Texts: Exodus 20: 1-17

Psalm 19

1 Corinthians 1: 18-25

John 2: 13-22

In Mel Brook’s film, History of the World, Part 1, there is a scene with Moses standing on the side of the mountain holding three stone tablets. He proclaims boldly, “Our God has give us these 15…” (Then he accidentally drops one of the tablets and it shatters.) “I mean, 10 commandments.” It’s a good joke, but with a point. This list of commandments was not intended to be the final and finite list of God’s directions for human beings.

Certainly, in one sense, they are timeless. In another way, they are but one important step in the development of the covenant between God and humankind. They are timeless in that they provide a bedrock of basic rules to live by. Do not worship anything but God or make false images of God. Do not use God’s name for evil. Keep the Sabbath. Honor your parents. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not bear false witness. Do not covet.

A while back, Karen and I were invited to the home of one of the folks I got to know during my pilgrimage to Turkey last fall. Gloria and her family graciously invited us to share Shabbat with them and also invited a Muslim couple. As part of their weekly Shabbat ritual, they discuss some portion of scripture and that week happened to be the Ten Commandments. They had asked us to read the text and be prepared to join in the conversation. When we drove up to their beautiful home, Karen and I resolved before we entered their home not to covet it.

It was a fabulous evening with incredible food and fascinating conversation. One of the things that came up was the question of making idols. Muslims believe that you should never make any kind of image that represents God, because any attempt to do so would only create a false image. Sure enough, if you look at the history of art, most portrayals of God end up looking like the artist, which means that many Westerners ended up with a mental picture of God as an old white man with a beard. Ask a child to draw God and most often, that is what he/she will draw.

Perhaps you recall that wonderful scene in Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple, where Shug talks about why she had stopped praying for a long time. She describes the process she had to go through to get that image of an old white man pretending to be God out of her head so that she could pray again.

Our Shabbat host shared with us the story of Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, who gave Moses advice on setting up a legal system not unlike our modern judicial system. That story is told in the chapter before the Ten Commandments. Together, these represent a vital turning point in the development of the Israelites as well as a significant contribution to civilization itself. But they also reflect another side of that culture, particularly shown in the last commandment. It is clearly directed only to men, telling them not to covet each other’s possessions, which include the neighbor’s house, wife, slaves, and animals all lumped together. (Maybe that is why they have always been so popular among Southern patriarchs.)

Still, the 10 commandments were a great starting place in developing rules for God’s covenant people. Rules are important; they provide structure and boundaries. Many of us who’ve come out of some form of religious fundamentalism with rigid rules can overreact and not see the value of having good rules to live with. Some who had overly authoritative parents overreact and have trouble establishing and enforcing good rules for our children. It has been shown that rules provide a sense of security for children, even during those times like adolescence when they feel they don’t need them.

The Psalm for today encourages us to look at the law of God as being a very positive thing, more desired than fine gold and sweeter than the drippings of honeycomb. Yet commandments and rules and law, even when they are good ones, are not enough. Which brings us to today’s gospel lesson. There is no indication that any laws were being broken in the temple. In fact, temple priests were carefully controlling the proceedings to make sure that all the ritual laws were being observed. There was a place for pilgrims who had come to Jerusalem for Passover to get everything they needed for proper worship. There were moneychangers helping people to exchange their Roman money, with images of Caesar declaring himself to be God, for Jewish money with no graven images. There were merchants selling cattle of various sizes as well as birds so that everyone could find something they could afford to offer as a sacrifice according to the law. This all took place in the temple courtyard away from the temple’s sacred worship place. It all worked nicely, which is why no one seemed to understand why this itinerant rabbi suddenly went berserk.

Or maybe it was not so suddenly, as he took the time to make a whip of cords, indicating it was somewhat pre-meditated. No one paid much attention until he took his homemade whip and began driving out the sheep and cattle. Jesus’ aggressive behavior must have scared the merchants who otherwise would have stopped him. The next thing you know he is back in the courtyard and this time he is pouring out the coins of the moneychangers and turning over their tables. Then he said, or probably shouted over the noise and uproar this caused, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

There is not another story in the Gospels where Jesus gets this angry and acts like this. But there is a version of this story in all four gospels, and scholars general accept this as an act of the historical Jesus. The three synoptic gospels place this story near the climax of Jesus’ ministry, as he makes his first and only trip to Jerusalem. John places it near the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, during the first of several visits to Jerusalem. John also adds an interchange between Jesus and “The Jews.”

