March 4, 2018 – John 2:13-22
John 2:13-22
What the Lord Looks Like
Third Sunday in Lent – March 4, 2018
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
When I was young in the 80s, I went to see 1954’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
There was this series of classic films at the museum one summer in Regina.
Some high school students ran the series and had rented out the space and sold tickets.
It was a very Regina venture.
I had gone to a couple of the other offerings that summer and there were maybe
20 or 30 people at each showing – which was fine, but . . .
When I showed up at the theatre for Creature from the Black Lagoon,
the place was packed! It was a sellout!
And it was quite a large theatre that held several hundred people.
It was a warm August evening and people had come to see a film that was not easy to see.
Needless to say, the kids who ran the series were out of their minds with excitement.
Shortly before the lights dimmed, one of them ran out onto the stage with a camera and
took a picture of all us.
He could barely contain himself – “We’ve never had an audience like this before!”
It was adorable – and the place erupted in laughter and cheers.
Well, the movie was great and it was so fun to be there with a crowd like that.
The film features an amphibious fish-like man from the Amazon who ultimately
abducts a woman who is deathly afraid of him.
It is all kinda sad and in the end the creature is killed and the woman is saved.
Well – in Guillermo del Toro’s beautiful new film, The Shape of Water, there is an amphibious
fish-like man from the Amazon who looks a lot like the creature from the black lagoon.
And this creature, too, falls in love with a woman.
However, the story and the ending are very different.
As del Toro himself has said, “I wanted to make a version of the The Creature from
the Black Lagoon where the romance between the creature and the woman succeeds.”
The story is set in Baltimore in 1962 at the height of the cold war.
The U.S. government has a laboratory where they are conducting secret research on
a mysterious creature they call “the asset.”
The asset is the fish-like creature that stands on two legs from the Amazon.
They want to discover how it can breathe both on land and in water in the hopes of
learning something valuable that will crush the Soviets in the space race.
The creature is kept in captivity, tortured, and ultimately will be killed.
However, a night-shift cleaning woman, Eliza, who is mute,
discovers him in the secret lab where he is kept they discover they have an affinity.
She begins to visit him in secret.
Both are not able to speak,
but the creature has intelligence and so Eliza teaches him sign language.
Both love hard-boiled eggs and Eliza introduces him to the pleasures
of big band music.
When she learns that he is to be killed she is mortified and decides she must engineer his
escape from the highly militarized site and save him.
She does so and keeps him at her apartment for as long as she can,
before she is able to release him to the sea.
A lot of the film deals with the question of what is normal and who really matters.
Eliza and her friends are all misfits in one way or another – they are people who
do not belong in a male-dominated culture of cold-war conformity.
Eliza is mute, of course.
Her best friend Zelda is black – and of course both are women.
Eliza’s friend Giles is a recovering gay alcoholic who works as a commercial artist.
In the eyes of the culture, they are unimportant and second class.
And then there is the fish-man.
The U.S. government agent who found him considers him a thing, an it, an ugly
creature whom the people in the Amazon where he came from had the stupidity to
worship him as a god.
At one point the agent says, “You may think, ‘That thing looks human.’
Stands on two legs, right? But – we’re created in the Lord’s image.
You don’t think that’s what the Lord looks like, do you?”
And when he says “we’re created in the Lord’s image,”
you are pretty sure he means privileged white males.
So the question is: where do we look for god?
The exact same question is raised by John’s Gospel this morning.
Where is God to be found?
Where is the site of God?
In Jesus’ culture, the answer would have been, “In the Temple, which is God’s dwelling place.”
The Temple is where God met humans.
That was 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.
And you went there to give a sin offering if you did something bad.
The best kinds of offerings were animals: cattle, sheep, or, if you were very poor, doves.
And animals could be conveniently purchased at the Temple.
But you couldn’t buy them with your normal Roman currency which had a picture of
the emperor on it, which was considered an idol and so you couldn’t take that in.
