Latest / Beyond the Sermon / Turning the Tables: Sermon

Transcript

Turning the Tables: Sermon · Beyond the Sermon

0:04
You're listening to Beyond the Sermon, the podcast the First
0:06
Methodist Church in Collingswood, NJ.
0:09
On this podcast, the goal is not just to share our sermons, but
0:12
to go beyond the sermon and talk about what we're learning and
0:15
what God is doing in us and in our community.
0:18
This fall, we're living in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke,
0:21
and John and learning how to live from our model, Jesus.
0:25
This sermon is part of our series The Gospels.
0:28
You can find out more information about our church at
0:30
fumccollingswood.org. Thanks for listening.
0:42
Today's scripture comes from the Gospel of John.
0:45
We did have a little typo in the OR change I should say in the
0:49
bulletin. So chapter 2, verses 13 through
0:52
22, not up to 25. When it was almost time for the
1:00
Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
1:04
In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep,
1:07
and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money.
1:12
So he made a whip out of cords and drove all from the temple
1:15
courts, both sheep and cattle. He scattered the coins of the
1:18
money changers and overturned their tables.
1:22
To those who sold doves. He said get these out of here,
1:25
stopped turning my Father's house into a market.
1:28
His disciples remembered that it is written, Zeal for your house
1:31
will consume me. The Jews then responded to him,
1:35
What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all
1:38
this? Jesus answered them, Destroy
1:41
this temple and I will raise it again in three days.
1:45
They replied, It has taken 46 years to build this temple and
1:48
you are going to raise it in three days.
1:51
But the temple he had spoken of was His body.
1:54
After he was raised from the dead, His disciples recalled
1:57
what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture
2:00
and the words that Jesus had spoken.
2:02
This is reading of the word of the Lord.
2:09
I apologize, I apparently I printed off the wrong scripture
2:12
for for the wrong translation for William to read there, but
2:17
you got the idea. You got the idea.
2:20
All right, kids, you are welcome to go to children's church if
2:26
you're headed that way with Miss Aaron and Miss Jennifer and the
2:35
rest of you. Show of hands.
2:38
Anyone here ever gotten angry? All right, thank you.
2:45
For those of you who are honest, the rest of you are liars.
2:49
The fact is, right there are things that make us as people
2:55
angry. There are things that make us
2:57
angry. And I'd go so far as to say that
3:02
our ability to get angry is one of the ways that we bear the
3:09
image of God. All right, Our our ability to
3:14
get angry is one of the ways that we bear the image of God
3:19
because anger in and of itself isn't sinful, although it can
3:25
open the door for us to sin. Remember the verse in Ephesians
3:30
chapter 4 verse 26. It says, and don't sin by
3:36
letting anger control you. Don't let sin go down while
3:41
you're still angry, which Paul was actually thinking about and
3:44
reflecting on. A quote from Psalm chapter 4,
3:49
1st 4 The Psalmist route. Don't sin by letting anger
3:53
control you. Think about it overnight.
3:56
Remain silent. Or it's possible for us to be
4:03
angry and yet not sin. Or it's possible to be angry and
4:11
not become controlled by our anger.
4:17
Or the problem is what makes us angry, And what often makes us
4:23
angry is when we felt offended, when we've been wronged or
4:29
slighted, misunderstood or misrepresented.
4:36
And anger is, I think, the appropriate response when we
4:41
experience or when we witness injustice in the world, right?
4:48
We should get angry. When people lie and cheat to get
4:53
ahead, or we should get angry. When people manipulate other
4:58
people's emotions to get what they want, we should get angry.
5:04
When women and children are sold and trafficked for another
5:09
person's pleasure, we should get angry when we see people
5:14
discriminated against simply based on their race or their
5:19
gender, we should get angry when the poor are exploited and
5:26
oppressed. When someone's food is withheld
5:31
to make a political point, we should get angry.
5:36
When the widows, the fatherless, the foreigners in our land are
5:41
abused and mistreated, we should get angry.
5:46
When religion is leveraged to gain personal or political power
5:51
and influence, we should get angry about those things.
5:57
These are the things that we're told in Scripture make God
6:02
angry. And if these are things that
6:05
make God angry, they should make us angry too.
6:12
You see, if our goal as Christians is to become like
6:15
Jesus, who is God, by the way, right?