This probably reflects the situation of the church in John’s day when the conflict between those who believed in Jesus and other Jews who didn’t had intensified to the point where the followers of Jesus were being expelled from the temple. The words that follow this episode in John’s account seem to reflect a time when the temple has been destroyed and Jesus’ followers have experienced the resurrection.

But all four gospels agree that this was a major escalation of conflict involving Jesus. Jesus’ decision to challenge the sanctioned way of doing things in the temple and the aggressive way he did it got the attention of the authorities. This episode no doubt played an important role in the ultimate decision by religious leaders to have Jesus arrested and killed.

Did Jesus realize how dangerous his actions were that day? Was it a holy temple tantrum that showed how frustrated Jesus was with the way religion had become in his day, a meaningless mixture of ritual and capitalism? Or was it a carefully thought out act that was provocative, yet a non-destructive act that like his parables aimed at overturning the furniture in people’s minds.

Whatever he intended, the disciples saw the danger in it. It reminded them of a verse from Psalm 69, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” They realized that this kind of behavior could get you killed.

Whether it was holy rage or a carefully calculated protest, this would be as violent as Jesus would ever get. Perhaps he realized he had gone to the edge of one way to go, and he turned another way. Perhaps he breathed a sigh of relief that in his anger he had not attacked any people, had not hurt any one except maybe the cattle. He may have hit the cattle a little too hard, but then they have thick hides.

From this point on, he would not lift a finger to defend himself. On the night when Jesus was arrested, one of his followers drew a sword and began to fight for Jesus, but Jesus said, “Put your sword in its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will send me more than twelve legions of angels? But then, how would the scriptures be fulfilled, which say it must happen in this way.” (Matthew 26: 52-53) This way, the way the kingdom would come about, would be the way of non-violence. To those ready to defend him, his words seemed foolish, and to most people, they still do.

These have been challenging, maybe even difficult days, to be the pastor of this church. I received an email from one member who said he had lost all respect for me and others in the church because of our tendency to “blame-America-first.” I have heard that some folks have not felt comfortable being here because of a perceived over emphasis on peace. I have tried to listen to that, and for many weeks deliberately kept the issue of the impending war out of my sermons. Of course, this meant that there were folks who felt that the church was not taking a strong enough stand for peace. After 14 years here, I accept that managing polarities is a big part of the job that you pay me for. Given my propensity to want to please everybody, this does take its toll, which is why I have tried to take more time off lately than I normally might have.

I have tried to be as non-defensive as possible in responding to those of you who have been unhappy, at least those I knew about. I have appreciated the chance to talk openly about differences with some of you. I try to let go of rumors of unhappy people who do not let me know what is going on with them because not letting go makes me crazy. I once had somebody mad at me for not visiting them in the hospital even though they did not tell me they were in the hospital. Dialogue is not possible if I do not hear from you in some way.

Over the last months, I have not chosen people to pray or participate in worship with any thought to their views about war. I hope I have never claimed to have any more of an authoritative word from God than any one of you. I work hard to make it clear that this is not my pulpit. I also struggle mightily to balance the tension between the church’s need to stand for something with our need to honor the diversity of opinions among us on a particular issue.

I welcome and look forward to our Readers’ Theater next Sunday and hope it helps us listen to one another in our differences. It helps to remember that we have been through countless conflicts here just as difficult and more as the current one. What we think about whether this war is right or wrong is not a litmus test for being a member of this congregation. What holds us together is our covenant with one another and with God.

I have never seen my sermons as anything near the final word of God. I hope they are at least good conversation starters in our quest to piece together the truth of God like putting together a quilt. But I also take seriously the authority you have vested in me when you called me as your pastor. This is not my pulpit, but since I enter it more than anyone else, I feel a deep obligation to struggle with the scriptures and my own experience to wrestle whatever truth I can bring to this patchwork of faith we share.

Even after fourteen years, the process of writing a sermon often begins with a groan and a feeling of “why me, Lord?” And yet, to my ongoing surprise, most weeks God breaks through my resistance and a word comes through. Not the only word from God, but a word from God.

