Sermon for the people of God at St. Mark Hope and Peace preached, 2018-03-04, Lent IIIB
Preaching text: John 2: 13-21
There is a lot going on in this passage. Much of it makes little sense to us, not being first century Jews, and not having direct access to the practices, sacrifices, and pieties of first century Jews.
Unlike us, Jesus was an observant Jew from a family of observant Jews,. We learn from Luke that Jesus’ family went to Jerusalem every year for the Passover [Luke 2:41], and Jesus appears to continue this tradition into his adulthood.
Jesus has come to the Temple before. But this time is different – this time Jesus notices what’s happening in the outer courts in a way that he hasn’t before.
He notices people selling animals to be sacrificed, sheep and cattle for wealthier people, doves for the poor.
He notices money changers, who are exchanging pilgrims’ money into the coinage necessary to pay the annual temple tax – which, bizarrely, is the Tyrian shekel.
It was important that the temple tax be paid with silver, and Tyre – a Northern city just outside of Jewish territory – had an independent mint that made coins that were 90-95% pure silver, the purest silver around.
Unfortunately, the Tyrian coins were engraved with an image of Melkart, the city-god of Tyre, which, since we’ve just had a refresher on the ten commandments, is obviously in violation of them – it’s a graven image, and it’s an image of a God other than the One God of Israel.
When we approach the world as peacemakers, we are called to observe the world attentively, looking for gaps in justice, places where the grace of God is needed. When Jesus comes to the Temple, he finds these places easily.
I should tell you there is some debate about what exactly upsets Jesus about this scene. I suspect that there are some details we have lost – there may have been dishonesty or corruption, since those are common where there is commerce. Perhaps people we being overcharged for sacrificial animals. Certainly the use of pagan currency to pay a tax for God’s house is offensive.
The text tells us that Jesus accuses the dove-sellers of “making my Father’s house a marketplace,” and the disciples see in Jesus a person consumed with zeal for God’s house.
They are quoting Psalm 69. It is zeal for your house that has consumed me, the Psalmist writes. The insults of those who insult YOU have fallen on ME. [Psalm 69:9]
The use of currency with a pagan God’s image is certainly an insult to God, and Jesus takes that insult personally. He is deeply angered at the misuse of God’s house, overcome by the distance of the marketplace-Temple of his day from the house of prayer for all peoples envisioned by Isaiah.
This is not what the house of God is supposed to look like.
Jesus’ zeal for God’s house is a vision of what the Temple should look like – a place where all can offer prayers and sacrifice, rich and poor alike, where no one makes a profit off other people’s piety, and a place where only God is God – not money, not the marketplace and not Melkart.
Jesus sees the house of God in a world where Israel is free from her Roman yoke, where no Roman coins of any kind are used in Jerusalem, where it’s possible to give one’s offering with pure silver, unadulterated by copper, unmarred by images of idols.
And struck by the contrast between that imagined world and the real world, consumed with zeal, Jesus searches around him and uses what he finds – fraying ropes binding sacrificial animals in place, dirty reeds that were animal bedding or straw that was their food – to create a “whip of cords.”
Jesus makes a whip and then uses the whip to make one of the most important tools of non-violent protest: a spectacle.
Jesus is an active agent – he makes a whip and drives out animals, he pours out coins and overturns tables.
It’s messy and chaotic, goes against custom and law and authority. It gets people upset and paints a picture of the upside down world promised in the Magnificat, where the poor are fed and the rich go hungry. [Luke 2:46-55] Jesus literally upsets the tables to symbolically upset the status quo and paint a vivid picture of God’s transformation of the world. The marketplace world and its marketplace values will have to go if there is to be room for God in God’s house.
So to recap, Jesus’ seminar in nonviolence has so far covered these steps:
First, look at the world with attention, and notice the specifics of what’s happening around you.
Second, compare that world with God’s vision of the world as it should be
Third, look around again and find the tools that are handy to
Fourth, Create a ruckus
That ruckus should be created with purpose, of course, designed to symbolize or signify the new order we imagine.
For us, the question might be, “What will this look like on the evening news?”
What are the optics?
What will people see?
A whip, the chaos of animals milling about, coins poured out.
Candlelight vigil, arms linked in solidarity. Rainbow flag, rainbow facepaint. People sitting in the road, blocking traffic.
Water cannons, pepper spray, dogs attacking protesters. A bloody execution.
