Month: March 2024

Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on March 31, 2024, Easter Sunday. Based on John 20:1-18.

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I want to start by backing up a week. You may recall that last week was Palm Sunday. Jesus borrowed a donkey and rode into Jerusalem triumphantly. What exactly his triumph was at that point, I don’t know. But the people loved him and cheered for him as he rode into town as if he were a conquering hero. They waved palm branches and shouted, “Hosanna!” That’s a Hebrew word that basically means, “Save us!” It’s an expression of praise for a coming savior who is deserving of special respect. They shouted, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” The crowd clearly thought that Jesus was coming to up-end society and save them all in God’s name. This was essentially a political demonstration in support of Jesus and in opposition to Rome.

Next, either Sunday afternoon or Monday, Jesus committed his most openly rebellious act: the cleansing of the Temple. He came into the Court of the Gentiles, which was a big outer courtyard where people of every background could gather. It was a festival season, so there were lots of people from all around the Mediterranean. The Temple leaders had allowed vendors to set up in the Court of the Gentiles to sell sacrificial animals and currency that would be acceptable in the Temple. Jesus said, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” He drove out all the animals and flipped the moneychangers’ tables. Arguably, this was the critical event that set things in motion, leading ultimately to the events at the end of the week.

Over the next couple of days, Jesus and the Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, and priests sparred verbally. They all tried to trap him into saying something that would either turn the crowd against him or enable them to convince the Romans to kill him. But Jesus foiled their every effort. When they challenged his authority, he lifted up John the Baptist, whose followers filled the crowd, as his forerunner. When they tried to use tax law to force him to choose a side, he chose neither the crowd nor the Romans, but God alone. Stymied at every turn, the chief priests decided to use trickery and bribed Judas Iscariot.

When Thursday came around, Jesus knew that things were getting serious. He knew that he didn’t have much time left with his disciples. He knew that if he had anything important to tell them, now was his last chance. He said a lot that evening, about who he was, where he was going, and what would happen. It all came together, though, in a simple phrase: Remember me. He took bread, broke it, and said, “As often as you do this, remember me.” Not just when we have communion, but each time we eat, we should remember Jesus, our great teacher, the Son of God.

All week, and indeed before they ever came to Jerusalem, Jesus told his disciples that he would die. He told them that “the Son of Man will be lifted up,” a euphemism for the crucifixion that he knew awaited him, just as it awaited everyone that Rome perceived as a rebel and a threat. He kept saying it and saying it, but nobody really believed him. But indeed, on Friday, it happened, just as he predicted. And as he predicted, his followers all fell away.

See, if Jesus was a threat to the Roman occupiers, so were his disciples. So of course they ran and hid. I think there was more to it, though. They had placed all of their hopes and dreams on the movement that Jesus led, and here it was coming to an end. They couldn’t bear to see the ignominious death of their leader, which they knew would lead to the death of the movement, too. Some of them probably held out hope that Jesus would bring himself down from the cross, or call down legions of angels to defeat the Romans.

But that was not to be. Jesus died the death of a rebel, the death of a criminal. All four Gospels report the Roman soldiers and centurion and governor making absolutely sure that Jesus was dead. He wasn’t just comatose or something, but truly dead.

The disciples had all fallen away. They were all in hiding. But one person held true through all of this turmoil: Mary. That was an extremely common name in Jesus’s time, and so there is some confusion about which Mary is which, plus there are some anonymous women in the various stories. But I’ve read and listened to some recent research, and here’s what I think. The one key person who moves from the background to the foreground is Mary Magdalene. I believe that she was the sister of Lazarus, and in gratitude for Jesus’s miraculous restoration of her brother whom she had lost, she anointed Jesus with expensive perfumed ointment. She stayed true to Jesus, her Lord, who she believed to be the Messiah, the Son of the living God. She stood by the cross. When all the disciples fell away, only the women stayed true, and the only woman besides Jesus’s mother that is repeatedly identified among them was Mary Magdalene. She held on through the pain and grief of Jesus’ crucifixion, with the devotion of a sister who would do anything for her spiritual brother and Lord.

Friday evening, all hope had died. The movement that Jesus had started died with him. All that was left was mourning and sorrow. You’ve probably heard of the five stages of grief. I think it’s better to describe them as five modes of grief, five different ways that grief takes hold of you. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. We see bargaining in the story of Lazarus: “Jesus, if only you had been here, you could have saved my brother.” Now, after her brother had been raised, her Savior was taken from her. She was perhaps in denial. She was holding on to some thin sliver of hope that maybe this wasn’t real.