One of the amazing things about following an assigned lectionary is that you are constantly preaching from texts that you did not choose. On Wednesday, I consulted with the Lent Team about whether we should change the service we had planned in light of the war’s beginning. They helped me see that we should not, but also pointed out that the texts themselves might have something to say about it.

And sure enough, they did. In our gospel today, we see Jesus as violent as he would ever get and yet he did no harm to anyone. The sheep and the cows were probably frightened, but he may have saved them from being slaughtered for sacrifice, at least on that day.

We can have different opinions about whether this particular war is justified in terms of our national security and our country’s well being. We can hold different opinions about whether this was the way to remove a brutal dictator. Now that the war has begun, I pray that the Iraqi people will someday be better off and not just the oil executives.

For me personally, I feel betrayed and lied to by my own government. I listened to the U.N. inspectors who were fleeing Iraq and getting virtually no press, saying that the Bush administration cut short their work, bad-mouthed their efforts, and made false claims to the press about evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Near the end, the U.N. inspection teams invited a new batch of scientists from Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories. The U.N. official described these inspectors as arriving as hawks and leaving as doves, after finding Iraq “a ruined country, not a threat to anyone.” (As reported in the Atlanta Journal Constitution)

I had a hard time hearing, “May God Bless America” at the end of the President Bush’s declaration of war. “The recourse to war, according to our Christian tradition, is an admission of human failure. By such action, we admit our lack of commitment to resolve human conflict. It is a resounding ‘no’ to God’s eternal ‘yes’ to humanity.” As this statement by the United Church of Christ expresses well, war is not the will of God.

But wrestle with something even more troubling than this particular war. It seems like we have one more example of the foolishness of the Gospel that we proclaim. Nobody seems to believe that it really works, even countless folks that call themselves Christians. The way of Jesus seems to have failed.

When I was young, I remember singing a hymn whose refrain began, “He could have called ten thousand angels.” I don’t remember any of the rest of it, but the meaning was clear: Jesus could have avoided dying on the cross. He said it himself. “Put your sword in its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that I cannot appeal to my father, and he will send me more than twelve legions of angels?”

Can you imagine how much shock and awe twelve legions of angels could have brought to that group of Roman soldiers and priests that had come to arrest him? Jesus could have grabbed the sword and led the charge. It is the view of salvation that we have seen in countless Hollywood movies. We believe more in an image of Mel Gibson mad as hell and kicking ass than we do in Jesus Christ dying on the cross. There are passages in the Bible where God uses war to achieve God’s purposes. But on that night when Jesus chose not to go that route, he forever changed things.

As our Bible Study leader pointed out on Wednesday night, Jesus said, “If anyone strikes you on you on your right cheek, turn the other also.” We cannot look to Jesus for justification to beat someone up because you think they might hit you.

After Mahatmas Gandhi studied the teachings of Jesus to come up with his method of bringing about change through non-violence, this Hindu man of faith wondered, “Why do Christians not believe it can work?”

Okay, whatever we thought about the war, it has begun. We can join together in praying for our soldiers and our leaders. As followers of Christ, we are also called to pray for our enemies, the soldiers, leaders, and civilians of Iraq. I pray that this war that I strongly opposed will bring some good. I must admit that the sight of children flying kites and women walking freely in public in Afghanistan without the fear of the brutal policies of the Taliban was a good thing that came from that war. Certainly, the world was better off after the removal of Hitler. That does not mean that Hitler could have been stopped much earlier without a World War. Ninety-three percent of Germans were Christians, and most of them went along with what he was doing.

I think that an argument can be made for war’s being necessary, and maybe I am wrong and this one was. But if it is a necessity, I hope we can agree that it is more about the mess we humans make of things and not about the will of God or the way of Christ.

However we feel about this particular war, I also hope that we can find our unity as a church in dedicating ourselves to prayer and action to help find ways to avoid ever having another war. That may sound like working for a pipe dream, but I believe it is what we are called to help bring about: no less than the kingdom of God.

I would like to close with several short quotations that together summarize what I have been trying to say. The first is from a long-time peace activist, the second from a former general and Republican president, and the third from an early follower of Jesus:

From Joan Baez: “The only thing that’s been a worse flop than the organization of nonviolence has been the organization of violence.”

From General Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under a cloud of war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

From the apostle Paul: “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are saved it is the power of God.”