Sermon: Mechanics, Logistics, and Deep Faith

John 2:13-22

Mechanics, Logistics, and Deep Faith

James Sledge                                                                                       March 4, 2018

I assume that many of you have seen the QR code printed in the announcements section of the bulletin. For those not familiar, these are a kind of barcode that can be scanned with a smartphone app. Scan ours and it lets you use a credit card to pay your pledge or make a contribution to the Hunger Ministries offering that we do the first Sunday of each month.

We added that QR code to address a problem that increasingly impacts church giving. Many people no longer carry checkbooks and rarely carry much cash. If they want to donate to our Welcome Table ministry, they have to use a credit card, debit card, iPay, etc.

In an increasingly cashless, paperless economy, offering plates passed down the aisle may soon become relics replaced by new technologies. Some churches have added kiosks so that worshippers can make a credit card contribution more effortlessly than with QR codes.

Some people do think that offering plates and a giving ritual are an important, but not many think them absolutely central to Christian faith. They’re mechanics and logistics, and the same could be said of the money changers and animal sellers in today’s gospel.

Jewish pilgrims journeyed long distances to celebrate Passover in Jerusalem. Many traveled on foot, with no way to bring animals for sacrifice. And they carried Roman coins which weren’t allowed in the Temple because they had images of emperors on them, graven images considered idolatrous. They couldn’t be used for offerings or to pay the Temple tax.

Booths for buying an animal or swapping Roman coins for Jewish shekels addressed a practical problem. They were necessary logistics for the Temple to operate, little different from offering plates, QR codes, or payment kiosks.

John’s gospel handles the so-called “cleansing of the Temple” very differently than do Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Those all place it in Holy Week where it heightens the conflict that leads to Jesus’ death. But John has it as the first public act of Jesus’ ministry.

Modern minds tend to wonder which version is historically accurate, but that misunderstands the nature of the gospels. John doesn’t place the cleansing of the Temple at the beginning in order to correct the historical record. Rather, John uses this event as a lens for viewing and understanding Jesus. He puts it first as an interpretive key for what follows.

Initially Jesus looks like other pilgrims who’ve come for Passover, but he quickly turns into a wild-eyed prophet, condemning goings on at the Temple. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus says, “You have made it a den of robbers,” suggesting that pilgrims are being overcharged for animals or currency exchange. But John omits this charge. Jesus merely says, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” No suggestion of anything criminal. And in John’s telling, focus quickly shifts away from Temple mechanics and logistics to symbolic language where “temple” refers to Jesus’ body.

In what will be a recurring pattern in the gospel, the truth about Jesus is located in the symbolic or figurative and not the literal. Recognizing and understanding Jesus requires moving from the literal to the symbolic. In our reading, Jesus’ opponents don’t understand because they hear “temple” literally. And in the gospel’s very next story, Nicodemus, a Jewish teacher, cannot understand Jesus because he hears a literal, “born again” rather than the figurative “born from above” Jesus intends.

Similarly, the Samaritan women in the following story misunderstands “living water” to mean fresh, running water when Jesus actually speaks symbolically of spiritual refreshment that brings new life. But unlike Nicodemus, this Samaritan woman, this outsider from a despised group, is able to move past her literalism, and so began to recognize Jesus for who he is. As this happens, Jesus says something to her that seems connected to our reading.

“Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain (a Samaritan holy site) or in Jerusalem… But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him.”

_____________________________________________________________________________

Our gospel reading starts with a story ostensibly about Jesus’ upset over temple logistics and mechanics, but it quickly moves to allusions of God’s new day. In John, the Temple cleansing is about the arrival of the Word made flesh, God incarnate, an arrival that transcends the Temple and its patterns of worship.

For John, this is a Christological event, not a historical one, an event that fulfills the prophecy  of God’s final victory in the Old Testament book of Zechariah. The last sentence of that book says of God’s coming in glory and final victory, …there shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord of hosts on that day.

_____________________________________________________________________________

According to John’s gospel, participating in the new day of God that comes in Jesus means letting go of old ways, of institutional mechanics and logistics, and discovering a new, spirit filled existence and worship, radically focused on Jesus, on the Word made flesh.

I couldn’t avoid seeing a connection here to our Lenten focus on letting go, on pausing and simplifying in order to go deeper in our faith. And I can’t help wondering if some of our mechanics and logistics, the rhythms and patterns of our congregation or our individual lives, might not get in the way of a spirit filled faith radically focused on God’s love in Christ.

Mechanics and logistics are unavoidable, even necessary, but they also have a tendency to get confused with the thing they’re meant to support. When Presbyterian missionaries went into Ghana in the late 1800s, they insisted that worship required European music on organs or pianos. When they begin to train indigenous pastors, they required European style academic robes, ridiculous attire in the African heat. Somehow the mechanics and logistics of worship got confused with God’s new thing in Christ, a confusion that gets in the way of true and deep faith.

Where is the center of your faith, of your life? Is it the new life in Christ that brings grace, wholeness, and renewal as God’s beloved? Or has it gotten a bit off track, distracted by mechanics and logistics, by the things the world values, by things that draw our focus off of Jesus? If so, Lent may be the ideal time to stop, to simplify, to let go of those things that are not central so that you can fully experience new life as God’s beloved in Christ.

All praise and glory to the God who comes to us in the flesh that we might have life, and have it abundantly. Thanks be to God.