Rev Barbara Peddie

Pattern for living

A sermon on Exodus 20: 1-17 and John 2: 13-22. Lent 3B 2024

In these days of rising costs, ever-increasing lists of repairs left undone, resident Covid, and ever-louder voices of protesters, it takes an effort of will to move into the place of expectation that Lent brings to us. Just now, it’s definitely not easy to believe that God is about to do a new thing.

Well, it certainly wasn’t easy for the exodus Israelites in the desert, and it’s even harder today for the Palestinians in the wreckage and bloodshed of Gaza and the Ukrainians constantly listening for the next explosions. In these times, just as much as in the time of Moses there’s constant challenge and uncertainty and worry and fear about what tomorrow might bring. So maybe today’s reading from the Hebrew Scriptures comes at a very appropriate time for us. Although, for the Israelites in the desert, when God did do a new thing and gifted them with Torah – the Law – it’s possible they felt like it was like being kicked when they were down. Who wants rules and regulations when survival is top of the priority list? Who wants more challenges in a way forward? As far as the Israelites were concerned, all they wanted was to stop wandering and settle down in a good place!

The appearance of the Decalogue in the midst of the readings for Lent comes as a surprise. We’ve heard it all before. For my generation, the Ten Commandments were given a fair hammering. Moreover, the Sunday School stuff was probably overlaid with a heap of non-biblical imagery that can be very hard to shake off. Altogether, it’s hard to think of those 10 commandments, or laws, or ‘words’ as a gift of God to God’s people. But they were and they are. Walter Bruggemann writes, they’re a ‘proclamation in God’s own mouth of who God is and how God shall be “practised” by this community of liberated slaves.’ It’s about the ‘how’ of living in covenant with the faithful God of Abraham, – and Jesus. And God’s faithfulness is not a response to the people’s obedience. Fortunately!

We’re called to live in community with God and with all other pilgrims on the way – even if some of them seem like strange bedfellows to us. And we need all the help we can get. The Bible doesn’t have a specific social and political programme – not as such. But it does give us values and principles to help us organize our social and individual lives. Freedom, responsibility, justice, peace, equity, and covenant – these are the lamps for our feet.

If you’re like me, you were taught about the Ten Words in a block. But they’re really divided into two blocks. The first four are about establishing a right relationship between God and God’s people. The rest are about relationships between people in God’s created world. There are plenty of people in Aotearoa who are quite comfortable to go along with this second group, but don’t think that the first four apply to them at all. They’re optional extras for peculiar people like Christians, in the same way that the rules of Islam only apply to some of our more recent immigrants.

The mix of peoples in this country has led to changes in our way of managing life in Aotearoa New Zealand. The time when most children were taught something about the Christian faith is long gone. Unfortunately, this has also meant that ethics doesn’t feature in school curricula either. There’s fierce argument about how this should even be approached. I think this deflects us from the real issue. If you’re a teacher who is serious about being a Christian, then the way you attend to God, whatever and whoever you believe God to be, shapes the way you attend to your neighbour. It will underpin all your teaching, in the same way that the beliefs of a committed Muslim or a committed Jew will underpin their relationships with community. Of course, for any of us, if the way we live doesn’t show that we care deeply about our relationships with others, then we’re going to give out very mixed messages! Why do you think Jesus summed up the whole of the Law as ‘love God and love your neighbour’?

Think of it this way: good theology is good ethics. If we put God before all other, then the gods of our society won’t have such a grip on us. There are plenty of them around. The gods of ‘progress is essential’, ‘if you just put your back into it you’ll succeed’, ‘the only medals worth having are the gold ones’, ’free speech’, ‘freedom of choice’ etc etc. The idolatrous society worships the work of human hands – and forgets that God is the Lord of creation.

We can’t bind God into an image. We say, and should remember, that God is in all creation, and that goes much wider than the human image. Who among us can tell what’s out there in the cosmos after all? But close to hand, if God is in all creation, then God is in your neighbour and your family and the stranger in the shopping mall – and the hoons and the litterbugs and the gang-members. It’s quite a challenge!

All of this means that when we take the second set of commandments, we can’t leave God out. We are to respect all life. We are not to be a violent society – we are to care that life is being destroyed, and that includes the environment. We are not to take away the freedom of others or exploit the weak.

We need eternal vigilance. We often use today’s Gospel story to say, justifiable anger is OK – look, Jesus could be angry at need. Jesus angry about injustice, hypocrisy and the misappropriation of God’s name is a very attractive figure. It’s what prophets do. We can get amazingly judgmental about what was going on in the Temple courts, and place it very firmly in a long-ago time and a culture that’s nothing like ours at all. But, is it so very different? The temple authorities were committed to studying the word of God and to building up institutions to proclaim and embody that word, and along the way, they had accommodated the money changers: small businessmen performing an essential service. Temple tax had to be paid in temple coinage: sacrificial animals had to be without blemish – and you couldn’t drive a sheep along dusty roads for days without some scars! It had all settled into a convenient way of meeting institutional goals. No need to check too closely for corrupt dealings – or to realise that worship of the living God had become a commercial deal. If you couldn’t afford it – tough.

The temple is long gone. But Christendom has its own way of commodifying worship. Centuries down the track, Luther railed against the practice of selling forgiveness – of buying your way into heaven.  And then, what do we do today in our institutions? Forget the tele-evangelists. What do we do? Do we say, we can’t ‘be’ church if we can’t pay a professional to do most of the work for us? We can’t ‘be’ church if we can’t afford to stop the roof leaking or mend the floor? Post-earthquake we slowly begun to learn that we can actually go on being a community of faithful people without a building. The risk is that now we’re back in our rebuilt or repaired sanctuaries, we may forget what we’ve learned.

And there’s more to this reading. John reports Jesus as saying: ‘Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.’  The religious leaders assumed he meant their magnificent Herodian edifice, and of course, the idea that Jesus or anyone might rebuild this in three days is a nonsense.  When John wrote this, the temple was dust and rubble, but what John is doing here is issuing a warning to us, his readers, about the danger of thinking we understand Jesus, when the Jesus we think we understand is a Jesus of our own design, a Jesus with whom we are quite comfortable – our friend.

As John makes quite clear, Jesus was speaking of his own body. His challengers will try to destroy him. They will think they have done it. The shadow of the cross falls over the narrative for that instant. But the cross will not be the end. People still seek to destroy Jesus, but still their efforts will be in vain. John’s message to us is that you can’t understand Jesus until you have the whole story. Lent reminds us that the story of Jesus culminates at the cross, but doesn’t end there.  If we only take parts of the story, then our understanding might be incomplete and inadequate, and we will build our own constructions that we might think are dedicated to God’s purposes, but actually oppose them.

Lead us on our journey, Lord,

from where we are to what you want us to be;

so that we become a community where all are welcomed and no one is excluded,

all are valued and no one is made to feel inadequate,

all are forgiven and no one is ashamed to belong,

all are encouraged, and no one is too hurt to come among us…..

Let us journey in the peace and power of the Spirit.

            Ruth Harvey (Eggs and ashes)