So, also conveniently, you could purchase Hebrew Temple coins at the Temple.
But there was a cost for all this – and here’s the thing: because the Romans ultimately
controlled the Temple, along with everything else, the profits from the
exorbitant fees for the offerings and the temples ultimately made their way
into Roman coffers.
The Roman Empire was unjustly profiting at the expense of sincerely Jewish people,
and this – this 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 are rampant!
God just didn’t seem to be residing there any longer!
And so Jesus loses it: he brandishes a whip of cords, drives them all out, and tells them
to stop making his Father’s house a marketplace!
The religious leaders there are puzzled and probably angry and ask him by what authority
he is doing these things.
Jesus says, mysteriously, that if this temple is destroyed Jesus will raise it up in three days.
They are as mystified as you by Jesus saying this, wondering what he could possibly mean
since the temple is, you know, absolutely enormous and
has been under construction for 46 years.
But John oh-so-helpfully tells us that when Jesus said this,
he was speaking of the Temple of his Body.
Ooooooohhhh-kay, then. Right. Thank you, John. Clear as mud.
What John is saying is that although formerly the God of all holiness and all compassion and
all justice could be met at the Temple, now that God can be met in Jesus.
After I saw the film, I wondered: really:
shouldn’t you expect justice and fairness in a U.S. government agency?
Isn’t that what the government is supposed to ensure?
Looking at the film through the lens of the Gospel helped me to wonder that,
but I don’t think most people would wonder at that.
Because we all know that in real life, people have suffered at the hands of government agencies,
people have been unjustly imprisoned and tortured – and not just during McCarthy era.
And we have become so cynical that we aren’t even surprised to see a U.S. government lab
where imprisonment and torture are part of the standard operating procedure.
You look at this creature, and you wonder, “Is this what the Lord looks like?”
Does the Lord look like an amphibious fish-man?
Okay, you’re still wondering – but the film makes you ask yourself:
does the Lord look like the mute cleaning woman?
Or the black cleaning woman in a loveless marriage?
Or a recovering gay alcoholic?
And you have to say yes, yes: that is actually what the Lord – our Lord, anyway – looks like.
Not like the unjust government lab, but like these people.
Because a long time ago, the Lord did not look like a government agent who
cheated people at the temple.
And the Lord did not look like the supposedly upright religious leader who all the while
Allowed his people to be swindled.
And the Lord did not look like the emperor whose face was printed on the Roman coin and
who was even called “Son of God.”
No: what John tells us is that what the Lord looks like is a poor Jewish peasant who
went around feeding the hungry, forgiving the sinful, healing the sick,
combatting injustice, and who got into trouble and died as a criminal on a cross.
That is what the Lord looks like.
The Lord looks like the despised.
The Lord looks like the outcast.
The Lord looks like the rejected.
As it says in the hymn we will sing this morning,
“Every person lost and broken wears the body of our Lord.”
God, the Bible proclaims from start to finish, is especially close to the lost and broken.
In the end, the film does indeed have a happy ending –
the romance between Eliza and the creature succeeds.
In the end, he breathes into her and . . . she becomes like him,
able to breathe on land and in sea, and presumably they live happily ever after.
There is a happy ending to Jesus’ story, too.
Yes, the reigning authorities tore down the temple of Jesus’ body –
but in three days it was raised up again.
And in John’s Gospel, Jesus breathes his spirit into his followers so that they,
now, become his body: they become like him.
You, now, in John’s accounting, are the body of Jesus.
You, now, are the temple where people can dependably meet the God of all holiness and
justice and mercy and love.
You, now, are what the Lord looks like.
When you encourage each other and feed the stranger.
When you forgive each other and welcome the outsider.
When you strive for justice and take your calling from God seriously.
When you see in each person – whether they are gay or straight, married or divorced or single,
young or old, rich or poor, healthy or sick, counted or discounted, employed or not –
when you see in each person the image of the Lord:
that is when you are showing forth the Spirit of Jesus that is living in you now.
So together, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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