Wait, what?
Part of the strategy of nonviolence is to turn violence on itself. Nonviolence anticipates retaliation and welcomes it. We know that authorities will escalate unreasonably, will demonstrate the irrationality and wickedness that are at the core of oppressive power structures.
In his letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. writes, “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” And again, “The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”
Direct action is a dramatization that creates a crisis – as, for instance, a rabbi driving out animals and overturning tables, disrupting business as usual so that folks are forced to confront the flaws in the sacrificial infrastructure and cannot help but notice the person at the center of this chaos.
Matthew (21:12-13), Mark (11:15-19), and Luke (19:45-48) tell us this protest in the Temple came at the end of Jesus’ life, that it was the immediate cause of the crucifixion.
Jesus will scold the soldiers who arrest him in the Garden, reminding them of how he preached openly in the Temple (Matthew 26:55//Mark 14 48-49//Luke 52-53). We could mention also this open demonstration, designed to attract attention. Nonviolence takes place in the light of day, in the middle of the city, in the place that has (unfortunately) become a marketplace, filled with people.
Attracting the attention of the authorities isn’t safe. But it’s not supposed to be safe.
Back in John’s story, “the Jews” – religious authorities, presumably – question Jesus about the whole temple/marketplace/tables/doves thing – asking, confusingly, for a “sign,” as if Jesus protest itself wasn’t a clear sign, like they want “The Temple Is Not Marketplace!” painted on posterboard for this to be a legitimate protest. Like they want him to produce written permission from the high priest to cause a disturbance, or, like the religious leaders whom Dr. King is writing to, they’re wondering why Jesus doesn’t try to negotiate first, why he’s resorted to “unwise and untimely” direction action.
And typically, Jesus doesn’t exactly answer their question, saying, “Destroy this temple, an in three days I will raise it up.”
Like everything in John’s Gospel, this saying has layers of meaning. There’s the literal temple, still standing in Jesus’ time but forever destroyed by the time John is writing. And there is, as the narrative tells us, the temple of Jesus’ body, and the promise that Jesus will be killed, and that in three days Jesus will be raised again.
Even in John’s Gospel, then, when several years separate this event from the crucifixion, the logic is the same. Jesus does this sign – this act of civil disobedience – and signals the incoming of God’s kingdom. Throughout his ministry, Jesus gives signs – in his healing, in his teaching, in his table fellowship and in his body – of the change that’s coming.
Jesus is here d̳a̳r̳i̳n̳g̳ the authorities to kill him. “I’d like to see you try.”
And eventually they do try, and they succeed, except:
Jesus’ violent death provides an opening for an even more spectacular sign, an even clearer image of the new world that God is ushering in.
In the new world, peace is triumphant over violence, the temple is torn down and built up, the rich starve and the hungry eat, marketplaces become houses of prayer, and greed and hatred don’t have the final word,
Jesus’ ruckus in the temple, tables turned and money poured out, animals running amok, is a spectacular image of the upside-down logic of God’s kingdom, the kingdom promised through the prophets, the Kingdom testified to by Jesus’ mother when she sang the Magnificat.
And we are called to do likewise. To take that magnificent, Magnificat image, of God scattering the proud in the thoughts of their hearts just as Jesus scatters coins on the Temple floor, and to look around at the world we live in, and compare them.
When we see places where they don’t line up, where the world we have doesn’t match the world God wants for us, we’re to use the tools and images available to us to create a picture of the world flipped on its head, the marketplace brought down and the Temple lifted up – a picture so compelling that it turns heads and turns hearts, just as God is turning the world upside down.
The hymn of the day – which for the record I did not pick out – is #723, Canticle of the Turning.
++
Works consulted:
Keys to Jerusalem: Collected Essays by Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, on Google Books
Alexis-Baker, Andy. "Violence, Nonviolence and the Temple Incident in John 2:13-15." Biblical Interpretation, vol. 20, no. 1-2, 2012, pp. 73-96. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1163/156851511X595549.
and of course:
Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Showing posts with label saints:mlkj. Show all posts
Showing posts with label saints:mlkj. Show all posts
Sunday, March 4, 2018
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
[sermon] dance with the One who brought you
[Delivered 2010-06-02 at the Kansas City Interfaith Pride Service, hosted by Spirit of Hope MCC, speaking on the given theme of Then - 1978]
Dance with the One who brought you.
