3/11/2012
Thank you for the opportunity to share with you this morning. I know some of you, and feel connected to this community through our shared experience of the life-giving power of the Church of the Saviour in its various expressions, and through helping provide a place for silent retreat for Eighth Day at Dayspring. So, it is good to be here.
I want to use as my departure point today the passage in John’s gospel. It is a unique and somewhat contentious passage for the anger apparently displayed by Jesus. His temper flashes in a few other places, almost always with religious authorities. But nowhere else does he express it physically, throwing over tables, pouring out the coins of the money changers, driving the animals sold for sacrifice from the temple with “a whip of cords”--making a scene.
So, we have reason to really pay attention to this passage. We must ask, “What is Jesus angry at--or at least protesting forcefully against?”
“Stop making my father’s house a marketplace!” he yells. This gets at the very heart of the gospels, and today’s scriptures. The kingdom of heaven--call it what you will--and the marketplace don’t mix. They are opposed, competing values.
I think it is helpful to have a little historical context about the temple and the people selling animals and the money changers. Here’s how Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan describe it in The Last Week, their book about the last week of Jesus life as recounted in Mark’s Gospel (the other three synoptic Gospels place this scene in the temple at the end of Jesus’ ministry, which is probably more historically accurate):
The temple mediated not only God’s presence, but also God’s forgiveness. It was the only place of sacrifice, and sacrifice was the means of forgiveness. According to temple theology, some sins could be forgiven and some kinds of impurities could be dealt with only through temple sacrifice. As the mediator of forgiveness and purification, the temple mediated access of God. To stand in the temple, purified and forgiven, was to stand in the presence of God. (p. 6)
Later, they add:
We emphasize that the money changers and animal sellers were perfectly legitimate and absolutely necessary for the temple’s normal functioning. The buying and selling all took place in the huge Court of the Gentiles. Money changers were needed so that Jewish pilgrims could pay the temple tax in the only approved coinage. Buying animals or birds on site was the only way pilgrims could be sure the creatures were ritually adequate for sacrifice. (48)
But Jesus seems to object to this whole established system. It is a system which allows a few to control access to forgiveness itself, to the mercy of God, through priests, purified animals, etc. How different this temple system is from the invitation in Isaiah, “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price” (Is. 55:1). There is a violation of God’s grace--freely given to all who hunger and thirst for it--in this system. Wealth is no benefit before God--and, in fact, is a major obstacle, in Jesus’ teachings, to entering the kingdom of heaven.
I think we usually get in trouble with black and white, either-or thinking, that both-and thinking is generally wiser. But here we have Jesus quite clearly setting up an either-or choice. The choice is at the heart of The Ten Commandments, in the idea that we shall have only one God, that God is a jealous God, that we shall have no idols, no divided loyalties. What divides our loyalties? What else do we worship? In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth (or mammon)” (Matt. 6:24). We see this divided loyalty clearly in the temple, infiltrating the very “house of God,” and Jesus lashes out at it.
But it isn’t just money--it’s wealth. What was meant by wealth? I think it relates broadly to security, safety, even a certain kind of certainty. It hearkens back to last week’s Gospel passage when Jesus says, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” (Mk. 8:35-36) Being in control, being successful, earning approval, having security, being certain of things, these can all be aspects of wealth, of what we must lose--or at least not cling to, not make into idols.
In a sermon on the cleansing of the temple, Meister Eckhart, a German mystic of the 14th century whose spiritual insights are still fresh today, helps us understand these merchants, and wealth. He sees how a fundamental acquisitiveness, a valuing of things based on how they can benefit us, creeps into our thinking. He says, “As long as we look for some kind of pay for what we do, as long as we want to get something from God in some kind of exchange, we are like the merchants. If you want to be rid of the commercial spirit, then by all means do all you can in the way of good works, but do so solely for the praise of God. Live as if you did not exist. Expect and ask nothing in return. Then the merchant inside you will be driven out of the temple God has made. Then God alone dwells there.” Eckhart shows how this merchant spirit gets into everything, even into our relationship with God, undermines it.
So, I think that the important question for each of us today is, “What form does wealth take for me? How am I like the merchants? What are my idols?” Wealth, per say, and material goods do not hold much appeal for me, personally. Perhaps they do for you, perhaps they don’t. But there are lots of related problems, and another aspect of this in our culture is the tyranny of thinking.
By thinking I mean a limited, rationalistic way of knowing and understanding things. The seminal psychologist Carl Jung identified four functions of consciousness: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. (Brief description of each.) He said that for something to be true it must be so for all four functions of consciousness. I relate this to the command to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart (associated with feeling) and with all your soul (intuition) and with all your strength (sensation, the body) and with all your mind (thinking)” (Lk. 10:27). Love God with all of it. But our culture exalts thinking, and perhaps sensation, beyond the others, which are more subjective and more difficult to understand.
