my inner self, and my emotional experience of others. Somewhere along the way, in the bright, sunny Sunday school classes of my youth, I internalized several simple rules about who Jesus is allowed to be. Jesus doesn’t get angry, he is eternally patient. He never uses force or violence. Jesus is polite, calm, and kind.
But then there is the Jesus in John’s story today. The Jesus in this passage finds the temple filled with people selling animals for sacrifice and money-changers ready to rip off Passover pilgrims. This Jesus makes a whip out of cords and drives people away, flipping over tables and spilling coins. This Jesus yells at the top of his lungs and makes chaos out of the orderly exchange of goods and services. This Jesus is incensed, forceful, and quite frankly violent. And he certainly doesn’t give a hoot about social decorum. He's much more concerned with expelling an exploitative marketplace system that has invaded and corrupted God’s sacred space. By imposing their own rules about value and exchange onto the religious experience of the Jews arriving for Passover, the buyers and sellers have inserted themselves between the pilgrims and their relationship with God. Jesus chooses anarchy over unjust order that alienates and divides.
Jesus’s actions in this passage are in open defiance of the Roman Empire and Jewish authorities. His emotional state and bold expression of rage also openly defy the perfect pedestal I’d prefer to keep him on. They force me to recognize what we lose when we attempt to put constraints on Christ. When I refuse to acknowledge that Jesus feels irritation or rage, I deny Christ’s total humanness. I prevent him from showing and experiencing every part of what it means to be one of us. Jesus without anger is Jesus locked out of the authentic human experience.
It’s not just Jesus who gets restricted by unspoken boxes. We all have secret rules about which parts of ourselves we allow to be shown, about which emotions we act on. Sometimes the rules we place around how we relate to God are intertwined with the rules we’ve invented about how we relate to ourselves.
In resisting Jesus’s connectedness to humanity through anger, I’ve rejected that my own, and others’, experiences of anger could be holy and healthy. Jesus has a right to get angry. And so do you and I. The fact is that many of the rules we’ve devised and the systems we’ve created perpetuate the very injustices God calls us to renounce. We should get angry. We should get angry when our leaders refuse to act to prevent the exploitation of our earth, when the plight of so many oppressed people in the world is ignored, when unfairness and inequality lead to the violation of human rights on a daily basis. Some things in this world need to be overturned and poured out and driven away. Some things deserve to be shouted at the top of our lungs.
It doesn’t just have to be about anger.
Maybe what you’ve internalized about feeling and expressing sadness in public has prevented you from coming up for healing prayer on Sunday. Maybe what you’ve constructed to protect yourself from intimacy has kept you from reaching out to a friend in need. Maybe personal guidelines about admitting when you’re afraid mean fear spills out as anger instead. Maybe you put a lid on pride and joy before they even have a chance.
What rules have we been clinging to actually prevent us from knowing ourselves? What obstacles do we put between ourselves and God simply because they are firm and familiar and safe?
When have we let the world move in and set up shop in the temple of our hearts?
If we allow him, today’s Jesus can do more than disrupt the corruption of God’s house. We can also let him tear apart the rules that we set around our own humanity, even if it means letting chaos into our hearts.
And here’s the Good News. “Get out!” isn’t all of what Jesus has to say today. Jesus also says, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” Tear down and I will rebuild. Peace Activist Scilla Elworthy had this to say about anger in her TEDtalk on confronting violence and bullying, “Anger is like gasoline…if you spray it around and somebody lights a match, you've got an inferno. But…if we can put our anger inside an engine, it can drive us forward.”
Jesus’s anger doesn’t stop at destruction--it paves the way to resurrection, to Easter. His life and his ministry drive us forward, with purpose. God clears away in order to build anew. He dies in order to be raised again.
Let us pray.
Merciful One,
In these forty days of Lent, you have called us into the wilderness to prepare ourselves for the holy mystery of Easter. Cleanse our hearts of the barriers that keep us from one another. Give us the wisdom to know when choose grace and compassion. And Lord, remind us that we are purified for a purpose. Raise up in each of us a new and holy temple, open to your presence.
In your human name we pray,
Amen
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