Text of 3-15 Sermon

John 2:13-22 (Exodus 20:1-17) "Startled by Clint Eastwood"
James Sledge -- March 15, 2009

The other night I was doing a little channel surfing, and I came across the old Clint Eastwood movie, Pale Rider. For those who’ve never seen it, it’s a fairly typical Eastwood western. The setting is the days of the California Gold Rush and a conflict between a group of poor prospectors with their families and a greedy, mining corporation that wants to take over their claims. Some ruffians hired by this corporation are harassing the prospectors when a mysterious stranger played by Eastwood rides into town and manages to bust up these hoodlums wielding an ax handle. The mysterious stranger then takes up with the prospectors, at which point we realize he is wearing a clerical collar. For the rest of the movie he is known only as “Preacher”

At a key moment in the drama, the owner of the mining company attempts to buy off the preacher. He invites him into his office for a drink and explains that he could be more than a preacher for just the prospectors. He could be a pastor to the town. It could be his parish and the mining company would build him a nice church building.

The Preacher seems intrigued and discusses these prospects, and one point noting that as a pastor with a congregation and a building he would naturally be worried about collections. The mining owner can scarcely contain his glee as he explains how there is a lot of money in the town and those collection plates would be overflowing. To which the Preacher responds, “That’s why I can’t do it. The Bible says you can’t serve God and mammon,” and he stares at the owner with steely eyes as he continues, “mammon being money.”

Now I have no idea if Clint Eastwood, in a movie filled with religious overtones, meant to take a swipe at the church with this line or not. But the line rattled me just a bit. After all, rare is the church pastor who doesn’t worry about how much will be in the collection plate. We Presbyterians tend to resist some of the more overt forms of church fund raising; no bingo or fund raising dinners here. But we still worry about how to get members to give enough to meet the budget. Our denomination has a Stewardship Office that produces materials to help with Stewardship Campaigns. And while stewardship and fund-raising aren’t quite the same thing, sometimes it can be awfully hard to tell them apart.

As coincidence or providence had it, I caught the movie, Pale Rider, the evening before I first looked at today’s Scripture readings to begin preparing this sermon. And there was Jesus, fashioning a whip and chasing the money changers and those selling animals out of the Temple. Now years ago I would probably not have made any connection to Jesus cleansing the Temple and that Clint Eastwood movie line. But years ago I didn’t really appreciate the situation Jesus found at the Temple.

I think there is a tendency to make stereotyped bad guys out of the money changers and animal sellers, to view them a little like villains in a Clint Eastwood western. But the fact is that these folks who get Jesus so riled up don’t look much like villains. You see, the Temple in Jerusalem didn’t function like a church sanctuary does for us. Rather it was the center of the Jewish religion, perhaps a bit like the Vatican is for modern day Roman Catholics. Depending on how far away you lived from Jerusalem, you might make a trip there once a year, maybe every few years, or maybe only once in your life. And at times of year such as Passover, huge crowds of pilgrims would flock to Jerusalem and the Temple.

Now naturally these pilgrims wanted to make offerings to God. But for most of them, the money they used in daily life could not be brought inside the Temple. These coins had images of Caesar, who had proclaimed himself divine. These were graven images that were perhaps unavoidable in daily life, but no good Jew would dare present such a graven image to God as an offering. To help alleviate this problem, money changers were stationed in the outer courtyards of the Temple complex, not inside the Temple itself.

And the pilgrims who had come from far away usually could not bring animals with them to offer as sacrifice. And so, there in the same outer courtyards of the Temple complex, you could buy an animal to sacrifice as an offering to God.

Now admittedly animal sacrifice seems a bit odd to most of us, but it was the norm in Jesus’ day, not just in Judaism but in most all religions. And I’m not sure that helping folks buy these animals was any different from being able to buy a candle for you to light in a Cathedral, or even from being able to buy Christian books in a church bookstore. And is it all that different from money changers to offer worshipers the chance to pay their offerings with credit cards or have their pledges directly drafted from their checking accounts, something we’re considering here?

And so perhaps you can see how, for me, when I start to look at the cleansing of the Temple story from this angle, Jesus morphs into Clint Eastwood’s Preacher, looks at me with a steely squint and says, “You can’t serve God and mammon… mammon being money.” And I squirm.

I squirm but I don’t for a moment worry that Jesus is going to chase me out of the sanctuary, or that Clint Eastwood is going to beat me up with an axe handle. Rather I think that Jesus wants to use my squirming to drive me in a much more helpful way, to drive me into deeper trust in and relationship with God.

As a religious professional, one of the real dangers to my faith is that I can find myself serving the church rather than serving God or Jesus. And Jesus and Clint jar me into taking a hard look at myself and discovering those places where my trust and loyalty have gotten misplaced. The 10 Commandments work in similar fashion. While the second part of these commandments deal with run of the mill morality, stealing, murder, etc, the real focus of the commandments seems to be on right relationship with God, on not seeking to manipulate God’s blessing for personal gain, on making sure that all of life is properly oriented toward God.

Now I realize that most of you are not religious professionals, and so Clint Eastwood’s Preacher may not speak through that steely squint to you in quite the same way he does to me. But most all of us have those things we serve or trust in rather than serving or trusting in God. And I’ve known more than a few church members whose loyalty to a particular congregation, or to some group in that congregation, seemed to be considerably stronger than any loyalty to Jesus’ call to follow him.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think Jesus thinks the church is a bad idea. Clint Eastwood may, but Jesus has called us to be the Church. But he also knows that from time to time we need to remember what it means to be the Church. We need to do a little cleansing of those things that have deflected us from loyalty to God and God’s call to discipleship in Jesus, the things that distract us from the temple that is destroyed and raised up in three days.

You know, beautiful temples and sanctuaries are wonderful places. They can often help draw us toward God, open us to God’s presence, remind us of God’s majesty and transcendence. But there is a more wonderful temple, one not made by hands, and he calls us to follow him into true and full relationship with God.
Thanks be to God!