6:19
Let's not forget that. That then one of our goals
6:23
should be to get angry about the things God gets angry about, to
6:28
get angry about the things Jesus gets angry about, and just as
6:35
important, to let that anger move us to action that reflects
6:41
God's heart and nature. In the story that William read
6:48
for us this morning from John chapter 2, we see Jesus get
6:53
angry, right? And so I want to take some time
6:57
this morning to talk about what got Jesus so angry, what he did
7:06
about it, and what that might say to us today as we strive to
7:13
be with Jesus and become like Jesus and do the things that
7:18
Jesus did. All right.
7:21
And so as we start in on the Gospel of John, the the 4th
7:26
Gospel in the Bible and in our reading plan, if you're reading
7:29
along in the Gospels with us, we just started John yesterday.
7:34
You can still catch up if you want.
7:36
Start Job, read chapter 1 and 2 today and you'll be good to go
7:40
with the reading plan. But but I want to say a few
7:43
words about John's Gospel as we get started here, because if you
7:48
haven't realized after just two days of reading John, you'll
7:51
soon realize that this gospel isn't quite like the three that
7:56
we've just read, right? If you remember back to your
8:00
Sesame Street days, you might recall they used to do a little
8:04
thing where they'd sing a little song about one of these things
8:08
not being like the other. Anyone remember that?
8:11
Well, maybe you need a little reminder, Tim.
8:18
One of these things is not like the other.
8:22
One of these things just doesn't.
8:25
Belong. Can you tell which thing is not
8:29
like the other before I finish my song?
8:36
Now look very carefully, because one of these things just doesn't
8:39
belong here. Is it the apple or the the ice
8:44
cream cone or the mitten or the hamburger?
8:49
Well, if you guessed this thing is not like the other, If you
8:54
guessed this thing just doesn't belong.
8:58
If you guessed this thing is not like the other, well, then
9:05
you're absolutely correct. Because all of these things.
9:10
They are. That's good.
9:12
You, you get the point, right? One of these things isn't like
9:16
the other. And a lot of ways when we look
9:19
at the four gospels, John sticks out like a mitten among the food
9:27
right there. There's something different
9:29
about the way John writes, the themes he chooses to emphasize,
9:34
and even the way he structures his gospel that just doesn't
9:39
line up with the other 3 gospels.
9:43
Matthew, Mark, and Luke together are known as the Synoptic
9:48
Gospels. All right, write that down for
9:51
your quiz. Synoptic gospels.
9:54
Synoptic just means they're seen together soon optic seen
9:59
together, right? And you may have noticed that as
10:03
we've read through them, that while they each have their own
10:06
flavour, right, they each have things they they emphasize and
10:10
highlight, they follow a very similar structure.
10:15
Most scholars believe this is because Mark was written 1st.
10:20
And then Matthew and Luke used Mark as a template that they
10:24
followed, kind of like an outline that they then fleshed
10:27
out with the things that they felt like mattered to tell about
10:31
Jesus for the audience that they were writing for.
10:35
But then John, John at the end of his long life, decided to
10:41
write down his own recollections of Jesus's life and ministry
10:46
kind of separate or independent of what others had already
10:51
written down. And it's because of these
10:54
structural differences that the theological emphasis that John
10:58
stands as the one that's not quite like the others.
11:05
But that doesn't mean that John doesn't belong, right?
11:10
Because John's gospel and, and its uniqueness add to our
11:14
picture of Jesus in significant ways.
11:18
And so we, we wouldn't want to ignore John at the sake of
11:22
highlighting the others. For, for instance, though it's
11:27
widely believed that Jesus's ministry lasted for roughly how
11:31
long? Who knows?
11:32
Yeah, three years, right, from Jesus's baptism and the calling
11:36
of the 12 disciples up until his arrest and crucifixion and, and
11:41
resurrection. So it would follow, right, that
11:44
if Jesus was a good Jew, he would have celebrated the
11:48
Passover in Jerusalem at least how many times?
11:54
Three times, Right. Right.
11:55
This, this is just logic, right? But did you realize as we were
12:03
reading through Matthew and Mark and Luke, that these Gospels
12:09
only record Jesus going to Jerusalem once, or at least as
12:14
an adult, right? He goes once at the end of his
12:19
life and his ministry, and they only record him celebrating the
12:22
Passover once at the meal that we've come to know as the Last
12:28
Supper in those synoptic Gospels, that the story is one
12:34
of an intentional move of Jesus to Jerusalem, where he knew he
12:40
was going to be arrested and killed, right?
12:44
It's a straight line moving towards Jerusalem.
