|
Sermon 03/23/2003
A House of
Prayer for All by Tom Kinder
March 23, 2003 Third Sunday in Lent
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont,
UCC
Psalm 121 &122; Isaiah 56:1-2, 6-8; Mark 11:15-19
Right now more than a few brave Christians around
the country are risking arrest, disrupting business
as usual with acts of civil disobedience. They
are using the nonviolent means of blocking traffic
or chaining themselves to military gates to protest
a war that they feel is unjust.
One of the first to be arrested after the war
started was a Catholic priest. He was responding
to the words of the Pope, who has said that this
war is immoral, and anyone participating in it
will have to face the moral consequences. As citizens
of the United States, the only way we can compensate
for our participation in the war as voters or
tax payers or people who enjoy American privileges
is to take some action to show our disagreement
with it.
Not everyone is called to civil disobedience,
but if we agree with the Pope and the Archbishop
of Canterbury and the presidents of the United
Church of Christ and the Methodist Church and
so many other religious leaders who see this war
as unjust, then we need to find something that
we can do to protest. Otherwise, this war is our
war, and we share its moral burden.
In protesting, we are following in the footsteps
of Jesus. He saw the immorality and injustice
of his own society and took a stand against it
in many different ways. His illegal healings,
his unauthorized forgiveness of sins, his touching
and eating with the unclean all confronted the
establishment with its wrongs. In today’s
gospel passage we see one of the most extreme
things that Jesus did. The disruption of the temple
market-place was a nonviolent act of civil disobedience
very similar to what people are doing to protest
the war today.
We need to picture the scene. Roman soldiers stood
like riot police nearby—their garrison literally
overlooked the temple grounds. Everyone there
would have felt tension, wondering how far the
priests and soldiers would let Jesus go before
arresting him. The temple marketplace was not
like a little side-booth gift shop at a cathedral
or museum. It was more like a shopping mall. In
fact, it was the most important and powerful mall
in Jerusalem—the kind of mall where all the
big-name stores have outlets, and all the biggest
banks have branch offices. The temple marketplace
was the heart of the Jewish economic system, and
it was a system that exploited the poor and profited
the powerful and wealthy, often through unethical
means. The ancient historian, Josephus, records
that in Jesus’ time the temple was especially
corrupted with greed and hate.
The money changers and the sellers of doves were
both symbolic of the whole oppressive religious
economic system. Among other things, people who
were considered unclean because of sickness or
disability had to purchase the doves to sacrifice
in the temple before they could be fully restored
to participate in daily life. It would be like
making unemployed people pay money before they
could go back to work. The system not only excluded
people, but kept them excluded and profited by
their exclusion.
Jesus used direct action to communicate his opposition
and to bring attention to the unjust exclusion.
After getting everyone’s attention by shutting
down the marketplace operations, Jesus stood up
and taught the crowd that was now eager to listen,
spellbound. He drew from the two great prophets,
Isaiah and Jeremiah, for texts to support his
actions. Jeremiah called the temple a den of robbers
for the way it oppressed and excluded people.
Jeremiah threatened that God would destroy the
temple if it continued its injustices.
Isaiah, on the other hand, presented the positive
vision of what God intended the temple to be.
Jesus was quoting the passage we heard a few minutes
ago. Isaiah used foreigners as representative
of all who are excluded form full participation
in religious life, and said, “These I will
bring to my holy mountain to make them joyful
in my house of prayer…for my house shall
be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus
says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of
Israel, I will gather others to them besides those
already gathered.”
This vision of an all-inclusive house of God was
the cause for which Jesus was willing to risk
arrest and crucifixion. To say that Jesus died
for our sins is too general a statement. In a
real sense, Jesus died for the specific sin of
our excluding people from the blessed community
of God’s realm. He died for the sin of our
discrimination against people who are outcasts
because they are different or disadvantaged or
disabled, and the sin of the exercise of our privilege
when it is at the expense of others’ exploitation.
Jesus died for these sins because he worked to
end oppression and discrimination whenever he
encountered them, and he would not quit, and it
made the oppressors angry and afraid.
