We make a series of assumptions when we read the
story of Jesus throwing the moneychangers and the other merchants out of the
temple. #1) we assume that Jesus must hate the market. That’s not exactly true.
He just didn’t want it in the temple. #2) we assume that the modern-day
equivalent of the temple is our church building, which leads to #3, which is
that we moralize the story and make it into rules about what can and cannot
happen in the church building. Our big assumptions are built on the premise
that our church building is the temple. In this way we make the same assumption
as the Jewish temple leaders. However, the temple, as Jesus tries to tell the
temple leaders, is Jesus himself. He is going to die and rise in three days;
not the temple building.
The moral of the story is not to keep the
building holy. The moral of the story is get rid of the impediments to seeing
Jesus in the building! Yes, if you are putting monetary gain before God then
you have things backwards, but not because the church building is somehow more
worthy of reverence; we don’t worship the building, we worship Jesus Christ.
The question this text is begging is “Do our
buildings and history matter more to us than Jesus.”
I’m a history person. I minored in it in
undergrad, and American history is one of my favorite subjects to read. So,
naturally, I understand it is critical that we learn from the past in order
that we might build upon the work of those who have gone before. This is what
the church should do. But somewhere along the line we began to value our
history and tradition with far more reverence than we should. We began to think
that the most important thing for the church was to leave a legacy, so that in
100 or 200 years somebody would read our names in a book. Our mission became
about legacy rather than proclamation.
A bishop I know once visited a church that was
struggling to survive financially and he asked what they would like people to
say about their church. A lady stood up and said, “We want people to say that
we were good and that we were here a long time.” That’s not a mission
statement, the bishop said, that’s an epitaph.
This is a challenge facing every church in every
mainline denomination. We have a history that is so important to us that—like
the Jews in the temple—we risk losing the centrality of Jesus Christ. It’s not
that we’re selling trinkets out in the halls; instead, we are living out
traditions that matter more to us than our mission to spread the gospel.
The metaphor for the church that keeps coming
back to me is that of a forest. A healthy forest has some old growth and some
new growth; it has portions that have burned recently and other portions that
have not seen fire in as long as anybody can remember. A healthy forest is rich
in diversity and embraces the death of some of its parts because death is the
only way to bring about new life.
Like churches, forests are also chronically mismanaged.
For example, it was the standing position of the US Forest Service up through
around the time of World War II to fight all wildfires that affected forest
land. This was a policy borne out of the notion that fire threatened life;
first the forests, then the animals and plants, and finally us. The forest
service was ruthlessly efficient at putting out fires, because few people
stopped to ask the question, “Could fire be a good thing?”
As it turns out, fire can be good. Forests had
survived for millions of years without humans keeping them from burning, and in
fact most forests depend on burning every once in a while for new growth to
appear. Fire destroys but then it brings new life. It’s not simply the case
that life will triumph one way or another. The US Forest Service discovered in
the 50’s and 60’s that forests filled with old trees were effectively dying
because there was no vitality to the life of the forest. Moreover, when there
was a fire all those old stands of trees and deadfall created blazes of a size
previously unfathomable. The old trees were gorgeous and impressive things, but
when the old trees were all that there was the whole forest burned.
Christianity in America is filled with old trees.
If we’re not careful, we are going to reach a point where the whole framework
of American Christianity is going to be so saturated with our culture of
self-sufficiency and greed that the traditions as we know them are going to
burn to the ground. Now, when I say old trees please don’t hear old people.
What I mean by old trees are churches that are always looking inward and
backward—churches where you hear more about traditions than about faith. It’s a
great thing to value history, just as it’s a great thing to value a tree. But
there comes a point when we are no longer capable of doing anything presently
because we are so handicapped by our past. When that happens, we risk letting
it all burn: the past, the present and ultimately the future. If there’s no
vitality in the church today; then there will be nobody tomorrow to remember
how it had been.
Forests teach us that vitality requires death.
And as Lutherans, we should already know this, because it is the same thing we
hear in our baptism. We are drowned in the waters before we rise again. But—now
here’s the challenging part—your baptism is not just a piece of history. It is
a living promise made to you every day of your life. When the Holy Spirit was
given to you in baptism you were put to death before you ever could rise. We
live in an extreme makeover culture that wants to make every imperfection
better. Baptism is the opposite of an extreme makeover; it is death and
resurrection. We need to remember that
every day of our lives. We need to throw off the pretension of self-importance
we carry with us, and that requires experiencing our baptism every day—dying to
ourselves so that we can live with Christ.
This week somebody told me that death is hard.
But I think that’s wrong. Death is easy; dying is hard. Because dying is
holding out the hope for an extreme makeover; death is accepting that all we
have left is resurrection.
Dying is holding on when the usefulness of a
thing has passed. So many of our little desires in life are dying and we put
them on ventilators, as if hoping to wring every little last bit of life out of
them, when we should be putting them to death. You can’t remember—you can’t
honor—a thing until it’s gone. It’s why Alzheimer’s is perhaps the cruelest
disease. It delays death and in its place we have dying. Many of you know that
my grandma recently died after a long progression of Alzheimer’s, and while I
am incredibly thankful for all the cards, thoughts and prayers I want you to
know this. Death is easy. The dying was hard. Whether it’s a church, your body,
your money, your grandma, or a forest, death is not something to fear. Death is
a precursor to resurrection. Nothing more.
And if we are afraid to say that, then there’s
nothing more to do. Then we’re dying. We’re the old growth, standing tall in
the forest, proudly showing for all the world the history embedded in every
ring in our trunk. But nobody cares. They’re all old trees, slowly dying;
they’re all turned in on themselves. And the fire is coming—one way or another.
Eventually, everything turns to dust.
So what do we do? Do we hold on harder to our
history and traditions? Do we go the other direction and try to assimilate to
the dominant cultural messages of our day?
Neither! Instead we do the most countercultural
thing of all. We stare down death; and say, “Is that all you’ve got? Because I
have a promise bigger than death; a promise, in fact, that I have experienced when
my sinful self was drowned in baptism. It’s done. I have died to sin, and it is
with Christ that I rise again.”
To be faithful, every day we must die to
ourselves, not as some melancholy ritual but because it is the only thing that
will not disappoint us. We will fall short of the glory of God on our own; so
it is time that the church of all places stops trying to reach that glory. This
is countercultural, and being countercultural is the only hope that our church has.
You see, when a healthy forest burns it just a
little death; at the end of our lives when we take our last breath it is just a
little death; and when our church looks different than it once had it is just a
little death.
And then we rise.
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