12:47
It's only by reading John's gospel that we get a sense of
12:51
the length of Jesus's ministry, because John records Jesus going
12:55
to Jerusalem at least four different times to participate
12:59
in the Passover and other festivals.
13:02
And when we look at all of this from our our modern perspective,
13:08
it's tempting to look at the evidence and side with Matthew,
13:12
Mark and Luke against John, right three to 1.
13:20
And then we conclude, right, that that John must have gotten
13:24
it wrong. We have to find a way to fit
13:29
John's timeline into the timeline of those other gospels.
13:35
And various attempts have been made at this, including theory
13:39
by the liberal theologian Rudolf Boltmann, who said that the
13:43
pages of John's Gospels after he wrote it down, they must have
13:46
been dropped and then just picked up and put back together.
13:49
Anyhow, in whatever order they were picked up.
13:53
That that that's the only explanation for how John's
13:57
Gospel could be so different from the others.
14:01
But I want to suggest this morning as we start into our
14:05
reading of John, that's actually John who got the timeline right
14:13
and Mark and those who followed him, they arranged things the
14:17
way they did to make a theological and thematic point,
14:22
right? That Jesus whole life and
14:23
ministry was moving towards his death and resurrection in
14:27
Jerusalem, which which isn't wrong, right?
14:30
It just doesn't follow our modern guidelines for what it
14:34
looks like to write a biography, right?
14:39
We can talk about that more on the podcast this week.
14:42
I've got lots of thoughts about that.
14:44
Go ahead and make some notes If you have questions about all
14:47
that, feel free to e-mail Jeremy or I by tomorrow morning.
14:52
Our emails are on the back of the bulletin, even.
14:55
My point is, John is different from the Synoptic Gospels, but
15:03
that doesn't mean that John is wrong.
15:06
You might be wondering why I'm making such a a big deal about
15:10
this, but it's because of the story that we're looking at
15:13
today. The the story that we're looking
15:16
at this morning is found in John chapter 2, right at the very
15:20
beginning of John's Gospel, and presumably in his timeline takes
15:27
place early in Jesus's ministry. Right just after Jesus performs
15:32
his first miracle of turning water into wine to extend the
15:37
party at the wedding at Cana right, to spare the bride and
15:42
the groom from the disgrace of running out of wine before the
15:46
party was over. But in the synoptic gospels,
15:50
Matthew, Mark and Luke all place this story or one very similar
15:57
to it. There are some who argue that
15:58
there were. There are two events like this,
16:01
but they place it on the Monday of Holy Week right after Jesus
16:07
triumphal entry into Jerusalem on the back of a young donkey.
16:14
And here's the thing, if if you're if the only time in your
16:18
story about Jesus that he ends up in Jerusalem is there at the
16:23
end of his life, then that's where you have to place this
16:26
story. Or I think it's significant
16:28
enough that they felt like they had to include it.
16:31
All the gospels agreed that this was a key moment in Jesus story
16:36
and a key moment in Jesus relationship with the religious
16:40
leaders that ended up turning them against him.
16:45
But I can see this event taking place early in Jesus's ministry,
16:50
like John says, and that it would have set the stage for
16:54
this tense relationship that we see between Jesus and the
16:58
religious leaders all throughout the Gospel story.
17:03
So let's take a look at this story.
17:06
This morning, Jesus goes to Jerusalem to celebrate the
17:10
Passover. When he gets to the temple, what
17:15
he sees is the entire courtyard filled with animals for sale,
17:21
bulls and lambs for those who could afford them.
17:25
Cages full of doves and pigeons to be sold to the the poorest of
17:32
the worshippers who came to the temple.
17:34
Tables were set up where people were exchanging their Roman and
17:38
Greek coins, the the currency they used in their day-to-day
17:42
lives for official temple shekels.
17:45
But this was not why the courtyard existed.
17:52
Let's take a quick look at Herod's temple, which he started
17:55
rebuilding around 20 BC. Can you see that up there?
18:00
That is a rendering of what Herod's temple would have looked
18:06
like. You can see there in the center
18:08
of the center. That's the Holy place, which
18:12
also housed the Holy of Holies, where God's presence was to
18:15
dwell among his people. That's the the part with the
18:20
gold on the top right. And then outside of that, you
18:22
had the court of the Israelites where the sacrifices were
18:26
offered and slaughtered and burned upon the altar.
18:30
Then in front of that you can see there's the court of women.
