Love Carries Through

You have given all to me

To you Lord, I return it

Everything is yours, do with it what you will

Give me only your love and your grace

That is enough for me

And in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,

Amen

In the last few years, I’ve had to say see you later to my children in new and different ways.

I have found these more recent fare thee wells have been more poignant than the others in a long series of milestone see you laters.

I can remember as if it was just yesterday when we first dropped off the kids at daycare, then kindergarten.

The elementary school years flew by and soon it was time for middle school and then, high school of course.

And I can’t forget those drop-offs at camp where Jen and I would be promised two whole weeks of our children off on their adventures while we would head to a favorite restaurant and toast each other with chicken wings and songs of freedom.

Yet these most recent goodbyes, the college drop offs, have been huge for me; leaving me with a sense of profound pride in the adults they have become.

My children are living and building their own lives in places away from home, their bedrooms no longer echo with the sound of video games and facetime conversations.

Sure, they do come home on break and all of that but the period away is longer, less celebratory and more routine.

Far less chicken wings are consumed these days.

And Jenn and I have found a life together, reconnecting and disconnecting and building new connections as we navigate the empty nest.

Our routines are new, sharing dinner purposefully on Sunday and then watching All Creatures Great and Small while wearing mud masks is well looked forward to, I assure you.

And yet, we are still parents.

Distance does not change that, it only makes it different.

Not difficult, just different.

And it is in these seasons of change where I find myself in a rather reflective mood; wondering about change in general and my place within a world made new and yet filled with pride and love and awe.

It is also in times of change where we might struggle.

All that we relied on, those familiar footsteps heard from downstairs, the lumbering pounding of growing feet rumbling down the steps, doors slammed in youthful frustration, laughter at the dinner table, tears of frustration falling on that same table when it came to math homework.

And I admit, some of those tears might have been my own, as I never really did get Common Core Math.

The sounds are now new, silence enters where once there was noise, there are only two forks striking their plates where once there were four.

Change, though necessary and good and wanted, can bring a mix of feelings and we can react to it in many ways.

And that, my friends, is my thought about this morning’s gospel reading.

Because at the time the Evangelist John wrote his gospel, the Temple, the Temple that took years to build had been toppled by the Roman occupiers.

And this caused a great deal of consternation, a great deal of anger, a great deal of sorrow.

The Temple’s destruction, it’s stones so large that when the Romans pushed down its walls they left indentations on the pavement below that are still visible to this day, was a sea change for Judaism and one that caused a great shift in Jewish religious life.

Following the Temple’s destruction, Judaism shifted to a more localized form.

No longer would pilgrims make their way down to Jerusalem for holy days to worship and offer up sacrifices.

Instead, Jews began worship in synagogues and study the Torah and Talmud.

This changed form of worship and devotion to God became known as Rabbinic Judaism

And yet there was still a struggle here.

How was Jewish life supposed to proceed without Temple life.

Rabbinic Judaism began to offer answers to that question for practicing Jews, and yet for Christians, some who still considered themselves Jewish, that question was particularly acute.

How to worship without a Temple?

And John offers us an answer.

Enter Jesus into the story.

And he enters the Temple.

He looks around a bit.

He forms a whip from ropes and begins freeing the animals caged there to be purchased for sacrifice.

He is furious.

He is turning over tables pouring out money from the money changers.

And he shouts, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

All of this takes place at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry.

Unlike in Matthew, Mark, and Luke where Jesus’ turning of the tables happens at the end of the story, this is the beginning.

And it is a proclamation of change.

A new way of doing things, a new way of being.

Because what was happening in the Temple at the time he entered it, had been happening for quite a while.

Money changers weren’t there for profit, they were there to exchange currency from those pilgrims traveling to the Temple from far and wide.

Those animals weren’t there as part of a Sunday market, they were there to be purchased for sacrifice with newly exchanged coins.

And they weren’t located in the sanctuary but outside the holiest places in the Temple.

So, we might ask what Jesus is so upset about, why is he turning tables and freeing animals if this was the best way for folks to practice their faith?

Well, we can look to the prophet Zechariah, a minor prophet active in the sixth century BCE.

Zechariah spoke about the Day of the Lord, essentially a time when justice shall come to all peoples.

Christians have a different point of view about this day, they might see it as the time when Christ returns.

Yet in Zechariah, this, again, is when all peoples of the earth shall receive justice and he writes at the very end of his book:

On that day there shall be inscribed on the bells of the horses, “Holy to the Lord.” And the cooking pots in the house of the Lord shall be as holy as the bowls in front of the altar, and every cooking pot in Jerusalem and Judah shall be holy to the Lord of hosts, so that all who sacrifice may come and use them to boil the flesh of the sacrifice. And there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord of hosts on that day.

So, in John, Jesus is seen removing the traders from the house of the Lord.

John is saying that with Jesus’ arrival, we will now all experience justice; all of the cooking pots, whether they are in the Temple, at its altar, even outside of the Temple and in all of Jerusalem and Judah, shall be holy.

There should be no traders in the Temple because they are no longer necessary, all things have been made holy on the Day of the Lord.

And yet, why does Jesus expel them so violently?

Well, John is writing to a community that is in deep disagreement about the future of Christianity and Judaism.

These are still two Jewish communities and they have been profoundly changed by the destruction of the Temple.

While some will move towards Rabbinic Judaism, John’s community is arguing with a subset of the continuing Jewish community about how to carry on after the destruction of the Temple.

And John addresses this by focusing no longer on stone and masonry, but on the Christ being the new Temple.

Remember Jesus said the Temple would be destroyed and in three days, it would be raised up again.

This was not a reference to the actual walls, but to Jesus being the Temple.

And following his death and resurrection, his disciples recalled that indeed, Jesus was the Temple.

This idea would have been anathema to those who did not believe Jesus was Messiah and it was anathema to those leaders in the continuing Jewish community.

That is evidence of why John placed Jesus’ entrance into the Temple at the beginning of the story, evidence of why John focused so much on the violence portrayed in that entry, because John and his community were arguing for their side and arguments can sometimes be angry.

The answer for the Johannine community to the question of what to do after the Temple fell was focus on Jesus as the Temple.

No longer would they need to center their religious life around a physical structure but instead around the metaphysical being that is Jesus Christ.

Rather than looking at this argument and continuing it in the modern day, we can see it for what it was: two communities mourning the destructive change that just occurred in their lives and trying to figure things out.

The arguments that occurred two thousand years ago are not ours to have.

That was an argument between the authorities of Jews and Christians and no longer belongs in this age.

Too much hatred has been spat, too much blood has been spilt in the name of antisemitism.

We need to atone for all of that and in this season of Lent, now is the time to ask God to forgive us for the evil performed in Christ’s name.

We need also to acknowledge that we worship one God, the God of Abraham, and that God in Deuteronomy and Leviticus and again in our gospels, commands us to love God and love each other.

It is in times of change when words can be spoken in anger and the impact of that anger can last centuries.

Yet now, we can look with favor upon each other and love each other always.

Our house, Jenn’s and mine, is quieter now.

We are separated from our children in wild and wonderful ways.

Yet we are not broken.

Love carries through the miles between us.

Just as all of us are separate from Judaism and Islam and Hinduism and all of the other flavors of faith and lack of faith, love carries on.

God loves us all.

God’s love is universal.

God’s love continues to be reborn.

Amen.