Our Open and Affirming covenant describes one
of the truest ways of following Jesus imaginable,
because it pledges that we will do just the kind
of things he did. Following Jesus that closely
feels dangerous because we know that his way leads
through the cross. Discipleship requires that
we be willing to risk sacrifices all the way up
to our own crucifixion. But we know also that
the way does not end at the cross. It ends in
the realm of God. That realm is what we create
on earth through our sacrifices. We make the earth
a little bit more like the inclusive, all-welcoming
realm of light and love that people describe who
have died and come back to life. When we sacrifice
ourselves to end oppression and exclusion God’s
will is done on earth as it is in heaven.
Today some Christians are going to the cross of
arrest and punishment because of an unjust war.
Others are sacrificing themselves to try to reverse
the widening gap between rich and poor. Others
are working to prevent the environmental catastrophe
of global climate change that will oppress and
make beggars of entire nations, if not of all
nations. And still others are trying to turn back
the racism that has increased dramatically since
September 11, 2001.
As Pril Hall pointed out at our banquet last Sunday
evening, all these troubles in the world seem
so huge that we can feel helpless before them.
It is our duty to keep working even if it is an
entire empire we are taking on, but sometimes
we can’t help feeling as if we are not making
a difference even as we try. As Pril said we are
truly blessed to have something we can do, something
that is especially ours to do, something where
we can make an enormous difference as individuals,
and we can solve as a community.
Right now this church is guilty of the kind of
sin Jesus risked his life to stop with his direct
action in the temple. We are excluding from God’s
house people with physical disabilities who cannot
walk up and down stairs. If we were doing this
maliciously out of our own corruption or prejudice
or to protect our own privilege, then the tactics
Jesus used in the temple would be appropriate
here. I would be urging you to chain yourself
to the doors or block access to the bathrooms.
But the injustice we are guilty of has never been
intentional, and we are unified in our willingness
to change it ourselves.
So the cross we have to bear is not the delivering
of our bodies to prison, but the giving of our
time and money to make our church accessible.
We are not risking an uncomfortable jail cell,
but the discomfort of talking about money with
one another.
Just as Jesus’ arrest or the arrests of the
protesters today are not ends in themselves, so
also money is not the end of our campaign. As
with Jesus in the temple, our goal is all about
people. The talk of money is only our best means
to achieve the end of this church becoming a house
of prayer for all, a day care center for all,
a site of weddings and funerals and baccalaureate
services open to all. Our goal is not to raise
money or even to build the beautiful addition
we envision, our goal is not to add our contribution
to that of the many generous generations that
have gone before us—all these are merely
means to the end of fulfilling the solemn vow
of our covenant, in which we say, “We pledge
to end oppression and discrimination whenever
we encounter them, and, guided and empowered by
the Holy Spirit, to help create the blessed community
of God’s realm.”
We may not be able by ourselves to end the war,
to establish economic justice for all, or to stop
global warming or racism or homophobia, but we
can end the wrong that takes place at our church
door. It may require sacrifices on our part, but
certainly not a heavier cross than we can bear.
And as Pril said, what a joy there is in our being
able to do something so positive, so attainable,
so rewarding at this time in history.
In a few minutes we will be commissioning our
campaign visitors to go out seeking pledges, and
we will commission the congregation to receive
them with hospitality. As we do it we should think
about Jesus commissioning his disciples to take
part in his nonviolent direct action campaign.
Jesus and the disciples brought good news to the
oppressed, restored them to the community, and
gave them their own share of the ministry to bear.
We are following directly in the footsteps of
Jesus and his first followers. Our feet are stepping
surely along the sacred way as we do this good
thing. We may be in the wilderness of Lent and
an overshadowed world, but we can rejoice as we
walk this road together. We can rejoice as we
imagine the voices of all those who have ever
been shut out saying in unison within these walls,
“I was glad when they said unto me, ‘Let
us go into the house of the Lord.’”
Let us pray in silence now, feeling our own gladness
to be able to be here, and imagining how much
greater our collective gladness will be when we
have made this house of prayer open to all. Let
us pray in silence…
return
to the top of page
return
to Past Sermons Archive
|