But it was real, and Jesus was truly dead. Come Sunday, Mary did the only thing she could think of: she wanted to see and care for the body of her Lord, her brother, her friend, her teacher, the man who meant everything in the world to her. Now it was time for anger: not only was she deprived of the life of her teacher, but now she was also deprived of his body. She went to the garden seeking to show her devotion by caring for the body, and it was gone! Where could it be? Why would someone have unwrapped the graveclothes? What could possibly have happened?

The waves of grief came at her as depression. Deprived of her opportunity to perform funeral rites, she did the only thing she could do: she wept. Just as Jesus had wept when he learned that Lazarus was dead, Mary wept.

What kept her in the garden? Love. The only thing stronger than death is love. When someone passes away, our love for them doesn’t die, it just transforms. Mary stayed to show her love in the only way she knew how, with her simple presence. She stayed true to the end, and even beyond the end.

For her faith, for her love, for her fidelity and commitment to her Lord, Mary in turn was blessed. Though blinded by grief, she continued to seek her Lord. And because of her love, she found Him.

And yet, Jesus appeared at a time of his choosing. He waited until the time was right. How did he know? God knows! Indeed, often God knows exactly the right time to reveal his Truth to us. Sometimes, God comes to us in our joy, in those times of our greatest fulfillment, like at a wedding or the birth of a child or a reunion with someone you love. Often, though, God comes to us when all hope is lost. When we have nothing left, when emptiness seems to reach down to our very soul, there is Christ waiting for us.

Faith, hope, and love, these three remain; and the greatest is love. Mary had only the tiniest sliver of hope, but her faith was strong. Now, we often use “faith” to mean “treating something as if it were true despite the lack of evidence for it.” But that’s a fairly modern meaning of the word. “Faith” as Paul meant it, and as it is meant throughout the New Testament, is more like fidelity and commitment and staying true to your relationship with God. Mary had faith in that sense. She believed Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of God, and she acted on that understanding. But even more than faith, she acted out of love. She clung to a love that is greater than death, and through that love, she found her risen Lord.

In the same way, we are challenged to love through grief, to love through fear, to love our God who sometimes seems absent. And if we do, we know that Christ will reveal himself when we most need Him. Just as Jesus revealed himself to Mary when he knew she was ready, Christ comes to us when we are ready to receive him. He shows up in the needy, the homeless, and the imprisoned when we have something to give, and he shows up as our comforter, our guide, and our Savior when our pain has opened us to his healing touch.

On that first Easter, nobody really knew what would happen. In retrospect, the disciples understood what Jesus had been saying to them. In the moment, though, his promise seemed too far-fetched. They thought, sure, Jesus will rise in the great resurrection on the Last Day, along with the rest of us. They didn’t understand that Jesus meant that his resurrection would come now, and that he truly is the resurrection. With two thousand years of history, we might think we would have acted more like Mary than Peter. But at the time, Peter was running scared. He had good reasons to fear the Romans and the Temple authorities. Mary may have, too, but her yearning for her Lord overcame her fears. Both of them were trying to do their best in a bad situation.

Maya Angelou once said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” Unlike Peter, unlike Mary, unlike all of Jesus’s followers on that fateful day, we know that Christ has risen. We know that he has conquered death and brought us into a right relationship with God. We know that his love transcends all of the pain and struggles of this world. We know that Christ is in each person we meet, and that actually, we, the Church, are Christ’s body. We are Christ.

So now that we know better, let’s do better. Peter fled in fear, both at the time of Jesus’s arrest and after discovering an empty tomb. Mary did better: she stayed as close as she could to her Lord, with no real hope, only grief. We can do even better than that. We can stay true to our calling, stay true to our role as members of the body of Christ, and watch expectantly for Christ to show up in each other. We can watch for Christ, confident that he will reveal himself to share our greatest joys and our deepest sorrows.

Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed!) We know that Christ’s love transcends pain, and grief, and even death. We know that we have been promised life in His name. Let us demonstrate that knowledge by following Christ, by expecting his presence in our lives, and by participating as a part of His body, the Church universal. Amen.

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Sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on March 3, 2024, the Third Sunday in Lent. Based on John 2:13-22.