In 2008, I moved to Kansas from Massachusetts for the only reason that a sane queer person would move from Massachusetts, the state that pioneered equality marriage, a state where there's been a Pride parade in the capitol city every year since Stonewall, home of my big fat queer family where I'm not the first but the fourth person in my family tree to identify as queer. I came because I was in luuuuuuuv.
In 1978, I wasn't born.
In 1978, my mother was 16 years old and going to Baptist Bible Camp and being told that even though she was a fine public speaker, she wasn't being called to the ministry because God didn't call women.
In 1978, my mother had no idea that she liked girls. The idea wouldn't occur to her for another two decades.
In 1976, Carter Heyward, a pioneering lesbian theologian, was making history because she was ordained. It wasn't historical because she was queer; it was historic because she was a woman, among the first batch to be extraordinarily ordained, contrary to the policy of the Episcopal Church in the USA.
So in 1978, this twentysomething queer girl [cock head -- woman? no, this was 1978, she was definitely a girl] from Boston flies to Kansas City to live with her girlfriend.
We met at a women's college, before "women's college" was synonymous with "dyke haven." We didn't come to college expecting to find a girlfriend; people were telling us, quite seriously and worriedly, that we'd have a hard time getting our M.R.S. degree at a girls' school. We were planning to pursue careers, not unheard of but not usual. I knew I liked girls, but I also knew that it was just a stage and that I'd grow out of it soon. That's what all the books told me as I secretly marked the pages that mentioned this little problem about liking girls. It was just a stage and I'd stop when I grew up.
It wasn't something we talked about at church. I knew other churches did, in a pretty horrific way, but I grew up in mainline churches that preferred to think that this wasn't happening, that this movement was outside religion and apart from it and that the church didn't need to have a response to the gay rights movement because the gay rights movement wasn't asking for one.
So then I met this girl, right, and suddenly it was important for me to tell the people I cared most about, the people who were part of my church, my family.
I came to Kansas City in 1978 and I wanted a place where I could worship -- and now I had to make a choice.
And even though, secret, not all of us are from 1978, it's a choice all of us have to make.
Dance with the One who brought you.
But what brought me here, to Kansas City in 1978, a femmey Christian dyke with a backpack full of books?
What brought you here, tonight?
What brought this church into being, and what brings the other churches and communities in the Coalition into being and together?
How do I choose? Can I forgive the denomination that kicked me out, the church that scorned my spiritual mothers and fathers, a religion that executed people like me?
Will the old forms still hold me? As I fall in love with Christ all over again, will any hymns bear that love, or must I write new lovesongs for Her?
Will new communities sustain me? Is there enough depth in them for me to put down roots, twisted and ancient?
Where will I find the stories that will speak my history?
~~~~~
Story has currency in the queer community. Story is the thing that we take with us, the thing that holds us together, the thing that embraces us as a community.
"When did you know?"
"How did you know?"
"When did you come out?"
Queer is a thing we are, but it's also a story about where we were. I'm a lesbian because I've fell in love with a woman when I was twelve. You're transgender because you were labeled female at birth and now call yourself male. You are genderqueer because yesterday you bound and packed and today you're wearing a lacy dress. You're bisexual because, although you're married to a woman now, you dated mostly men in your twenties.
And story is the way we find our way into community. Even in those years that don't stand as decade landmarks, the Pride festival is an anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and in joining the festivities, we join a story that's punctuated by that rebellion, claim kinship with the queer folks who fought back forty-one years ago.
The queer community has a fascination with our own history. Part of that history has been hidden from us, erased with words like "friendship" and "spinster." It's a history that must be uncovered obliquely. We look at our own family trees and see the maiden aunt and bachelor uncle and we wonder, but will never know. We reread old stories and claim them as our own. We look at the Bible and see Naomi and Ruth and David and Jonathan and say yep, those are ours. But it's a history that has to be claimed, a history that had to be written, within the last century. And it's one that as queer children or adolescents or young adults or older adults we had to rediscover for ourselves because it's not taught in schools like our country's history or around the dinner table like our family history, our cultural history.
So there are two reasons we're attached to queer history -- because we have to go out and claim it. And because we are in the middle of making it.
What has brought us safe thus far?
Who has brought our history to this point?
Who brought you here?
What brought you here?
WE have done the bringing.
If you've been out there making a noise, some lonely gay man heard it.
