Lent 3B, March 7, 2021.  The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of Love, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth – come when it may and cost what it will.

My three-year-old granddaughter asks a version of the universal question of why, which effectively blocks the response, “Because I said so,” or “because that’s the rule.” Instead of asking why, she asks, “What will happen; what will happen” if I do this thing that you’ve told me not to do? What will happen if a kid on the playground doesn’t do what they’re supposed to do; what will happen? What will happen; what will happen? She’s learning about rules, expected behaviors, desired outcomes, and consequences. Sometimes we don’t know the answer; sometimes there is a range of possibilities. This is frustrating to her; she wants to be know; she wants us to be sure of the consequences. On this Third Sunday in Lent, we have lessons about the consequences of being God’s people, of not loving Loving, of proclaiming Christ crucified, and of fidelity to Jesus.

By now, many of you have heard me say about “The Ten Commandments” that there aren’t exactly ten, and they’re not exactly commandments. I keep saying it because someone is always hearing this for the first time. The Torah does refer three other times to the decade of words delivered at Sinai, and that’s what gets translated as Ten Commandments, but it seems to me like a stretch. Our passage in Exodus begins by telling us that speaking these words, God reminded the people first that it was God Who brought the people out of the house of slavery, brought them out of the narrow place, out of a very tight spot between a rock and a hard place, also known as Egypt. (They probably thought they’d escaped on their own.)

The poignancy of this telling is that this part of Exodus was most likely written 1000 years after the legendary Exodus from Egypt. This account was written in about 500 BCE, as the Israelites were coming back to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon (another narrow place, another tight spot, a different Egypt). This was their new beginning (from God), a fresh start for their community, yet another chance to live in an entirely new way. They were writing down this story to remember again about God expressing God’s desire for God’s people. They heard God saying:

Listen, I have moved you out from a place of dishonor and disrespect. You are free. You are no longer stuck. You are on your journey home. I have redeemed you. You are valuable, precious to me. Here’s what will happen, my beloved, when you have no other gods more important to you than me, when you know deep in your hearts that you are my people.

I know that it’s hard not to think of what comes next as a list of regulations, but these are not regulations. These words of the Holy One are absolute proclamations, descriptions of a hoped-for future, a vision of a just society. They are promises; they are consequences. With the exception of two, the Hebrew verbs in these proclamations all indicate ongoing, incomplete action; in other words, they look to the unfinished future. The sense of these words is that God is saying, “When you have no other gods before me, here’s how you will act, here’s how it will look.” Just listen to how different it sounds, “You shall not commit adultery” versus:

When you have no other gods more important than me, you will not be committing adultery; you will not be untrue to your primary commitments in relationship. When you have no other gods before me, you will not murder or steal from one another –you will not even desire to murder or steal. You won’t hinder justice with untruths. You won’t covet or use power to take what isn’t yours. You’re getting a fresh start. Here’s how I want it to be for you.

Now, I said that there are two exceptions: remember, as in remember the seventh day to be holy (infinitive-absolute verb form), and honor, as in honor your father and your mother (and that’s an out-and-out command). I think they are in command form because they are the most difficult of all to live into, because they require our best attention and our best efforts. I’m going to start with the second one first. “Honor your father and your mother so that you can live long in the land God is giving you.” Honor is not the same as submission; it’s much more sublime than that; it has to do with dignity, integrity, and respect. The word literally means weigh heavily; in other words, don’t take your father and your mother lightly. Even if they did nothing else that was good, they gave you your life; and for many of us, our parents did much much more. Treat them (or treat your memory of them) with dignity, integrity, and respect.

Then there’s the infinitive-absolute verb remember. Remember to keep the seventh day holy. This is the most challenging of all, and it always has been. Remember to rest and to pray a full 1/7th of your time. That might be the most foolishly extravagant instruction in the history of the world, and the most necessary. It’s not so much about a long list of do’s and don’ts; it’s about what Walter Brueggemann describes as a “disciplined and regular disengagement from the systems of productivity, whereby the world uses people up to exhaustion.”  The restrictive qualities of Sabbath in Christian teachings and in popular imagination have generally obscured its intended the purpose of cultivating joy. And yet, it’s clear here that the primary purpose of Sabbath is to experience God’s pleasure in creation, to feel refreshment and joy. I am convinced that regular rest and refreshment is the best prophylactic to protect against societal diseases (otherwise known as sin), the symptoms of which are on that list of things we will not do when we want to ensure the fullness of life.