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I’m going to start this morning with a little bit of history. In the earliest part of the Bible, Genesis, we read about the ancient Israelites worshipping God in a variety of places, places that seem holy like Bethel where Jacob had his dream of a ladder reaching to heaven. In Exodus, God and Moses instituted a sacrificial system based around the Tabernacle or Tent of Meeting. This was a sanctified tent, or rather, three tents nested like a Russian doll, and sacrifices to God could only be made there. After the Israelites settled in what was originally Canaan, they set up several shrines where sacrifices were made, but eventually, the Tabernacle was moved to Jerusalem and worship was centralized there. Solomon built the first Temple, and all of the rural shrines were destroyed.

A few centuries later, Judah was conquered by Babylon, the Temple was destroyed, and the Israelites had a crisis of sorts. How would their worship continue when they were exiled and there was no temple? When the exile ended, they rebuilt the Temple and doubled down on its centralized sacrificial system. What had gone wrong? Why were they conquered and exiled? Obviously, their worship of God had not been pure enough. The priests made sure that all Jews knew that worship could only happen at the Temple, which needed to stay pure.

One aspect of that purity was a set of concentric walls, with rules about who could pass which ones. The outermost Court of the Gentiles was open to everyone. In part, this reflected Isaiah’s prophecy:

the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord,
    to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord,
    and to be his servants,
all who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it
    and hold fast my covenant—
these I will bring to my holy mountain
    and make them joyful in my house of prayer;
their burnt offerings and their sacrifices
    will be accepted on my altar,
for my house shall be called a house of prayer
    for all peoples.

Isaiah 56:6-7

This outermost court was 35 acres—a pretty big space in a crowded city.

Next came the Court of Women, where Gentiles were excluded but all Jews, male and female, were welcome. Next was the Court of Israel, where only male Jews were welcome. This is where the priests would perform their typical sacrifices. Next was the Holy Place where certain elements were contained like the incense altar and showbread. Finally, the innermost area was the Holy of Holies, where only the high priest could enter, and only once a year on Yom Kippur.

This elaborate system ensured that the holy places stayed “clean.” Only people who were chosen by God could approach, and how close depended on their chosen status. It seems a little strange from our modern perspective, but it worked for them.

The Temple was the center of the sacrificial system that was spelled out in the Torah and the destination of several annual festivals. There was an expectation that all male Jews would visit the Temple on the high holy days: Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot, and Yom Kippur. My guess is that only the wealthy would visit from far off places on a regular basis, but there was an expectation that those who had the means would make a pilgrimage. It reminds me a little bit of the hajj, the annual festival that Muslims celebrate in Mecca. There are very strict rules around the hajj, regarding who is allowed to come and what they are allowed to do. Similarly, there were strict rules for celebrating Passover at the Temple.

One of those rules was that certain sacrifices needed to be made with unblemished animals. Another was that an annual Temple tax was due and could only be paid using certain coins that did not have any graven images on them. Let’s suppose you’re a Jew who lived far away, say, in Corinth. How would you get to Jerusalem for Passover? Probably by ship first, and then by foot, walking a long way through various Greek-speaking Roman provinces. If you were going to Passover, you needed a lamb. If you had to make a purification offering or some other sacrificial offering, maybe you needed some other animal like a dove or an ox. Would you really bring an animal all the way from Corinth on the ship? Probably not. Too many things could go wrong along the way. Oh, and you would probably be using whatever currency was in regular use in your hometown or in the provinces you passed through.

So now you’re at the Temple and need to come up with an unblemished lamb and some currency to pay your Temple tax. Wouldn’t it be convenient if someone was selling lambs right there where you needed one? Wouldn’t it be convenient if someone would change your bad currency into something you could use at the Temple?

So that’s why there were people who set up shop in the Temple to sell animals and change money. That wasn’t a problem per se. I read somewhere that during Passover in this era, they might sacrifice 277,000 lambs. That’s a lot of animals, and a lot of logistics to deal with. I can’t fault the priests and Levites for working out a system where vendors would provide them right where they were needed.

The problem was that they filled the Court of the Gentiles. Remember those concentric courtyards where only certain people could proceed inwards towards God? The Court of the Gentiles was the only one that was truly open. If you were a God-fearer, that is, someone who embraced Judaism but was not actually Jewish, you would want to be where the action was just to soak up the spiritual energy of that place. But what if you couldn’t get in because there was a bazaar going on?

