March 11, 2012 – John 2:13-22
John 2:13-22
The Site of God
Third Sunday in Lent – March 11, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
The best thing about the new Alvin and the Chipmunks movie may be its name: Chipwrecked.
Even better might be its title in German: Alvin und die Chipmunks Drei: Chipbruch!
The plot – such as it is – involves – and I don’t think I’m giving anything away here –
the fact that Alvin and the Chipmunks are, well, shipwrecked on a deserted island.
The most interesting thing about it, of course, is how they got there.
You know how Alvin is always getting into trouble?
That’s his basic character, right: wherever Alvin is, there’s trouble.
Wherever Alvin is, there’s mischief: Alvin is the site of trouble.
Alvin, the Chipmunks, the Chipettes, their manager Dave and their arch-enemy Ian
are all on board a cruise ship in the Pacific.
It’s there – on board the ship – that Alvin gets one of his oh-so-crazy ideas:
he sees a kid flying a kite on the deck of the cruise ship and thinks it would be great to
turn it into a parasail for him and his friends!
Naturally, everything goes wrong, since Alvin is involved, and the whole lot of them
end up stranded on a remote desert island.
Did I mention that Alvin is the site of trouble?
Believe it or not, this unsubtlest movie in the world does have a direct bearing on the
theologically sophisticated and subtle Gospel according to John this morning.
This may be proof of the existence of God. Move over Thomas Aquinas!
In any case: Okay: you know how Alvin is the site of trouble and mischief?
Well, in Jesus’ day,
the Jews believed that the Temple in Jerusalem was the site where God dwelt.
It wasn’t a like a church building as we think of them today.
The Temple was God’s dwelling place, the one place you could have sure access to God.
So you went there to give a thank offering if God did something good for you,
because that’s where God was.
And you went there to give a sin offering if you did something bad,
because that’s where God was.
The best kinds of offerings were animals: cattle, sheep, or, if you were very poor, doves.
Now because most people didn’t carry animals around with them in their pocket books or
purses, these animals could conveniently be purchased at the Temple.
Only, there was a problem: because Israel was a country occupied by a foreign empire,
the common currency in use was Roman coins.
Now, you know how our coins have a picture of the queen on them?
Just so, the Roman coins had a picture of the emperor on them, who was considered divine.
According to the Bible, then, the coins had images of an idol on them.
Well, you couldn’t very well be taking those into the temple with you,
and you certainly couldn’t purchase an offering to the one true God with them.
So – also very conveniently – you could exchange your pagan Roman coins for
good Hebrew temple coins that had no image on them at the Temple’s
handy dandy Currency exchange booth.
But: you know how when you go the currency exchange on Portage and
you get charged an exorbitant fee for the exchange?
The more things change, the more they stay the same, right?
The Romans ultimately controlled even the Temple in Jerusalem.
They appointed the chief priests, who were their lackeys, and the priests oversaw the
sale of offerings and the currency exchange.
The fees for the animal offerings were often exorbitant: one first century Jewish rabbi
complained that even when the price of doves was reduced by 99% the
vendors still made a profit!
Anyone who’s paid 8 bucks for a beer at a Jets game knows a bit where Jesus is coming from.
Anyway: the point is that all the profits from all this ultimately went into Roman coffers.
The Roman Empire was unjustly profiting at the expense of sincerely devout Jewish people.
And that just makes Jesus crazy.
I mean, the Temple was supposed to be the place where the God of all holiness and
the God of all justice was supposed to be in residence.
And yet it had been turned into a place where unholiness and injustice were rampant.
You can see now why he’s so piqued: this is offensive to Jesus.
Just as Alvin is the site of trouble and mischief,
so The Temple was supposed to be the site of the God of all holiness and justice.
Jesus was genuinely concerned about this.
Jesus performs this action of cleansing the Temple in all four Gospels.
But what you need to know is that by the time John wrote this Gospel nearly
70 years after Jesus died, the Temple had lain in ruins for 20 years.
The Romans had finally had enough of Jewish resistance to their rule and razed it.
So now the million dollar question was: where is the site of the God of all holiness and
the God of all justice now?
