3 Lent B 2024
Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22
In the 90’s I served a church in urban Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a key place in my spiritual journey. It was easily the most beautiful building of all the churches I’ve served, yes, including this one, which I dearly love.
It mirrored the style of the churches of Sweden, though on a smaller scale. Stucco exterior with a sweeping upward line and beautiful hardwood throughout. The wall behind the altar featured a bas-relief painting of the Good Shepherd that was one of the most beautiful pieces of religious art I’ve ever seen.
The church featured a gigantic pipe organ. The instrument itself was in the choir loft but it was connected to a massive system of pipes built into the wall behind the chancel. We had a retired dean of Berkeley College of Music who was also a renowned concert organist to play it.
Our Mark is a marvelous musician who works hard to prepare for each Sunday’s service, and we love him. But you might notice that we treat his preludes and postludes like background music, chatting away and going about our business.
Not at Faith Lutheran Church. When the prelude began, the people went silent, allowing the magnificent music to lift their souls toward worship. And after the service, when the postlude was played, the congregation would sit quietly, many with eyes closed, as they meditated on the day’s message. Most Sundays, when the postlude was completed, there was a standing ovation.
A standing ovation by the twelve to twenty people left in the four-hundred seat sanctuary, that is.
For the last roughly 1500 years, the church in the West played a vastly powerful role in shaping culture, economics and politics. It was a huge and complex institution, a multi-national corporation, a kind of culture machine. Beginning with the Roman emperor Constantine’s cynical and very effective idea to use the increasingly popular church as the cement of his empire, the church has been used by those in power to validate and justify themselves and their actions, good or evil.
And yet, this great institutional church was able to spread the message of scriptures, all of which were written long before the empire coopted the church. A great example of this strange synergy was the story of the first slave churches, established by slave owners to inspire their slaves to love their enslavement. The slaveowners taught early black preachers only those scriptures that justified slavery and encouraged slaves to be better slaves.
The slaveowners didn’t realize that sooner or later, literate black preachers would read the rest of the book, and that there they would find the hope of liberation in a story that featured a dark-skinned savior from a place far closer to their ancestral homes than North America was. On the one hand, the church spread because of its corruption, but it took root because of the scripture’s truth.
The old tale of the golden calf is the primal story of all idolatry: worshipping what we have made instead of worshipping him who makes us.
God never wanted to live in a temple. Like the humans he made, who for two to three hundred thousand years lived nomadic lives, constantly migrating on foot or in boats, constantly exploring and learning, God was the God of everywhere.
But people settled down, and they wanted God to settle down too. They lived in houses, and they liked them. Why wouldn’t God like a house?
People built boxes for themselves, and then tried to put God in various boxes. In today’s lesson from St. Paul, he talks about making God into a philosophy, a set of moral principles, a way to a happy and prosperous life. Or God is the one who shows up in hard times to do something miraculous, but is absent the rest of the time.
The problem with putting God in a philosophy box is that God is alive and available for real time relationship. He’s not just a way we talk about right and wrong or how to live a happy life. And the problem with the Miracle Box is that God is doesn’t disappear between miracles, but is actively involved in every thing that exists, and every being that lives. God is the God of Everything and Everywhere.
We worship what we make of God, rather than the God who makes us. And this is indicative of the cardinal sin of pride that runs through all of our being and doing, our focus on ourselves, our ego. We watch ourselves and we listen to ourselves and we rule over ourselves. We make things and we worship the things we make, even when what we are making is religion.
And so the notion that the new temple of God is a destroyed living body, our good and faithful servant who suffers so that we can live, is foolishness to people who put God in a philosophy box, and it is a sign of failure to those who put God in the Miracle Box.
This is the struggle, this is the real story, to one true narrative, that humankind worship what we have made, and forget the God who longs to make us.
In the late nineteenth century, the church was the center of life for rural Americans, the Bible the chief book in every home, and those who formed Philippi had a vision of the Christian Church’s mission, a belief that the church on earth, with the exception of Catholics of course, was united in one confession: Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, the savior of the world. The rest of their thinking about God was a more-or-less uncritical acceptance of Baptist and Presbyterian doctrine, itself a variation of a thousand years of biblical interpretation, that great edifice of the Western church.
