Marketplace or Quiet Center

"Marketplace or Quiet Center ?"

John 2:13-22

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

March 15, 2009

Lent 3

Have you ever noticed that when you become cognizant of something of which you had not previously been much aware, that “something” becomes ubiquitous? You see it everywhere. Around this time last year I purchased a used white Subaru Outback. I bought it because I had had my Nissan Sentra at Gerry Stanton’s garage for some repairs and when I stopped by at lunch time to ask how the work on my car was progressing, Gerry answered by telling me that I really needed to buy the Subaru Outback that he had on his lot. Trusting Gerry completely, I said okay, got financing, and drove home in my new used car, my shiny white Outback of which, as my first ever four wheel drive, I was quite enamored. I felt a little special driving this nice, low mileage, attractive, economical find and fancied that others would wish they had such a car. As it turns out, they did. In the next few days I discovered that hundreds, if not thousands, of people in Jamestown alone had white Subaru Outbacks. Where had they been? Or where had I been? How come I never had seen the army of Outbacks before? A few weeks later a deer smashed into Angus’ (Watkins) car and totaled it and, when he called to tell me that he, too, had purchased a new used car and I asked him what kind, he said, “A white Subaru Outback!”

It was the same way a few years ago when I thought I had made a chance discovery of an unheralded but immensely gifted poet by the name of… Mary Oliver. When I started peppering my sermons with Oliver’s poems, I thought I really was on to something and that I was feeding you with uncommon homiletical fare, if not flair. But then a few references to Mary Oliver began to pop up in my reading and when I subsequently “googled” her name on the internet, there were just short of ten million allusions to her, I think. And then I learned that she was in her seventies and had been writing poems for decades and had more books published than any other living poet. Once I had “found” her, she began showing up everywhere.

The same phenomenon happened to me this week with the word zeal. Now certainly I knew that word but it is not one that I use or see on any kind of regular basis. In my experience, it is a “once every ten years” word, kind of an old-fashioned word. But, after encountering it in this week’s gospel reading that tells us about the zeal that Jesus had for the temple, I began to find the word cropping up everywhere. In my daily Calvin readings this week, there was a blizzard of zeals. Checking in on a colleague’s website, I found the word zeal in his sermon title for today. I picked up one of my baseball journals yesterday and read of Derek Jeter’s zeal for the coming season. Suddenly, it seems as if everyone is getting zeal for the word zeal.

Zeal, of course, is a word that means “passion,” “enthusiasm,” “ardor,” and “fervor.” As a Jew, Jesus had zeal for the right use of the Temple as the place where God lived on earth. Not that God’s presence could not be felt abroad in the creation, but it was believed that God dwelt specially in the Temple , and thus the Temple was to be a place where the people could learn about doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. It was a place where the reign of God was to be enacted and so the poor were to be able to find succor and sustenance there, the widow to find support, and all would be blessed in their needs. It was to be “a quiet center in the crowded life the people led, a room for hope to enter, the frame where people could be freed, a place for clearing the chaos and the clutter from their lives, so that they could see again the things that really mattered, be at peace, and simply be.” (1)

But that is not what Jesus found. The Temple had become a marketplace of triflings and trivialites, a den of commerce where entrepreneurs were fleecing poor people when they purchased the requisite animals to make their sacrifices, overcharging them and then adding a cut for themselves. Spiritual verities had given way to secular idolatries. Devotion had been twisted into self-promotion. Worship had been usurped by the whims of human desires.

Australian poet and pastor B. D. Prewer has caught well what Jesus, full of zeal for his Father’s house, likely felt as he entered the Temple gates on the day about which John wrote in his gospel. In a poem entitled The Pain, Prewer writes

The Pain

I was in the temple courtyard

that day when this Jesus came

and walked around among the stalls

at first with shoulders squared

like a centurion on inspection

but the more he saw the more

his shoulders sagged

like one dismayed and overwhelmed

by some gross indecency

institutionalized and on display

without apology

or any hint of dismay.