Where is that God dwelling now?
According to John, the site of the God of all holiness and all justice is no longer the Temple,
which has been destroyed in any case.
According to John, the site of the God of all holiness and all justice is now Jesus.
One of the main reasons the Jewish religious authorities conspire with the Romans to
have Jesus killed is because of what Jesus does in the Temple on this day.
He was, after all, disrupting Roman revenue!
So he tells them: “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up.”
The temple authorities don’t understand that he’s not talking about the building.
He was talking, John tells us, about “the temple of his body.”
If Alvin is the site of mischief,
Jesus’s body is now the site where the God of all holiness and justice dwells.
I mean, think about it with me: In John’s Gospel – which we’ll get a lot of now –
The God of all justice and love is present in Jesus, for where Jesus is present there is:
– The feeding of hungry people (the 5000 in John 6)
– Forgiveness (“let whoever is without sin cast the first sin” – John 8)
– A struggle against injustice (as in today’s story)
– Healing (an official’s son in John 4)
– Celebration and abundance (the Wedding at Cana in John 2)
– Deep, deep compassion and mercy (weeping with Mary over the death of her brother in John 11)
– New life (the raising of Lazarus in 11)
– The creation of caring relationships, the creation of caring community (at the cross Jesus creates a mother son relationship with his mother and a disciple)
In John’s Gospel, God is no longer dwelling in the Temple.
God has taken up residence in Jesus. Jesus’ body is the new temple. Jesus is the site of God.
Jesus is the site of the God of all holiness and all justice and all love.
The temple of his body is now the site of the God of all holiness and justice and love.
But that leaves us with another question: Where is the site of this God now?
In some Christian traditions, when the priest walks into the assembly on a Sunday morning,
he or she bows to the people gathered there.
This action contains a memory that it is above all the gathered people who are now
the temple of Jesus’s body.
Since Jesus’s resurrection, Jesus’s physical body is now the church.
The Temple of Jesus’s body is the church – not a building! – but a community of love that
pursues justice and holiness.
Your collective body, writes Paul – not your individual body – is a temple of the Holy Spirit.
In John’s Gospel, when Jesus rises from the dead, he breathes his Holy Spirit onto and
into the disciples.
You too received that Spirit in your baptisms.
In John’s Gospel, at the very end, he writes,
There are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.
Which is kind of weird, since Jesus’s life was not very long and his public ministry
in John’s Gospel only lasted about three years.
What John means, I think, is that Jesus is now active in the temple of his churchly body,
a community dedicated to love and justice and holiness.
You, now, are the temple of the God of all holiness and the God of all justice and
the God of all love and the God of all grace.
You see it in your support of one another, like how you shared with one another last week
for the sake of our youth and their upcoming youth gathering trip.
You see it in your welcome of guests to this congregation no matter who they are.
You see it in your deep compassion for one another, particularly in your recent care for
Rebecca and Jared and Evan and their families in their time of grief.
You see it in your feeding of the hungry of this neighbourhood through the LUM meal teams and
food bank and you see it in your concern for the children of this street in your kids club.
You see it in your forgiveness of one another when you’re not all you are called to be and
I see it in your forgiveness of me when I am not all that I am called to be.
And this last is necessary because it is true: we are not perfectly holy,
we are not perfectly love and we are not perfectly grace,
we are not perfectly just and we are not perfectly justice-seeking.
And yet Jesus in his grace has taken up residence here, because he is perfectly holy,
and perfectly just, and perfectly loving.
He has pitched his tent among us so very graciously and lovingly.
And so we now are the site of his grace, his justice, and his love, however imperfectly.
But we are nevertheless.
So: be of good courage. He is here. And he is near.
There is strength in him. There is healing in him. And there is goodness beyond measure.
He gives it to us. We can give it to one another. And together we can take it to our homes and
our workplaces and our neighbourhoods and bring to truth the statement that
were all the things that Jesus does written down I suppose
the whole world could not contain them.
For Jesus is the site of the God of all justice and all holiness and all love,
and you together are the site of Jesus. Amen
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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