But that great edifice is everywhere crumbling. The power and privilege of the church in the public sphere has been steadily declining, and many Christians, maybe even some of us, are full of nostalgia for the packed cathedrals and pipe organs of yesteryear, when a sermon from some great pulpit could sway millions. And let’s admit it, whenever we have a dialogue about our mission, the best we can come up with is “we need more volunteers, we need more members, we need more money.”
Our congregation is filled with the Holy Spirit, as is evidenced by how much we do for our community and the world. We help young people go to college. We volunteer in the community. We give significant money away to missions all around the globe. We are welcoming and warm to all who visit us. We bring people together, a ministry sorely needed in these days of widespread isolation and loneliness.
But I wonder about our actual religious life, the thing we are theoretically here to do. I spoke last week about martyrdom, which is simply witnessing to Christ in the midst of a world that worships itself and its desires. Certainly our many works of service, one would think, would say this, and I suppose it could, if anyone out there was aware that Christ inspired that service, but I doubt anyone is. I suspect most people, if they knew about what we do, might say that we are nice people, or that we are nice church. And we would be gratified to hear that, I suppose, but God would not be in that picture.
At my installation two years ago, our Regional Minister challenged us to find and tell our personal stories of faith. It’s something I rarely hear from any of you, and I wonder about that. I’ve heard many of you tell me about your history in church, but I can’t think of anyone who has actually told me what it was that God has done for them, or what they did to develop their relationship with God. We go to church, we say. We try to be better people, we say. When we invite people to church, we tell them its a nice church, good people, thought-provoking or fun, but do you hear anything in there about Christ? Does anyone say, “Christ has led me to a deep and powerful connection to God that is transforming me beyond my wildest dreams”? Or any words to that effect?
We repeat and repeat our traditional worship style, designed by people long dead for reasons opaque to most of us, and most of our favorite hymns were written two hundred years ago. We have annual programs we have always done, and feel compelled to always do, no matter what’s actually going on in our village or the world.
And the truth is the bleeding will continue, no matter what we do, because what we do is the same thing that hasn’t worked for the past fifty years. We prop up the temple, we prop up the edifice, we wear ourselves out rolling the rock up the hill, only to see it roll back down. And instead of wondering why it keeps rolling back down, we march back to the bottom of the hill and start pushing.
The answer is simple. Stop pushing, and let God push us.
What is true of humankind as a whole is true of me, church. I put myself in a box and I want God to be in here with me. And he is. But what he wants to do is let me out. He’s just waiting for me to realize it. He knows it will likely take pain and loss to teach me, and that’s what his son died on a cross to show me.
Jesus ran toward the pain, the pain of temptation. He faced it and defeated it by the power of the Holy Spirit, who gives life to the dead, who delivers us from our self-imposed enslavement. He showed us we will first have to experience the despair of pushing that rock up the hill before he will give us the power to take it up and throw it into the sea.
That beautiful church in Cambridge, with its amazing pipe organ and magnificent religious art, where my Liz was baptized and where we were ultimately married, burned to the ground last Easter. The current pastor was interviewed by a local Boston paper. And he said an interesting thing.
“It took the destruction of our church building to find out what the church really is.”
I believe the whole church on earth is in the midst of a profound sea change. As it sheds its attachment to the power of the state, its old stately trappings, its mighty buildings and its denominational office towers have come to dwarf the small numbers of elderly participants struggling to keep it all afloat. The number of churches closing greatly outnumbers the many that are planted. Seminarians we interview for ordination are rarely interested in serving in congregations, because they don’t see any hope in them. Instead they want to go into chaplaincy or social activism.
The American church is collapsing. But Jesus made a promise:
“Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days.”
When we grow sick and tired of doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, when we are driven to our knees by the struggle to make the church what we think it should be, when we become ready to let it die, it will be at that moment that the real opportunity will come.
When we stop making ourselves, God can begin to remake us.
