3 Lent B - 15 March 2009

3 Lent B - 15 March 2009
Exodus 20:1-17; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22
James V. Stockton

“We come into the world into the middle of things to which we are indebted, things not of our own making, for whose repair we nevertheless become responsible.” So writes professor and theologian Paula Cooey in her book Willing the Good: Jesus, Dissent, and Desire." She continues, “We die in the middle of things, leaving the legacy of our shared but unique presence, including the effects of our mistake, to strangers we will never know.” From this she concludes that “Transfiguration of desire” becomes for many people “a way of life, a perpetual revolution, and as such, a gift to the future.”

What is it that people desire but to love and to be loved, to be appreciated to be remembered, to be safe and secure, to be happy, to be free? This is a list of guesses; and as such it is incomplete. Probably anyone could add to or edit it. Cooey’s point is that a relationship with God especially as disclosed in God’s self-expression, i.e., in Jesus Christ, God become one of them, people can find their most basic desires met and thus transformed, we might say ‘morphed,’ into something quite unexpected.


The people of Israel are a people like any other, a people with a list of desires. They wish to be free. And as soon as God liberates them they begin to lose this desire for freedom and its incumbent responsibilities. They wish to be fed, and as soon as God provides them the miracle food from heaven they demand more tasty fare. The details of their story are there for the reading in the book of the Exodus, from which we hear this morning. Ultimately, the people desire a relationship with God. But when Gods draws near, they cower in terror and beg their leader to mediate for them so that they can keep a comfortable distance between themselves and God. ‘How do we have a relationship with God?’ they ask. ‘Find out for us, Moses, and we’ll stay here safe and secure, and continue our pursuit of happiness, recognition, and legacy.’

And what God gives them in response is what people know now as the Ten Commandments. They take up hardly a single page in our Prayer Book. We can find them printed on trinkets or wall plaques. And as quickly as they may written, as easy to read, perhaps to memorize, this is how hard they are to keep. What does it mean to have no other gods but God? What doe it mean to have no idols, no images of anything - anything? Really?! - in heaven or on earth. What does it mean not to misuse the name of God? Is it really as simple as not cussing or swearing? And as the last of the overtly religious commandments, what does it mean to honor the day of rest? On this last one, anyway, we likely understand enough of what it means, that we can share a smile over the many ways that we ignore it. After these, we can mention in passing those commandments that have more apparently practical applications: ‘Honor your parents; Don’t murder; Don’t cheat; Don’t steal; Don’t lie; Don’t scheme to get something that belongs to somebody else.’

Religious or practical, all the Ten Commandments seem to be quite straightforward. But it takes just a moment of our attention on any one of them, to realize, first, that all of them are spiritual in nature, and then, second, to realize that they are all quite difficult to obey without flaw. Now maybe all this additional explanation in this passage makes sense. These things are complex and subtle and keeping them is just the same. And in this way, the Commandments themselves can persuade us that God’s response in Jesus to our desire to have a relationship with God is just as subtle and complex. Until, that is, we find our desires being transfigured, until we find our hopes and aspirations transformed.

This I think, is what the Apostle Paul claims sounds like ‘foolishness to the wisdom of the world.’ And remember, Paul’s biography has him at the top of his class, so to speak, as a student of the Rabbis and the teachings of scripture. Far from throwing away his education, Paul builds upon it to reach others like himself: people seeking credible expression and practical application of divine truth; people, like himself, who find their desire for relationship with God being transformed.

Theologian Cooey writes that “Many ordinary people live this way, however falteringly…anonymously doing extraordinary things as if it were normal all the time.” Many people, she notes, “may dissent against their culture in the way they do their jobs, how they rear their children, when[ever] they, without considering the consequences, hesitatingly speak out against prevailing unjust practices.”

In Jesus’ day, the prevailing practice among his people is to worship God at the Temple in Jerusalem, to offer animal sacrifices as a way to plead with God for forgiveness and favor. And because many are traveling a long way, it is simpler to buy at the Temple an animal that is already deemed by the Temple priests acceptable for use as a sacrifice. Of course, in order to purchase the animal a worshipper needs to use money that is already ritually acceptable, e.g., money that has no image on it of some false god. So, one may use only ‘Temple money’ to make the purchase. And since the Temple vendors have a lock on the market, both the exchange rate for the money and then the costs of the animals for sacrifice are lop-sided in favor of the Temple.

The authorities of the Temple are the people who have the power to tell people, to tell you and me, that God is or is not off-limits. And they are using your desire and mine to come before God righteous and holy and pure as an opportunity to make a huge profit for themselves. And that’s just the way it is. We all have grown up with this system. Jesus himself has grown up with this system. It’s just the way it is.

Until the day that God in Jesus says “No more!” “No more profiteering in the name of my Father in heaven!” says Jesus. ‘No more preying on people’s desire for relationship with God.’ ‘No more telling people that obedience to commandment, ordinance, and rule is real response to God’s own desire to know them and love them. And he drives them out in a stampede with the very livestock they’ve bee selling running at their side.

It’s just too easy to analyze a commandment and make up the rules that define obedience to it, in order to ignore the spirit and its power that move behind the commandment to begin with. It’s just too easy to fix one’s attention on the outward Temple created by the labor of generations in order to ignore the Temple of oneself and the love of God that created it, that breathed us into being. It’s just too easy to focus on resigning ourselves to those systems of which we a part, at work, in church, at home, wherever, in order to ignore the ways that we are already working, praying, however haltingly, to live out our dissent to injustices being committed in the name of life, liberty, or happiness, or in the name of God, or in your name or mine. Finally, it is just too easy to focus on the hypocrisies of systems outside ourselves in order to ignore the personal systems, habits, or patterns that you or I accommodate within, and which effectively keep each of us at a distance from God, from others, and from ourselves, even while we claim a desire that others would come with us and know God intimately.

“It happens…,” writes Cooey, “that life transformed and transforming, - life lived out of the love of God - makes available to those [loving God and loved by God] a peculiar kind of joy that sustains the circulation of love through them in the midst of the [very] world they challenge.” Sometimes you and I believe that we are mysteriously, complicatedly, subtly indebted for it. But when you and I allow Christ to overturn our bids to purchase it with the petty coin of our own ‘holiness, purity, and perfection’ we find only that which we inherited when we were born ‘here into the middle of things.’ We find it to be our way of life, our perpetual revolution of holy dissent, our legacy and gift to the future. It is simple, it’s obvious, and it’s beautiful. It is the Love of God for all.

And so may Almighty God, whose will it is to restore all things in Christ our Savior, mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under Christ’s most gracious rule; who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

© 2009, James V. Stockton