Between the Lectionary and the world, we’re getting hit with fireballs: the kind of truth that burns and purifies, leaving us naked and lost.

I know I wasn’t the only one on Sunday, talking about Jesus in the Temple. A story often referred to as a “cleansing” of the Temple, but more to the point, it is a critique of abuse and corruption. It is a story, that goes beyond the simplistic idea we have of Jesus establishing rules and concepts in his actions: the sort of Bible abuse that tries to turn scripture into a rulebook for life.

What the Temple story does instead, is give Jesus a platform to nail the hypocrisy and the corruption in the system. Jesus calls out the dove-sellers and the money-changers for extortion and makes a holy mess of the the holy place. As mad as Jesus gets, we still find a way to paper over what he is telling us, pretending this is simply a story establishing Trinitarian theology.

Of course, earlier in the week,  the Justice Department brought to light that the Ferguson Police Department routinely and flagrantly commits civil rights violations, and worse extort the African American population to pay the city’s bills.

The parallels are almost too obvious. Except we don’t have a different sort of Messiah to overturn tables. We have an Attorney General. Perhaps the effects are the same, in the end; the establishment doesn’t want to deal with its own hypocrisy. They’d rather scheme out ways to deal with their political problem.

This came in the week after we talked about Jesus enlightening his disciples to what is to happen to him, to their movement. But rather than prepare themselves for the weeks ahead, they miss the teaching. Their resistance to Jesus is led by Peter, who rebukes Jesus, earning his own rebuke: Jesus calls him a stumbling block, the tempter.

Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.

The line echoes back to the temptation we read the week before when Jesus was tempted by Satan in the desert. Peter now, like the Tempter then, is trying to drive Jesus in the wrong direction.

While in Washington, the Israeli Prime Minister was invited to come to tempt us to move in a different direction. No, this doesn’t make him the devil, it makes him so much like Peter, whose own mission and understanding didn’t match Jesus’s. Perhaps our negotiations in the Middle East aren’t perfect, but we do know where harsher sanctions and aggressive military actions get us…and it certainly isn’t closer to the Kingdom.

This week, we had the temporary stay of execution for Kelly Gissendaner in Georgia and later today, another scheduled execution in Texas for Manuel Vasquez. Two different people with very different stories. And yet they’re bound to share the same fate, one decried by so many religious leaders and most of the industrialized world. A fate that proves we care more for vengeance than we do about justice and restoration. A fate that proves that whether or not we claim to be Christian, we don’t listen to what Jesus has to say in the daylight.

Like Nicodemus, who comes to Jesus at night to ask him questions in this week’s gospel story, rather than in broad daylight where he can be seen. Nicodemus, the secret disciple, the one who shows up at the beginning of John and at the end, but can’t seem to follow Jesus when people are actually looking at him. He’ll meet at night, you know, so he can’t be caught on tape. Real courage of convictions in this one.

It is so like “Take This Sabbath Day,” one of my favorite episodes of The West Wing. One in which the White House is pulled into a death penalty case which has run out of petitions and will happen at 12:01 Monday morning, because, you know, the Sabbath. And the whole team is wrestling with the case, with their role in it, and what they need to do about it. And then, in the end, this happens:

Perhaps we can reason that the president did the right thing, given what he knows and the trouble that would happen if he acted. But its clear that as a person of faith, he is completely wrong. A powerful end, showing how messy life really is.

Standing up in daylight? Need we look any further than Selma and its 50th anniversary? Can we avoid talking about solidarity and standing up to injustice? Can we not speak to the evils of racism and violent oppression of the marginalized? Do we dare go without speaking to actual living lynching survivors who have dealt with this evil, not before the March, but in the 50 years since? The young men who are still being strung up by the neighbors and those gunned down by police officers in our streets and stairways and Walmart stores and are victims of violence and yet are treated like an enemy in a war. Not victims at all, but the real perpetrators.

Christians can’t condone this violence of our past (but they did) or this violence of our present (but they do). And unless we stand up in daylight, we will continue to condone this violence in our future. We will continue to be the vehicles of violence, rather than grace and restoration.

Our world, our faith, and a little context. This is Lent.