Amen.
Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22
In the 90’s I served a church in urban Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a key place in my spiritual journey. It was easily the most beautiful building of all the churches I’ve served, yes, including this one, which I dearly love.
It mirrored the style of the churches of Sweden, though on a smaller scale. Stucco exterior with a sweeping upward line and beautiful hardwood throughout. The wall behind the altar featured a bas-relief painting of the Good Shepherd that was one of the most beautiful pieces of religious art I’ve ever seen.
The church featured a gigantic pipe organ. The instrument itself was in the choir loft but it was connected to a massive system of pipes built into the wall behind the chancel. We had a retired dean of Berkeley College of Music who was also a renowned concert organist to play it.
Our Mark is a marvelous musician who works hard to prepare for each Sunday’s service, and we love him. But you might notice that we treat his preludes and postludes like background music, chatting away and going about our business.
Not at Faith Lutheran Church. When the prelude began, the people went silent, allowing the magnificent music to lift their souls toward worship. And after the service, when the postlude was played, the congregation would sit quietly, many with eyes closed, as they meditated on the day’s message. Most Sundays, when the postlude was completed, there was a standing ovation.
A standing ovation by the twelve to twenty people left in the four-hundred seat sanctuary, that is.
For the last roughly 1500 years, the church in the West played a vastly powerful role in shaping culture, economics and politics. It was a huge and complex institution, a multi-national corporation, a kind of culture machine. Beginning with the Roman emperor Constantine’s cynical and very effective idea to use the increasingly popular church as the cement of his empire, the church has been used by those in power to validate and justify themselves and their actions, good or evil.
And yet, this great institutional church was able to spread the message of scriptures, all of which were written long before the empire coopted the church. A great example of this strange synergy was the story of the first slave churches, established by slave owners to inspire their slaves to love their enslavement. The slaveowners taught early black preachers only those scriptures that justified slavery and encouraged slaves to be better slaves.
The slaveowners didn’t realize that sooner or later, literate black preachers would read the rest of the book, and that there they would find the hope of liberation in a story that featured a dark-skinned savior from a place far closer to their ancestral homes than North America was. On the one hand, the church spread because of its corruption, but it took root because of the scripture’s truth.
The old tale of the golden calf is the primal story of all idolatry: worshipping what we have made instead of worshipping him who makes us.
God never wanted to live in a temple. Like the humans he made, who for two to three hundred thousand years lived nomadic lives, constantly migrating on foot or in boats, constantly exploring and learning, God was the God of everywhere.
But people settled down, and they wanted God to settle down too. They lived in houses, and they liked them. Why wouldn’t God like a house?
People built boxes for themselves, and then tried to put God in various boxes. In today’s lesson from St. Paul, he talks about making God into a philosophy, a set of moral principles, a way to a happy and prosperous life. Or God is the one who shows up in hard times to do something miraculous, but is absent the rest of the time.
The problem with putting God in a philosophy box is that God is alive and available for real time relationship. He’s not just a way we talk about right and wrong or how to live a happy life. And the problem with the Miracle Box is that God is doesn’t disappear between miracles, but is actively involved in every thing that exists, and every being that lives. God is the God of Everything and Everywhere.
We worship what we make of God, rather than the God who makes us. And this is indicative of the cardinal sin of pride that runs through all of our being and doing, our focus on ourselves, our ego. We watch ourselves and we listen to ourselves and we rule over ourselves. We make things and we worship the things we make, even when what we are making is religion.
And so the notion that the new temple of God is a destroyed living body, our good and faithful servant who suffers so that we can live, is foolishness to people who put God in a philosophy box, and it is a sign of failure to those who put God in the Miracle Box.
This is the struggle, this is the real story, to one true narrative, that humankind worship what we have made, and forget the God who longs to make us.
In the late nineteenth century, the church was the center of life for rural Americans, the Bible the chief book in every home, and those who formed Philippi had a vision of the Christian Church’s mission, a belief that the church on earth, with the exception of Catholics of course, was united in one confession: Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, the savior of the world. The rest of their thinking about God was a more-or-less uncritical acceptance of Baptist and Presbyterian doctrine, itself a variation of a thousand years of biblical interpretation, that great edifice of the Western church.