As we read the Gospels, we see that Jesus was in conflict with the religious establishment and local government throughout his ministry. Yet whenever the conflict got too acute, he would fade away and avoid escalation. His one exception was the cleansing of the Temple. This was the one time he actively sought confrontation with the establishment. He went straight to the heart of the system and challenged them. It would be like someone protesting against the Catholic church at the Vatican. The authorities would see it as something more than a protest—the start of a revolution. This was the one time when Jesus publicly embraced his messianic calling to literally overturn the systems that were oppressing His people. And it had predictable results: cleansing the Temple started a chain of events that ended on Calvary with Jesus’s ignominious death at the hands of an oppressive occupying government that sought to crush the hopes of the movement he had started.

Why did Jesus die? That’s a huge theological question that we can discuss some other time. The literal reason, though, was that he was perceived as a threat to the stability of Roman rule in Judea and the relationship that the priests had established with their occupiers. And the most obvious act Jesus made was to remove barriers between people and God.

The history of the Christian church has been one of cycles of inclusion and exclusion. In the early days, we expanded beyond Jews to include Gentiles. As the church grew, various heresies were denounced, and their adherents were excommunicated. The Reformation was marked by attempts both to make God more accessible, such as translating the Bible into everyday languages, and to control who “counts” as Christian, such as the Anabaptist movement. The tension continues to this day. Yet Jesus demonstrated what was most critical to him: removing barriers that kept people from worshipping God.

I’d like you to think about people who are either unchurched or have been hurt by the church, and what barriers we might put up that keep them from worshipping with us. For starters, we have this beautiful church on a hill that looks a little bit intimidating. Worship spaces are intended to fill us with awe at our transcendent Lord, but awe can lead to fear.

Beyond the look and feel of the church building, what about our schedule? When I moved to Rolla, I made a concerted effort to keep my Sunday mornings clear and dedicated to worship. Previously, we would often travel on the weekend, or do yard work or other home projects, or whatever. Truthfully, in those days, 9:45 was a little late for us. We would have preferred to be done with church by 9:00 so we could get on with the rest of the day. My kids were never hard-core athletes, but I know many kids are, and have games on Sundays.

Let’s think about what happens in here each Sunday. It’s a very traditional service. I wouldn’t say that it’s “high church” exactly, but there is a definite formal feel to the service. That can make people very uncomfortable. It’s like going to a fine restaurant and not knowing which fork to use. Is it appropriate to shout an “amen”? What is appropriate to say when the worship leader asks for prayer requests? Oh, and what should you wear?

I don’t have good answers to all of this. I personally like worshipping at 9:45 am on Sundays, dressing nice, and following a traditional worship format. I’m just saying that perhaps some aspects of what we do are barriers that are keeping people out.

Another problem we face is that we are Christians, and therefore inherit all of the good and bad of our colleagues in ministry. Christians are known for being judgmental. Suppose you were hurt by some church because, say, you got divorced or dared to challenge the pastor. Or perhaps you or someone you know were exploited in some way by a church leader and the congregation chose the perpetrator or the institution over the victim. Or perhaps you consider yourself a “sinner” and don’t think you would fit in with good church folks. There’s a sign at the church down the hill that says, “Come as you are; you can change inside.” I’m sure they intend it to be welcoming, but I read it as exclusionary. I read it as saying, The person you are right now is not good enough to belong with us. You can come worship here, but only if you agree to change into the kind of person we think you should be.

Or maybe, someone thinks they can’t afford to join a church. Yes, it’s important to financially support your spiritual home, but we should never give the impression that people who are too poor to give are not welcome here. The ancient Jewish sacrificial system had options: if you couldn’t afford a lamb, you could buy two doves instead. I could imagine someone making their pilgrimage to Jerusalem, then seeing the prices on all of the animals and thinking, Wow, I guess I can’t really participate like I thought. That’s at least part of what Jesus protested against.

I’m going to give you all homework again. I want you to seriously look at and think about and pray about our church and the people who we would like to have worshipping with us, and what ways we are creating barriers that keep them out. I want you to think about ways we can tell people that it’s OK: God loves you for who you are, and so do we. I want you to think about ways we can meet people where they are and accommodate their needs. I want you to think about ways we can help people experience the loving God that we know, and ways that we can truly and actively love our neighbors.

Jesus flipped tables as a prophetic indictment of the way the priests and Levites were keeping people out of the Temple and keeping them away from God. A few decades later, the Temple building was destroyed. But more importantly, a few days later, Jesus laid down his life so that God could break free of a system that tried to tame God, so that we can all be a part of God’s family. Let us seek ways to welcome more of our siblings so that they can experience the love of our risen Lord through His body, which is the Church. Amen.

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