If you've been in here, building a place, a nice gay couple found it.
If you've been way, way out there in your denomination, witnessing to a Love that's greater than any law, you've been singing in justice with a cloud of saints.
If you've been joining your heart to the universe, if you've been praying for a day of justice, if you've been davening or dancing or breathing your intention, you have been changing the universe. You have been bringing people to this place.
If you've held your lover's hand in church, if you'e told your grandma you're bringing home a personfriend whose preferred pronoun is "ze" --
you've been making history.
Martin Luther King Jr. said that the moral arc of the universe is long, but bends toward justice.
The universe is bending toward justice. The universe, the Spirit, All-That-Is, God, all Goddesses and Gods, bend toward justice. We are dancing toward justice, and we are not dancing alone.
I don't know most of you, so I don't know what's brought you to this place today.
For some of you, Spirit of Hope is home, and the call to come here was as familiar as the call to come on Sunday mornings. Some of us come from other Coalition churches. Some of us come because we are proud of our queerness and long to honor that. Some of can do that at our home churches, and some of us can't. Some of us have come to a church today with a sense of suspicion, even though we've been promised welcome.
Some of us are old enough to remember when this was the only choice for queer people in search of a spiritual home, and some of us are old enough to remember when there was no choice, and some of us are young enough that we can't believe there was ever such a time.
Take a moment and think about what brought you here this evening. Was it an invitation from a friend? The movement of a spirit? A question? A doubt? A hope? This is an Interfaith Pride service, so I'm going to guess that everyone here has a little bit of faith, and a little bit of pride. Hold tight to those. What do you have faith in? What do you base your hope on? What matters so much that you will give your life to it, to him, to her, to hir?
What are you proud of? What's offbeat, eccentric or queer about you, what's so true about you that you must share it if you will live authentically?
What faith, what pride, what spirit, brought you here?
Dwell with that for a little while. Who brought you here tonight?
[pause.]
As a people, we've been brought here by the powerful moral arc of history. We've been brought here by the courage and strength and deep faith of our ancestors. Tonight we're going to join hands with those forces, join our strength with theirs, and look into the future together.
As you look, I'd like you to dance.
Dance with the One who brought you.
Dance with the One who brought you.
In 2008, I moved to Kansas from Massachusetts for the only reason that a sane queer person would move from Massachusetts, the state that pioneered equality marriage, a state where there's been a Pride parade in the capitol city every year since Stonewall, home of my big fat queer family where I'm not the first but the fourth person in my family tree to identify as queer. I came because I was in luuuuuuuv.
In 1978, I wasn't born.
In 1978, my mother was 16 years old and going to Baptist Bible Camp and being told that even though she was a fine public speaker, she wasn't being called to the ministry because God didn't call women.
In 1978, my mother had no idea that she liked girls. The idea wouldn't occur to her for another two decades.
In 1976, Carter Heyward, a pioneering lesbian theologian, was making history because she was ordained. It wasn't historical because she was queer; it was historic because she was a woman, among the first batch to be extraordinarily ordained, contrary to the policy of the Episcopal Church in the USA.
So in 1978, this twentysomething queer girl [cock head -- woman? no, this was 1978, she was definitely a girl] from Boston flies to Kansas City to live with her girlfriend.
We met at a women's college, before "women's college" was synonymous with "dyke haven." We didn't come to college expecting to find a girlfriend; people were telling us, quite seriously and worriedly, that we'd have a hard time getting our M.R.S. degree at a girls' school. We were planning to pursue careers, not unheard of but not usual. I knew I liked girls, but I also knew that it was just a stage and that I'd grow out of it soon. That's what all the books told me as I secretly marked the pages that mentioned this little problem about liking girls. It was just a stage and I'd stop when I grew up.
It wasn't something we talked about at church. I knew other churches did, in a pretty horrific way, but I grew up in mainline churches that preferred to think that this wasn't happening, that this movement was outside religion and apart from it and that the church didn't need to have a response to the gay rights movement because the gay rights movement wasn't asking for one.
So then I met this girl, right, and suddenly it was important for me to tell the people I cared most about, the people who were part of my church, my family.
I came to Kansas City in 1978 and I wanted a place where I could worship -- and now I had to make a choice.
And even though, secret, not all of us are from 1978, it's a choice all of us have to make.
Dance with the One who brought you.