But that great edifice is everywhere crumbling. The power and privilege of the church in the public sphere has been steadily declining, and many Christians, maybe even some of us, are full of nostalgia for the packed cathedrals and pipe organs of yesteryear, when a sermon from some great pulpit could sway millions. And let’s admit it, whenever we have a dialogue about our mission, the best we can come up with is “we need more volunteers, we need more members, we need more money.”
Our congregation is filled with the Holy Spirit, as is evidenced by how much we do for our community and the world. We help young people go to college. We volunteer in the community. We give significant money away to missions all around the globe. We are welcoming and warm to all who visit us. We bring people together, a ministry sorely needed in these days of widespread isolation and loneliness.
But I wonder about our actual religious life, the thing we are theoretically here to do. I spoke last week about martyrdom, which is simply witnessing to Christ in the midst of a world that worships itself and its desires. Certainly our many works of service, one would think, would say this, and I suppose it could, if anyone out there was aware that Christ inspired that service, but I doubt anyone is. I suspect most people, if they knew about what we do, might say that we are nice people, or that we are nice church. And we would be gratified to hear that, I suppose, but God would not be in that picture.
At my installation two years ago, our Regional Minister challenged us to find and tell our personal stories of faith. It’s something I rarely hear from any of you, and I wonder about that. I’ve heard many of you tell me about your history in church, but I can’t think of anyone who has actually told me what it was that God has done for them, or what they did to develop their relationship with God. We go to church, we say. We try to be better people, we say. When we invite people to church, we tell them its a nice church, good people, thought-provoking or fun, but do you hear anything in there about Christ? Does anyone say, “Christ has led me to a deep and powerful connection to God that is transforming me beyond my wildest dreams”? Or any words to that effect?
We repeat and repeat our traditional worship style, designed by people long dead for reasons opaque to most of us, and most of our favorite hymns were written two hundred years ago. We have annual programs we have always done, and feel compelled to always do, no matter what’s actually going on in our village or the world.
And the truth is the bleeding will continue, no matter what we do, because what we do is the same thing that hasn’t worked for the past fifty years. We prop up the temple, we prop up the edifice, we wear ourselves out rolling the rock up the hill, only to see it roll back down. And instead of wondering why it keeps rolling back down, we march back to the bottom of the hill and start pushing.
The answer is simple. Stop pushing, and let God push us.
What is true of humankind as a whole is true of me, church. I put myself in a box and I want God to be in here with me. And he is. But what he wants to do is let me out. He’s just waiting for me to realize it. He knows it will likely take pain and loss to teach me, and that’s what his son died on a cross to show me.
Jesus ran toward the pain, the pain of temptation. He faced it and defeated it by the power of the Holy Spirit, who gives life to the dead, who delivers us from our self-imposed enslavement. He showed us we will first have to experience the despair of pushing that rock up the hill before he will give us the power to take it up and throw it into the sea.
That beautiful church in Cambridge, with its amazing pipe organ and magnificent religious art, where my Liz was baptized and where we were ultimately married, burned to the ground last Easter. The current pastor was interviewed by a local Boston paper. And he said an interesting thing.
“It took the destruction of our church building to find out what the church really is.”
I believe the whole church on earth is in the midst of a profound sea change. As it sheds its attachment to the power of the state, its old stately trappings, its mighty buildings and its denominational office towers have come to dwarf the small numbers of elderly participants struggling to keep it all afloat. The number of churches closing greatly outnumbers the many that are planted. Seminarians we interview for ordination are rarely interested in serving in congregations, because they don’t see any hope in them. Instead they want to go into chaplaincy or social activism.
The American church is collapsing. But Jesus made a promise:
“Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days.”
When we grow sick and tired of doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, when we are driven to our knees by the struggle to make the church what we think it should be, when we become ready to let it die, it will be at that moment that the real opportunity will come.
When we stop making ourselves, God can begin to remake us.
Amen.