18:35
Back in those days, that was as far into the presence of God
18:38
that women could go. They couldn't actually be part
18:41
of the sacrifices that were offered.
18:44
And then surrounding all of this, all that space inside
18:48
those outer walls, this was the court of the Gentiles, the only
18:53
place where those who were not of direct Israelite descent
18:59
could go to worship, right? This space was roughly 35 acres.
19:07
That's half the size of Night Park, roughly 26 American
19:14
football fields. Inside those walls now is this
19:19
outer court, the court of the Gentiles, where Jesus found the
19:24
money changers and those who were selling animals to be
19:27
sacrificed. And, and it would be one thing,
19:31
right, if there were a few stalls set up where people could
19:36
go and make an honest exchange of their money rather than
19:38
travelling all the way from home with their animals.
19:41
That was a difficult journey. But what was happening is some
19:47
people were travelling all the way from home with their
19:50
animals, ready to be brought to sacrifice, only to get to the
19:56
temple and be told that their animal had some kind of defect.
20:01
It disqualified that animal from being offered as a sacrifice
20:05
according to the law of Moses. So they were going to need to
20:08
buy another animal. And in order to buy another
20:13
animal here in the temple that meet the qualifications that
20:18
Moses set out, they were going to need to exchange their their
20:22
currency, their Roman coins, their Greek coins, whatever they
20:25
had for temple shekels. Then they could buy a new animal
20:32
to sacrifice. And at every point along this
20:36
process, the people were losing money, right?
20:41
The exchange rate was bad. The animals were more expensive
20:45
than they would buy them outside of the temple.
20:47
It was a racket where the rich and the opportunistic preyed
20:52
upon the devotion of those who came simply to pray.
20:59
Not only that, but this whole temple industrial complex, run
21:04
by those who could enter into the inner court to worship, left
21:10
little to no room for those Gentiles who had come to believe
21:15
in the God of Israel, the one true God.
21:18
It left no place for them to worship Him.
21:23
And Jesus sees all of this. And I have to believe that this
21:29
wasn't the first time that Jesus was seeing this.
21:33
He had grown up in Israel as a faithful Jew.
21:38
He'd been to the temple before. This wasn't new for him.
21:42
But this time it was different. I don't think that Jesus walked
21:48
into the temple that day, saw it all for the first time, and flew
21:52
into a rage. I think God the Father had
21:57
finally given him a green light. A green light to announce the
22:02
beginning of his ministry with dramatic expression, right?
22:07
Similar to the actions of the prophets of old who God asked to
22:12
act out certain things as part of his message to the people.
22:17
So Jesus walks into the temple that day.
22:23
He sees what's going on and, and calmly, I think he picks up some
22:27
ropes that he finds around and, and he makes a whip out of those
22:32
ropes and and then he begins chasing all of these people out
22:38
of the temple. He he drives out the livestock
22:40
with that whip. He he flips over the tables
22:43
where they were exchanging money.
22:45
He tells them to get their cages of doves out of the temple.
22:49
And he says, stop turning my father's house into a
22:54
marketplace. You see they had turned their
22:58
sacred space, space set apart to worship the living God, into a
23:08
bazaar, a market, a place of transaction and consumption and
23:14
extortion. Mark gives us some further
23:19
clarity on what made Jesus so angry about the whole
23:23
arrangement. In Mark 11/7 it says that Jesus
23:26
said to them, The scriptures declare My temple will be called
23:31
a House of prayer for all nations, but you have turned it
23:34
into a den of thieves. The temple, as central as it was
23:44
meant to be for the people of Israel, was never meant to exist
23:50
solely for the people of Israel. It was meant for the world.
23:59
And not only were they preventing the nations from
24:01
coming to worship, they were preventing them from worshiping
24:05
by extorting and abusing their own people.
24:12
So the Jewish leaders see all this happening.
24:14
They, they come back at Jesus demanding to know whose
24:18
authority Jesus thinks he's acting on.
24:21
They, they want to sign that God has has sent Jesus to do this.
24:29
Jesus says you want to sign all right, here's the sign.
24:32
Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up and they
24:39
miss it completely. They don't understand they,
24:43
they, they can't believe it right.
24:45
Herod the Great had commissioned the rebuilding of the temple 46
24:50
years before this day, and it still wasn't finished.
24:55
They kept working on it all the way up to 64 AD.
