A sermon preached at St. Francis by the Lake Episcopal Church in Canyon Lake, Texas.

The lectionary readings for the third Sunday in Lent are here.

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During the season of Lent, it’s an option to recite the Ten Commandments at the beginning of our worship service. I’ll confess I am not in favor of doing it mainly because what we know as the Ten Commandments have been so misused by some and so over used by others that we don’t really stop to consider their original intent and purpose. They’ve become something we hang on the wall and used as a political and religious weapon to force Christianity upon non-Christians; a line in the sand to determine who’s in and who’s out.

It’s quite fortuitous that this past week we discussed the Ten Commandments in our Bible in a Year group. If you remember the story, God spoke these words to Moses and the people promised to obey and before the ink was dry on the stone tablets – well, you know what I mean – the people were already breaking the covenant these words represented. And God forgave and kept the covenant knowing full well, we humans would break the covenant over and over again.

A covenant is intended to establish a relationship, with responsibilities on both sides. It isn’t conditional or transactional but an agreement in which both parties say they will behave in certain ways for the good of the relationship between them.

God’s covenantal words given to Moses were intended to give the people great responsibility not entitled privilege. They aren’t “arbitrary prohibitions but loving limits”* intended to guide God’s people in a way of life grounded in justice and mercy. These words are about living every day life in response to God’s goodness, not earning God’s favor by completing some checklist.

When we love God and seek to know God, we let God’s love be our ultimate authority in all that we think, say, and do. When we love and seek to know God, we see the image of God in others and don’t need any other image of the God who created all. When we love and seek to know God, we don’t do ungodly things to others in God’s name.

As God’s people, knowing who and Whose we are, we live in the rhythm of work and rest as God designed all of creation; we don’t try to elevate ourselves above God claiming we don’t need to rest or avoid resting in our attempt to prove how much we can get done. We do as God did. We rest and worship on a day set apart from our other days so that this holy day shapes all that we think, say, and do the other six days. This is the pivot point, the fulcrum that balances our relationship with God and our relationship with others.

When we seek to love as God loves, we honor each other, we value all life, we stay true to our commitments, we don’t take what isn’t ours, and we are content and satisfied with what we have because we know that our relationships are far more valuable than any thing we may think we want.

But, what, you may be asking, does any of this have to do with Jesus getting angry with the folks selling sacrificial animals in the temple marketplace? Aren’t they just doing what God told them to do?

Well, yes and no. But let’s get a little background first – “the temple’s sacrificial system depended on the marketplace to supply both the animals suitable for sacrifice and the special coins permitted in the temple.” To shut down the marketplace was to strike a blow to the whole sacrificial system itself – the very system God had told the people to participate in as part of their covenantal responsibility.

Jesus doesn’t condemn marketplaces in general, but the way the temple market had become a corruption of what God had intended. The temple’s focus had become the sacrifices themselves rather than the relationship between God and the people that the sacrifices were to serve. The temple economy lived by the surface and literal interpretation of the commandments. As long as they didn’t actually take someone’s physical life, it didn’t matter what harm they might cause to their soul by treating them as less than God’s child. As long as they made the sacrifice it didn’t matter how they treated their parents or anyone else for that matter. As long as they didn’t take any material possessions it didn’t matter if they took away another’s peace of mind or well being.

In driving out the marketplace, Jesus is shutting down the old and bringing in the new way of being in relationship with God, the way promised by the prophets of old. And when questioned about his authority to do such a thing, he speaks of the destruction of the temple, a statement that the temple leaders take literally and as a threat but the writer of this story makes clear is a metaphor for Jesus’ body, a revolutionary vision of the new era when all who choose to follow Jesus will abide in him and “thereby abide in the house of the Lord”.

Jesus was telling them “The old sacrificial system must end; there is no longer a need for a market to sell the animals or exchange money. A new day, a new era, has begun.” The era of God with Us, in which we make up the temple of God’s presence. The era in which the sacrifices we make are about giving up our personal desires and our egos for the greater good of all as we walk in relationship with God every moment of every day wherever we are.

God’s ‘commandments’ are an invitation to learn to live relationally rather than transactionally. When we walk with God in humility and love, living in the rhythm of God’s creation, knowing who and Whose we are, we have no need for violence or thievery.

When asked what he thought was God’s greatest command, God’s greatest Word, Jesus says that all of the laws and prophetic words throughout the history of God’s people hang on one thing – Love. Being God’s people is about loving well – God, others, and ourselves. We come to worship together as one of many ways we maintain our relationship with God and each other. We do life together because we know that God created us for community and relationship.

Jesus’ clearing of the temple marketplace was a spring cleaning of sorts, removing the clutter that got in the way of people’s relationship with God, removing the stumbling blocks and barriers between the people and God’s presence, dusting the cobwebs off of God’s loving words of relationship, making room for the abiding presence of God within each of us.

For us, in our day and time – without sacrificial animals and temple marketplaces – this story leads us to the question of how and where do we put up barriers to keep others from knowing God’s loving presence? In what ways have we let God’s words get lost in the cobwebby corners of our lives? Where do we ‘do’ the outward activity of church without the inner transformation of becoming the body of Christ? How do we behave as if being God’s people was a privilege instead of a responsibility?

The Psalmist tells us that “The law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul”. God’s law, God’s word, God’s commandment is to love with our whole selves so that we proclaim the good news and reveal God’s image to the world. Amen.

*I am so very grateful for Salt Project! Most weeks, their blog offers me a way to organize my thoughts to begin preparing my sermon. Some weeks, like this one, the blog helps me craft a word for my congregation when I am close to overwhelmed by all that needs to be done. Thank you, Salt Project! https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2018/2/27/why-is-jesus-angry-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-lent-3