Although our New Revised Standard Version translation renders the ancient Hebrew, “I the Lord your God am a jealous God”, a much better translation is “I, the Lord your God, am an impassioned God.” The Lord our God is a fervent, zealous, passionate lover, who invites us, urges us, to become fervent, zealous, passionate, joyful lovers in response. I hear this scripture challenging us to remember that at the core of our beings, we delight in the law of the One who has freed us and who longs for us to live as if it is true. We are called to forsake whatever idols we have bowed down to, to examine whatever we have made more important than the Holy One, whatever has gotten in the way of the well-being of our world, whatever separates us from Loving.

In our passage from Paul’s letter to the Jesus-followers in Corinth, he begins with a message about the cross. The Greek word that gets translated message is logos, the same word from the prologue to the Gospel of John: the Word (capital W). It’s hard for us to get beneath the thick layers of Christian art and jewelry to remember that the cross was a torturous form of public humiliation for capital punishment, a gallows, a lynching. Preaching the cross, that is, preaching that somehow Jesus’ most important work was accomplished through his brutal execution, is still utter nonsense according to the wisdom of the world, and a complete scandal to the people of God. I hear Paul explaining that the Otherness of God in the mystery of the cross cannot be known or demonstrated once and for all, by philosophical proofs or miraculous signs. God acts otherwise. [1] The answer to “what will happen,” is love, which is salvation.

Then there’s the Gospel of John. This story gets called “the cleansing of the temple.” Cleansing has always struck me as an odd descriptor for what sounds like the making of a huge mess. I do not like the violence in this story, although I call on it frequently as a rebuttal to the facile notion of Jesus meek and mild. Jesus took time to make a whip of cords, then used it to herd the animals out; and then he ransacked the place. None of us would tolerate that kind of behavior in our houses of worship. In the Gospel of John, this fit of pique did not take place at the very end of Jesus’ life the way the other Gospels tell it, but as Jesus’ first public appearance.

John says that when Jesus’ disciples looked back on this scene, through the experiences of resurrection, it reminded them of holy scripture. They remembered Psalm 69:9: “Zeal for your house has consumed me.” I bet they remembered Nehemiah 13:9, in which Nehemiah was very angry and “liberated” the House of God by throwing out the furniture and cleaning out the chambers. [2] I imagine they remembered Malachi 3:

See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple…but who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire… and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.

That is, in right-relationship with others, especially with those who are poor. Malachi’s testimony is against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, who mistreat the most vulnerable, and who thrust aside the alien, and thereby demonstrate that they do not revere God.

John’s picture of Jesus is as an observant Jewish male, who went a number of times to Jerusalem for the pilgrimage feasts. In this story he was in Jerusalem for the observance of Passover, the celebration of liberation from oppression.  According to John, Jesus’ anger had to do with the temple being used for commerce. (Biblical scholar Bruce Chilton explains that the high priest Caiaphas had moved the animal vendors from outside the city on the Mount of Olives up into the Court of the Gentiles, angering some Jews, Jesus included apparently, although Chilton doesn’t say what the anger was about.) [3] Whatever it was, Jesus was passionately challenging an institution of which he was a member. If we are paying attention, we will get that Jesus is challenging us.

What is his challenge? Maybe Jesus is challenging the institution that thinks it has got God (or right-relationship with others) all wrapped-up to be open to fresh revelations from the Holy One. While this is a story about a challenge to the leadership of the Temple in Jerusalem, it is most certainly not a challenge for Judaism; it’s a challenge for the Christian Church; it is our scripture, after all. Maybe Jesus is challenging us as individuals and as an institution to maintain space for outsiders and foreigners (gentiles in his case) for gathering, to create space, to make a clearing for the fresh revelation of God’s impassioned self. I hear the scripture challenging us to remember that at the core of our beings, we delight in the law of God, who has freed us and who longs for us to live as if it is true, as if we are freed to care for one another, to insist on right-relationships with one another and to dismantle systems of oppression.

What will happen? What will happen if we follow Jesus and claim our authority as children of the Holy One and get in touch with our own passion and joy for what is sacred in creation, incarnation, and inspiration. What will happen if we use this time of Lent to smash the idols we have bowed down to, to examine what other gods we have put in between us and the Lord of Love, the Holy One of Israel. What will happen? I can’t say how, but if we’re doing it right, the answer is more Love.

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