The gospel challenges us to show up when it’s hard, not pretend false neutrality absolves us of any responsibility for the world around us.
Tearing down the Temple to be agents of love
Proper 28C
Luke 21:5-19
Before we talk about the Temple coming down, let’s go back a few days, when Jesus showed up at the Temple and started to tear the whole thing down.
Toward the end of chapter 19, it says that Jesus came to the Temple “and began to drive out those who were selling things there”. That’s what it says in this version of the story: “selling things.” Good things, bad things, maybe both: things. In other versions its doves and Temple currency. Here it’s just “things.”
And it makes me wonder how we mistake this as neutral rather than encompassing.
Good or Bad is the right question wrongly applied.
A century ago, druggists discovered that morphine treated pain. A miracle drug to sell over the counter. They discovered it was super addictive—once people started to die from it.
So they improved on it, trying to make it less addictive. So they gave us heroin. Sold it over the counter. Until they didn’t and it hit the black market. One day it is medicine; the next an illicit drug.
They tried again with Oxycontin. Trying to make the wonder drug, the perfect pain reliever that would be non-habit forming. They made the same thing and sold it and then people started dying.
Which of these is the good one? The bad one? Nearly identical opioids, labeled medication, then drugs, repackaged as medication. All the same.
We want so desperately for there to be a good and a bad here. We want someone or something to blame. But we can’t find it in the drug itself or in the desire to make it work. The bad is in the thousands upon thousands of people who died. These aren’t bad people. Even as addiction distorts their humanity. We can call that bad.
Selling drugs we know are addictive. That’s bad.
So selling doves or Temple currency isn’t objectively bad. But exploiting our brothers and sisters; condemning them to death; that’s bad.
That’s why Jesus is willing to tear the whole thing up.
The Confrontations
By tearing up the Temple, Jesus ushers in a different vision of worship.
People are coming to make sacrifices; ranked, class-based sacrifices. The poor give their comparatively pathetic sacrifices to deal with the incredible hardship they experience. But the wealthy can drop serious coin on a perfect bull, beautiful, well-maintained.
The better the animal, the better the offering. So they are truly worthy of God’s redeeming love. Not like some ugly bird.
And Jesus comes along and says the Temple is supposed to be a house of prayer. This isn’t it. We are not glorifying God here. We’re protecting crooks and cowards and letting them exploit and destroy.
Jesus spends several days revealing the crookedness of the Temple’s leaders. Remember last week, when the Sadducees tried to trick Jesus with a dishonest question? There were three encounters just like that one.
But this whole time at the Temple paints a vivid picture of corruption and exploitation. The Temple leaders try to trap Jesus in a heresy. But instead, they reveal themselves to be crooks profiting off of their wealth and power!
And Jesus turns to his disciples and warns them about the scribes:
“They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”
And then, as if on cue, he points to the money box. Look. They watch wealthy people dropping in coins with a loud “clunk”. And then a widow walks up and gives everything she has.
When we know poverty kills, we can no longer pretend we bear no responsibility for preserving poverty in spite of its outcomes.
Tearing Down the Temple
It should surprise none of us that on the way out, Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple. After all, it is the place crooks go to hide. But I think we do more than hide here. We let our faith launder our moral responsibility.
At our convention, Kelly Brown Douglas, Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School and Canon Theologian for the National Cathedral described our need to show up as the church in a Godly now. That we are in God’s Kairos Time: a moment of opportunity. She said
“Calling ourselves church is aspirational.”
It is up to us to project a glimpse of the beauty of God through our moral memory, moral identity, moral proximity, and moral participation in a world that needs us to practice the love that we preach.
And that means confronting the history that informs our moral memory: including the challenge of being an institution that wielded power to oppress, enslave, segregate, and yes, kill our black brothers and sisters of Christ.
This is a hard word to hear when it feels like our Temple is coming down around us.
But Jesus doesn’t end there.
He doesn’t predict the demise of the Temple as an end to all time. And then come back forty years after ascending into heaven to say Told you so, suckers!
He metaphorically tears down the Temple and then predicts Rome’s physical destruction of the Temple precisely because it isn’t the end of the story.
There’s a resurrection coming.
So keep loving. Be brave, generous, and relentless. But don’t forget to rest and restore, apostles. We’re just getting started.
Justice, not unity
Yes, Jesus gives us this freaky, scary apocalyptic vision. And we want to read it historically because Rome did destroy the Temple in 70 CE. And we also read it metaphorically because Jesus was tearing down the Temple’s authority. He proclaimed how God was transforming how God would connect with the world: no more Temple: now the incarnate Word.
But neither of these explains the chills we feel when reading it.
And just as uncertain as our future is, our present can feel as divided and broken as this apocalyptic prediction. Doesn’t it sound like he’s speaking to us?
And while it is valuable to render this prediction as historically certain or metaphorically abstract, let us not cage this wild and dangerous story.
Because division is not the primary evil any more than unity is the primary goal of the gospel.
As Dean Douglas said to us,
“Justice, not unity, must be our guiding principle.”
Because it takes those eyes for justice to see our vague injustices are anything but neutral. And our participation in exploitation is always sin. Even when somebody else started it.
So what are we supposed to do when facing the worst the world has to offer?
Just show up!
Jesus says he will literally supply what will come out of our mouths.
He really couldn’t say it any plainer. He’s using physical language. Your job is to be there. Open your mouth.
But it isn’t just words! Jesus promises that he’s responsible for the hardest part: the communication and the understanding. So he’s saying
I’ll take care of dealing with their hearts. Just let me.
Not the past, but the beginning
Apostles, we are blessed. Not because we have it easy. Or because we have all the resources in the world. That isn’t blessing—that’s hoarding. We’re blessed because we have what we need. We have an amazing bishop, a fantastic church, devotion to a way of love coming out our ears, and a sense of purpose in a world that needs us.
And that’s not all.
We’re blessed because our mistakes don’t determine our forever. We get a say in that. Turning the racism, bigotry, and oppression of our past into the fuel for a radical welcome today is God restoring us. Not because we deserve it, but so we can restore relationship with those people we’ve exploited.
We get to be people of love without deserving to be. And we get to follow in the way Jesus is leading us; to heal and be healed; love and be loved; empower and be empowered.
We get to be these people. Right now. A people of love, hope, and imagination. A people devoted to reconciling, restoring, and renewing. The kind of people that people like to be around.
We’re not just living in the now. We’re living in God’s Kairos time. With all the saints, all our friends, all those people way better than we are but they’re cheering us on because it’s our turn and we’re the ones who are here.
This is our opportunity.
As Bishop Jennifer preached to end convention.
Imagine 30 years from now, thinking about this moment as the beginning of the glory days.
Imagine. These days are the beginning. Now. Us. Here. And all that loving grace God will shine upon this neighborhood.
We are already set free to set each other free.