I watched him move to near a door

and as the common pilgrims looked on

he took some cord and plaited a whip

before squaring his shoulders once more

and storming among the stalls

he up-ended tables and money boxes

while the traders looked on with shock

to see their silver and golden gods

go rolling across the pavement floor

and all the while his whip whirled around

as he drove them with the sheep and cattle

from that holy ground.

The thing I remember most sharply

were the eyes of that young Christ

not so much glinting with anger

but tearful with enormous pain,

pain such as I never have seen before

or rarely have again.

In their anger and resentment, the merchants and the money-changers ran to the Temple priests who in turn wanted to know from Jesus what right and by what authority he engaged in his radical housecleaning. “Destroy this Temple , and in three days I will raise it up,” was his cryptic answer. Even the priests did not get it, for they blabbered something about the Temple having been under construction for forty-six years and did Jesus think he could build it over and build it up in three days?

But what Jesus meant was that God’s presence, God’s dream, and God’s reign now could be found in him and in the gospel he came bringing. Jesus embodies the ways of God. “Three days” in the Bible is shorthand for “the action and affirmation of God.” Three days after the crucifixion, Jesus was affirmed by God and raised from the dead. “Destroy this Temple , and in three days I – the beloved of God with whom he is will-pleased, the One who has found favor with God – will raise it up.” No longer is God to be understood as being confined to a room inside a Temple made of stones. God is present in Jesus and, even more, makes his home in us, too.

We, too, are called to be temples, dwelling places, houses, homes in which God lives. Etty Hillesum, a most remarkable young Jewish woman in Holland who eventually was gassed by the Nazis at Auschwitz and who chronicles her journey in an amazing book called An Interrupted Life, had a deep sense of the value of each person as a dwelling place of God. When she was in Westerbork, waiting with other Jews for the hour of deportation to the death camp, she wrote that her only desire in whatever time was left to her was to help people to discover the treasure of their personhood, that each person is called to be a “house in which God lives.”

And so that is what I would like to do, too, this morning. Not only do we “live and move and have our being in God,” but, through the Spirit of Jesus the Christ, God “lives and moves and has God’s being in us.” That means that the marketplace of needs and desires, loves and lusts, pressures and prejudices, hopes and fear, roles and responsibilities that swirl in us like a tempest can indeed become a quiet center.

No less than with that frenzied storm on the Sea of Galilee that imperiled the disciples’ lives to which Jesus said, “Peace, be still!” and the wind and waves obeyed him…no less than in that Jerusalem Temple that Jesus cleared of all devilish distortion and distraction…no less does the Christ of God with zeal for “the Father’s house in us” create in us that still and quiet space where we can reflect and contemplate on life and our lives, that space from which wonderment can flow at all that is good and beautiful in our world, that place where we can receive the light of life and the whisperings of God’s Spirit, that place from which our love for others and other creatures and the whole porridge of creation flows.

At the heart of your life is not a tumultuous marketplace of competing vices and voices vying for your attention and allegiance but a quiet center, a sanctuary of the sacred, the temple where God lives in you. “Seek it and you will find,” Jesus said. You will find there the wisdom, strength, and courage to live your best life, to live into you. Or, as that common poet, Mary Oliver, says in her poem The Other Kingdoms:

The Other Kingdoms

Consider the other kingdoms. The

trees, for example, with their mellow-sounding

titles: oak, aspen, willow.

Or the snow, for which the peoples of the north

have dozens of words to describe its

different arrivals. Or the creatures, with their

thick fur, their shy and wordless gaze. Their

infallible sense of what their lives

are meant to be. Thus the world

grows rich, grows wild, and you too,

grow rich, grow sweetly wild, as you too

were born to be. (2)

Amen.

(1) A text by Shirley Erena Murray that our congregation uses as a gathering song in worship most weeks.

(2) Oliver, Mary, The Truro Bear and Other Adventures. Boston : Beacon Press, 2008, page 25.

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