Sermon 3-7-21
John 2:13-22

13 The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
14 In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and
the money changers seated at their tables. 15 Making 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. 16 He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these
things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” 17
His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will
consume me.” 18 The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show
us for doing this?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and
in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “This temple has
been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in
three days?” 21 But he was speaking of the temple of his body. 22 After
he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said
this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had
spoken.

30 minutes after noon today the Northwestern Wildcats will host the
Nebraska Cornhuskers at Welsh Ryan Arena. Now just imagine what
would happen if about noon someone goes and cuts the electric cable
that powers the arena. The lights would go out. The scoreboard would
go black. The TV cameras wouldn’t work. Now we wouldn’t say that
the person responsible for this was cleansing the basketball program.
No, they would be stopping the game.

And just like you need electricity to play and televise a basketball game
inside an arena, you need cow, doves, sheep, and moneychangers to
run a Jewish temple. By driving out the animals and overturning the
money tables Jesus makes it impossible for people to buy animals for
the required sacrifices, and impossible for those who have come from
all over the Roman Empire to exchange their money to buy the animals
and pay their tithes. Jesus is stopping the whole temple enterprise.

2
John tells us that his disciples summed up his actions by remembering a
verse from Psalm 69, zeal for your house will consume me.
Are we ready for this Jesus’ to come again with zeal to put a stop the
games we play? This is a good text for the Lenten season as we seek to
return to the Lord our God. We often refer to this event as the
cleansing of the temple. But it’s much more than that. It’s a whole
reordering of the religious enterprise of his day. Jesus brings temple
activity to a standstill, and in doing so points us to another holy
place altogether. The temple authorities are confused by his actions.
They want to know what sign he can show for doing this and Jesus
responds, “Destroy this temple, and in three days, I will raise it up.”
Did you catch the shift? In John’s gospel the temple is no longer the
place where you go for an encounter with the divine. Fast forward to
Jesus conversation with the woman at the well in the fourth chapter,
when she questions him about where one should worship at Mt.
Gerizim as her people do or at the temple in Jerusalem, Jesus answers
neither by saying that the day was coming when people will worship
the Father in spirit and truth. This is what truly matters, not the place,
but the how.

And in the ninth chapter, when the blind man, whom Jesus healed,
discovers Jesus full identity he responds by worshipping him. This too
connects back to what happened at the temple. When Jesus says,
“Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up,” John adds a
note of interpretation: He was speaking of the temple of his body. The
temple for John isn’t a place; it’s a person.
What then does it mean for us when we say that the Church is the body
of Christ? What does it mean to be the body of Christ when we’re
forced to gather for worship via Zoom rather than in our church
building?

3
I imagine that many here today yearn for the days when we’ll gather
once again for Sunday worship in that beautiful sanctuary on Lake
Street. But in the meantime, even as we grieve and long for a return
what was, this pandemic sojourn has given us the opportunity to
ponder the most basic questions about what we’re doing and why.
Divine encounters aren’t restricted to a sacred building on a Sunday
morning. They can happen via zoom or whenever and however the
body of Christ becomes present in the world, at a warming center for
the homeless, in the workplace, at a farmer’s market, within a family
gathering, or by a phone call between friends.

If we truly are the body of Christ, then Jesus words to the temple
authorities also apply to us, “Destroy this temple and I will raise it up in
three days.” Dying and rising is the very pattern of life into which we’ve
been called. This is the Jesus way of life to which we’ve been baptized
into. Our old sinful self and all the games we play to come out on top
and save ourselves are nil and void. Game over. We as the body of
Christ are filled with new life that helps us to imagine a whole new way
of being in a restored and reconciled world. And not only that we get
to help bring God’s rule for our world into being.

Mark Twain once met a man who was very excited about his upcoming
trip to Israel and Egypt. He told Twain the he planned to climb to the
top of Mt. Sinai and recite the ten commandments. Twain replied,
“Why don’t you just stay home and keep them?” That’s so much easier
said than done. Some people chafe at having a set of rules that they
have to follow. I think its better to view the Ten Commandments as a
blueprint to follow for living well. When we take these 10 words to
heart, they guide us in how to have a right relationship with God and
with others. They guide us in our dying and rising. They help us to see
where our games are over. They assist us in living out the very way of
life that Jesus embodied.

4
There is a story that I am told has been passed from mouth to ear
somewhere along the palmetto dunes of South Carolina, a story passed
down from West Africa and across the North Atlantic. Depending upon
whom you’re talking to, it is a little bit different, depending upon who is
telling the tale.

The story takes place on St. Johns Island, just off the coast of South
Carolina, as Africans who had been mislabeled slaves are toiling in the
hot sun. They are working so very hard to grow and harvest indigo,
used to produce a rich blue dye. There is one young woman and beside
her is her small boy, maybe six or seven. She’s working in the fields and
she has such incredible dexterity that she is able to pick indigo with her
right hand and caress the forehead of her child with the left. But
eventually, exhausted by working so hard in the fields, she falls down
from the weight and the pressure of being depleted property.

Her boy attempts to wake her very quickly, knowing that if the slave
drivers were to see her down, the punishment would be swift and hard.
He tries to shake his mother, and as he’s trying to shake her, an old
man comes over to him, an old man that the Africans called Preacher
and Prophet, but the slave drivers just called Old Devil. He looks up at
the old man and says, “Is it time? Is it time?”

The old man smiles and looks at the boy and says, “Yes!” And he bends
down ands whispers into the ear of the woman who was now upon the
ground and says these words: “Cooleebah! Cooleebah!”
At that moment the woman gets up with such incredible dignity. She
stands as a queen and looks down at her son, grasps his hand and
begins to look toward heaven. All of a sudden they begin to fly. The
slave drivers rush over to this area where she has stopped work and
they see this act of human flight and are completely confused. They do
not know what to do! And during their confusion, the old man rushes
around to all the other Africans and begins to tell them, “Cooleebah!
Cooleebah!”

5
When they hear the word, they all begin to fly. Can you imagine? The
oppressed flying? Can you imagine the disempowered flying? Three
fifths of a person flying? The diseased flying? The dislocated flying?
They are all taking flight! And at that moment the slave drivers grab
the old man and say, “Bring them back!”
They beat him, and with blood coming down his cheek, he just smiles at
them. They say to him, “Please bring them back!”

And he says, “I can’t.”

They say, “Why not?”

He said, “Because the word is already in them and since the word is
already in them, it cannot be taken from them.”

The old man had a word from West Africa, Cooleebah, a word that
means God. It had been placed into the heart of these displaced
Africans and now they had dignity and they were flying.
We are God’s temples now and the word of God within us continually
transforms us. God destroy whatever needs to be destroyed within us
and raises us up on the third day. With the word of God within us
we’re ready to fly. We fly from breakdown to break through. We fly
from brokenness to wholeness, from sorrow to joy, from despair to
hope.

God readies us today to fly forth to let all those still playing their power
games know that the game is over. God’s reign of justice and love has
become our temple. And we know deep in our hearts that this is the
only game in town.