“God's Radical Love”

After our amazing Talent Show and Youth Mission Trip fund-raiser last night, where we sold all those delicious refreshments in Brooks Hall, you might feel a little nervous about this Gospel reading today.  After all, we did technically have “money changers” in God’s House.  But today’s sermon is going to look more closely at what really got Jesus so upset there at the Temple when he turned over the tables and drove out all that livestock.  Contrary to what you might assume, this story of the “cleansing of the Temple” does not tell us how filthy dirty money is – which is often used as justification for never speaking of money in church, in sermons or during Stewardship season – but it tells us more about why Jesus talked about money as more than any other topic in his ministry, other than the Kingdom of Heaven.  Jesus knew how much God hates greed, and how concerned God is with how we invest our money for him – in the work of his Kingdom. 

If you read some of the other prophets, like Micah 6:8, where we get the words of our closing hymn today, “What does the Lord require of you?” we hear how important kindness, justice and humility are to God.  We remember how angry it makes God when we make a big show of our faithfulness in public worship but go out into the world and cheat the poor of their wages or allow the “widows and orphans” to starve outside in our wealthy cities.  God gives us religion as a moral crutch, so that we never forget where we came from – we need to remember how we were made from fragile dust, how we are held as brothers and sisters under the rainbow covenant given to Noah. How humbled we are to remember that, as offspring of Sarah and Abraham, we are as numerous and nameless as the stars.  How grateful we are to remember how we, like the people Moses led across the Red Sea, have been delivered out of slavery from the chains that bind us.

But how easily we forget the ways we are taught as children of faith when we get out into the big wide world with all its riches and temptations.  That’s when Jesus comes to us as a savior who calls us to account for ourselves and how we spend our time and money, as he did to the pilgrims who came to the Jerusalem Temple that Passover in John 2.

You would get a better understanding of this story you if you saw the photo I did of an Occupy Wall Street protester dressed up as Jesus.  He was carrying a placard that evoked today’s Gospel lesson, “I threw out the moneylenders for a reason.”  Wow!  That’s no “moo cow” Jesus.  That’s a Jesus who is a lot less like the clean-cut servant of God and a lot more like some kind of radical political activist.  This Jesus is a funny contrast to the model of good and obedient citizenship that we think of when we celebrate Scout Sunday.  But let’s think about what drove Jesus to his act of civil disobedience for a minute:  What are the laws of God that Jesus was trying to enforce by breaking the laws of Temple and Caesar and turning over the tables of the moneychangers in Jerusalem?  Let’s go back and read the 10 Commandments again – let’s go back to the source.

I thought it was great, on this Girl Scout Sunday, that “the 10 commandments” showed up as one of our scripture readings.  Did you know Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of British Scouting in 1908, deliberately made his 10 scout laws very different from the 10 commandments?  He wanted them to be less negative than those old-fashioned “thou shalt nots” of the Old Testament.  He wanted them to be positive rules for morality that could guide and inspire the modern young people of the 20^th century.  And so he based his Scout Law on some Native American codes of conduct, from honor codes of Japanese Samurai, the law of chivalry of European knights, and even the Zulu warriors of Africa that he had most recently fought against as an officer in the British Army. 

It’s not that some of the laws of scouting aren’t similar to those in the Bible, though.  Commandment #5, “Honor your father and mother,” is a lot like “A Scout is obedient,” or as the Girl Scout’s say, “respect authority.” “A Scout’s honor is to be trusted,” is very like Commandment #6, “Thou shalt not steal,” or #9, “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”  You shouldn’t steal or lie, right?  That’s dishonest.  Everyone knows that.  You should be “honest and fair,” as the new Girl Scout law puts it. 

But the Commandments that I think most concerned Jesus at the Temple were numbers 1 and 2, and maybe number 10 – the one about not coveting your neighbor’s stuff.  What were the violations of these commandments that made this “outlaw Jesus” angry enough to turn over the tables of the moneychangers?

