March 15 - Lent 3

Empty Traditions or Real Relationship?
John 2:13-22
Lent 3 – March 15, 2009

My favorite Lutheran joke goes something like this:
Q: How many Lutherans does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Change?!? What do you mean, change???

Now tell that joke to anyone who's been a Lutheran for even a little while, and you're bound to get at least a chuckle out of 'em. As Homer Simpson says, it's funny because it's true. We laugh at it because we recognize ourselves in it. Lutherans have a hard time with change.

No one likes change. You see that everywhere. Lately I've seen it on even on Facebook, where people are distressed about the change to the format. And you certainly find it in just aboutother churches find it in any church you go to, but Lutherans seem to have this dislike of change almost down to an art. There's a part of us that is almost proud of our resistance to change, which is ironic, considering our heritage, remembering the fact that our entire denomination came about because of someone who wanted to make some changes. (And we see where that got him – it got him kicked out of the church!)

But despite our Reformation roots, we tend to resent change. We have carefully-cultivated traditions, interwoven with our cherished memories of what church should be like, and we don't like it when anyone tries to mess with that. We struggle with relatively minor things, like when we change the musical setting of our liturgy, or use a new shape of palm for Palm Sunday, or change from wafers to bread. There's a strong urge inside of us to cling to the routines and rituals of the past, and there's a reason for that. These things have meaning for us. We get emotionally attached to those traditions, because in an unstable, ever-changing world, we at least want things inside the church to stay the same! Change is just downright hard. It makes us uneasy. Change upends us.

It's no wonder that the people in the gospel story today got all up in arms when Jesus came to the temple. Because here he comes, this young whippersnapper, near the beginning of one of the most important religious festivals of the year, the Passover. Jesus comes, and no sooner has he set foot in the place & he is literally upending the whole shebang! He enters the temple, and there “he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables.” This wasn't anything unusual – Jews came from all over the world at Passover to worship & to make sacrifices. They needed pure, unblemished animals to offer – and who wants to haul a sheep or a cow with them from Egypt or Greece? And they had to pay their temple tax. They sure couldn't do it with Roman money – they had to change it over into temple coins. These people selling animals and exchanging money were performing a service. People couldn't worship correctly without these things. And yet when Jesus sees all this, he makes a whip & drives out the animals with their people. He takes the money changers' cash boxes and dumps them out. He turns over tables, yelling at the dove sellers to get out of there, yelling at everyone to stop making his Father's house a marketplace! It's mass pandemonium in the temple that day, utter chaos as animals and people go scattering every which way, as coins clang and roll in every direction with the money changers chasing after them, no doubt.

In one fell swoop, Jesus has stopped everything. There will be no worship that day. In the span of a few minutes, Jesus has upended their life-long, unquestioned rituals. No wonder they ask him for a sign. “What gives you the right?” “How dare you?!” Jesus is messing with everything they have ever known, all that they consider good and right and meaningful. Jesus is forcing them to change & they don't like it one bit!

Perhaps that's why Jesus did it. He sees that their worship life has become a matter of routine. The system of sacrifice, which began as a way for people to remember God's covenant with them and be renewed in that relationship, that system is now just business as usual. It's checking things off a list. But more than that, these routines, these traditions, have become almost more important that the one they seek to serve in the 1st place! God is doing a new thing right in front of their eyes, in Jesus, but most everyone is so caught up in the old way of doing things, in their cherished traditions and patterns of worship that they can't see it! So maybe that's why Jesus had to come and cause such a commotion – to get their attention, to make them think about what they were doing & why – because their hallowed traditions had become barriers to true worship, barriers to a real, authentic relationship with God.

This story comes to us this Lent for a reason. Maybe Jesus is trying to get our attention too. Maybe he is inviting us to examine our own traditions, the traditions of our personal lives and the traditions of the church, and to really think about which things we do are still helping us to have a real relationship with God, the things that are helping us grow as followers of Jesus, the things that invite other people to enter more deeply into a life of discipleship - and which ones get in the way of that relationship, that are obstacles to what God wants to be doing in us and through us. What new things might God be doing among us that we just can't see yet? And what are we afraid of?

Change is always hard. Usually we won't do it until we are forced to. But you know, if we refuse to change that burned-out light bulb because we don't want to change, we end up sitting in the dark. A burned-out light bulb doesn't do anybody any good. But the good news is, Jesus came bringing light into our darkness. He is the light of the world, so when he calls us to change, we don't have to be afraid. Sometimes we may look at what he is doing here in this place in & in our lives and feel like he is just flipping over tables and causing chaos. But he does it to shake us up, to wake us up, to open our eyes to the new thing God is doing. And it's always so our relationship with him can be deeper and more trusting, based not on things that can and will and must change, like a church building or a particular style of worship or the programs of the past, but based on the One who never changes – Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, who lived and died so that we might be part of the new thing God is doing and whose love for us will never change. Thanks be to God. Amen.