24:59
But it wasn't until later, after Jesus had risen from the dead,
25:10
that the disciples remembered these words that he had spoken,
25:13
and they they finally understood what he meant when he was saying
25:17
this. Jesus wasn't talking about that
25:19
physical temple, that building and all of its pomp and
25:24
circumstance and glory. He was talking about himself,
25:29
His body. His body as the place where
25:34
heaven and earth met together. His body as the temple that they
25:41
would destroy, but which God would raise up three days later.
25:54
Friends, I I I didn't bring a whip with me today to chase you
26:00
out of the sanctuary, although I'm pretty sure most of you
26:03
could outrun me these days anyway.
26:09
But I think it's worth asking ourselves a few questions this
26:13
morning in light of this story we've heard from John's gospel.
26:19
I think some of the questions we need to wrestle with are if you
26:23
are the temple of the living God today, right?
26:28
If we together are the dwelling place of God, is God's house a
26:38
House of prayer for all nations? Do you have a heart to see the
26:43
nation's or or even the community around us come to know
26:49
Jesus? Does your heart be to pray for
26:53
the lost to become the found? If Jesus were here today, if he
27:01
walked through these doors at the back of the sanctuary, would
27:04
he identify us as a House of prayer or a denim thieves?
27:15
Are we pouring out our lives for the sake of those who don't yet
27:19
know God? Or are we focused more on how
27:23
much more we can get out of our church, out of its people?
27:30
Right, It's a matter of the orientation of our hearts.
27:34
A heart to pray and worship and seek God for the sake of the
27:37
lost, or a heart to consume and be filled and satisfied
27:43
ourselves. How much space are we making for
27:46
the world within our church versus the amount of space that
27:52
that we want to set aside for our favorite programs, our
27:55
favorite activities that we want to see happening?
27:58
What about the space within our lives?
28:06
Finally, I think we have to wrestle.
28:10
We have to wrestle with the things that we get angry about.
28:17
Are they the things that we're told?
28:20
Anger, God. Or do we tend to be whipped up
28:26
into a frenzy driven by the anger of the world, the things
28:31
the world says we should get angrier by, or even just our own
28:37
personal offenses? See, even this area of anger,
28:44
right? This, this way, one of the ways
28:48
that we image, bear the image of God, even this area Jesus wants
28:57
to disciple us in, right? There's no part of our hearts
29:03
and our lives that God doesn't want to touch and make us more
29:07
like him. And that includes our anger.
29:11
It includes our hearts. So we need to wrestle with these
29:19
questions. We need to ask Jesus to touch us
29:26
in these deep places. Are we making space for the
29:33
world, or are we seeking to satisfy ourselves?
29:41
Are the things that make us angry the things that make God's
29:47
heart angry, or is it just based on our own preferences, our own
29:53
opinions, our own desires, or those of the world around us?
30:01
I'm going to pray and this morning, as always, the the
30:07
altar's open. If you want to come and pray
30:09
about anything, maybe God's speaking to your heart about
30:12
something this morning and you want to come pray about it.
30:14
Maybe there's something else you brought into the service this
30:17
morning. You want to come and pray about
30:19
that. The altar is open and Jesus is
30:23
ready to meet you here this morning.
30:27
Let's pray together. Jesus, we come before you this
30:33
morning, and God, our hearts long to be made more and more
30:42
like you. That really is our desire.
30:48
But the reality is, God, we can't actually do anything to
30:53
make that happen. We need you.
30:58
We need you to pour out your transforming grace upon us to
31:04
touch the deepest, maybe the darkest parts of our hearts and
31:11
lives. God, would you expose the
31:16
orientations of our hearts and would you show us, shine a light
31:27
on the things that make us angry?
31:33
Would you help us? Would you forgive us for those
31:37
times when we let our anger lead us into sin?
31:43
Would you forgive us for the times we let our anger take
31:47
control of us because we personally have been offended?
31:57
Jesus, would you put a burden on our heart for the world, for the
32:03
loss, for those who have not yet been found by you?
32:12
And would you stir up a righteous anger within us for
32:17
the things that make you angry, the injustices of our world that
32:26
are far too easy to just keep scrolling past or changing the
32:29
channel on God? Would you put a burden on our
32:34
heart for the world? Come change us, even down to the
32:43
deepest parts of who we are and how we've been formed by the
32:48
world. Come and form your character,
32:51
your nature in us. There.
32:55
We yield ourselves to you this morning, Jesus, and we give
33:01
ourselves to you in Jesus name for his sake.
33:08
Amen.