Third Sunday of Lent 2012
Once I lost my temper and broke up a fight---it was part of a long bad day.
I drove to Sacramento in the pouring rain to testify at a parole hearing for a student I had visited several times in the prison at Vacaville. I drove back to Berkeley in the pouring rain with his fiancée who was of course miserable; we went to a café for a coffee. Over her shoulder and out the window I saw a group of middle school boys begin to bully and slap another one. We all sat drinking lattes. It was unbearable to watch young male violence, more children beginning their path to the criminal justice system I had just left. I went outside and said “Stop this, stop this!” I brought the boy inside. The male waiter gave the boy a drink, and the male waiter went out to talk to the boys who kept watching through window, waiting for the boy to come out—bullies need attention too-- and eventually they moved on. I was not Spencer Tracy as Father Flanigan bringing peace. It all felt futile. Who would be there the next day at 3 pm or the next? The reality of more money spent on prisons than schools in California was obvious, the idiocy of empowering young women without making boys into honorable men, the apathy of us drinking our coffee in the face of violence, the inability of the legal system to cope with our systematic lack of community
The day was a grim story right out of Flannery O’Connor in which failure and weakness reveal grace. Sometimes only the worst events reveal that we are children of God together, and reveal we owe each other our love and actions however imperfect. Remember it is not the successful and righteous who waltz into the kingdom of heaven in with the right temple coin in their hand. Jesus tells us again and again that it is the sick and the sinning, imperfect, creeping and stumbling. The widow’s mite, the prodigal son, the laborer who comes in the last hour, and all from mustard seeds.
This is what Paul calls the foolish of God’s wisdom, the weakness of divine strength. Christianity is not about righteousness—it is not a competition for us to win our salvation by what we do or whom we control in our vision of righteousness. Christianity is not a system we can game.
Christianity is the revelation of God’s love for and within the whole battered beautiful creation. We do not act alone, we do not suffer alone, we do not rejoice alone, but as parts of one another, all together as children of God. God calls us to come into the whole process of salvation which is going on around us to bring healing and justice. Nothing in God’s world is futile, nothing is wasted .
So Jesus throws the money changers out the Temple—they are the middle men to change your secular coin into the sacred to make acceptable sacrifice. And you know that they were back the next day, don’t you? But Jesus tells us that we don’t need to placate priests, nothing separates you from your Father, the sustainer of lilies and sparrows and lost coins. God steps outside conventional religion, and also conventional wisdom-- the disciplines of philosophy, the severe and high study of first principles that insures the wise 1% get to heaven in the right and worthy company. Jesus hangs out with the poor and needy and he fails. He will be put to death by the wise and the righteous to show us the cost and the way of love. This is the foolish wisdom of God. Our despair, our failures, our sins reveal our honest hearts and here alone the hope and forgiveness of God can deliver us.
If God loves us so much, who are we to love ourselves and each other so little? See how easy Christianity is: we don’t have to agree or even like each other to practice divine love—we simply have to see each other and see another’s need rather than our own, and stand up for each other, do something. This daily faithfulness---akin to friendship or marriage or parenting-- is anything but perfection, isn’t it? Nice isn’t Christian, forgiveness is. Passion, resilience, struggle, repentance, hope are all active states of being alive—Jesus argued, threw out moneychangers, laid hands on the unclean, saw the untouchable. He was fully alive in God’s world.
Lent is the time to throw the moneychangers out of our own souls, those middle men, those self justifications we use to hide our real selves or to refrain from actions we should take. Lent is the time to stop your superego from bullying you into perfection. Hang out with Jesus in the creation of God instead. When you read the headlines, start playing divine chess to the political checker game going on now. Do you think God cares how you vote in November? Start taking care of your community and the people around you right now. Let’s be foolish this week and do something new: pray for Syria, send money to Africa whether or not you like the viral video, give way when you drive, call up all old friend, be patient, be hopeful, be faithful, step into something you have never done before and learn from failure. Let us open our eyes this week and find God in the very places we fear God is absent.
