Warning: Dangerous Landscape

 

First Lady, Rosalyn Carter, said, “A leader takes people where they want to go.  A greater leader takes people not necessarily where they want to go, but where they ought to be.”

 

Today our sojourning in the land is a journey of a different form – not on land per se, but rather a

hike through the landscape of scripture text; crawling and exploring through the Bible’s pages into unknown landscapes.  Today we sojourn with great leaders – not to go where we want to go, but to go where we ought to be.

 

I love to read.  I love stories in all forms: literature, music, movies, spoken word. I am not alone in this. Human history reflects a gathering around story – ancient pictographs, hieroglyphs, totem poles.  Humans share their stories with each other: poems, songs, epic sagas, fables, parables, jokes, memes, history accounts, wisdom, scripture, commandments. It is no wonder that faith too is passed on in these forms.  Stories in all forms have a unique attribute – story is able to bypass the critical intellect – a story gets inside our heads, our emotions are aroused and engaged, and once inside then the story gets tossed around, thought about, interpreted, applied... once inside the pieces of a story can be tackled by the mind to discover what the possible message could be; arriving at meaning from the inside out.

Readers, often come to the Bible with an attitude that reading it automatically makes one better – reading doesn’t work that way. It is the journeying through the words, romping in its meadows, afterwards, where ‘bettering’ happens. ‘Bettering’ also happens in the discipline of hiking through the pages of your Bible, over years and a lifetime. Through this time we experience different parts of the story because we bring with us who we are and how we at the time; so each time getting a more dimensional feeling of the story.  If we are angry, we read angry, we see angry, we listen angry, we interpret angry – scripture will be angry – and so too will our understanding of religion, faith, and God. I mention an attitude of anger because some have taken Jesus’ action in the Temple and focused on his anger, not exploring other possible paths in the story.

We also walk through the landscape of scripture as products of Western civilization where we believe the myth that everything has an explanation. Could we – dare we-  accept that scripture is inexplicable? That scripture was written to read us, not us it. The texts, and especially the crazy ones, are there to jar us out of complacency.

This is the point of today’s texts.

 

This Jesus story – the episode in the Temple- is Jesus being jarred out of complacency having heard and recited and mulled over the Commandments since the time he was a young boy.  The Commandments have read Jesus, down to his very heart; and observing the world around him, Jesus is unable to see a living of that particular story from the Word of God.  The disconnect annoys Jesus’ sojourning with the text, the Law.  The episode in the Temple is a wake up call to his fellow travelers, pointing to the distance humans have created between themselves and others, themselves and God. Jesus, by throwing over the tables in the Temple is not telling us to refrain from having garage sales or other money maker events in the Church; Jesus is reacting to the religion’s failure to live the Law – the summary being the Commandments we heard earlier – love God, love your neighbour.   The letter of the Law - the rules about changing money, offering sacrifice, policing who can and can’t come to God, judging the sin of others- has become more important than the spirit of the Law; the spirit to focus on relationship and perfecting relationship with God, people, and creation.

Temple religion was keeping the Law which was by no means wrong, but the trouble was that hearts were disengaged, relationships were broken; evident in the vast numbers of people being left out, abandoned, forgotten – like the poor, the widow, the orphan, the slave, the foreigner, the sick, the aged, women.

What Jesus is experiencing is rearticulated again in the poetic words of George Elliot Clarke’

“It is the distance between earth and heaven, us and God; not God with us, but us with God.”

 

Jesus turning the tables in the Temple is the beginning of John’s telling of the Gospel story. Again and again the religious leaders will address Jesus with questions starting in points of Law, pointing out failure to follow the Law; pointing fingers at those breaking the rules- particularly Jesus and the disciples. John’s telling of the story has Jesus placed in moments were he faces following the letter of the Law, or deciding to set the letter of the Law aside, and follow the spirit and heart of the Law. The heart is Jesus’ choice. Courageously Jesus chooses relationship every time: Jesus sits down and has an intimate conversation with a Samaritan woman, Jesus sees a sick man and despite it being the Sabbath heals him, Jesus sides with a woman caught in adultery, Jesus let a woman anoint his feet, Jesus touched those not to be touched -the blind, the leperous, Jesus called Lazarus from death back to life.  This epic saga has Jesus breaking the rules and redefining the Law at every turn.

 

Today’s text is John’s warning to us, the readers and hearers of the story, that this story is going to be messy, it is going to get people into trouble, it is full of angst and argument and putting people in their place.  This is a story not for the faint of heart or those with gentile sensibilities. The story is an epic battle of cosmic proportions. Such stories, as told through history, include blood and brutality, wherein the hero faces suffering and often torture or death; but if you stay with the story one usually finds redemption and liberation on the other side.

 

Today you are being warned, that sojourning with the biblical characters, walking in the texts, --following Jesus in his mission to clean house and transform hearts in this revolutionary re-telling of God’s vision that it is all about relationship -  is not going to be comfortable! No matter how good you are, or how good you think you are, you are being called from complacency -- expect blisters, bruising, being short of breath, perhaps a twisted ankle --- the texts are going to lead us, not to the places where we want to go (green pastures and still waters); but, rather, lead us to the places we ought to be.

  (Places were our relationships are broken, or don’t exist at all. The hard places were there is suffering, pain, and grief. Places where we face confession, forgiveness, and guilt. Places of lament, where we need to listen and not talk. Places where there are relationships that we can’t just fix. Places where societal rules will need to be set aside. Places that bring us face to face with death: of ourselves, of others, of peoples, of creation.)

We are being forewarned that the story we are reading – the story that is reading us—is taking us to the  cross with Jesus.  

Not where we want to go --- but where we ought to be.