We tend to think of those first 2 commandments as no-brainers for us.  “You shall have no other gods before me,” and “you shall not make for yourself an idol.”  Those of us who have been even nominal Christians or Jews or Muslims our whole lives can congratulate ourselves for keeping those commandments, because we are monotheists in a mostly monotheistic world.  We are not tempted to worship other gods, and we don’t worship graven images – although I have to confess I do have a plastic dashboard Jesus in my car.  But in truth, no Christian goes around worshipping statues – we don’t get visual art mixed up with the real thing.  They are only props to bring us closer to God.  A statue of a god in the ancient world was believed to contain real power in the stone itself.

But let’s not let ourselves off the hook too quickly.  Listen to the whole of the first commandment.  Listen to how it begins: “²I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; ³you shall have no other gods before me.”  Is your god the one who brings you out of slavery to freedom?  Is your god a true savior and powerful redeemer, one who delivers you body and soul from trouble and sin, or is your god more of a part-time church buddy who only tells you what you want to hear?  There’s an old joke that a real friend helps you move a couch, but the Bible says the friend we have in Jesus calls you to move yourself from bondage into freedom – and will move heaven and earth, and even the Red Sea, if that’s what it takes to get you to the Promised Land.  In order to bring you out of slavery, the living Christ may try to turn over some of the tables cluttering up the entryway between you and God.  Your liberator and savior may be able to show you what idols are getting in your way.

What idols, you may ask?  To get a clue, listen to how Commandment #2 ends, “⁴You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven or earth …. ⁵You shall not bow down to them or worship them…⁶but... love me and keep my commandments.”  “Love me and keep my commandments” is the root source of those greatest and last commandments of Jesus, “to love God and love neighbor as oneself” and to “love one another.”  The whole purpose of the 10 laws is a very radical concept, when you think about it – to actually put into practice “God’s Radical Love.” 

I’m sure many people saw Lord Baden-Powell’s and Juliette Low’s scouting movements as radical back then – because they called boys and girls into radical equality under God.  Early English scouts, who were subjects after all of the great British Empire, were supposed to behave as brothers to all scouts world-wide – and not discriminate against those who were less wealthy, of a lower class, or from another nation.  And in a similar way, Jesus was calling Jews of the Roman Empire back into their original covenant of brotherhood and sisterhood at the Passover – which was the holiday all those pilgrims in Jerusalem were celebrating, by the way, when Jesus turned over the tables at the Temple. At the Passover, all Jews are called to remember (whether rich or poor, educated elites or peasants and slaves) that they are all on some level slaves who have been set free by a powerful, liberating God.  And as such, they are to remain obedient to the law of their parents, the law of Moses. 

The Temple practice of exchanging money was a way of overtly collaborating with Caesar’s Empire and its oppression.  Jews who had enriched themselves at their own countrymen’s expense by doing business with the Romans had pockets full of the idolatrous coins that bore Caesar’s likeness and proclaimed that Caesar to be God.  And yet they (and their offerings) were still welcome at the Temple in Jerusalem – as long as the money was “laundered” in the outer courts through the sale of these many livestock offerings.  What undoubtedly enraged Jesus (who hated hypocrisy) was how they managed to not only do business that ripped off the poor of their own nation, but they entered God’s Temple with no shame whatsoever for anything they had done.  It was, as the mob likes to say, “Nothing personal.  Just business.”

God is still calling us to practice radical love here in our times.  God calls us to look at our finances and our investments and think about where that money goes, what policies those companies follow and what good or damage they do to the earth and to their workers.  Like the Girl Scouts, we are called to make the world a better place to live in – not just for the 1% at the top, but for every human and animal in God’s Creation. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen. 

 

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Exodus 20:1-17

Then God spoke all these words:

1. ²I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; ³you shall have no other gods before me.
2. ⁴You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. ⁵You shall not bow down to them or worship them…⁶but... love me and keep my commandments.
3. ⁷You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God…
4. ⁸Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. ⁹Six days you shall labor and do all your work. ¹⁰But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns….
5. ¹²Honor your father and your mother…
6. ¹³You shall not murder.
7. ¹⁴You shall not commit adultery.
8. ¹⁵You shall not steal.
9. ¹⁶You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
10. ¹⁷You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

John 2:13-17

¹³The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. ¹⁴In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. 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!” ¹⁷His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”