But what brought me here, to Kansas City in 1978, a femmey Christian dyke with a backpack full of books?
What brought you here, tonight?
What brought this church into being, and what brings the other churches and communities in the Coalition into being and together?
How do I choose? Can I forgive the denomination that kicked me out, the church that scorned my spiritual mothers and fathers, a religion that executed people like me?
Will the old forms still hold me? As I fall in love with Christ all over again, will any hymns bear that love, or must I write new lovesongs for Her?
Will new communities sustain me? Is there enough depth in them for me to put down roots, twisted and ancient?
Where will I find the stories that will speak my history?
~~~~~
Story has currency in the queer community. Story is the thing that we take with us, the thing that holds us together, the thing that embraces us as a community.
"When did you know?"
"How did you know?"
"When did you come out?"
Queer is a thing we are, but it's also a story about where we were. I'm a lesbian because I've fell in love with a woman when I was twelve. You're transgender because you were labeled female at birth and now call yourself male. You are genderqueer because yesterday you bound and packed and today you're wearing a lacy dress. You're bisexual because, although you're married to a woman now, you dated mostly men in your twenties.
And story is the way we find our way into community. Even in those years that don't stand as decade landmarks, the Pride festival is an anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and in joining the festivities, we join a story that's punctuated by that rebellion, claim kinship with the queer folks who fought back forty-one years ago.
The queer community has a fascination with our own history. Part of that history has been hidden from us, erased with words like "friendship" and "spinster." It's a history that must be uncovered obliquely. We look at our own family trees and see the maiden aunt and bachelor uncle and we wonder, but will never know. We reread old stories and claim them as our own. We look at the Bible and see Naomi and Ruth and David and Jonathan and say yep, those are ours. But it's a history that has to be claimed, a history that had to be written, within the last century. And it's one that as queer children or adolescents or young adults or older adults we had to rediscover for ourselves because it's not taught in schools like our country's history or around the dinner table like our family history, our cultural history.
So there are two reasons we're attached to queer history -- because we have to go out and claim it. And because we are in the middle of making it.
What has brought us safe thus far?
Who has brought our history to this point?
Who brought you here?
What brought you here?
WE have done the bringing.
If you've been out there making a noise, some lonely gay man heard it.
If you've been in here, building a place, a nice gay couple found it.
If you've been way, way out there in your denomination, witnessing to a Love that's greater than any law, you've been singing in justice with a cloud of saints.
If you've been joining your heart to the universe, if you've been praying for a day of justice, if you've been davening or dancing or breathing your intention, you have been changing the universe. You have been bringing people to this place.
If you've held your lover's hand in church, if you'e told your grandma you're bringing home a personfriend whose preferred pronoun is "ze" --
you've been making history.
Martin Luther King Jr. said that the moral arc of the universe is long, but bends toward justice.
The universe is bending toward justice. The universe, the Spirit, All-That-Is, God, all Goddesses and Gods, bend toward justice. We are dancing toward justice, and we are not dancing alone.
I don't know most of you, so I don't know what's brought you to this place today.
For some of you, Spirit of Hope is home, and the call to come here was as familiar as the call to come on Sunday mornings. Some of us come from other Coalition churches. Some of us come because we are proud of our queerness and long to honor that. Some of can do that at our home churches, and some of us can't. Some of us have come to a church today with a sense of suspicion, even though we've been promised welcome.
Some of us are old enough to remember when this was the only choice for queer people in search of a spiritual home, and some of us are old enough to remember when there was no choice, and some of us are young enough that we can't believe there was ever such a time.
Take a moment and think about what brought you here this evening. Was it an invitation from a friend? The movement of a spirit? A question? A doubt? A hope? This is an Interfaith Pride service, so I'm going to guess that everyone here has a little bit of faith, and a little bit of pride. Hold tight to those. What do you have faith in? What do you base your hope on? What matters so much that you will give your life to it, to him, to her, to hir?
What are you proud of? What's offbeat, eccentric or queer about you, what's so true about you that you must share it if you will live authentically?
What faith, what pride, what spirit, brought you here?
Dwell with that for a little while. Who brought you here tonight?
[pause.]
As a people, we've been brought here by the powerful moral arc of history. We've been brought here by the courage and strength and deep faith of our ancestors. Tonight we're going to join hands with those forces, join our strength with theirs, and look into the future together.
As you look, I'd like you to dance.
Dance with the One who brought you.
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