This limited, one-dimensional way of understanding things can get us into trouble in many ways. In intercessory prayer, there are no causal connections we can understand--it just doesn’t make sense… In meditation, or centering prayer, the idea that we are doing nothing or that nothing is happening may eventually drive us away. And yet many sages tell us yet that it is here here, in this darkness we can’t understand, that transformation happens. The apparent idleness of retreat can frighten us away for the same reasons. In our work with social and institutional problems, a need for visible results, or tangible success may discourage us. Many of the problems addressed by Church of the Saviour missions, for example, have worsened over time, such as the number of people desperately seeking entry level work through Jubilee Jobs. If one is called to work on environmental issues, knowledge of the losses we’ve suffered, and the way these losses are bound to deepen, can overwhelm us. In this work--whatever our piece of it is--we must also trust our deeper knowing, our feelings of joy, our intuitions of the peace that passes all understanding. We need to understand what we are doing not just with our mind, but with our heart, strength and soul. Otherwise we will likely be overwhelmingly discouraged--if we stick with it at all.
In Paul’s message to the Corinthians, he cautions against the limitations of the mindset which seeks “signs” as proof of the Gospel, and the mindset which seeks “wisdom,” presumably a kind of thinking-heavy, or rationalistic understanding.
For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? … For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
Paul emphasizes that the story and message of Jesus’ life defies any limited kind of understanding, but plunges us into a kind of holy foolishness, a world of paradox where weakness overcomes strength.
I have been greatly enriched by the work of Carl Jung. In the recently published work The Red Book, we get a glimpse of his spiritual journey, and what the choice to follow “one master” might look and feel like. He writes:
If I speak in the spirit of this time, I must say: no one and nothing can justify what I must proclaim to you… [But] I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, namely that which rules the depths of everything contemporary. The spirit of this time would like to hear of use and value… But… the spirit of the depths from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time, who changes with the generations. The spirit of the depths has subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment. He took away my belief in science, he robbed me of the joy of explaining and ordering things, and he let devotion to the ideals of this time die out in me. He forced me down to the last and simplest things.
The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical. He robbed me of speech and writing for everything that was not in his service, namely the melting together of sense and nonsense, which produces the supreme meaning. (229)
Here we see how one man was compelled to serve “one master,” in Jesus’ language. The spirit of the depths, as Jung calls it here, is a jealous God who indeed destroys the superficial wisdom and discernment of the world.
In my own life it is a struggle at times to be faithful to things which others often can’t understand, or see the value of--things which at times I can’t understand or see the value of, either. For me, this has to do with my commitment to the inward journey and its cultivation through silent retreat, and with the love of scripture and poetry, and the struggle to be true to these in a world which gives them little, and it seems to me diminishing, value. To hold onto an essential value that is devalued in the standard metrics of our culture can be lonely work, and can lead us into conflict with the dominant culture. We need a community of support to stay the course, to be faithful. And we must go to prayer--to the wilderness, to silence and solitude, to God, as Jesus did, to know our path, and to find the courage to keep to it. That’s where Jesus’ journey was born, in the 40 solitary days in the wilderness, and where he returned--withdrawing to pray in the wilderness--again and again along the way for clarity and vision.
Ultimately, on the faith journey we follow something that can’t be explained or understood, measured or proved. Here’s how William Stafford put it in a short poem.
“The Way It Is”
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you’re pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
The thread led Stafford to be a conscientious objector during WWII, which he spent interned in a camp reading The Sermon on the Mount.
In a beautiful introduction to his rendering of some of the Psalms, Stephen Mitchell, the great translator of mystic texts, writes: “The Psalms speak as both poetry and prayer. Some of them are very great poems. But as prayer, even the greatest poems are inadequate. Pure prayer begins at the threshold of silence. It says nothing, asks for nothing. It is a kind of listening. The deeper the listening, the less we listen for, until silence itself becomes the voice of God” (A Book of Psalms, xv).
There are no merchants here, at the spiritual level. There is no merchandizing the Kingdom of Heaven. God’s grace is wild and free, and can be controlled and administered by no one. It doesn’t submit to proofs, doesn’t justify itself to rational thinking. It cannot be measured, proved a success. And yet it is real, and we can know, and believe it.
This journey into the deep realms of poetry, of song, of God’s foolishness, of the kernel of the law, into the silent language of nature which our soul still speaks and understands, into silence itself, is the journey that led Jesus into conflict with the powers that be--a conflict expressed so dramatically in the cleansing of the temple, and all that it set in motion. So, I’d like us to finish with a brief practice. Let’s sink into the first part of today’s Psalm, which speaks to the wordless ministry of nature which is such a big part of retreat at Dayspring. Then let us finish with a few moments of silence, of deep listening, knowing that the kingdom of heaven is within us, and among us.
Psalm 19
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
(Silence.) Amen.