Text: John 2:13-22
From the beginning of time, God has been trying to show us the way.
The way to abundant life.
The way to shalom.
We catch a glimpse of how God wants us to live in the laws of Scripture, which Bible scholar, Walter Bruggemann describes as “God’s full intention for the life of creation.”
But again and again, that intention is distorted in our lives.
Many years ago, our family visited Arnold’s Park at Lake Okoboji.
One of the highlights was the tilted house. Walking sideways on crooked steps and the ceilings seem to shrink above you feels odd and disconcerting.
We all know what a house should look like and feel like, and this was not it.
From there, my neice dragged me to the house of mirrors.
As we stood in front of skinny mirrors and fat mirrors and wavy mirrors, she giggled and pointed as we were transformed into creatures we didn’t recognize.
One minute I had mile-long legs and the next a neck as long as a giraffe.
We laughed and told stories about what it would be like to live with really tall tummies and itty-bitty heads.
I have to admit, I found the sight less amusing that she did.
The distortions brought what I perceived to be my flaws into greater focus and blew them out of proportion… or reduced my favorite feature into something grotesque.
We’ve been talking a lot about reality for the last few weeks… and how we come to know what is true about ourselves and our faith.
Sometimes, we don’t realize that we have been looking at ourselves through funhouse mirrors.
We think we know what is true and real about ourselves and our communities.
But perhaps, we have simply been living for too long in a tilted house full of funhouse mirrors.
We have grown familiar and comfortable with the distortion.
So when God shows us a more excellent way, it can feel like our world gets turned upside down and inside out.
So often, Jesus is portrayed as a gentle soul who walks alongside us and listens to our thoughts.
Yet how often does he do the unexpected?
He shows up in places he shouldn’t, loves the unloveable, calls the unworthy and brings us life through his death.
Instead of allowing us to stay comfortably where we are, the Christ we meet in the scriptures challenges everything we know.
In our reading this morning from John, Jesus is in Jerusalem for the annual Passover festival.
Those making the long trip would not have brought the animals required for sacrifice with them, but the streets and Temple would have been packed with vendors offering animals for sale.
Others exchanged currency so that titles and offerings could be made in coinage that did not bear a human image, like the Greek and Roman coins did.
This was the normal, expected way of doing things.
This was routine life in the Temple, especially around the holy days.
Without these vendors, the system just didn’t work.
This structure, with its rules and order, vendors and priests, were all part of how an individual made a connection with the presence of God.
You jumped through the hoops because that was the system.
But as God reaches out to show us another way, some of those systems needed to change.
God wanted to take up residence not within the curtains of the inner sanctuary of a building, but to lay aside glory and be born among us.
This is the moment, for John, when the new understanding of the Temple is born.
Jesus begins flipping over tables.
He disrupts the system.
He takes everything we knew and turned it upside down and inside out.
It is chaos and disorder and it will take days for the Temple to get up and running again.
All eyes turn to Jesus and the religious leaders cry out, “By what authority are you doing these things?”
“Who on earth do you think you are?”
They need something to make sense of what has just happened and why everything is in disarray.
Jesus responds by pointing to his own body, the very dwelling place of God.
This story is not about the moneychangers or the Temple… but about Jesus.
It is a caution against any institutional systems and structures that have distorted and twisted our ability to see what God is doing in our midst.
More than once in the history of faith, the Holy Spirit has moved in our churches and turned over some tables and the church failed to respond because of rules and traditions.
A new opportunity for ministry gets snuffed out by people who don’t catch the vision.
A church gets so wrapped up in what color their carpet is that they can’t see the neighbors in need outside their door.
Someone experiences a call to follow Jesus, but the book of rules says that it just can’t be possible.
From the inclusion of women in ministry, to the welcoming of immigrant communities of faith, to the questions we are wrestling with today over whether we will embrace LGBTQ+ people in the life of the church… I have seen time and time again that our systems and our rules and our traditional ways of doing things can get in the way of the very presence of God in our midst.
I love the United Methodist Church… most days…
But as Jesus turns over the tables in the Temple this week, I can’t help but think about the systems that we have put in place that keep us from the real ministry of Christ in this world.
This week, we announced the necessary postponement of our 2020 General Conference to the fall of 2022. With it comes a virtual meeting in May, to approve suspending our rules, so that we can vote by mail on twelve items to keep the institution functioning.
A friend and colleague, Rev. Andy Bryan put it this way:
“I am part of a denomination that needs to set a meeting to suspend our rules so that we can create new rules to dictate what we are supposed to do when we cannot meet to create rules.”
From unnecessary paperwork, inflexible constitutions, timelines that are out of sync with the world, and standards for ministry that deny the way the Holy Spirit moves in the lives of people… if we could flip some tables and transform some systems to better support ministry, we all would benefit.
A lot of us are asking hard questions about what it really means to be the church and do the ministry of Jesus.
For too long, we made a home in a system that felt comfortable… for us.
But the walls were crooked and the mirrors have been distorting who we thought we were.
We are coming to terms with how our institution has supported racist policies and colonial attitudes and are seeing the Holy Spirit move from the margins and tear down walls and chains that have been keeping us from the way of Jesus.
God, after all, does not dwell in the boxes we have created or the books we have written.
God desires more than rituals and rules.
And in our scripture for this morning, we see that lived out… for even with the Temple disrupted, people found a way to celebrate Passover.
They found ways to praise God and remember their history.
It wasn’t the building or the specific rituals that were important… but their relationship with the God who came and dwelt among them and led them out of oppression… the one who showed them what it means to truly live.
The Akan people of Ghana have a concept called Sankofa…
San… ko… fa…
In their language it means to go back and take what you need to go forward.
They represent this idea with the image of a bird, reaching back to take an egg from its back.
When we realize that we’ve been living in tilted houses and looking into funhouse mirrors, sometimes the best way to move forward is to go back and remember who we are.
To remember our call to love God and to love our neighbor.
To remember the plan for God’s shalom and the foundation of our life together in the commandments.
To remember that God has already shown us what is good: to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.
This year, our lives have been turned upside down and inside out.
But in so many ways, we, too, have had the opportunity to embrace the idea of Sankofa.
We’ve returned to the basics of our family life.
We’ve spent time reaching out in love and care to one another.
We’ve remembered that God doesn’t just live inside the sanctuary here at Immanuel, but is present in our homes and our work, too.
We’ve embraced generosity towards our neighbors.
As the tables of our lives… and our church… have been turned over this year… I’m grateful for how God’s love has shown the way.
In just a few minutes, we are going to gather around the table and share in communion.
Before we do, we want to share with you the theme song for this Lenten series… “Again and Again” by the Many.
As you watch and listen and pray, we also invite you to gather whatever elements you have at home and bring to them to your table… or coffee table… or set them in front of you.
Pour yourself a glass of juice.
Break apart your roll or donut or slice of bread and make sure each person in your home has a piece.
Let your hearts and minds and bodies prepare for the invitation to meet God right where you are.