All the gospels record this event in the life of Jesus. the clearing of the temple. It’s a passage that raises significant questions for us today. Now, you may wonder how we are going to get on with this tonight since out there in the foyer are a whole lot of Christmas cards that we are selling and in the supper area there is a vending machine that may potentially require money.

But, please understand that I had selected to preach this topic long before I even realised that we were selling stuff in the foyer. This sermon is not about justifying the selling of Christmas cards or coffee in a church building setting, rather it is trying to tease out some of the misunderstandings that surround this story.

So here’s the deal. The temple was this massive structure. It was 50m high at one point, and covered a plot of land 450m by 300m. it was massive. Every year there was a requirement for the Jews to come and make sacrifice there. It was the symbol of the Jewish religion in much the same way as the Vatican city is a symbol of the catholic faith. It was built for the glory of God and God dwelled in one of its rooms. It was inspiringly holy and magnificent. It was a fitting tribute to God.

Animals were sacrificed there all the time as Jewish pilgrims came to worship God. The sacrifice was tied in with the legal requirements as laid down by the old testament law and the rabbinic teachings that stemmed from it.

Travellers who came from afar would have found it much easier to make purchases of animals when they arrived in Jerusalem, so the outer courts of the temple had stalls where these purchases could be made. There were also issues with the roman currency that had the head of Caesar embossed on it and to the Romans, Caesar was as good as God. People couldn’t pay temple tax with roman coinage because it would be desecrating God’s holiness, so it had to be exchanged for the temple currency hence the money changers in this story.

Groups : why did Jesus get so angry about things that seem to be actually quite helpful? DT 14:22-26

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This is an enormously difficult sermon for me to preach because it is just too much of a hobby horse that I love to ride. And just to clear the air, here is my hobby horse. I’ve never felt easy about the idea that we can package ‘worship’ as a commodity. It’s never felt right to me that the songs we sing have copyright’s on them and that every year we as a church pay money to a Christian Copyright Association so that we can sing songs that someone in Australia has written and is making money from. Technically, unless we have paid for it, we can’t legally use it. Technically speaking, someone’s worship to God is not able to be shared with others if money hasn’t exchanged hands.

I’ve never felt easy about the fact that we aren’t allowed to quote from more than 10% of any one translation of the modern Bibles without the publisher’s permission.

I just don’t think it’s appropriate that a Christian band can sell worship in concert dvd’s or cds. I don’t like how the culture of Christian music is so showy, so beautiful and got such a ‘see, we can do as good as the secular music industry’ type of feel about it. I don’t like how the music becomes a label and we will try to assimilate music from another culture and congregation into ours without recontextualising it. I don’t think it’s right that there is a marketing machine that drives the kiwi music industry.

Is it right that big labels invest in Christian labels, doesn’t that say something? It says that secular profit making companies don’t invest in things that are not profitable. The Christian music scene is huge : far larger than it ought to be in my opinion. Yep, the American music industry is worth 9 billion dollars. They’ve got it sussed too. Bands were coming and going so much so that for a band to be sustainable it’s been recommended that they target the 11 and 12 year old audience and grow up with them. It means that the labels will get more time out of the musicians and have to spend less on marketing bands from scratch.

I don’t like how things have to be fresh and ‘relevant’ whatever that means. Most of the songs we sing are not at all musically similar to the music out there on the radio. In fact, if you watch the promotional music video that I got sent from Easter camp it’s full of songs that follow this formula: soft intro, kicks into massive chorus, comes back to medium verse, kicks into massive chorus, goes into bridge then ends with chorus a couple of times and fades out. Meanwhile almost all of them have this ending where the singer is looking at the camera and then in slow motion looks away and down from the camera. What hurts is that this stuff sells in the name of Jesus. Go figure.

And that’s the deal. This is what I’ve been thinking and I’ve been making assumptions all along about how the story of Jesus clearing the temple is relevant to this. But I’ve been wrong. I still might hold these ideas, but the support for them doesn’t come from this story in such a striking way as I thought it might. I’m not ready to say that my hobby horse is broken because let’s be honest here, when people say that a band is a Christian band and are really good, and their lyrics are full of undeniably holy words and apparently humble ones, when people say that about a band and you go and see them, and the guitarist is just loving himself and the singer is oozing arrogance and they might say it’s all about Jesus, but really they are getting a huge buzz from doing this performance and they love the attention of the 14 year old girls gushing forward for their autographs. When I see this, I can’t reconcile it with worshipping God. It’s a dangerous road to be a Christian in the limelight : especially in music.

how do I know? Because I’ve been there twice, I know what it’s like to be in a Christian band. I’ve performed twice on the main stage at parachute and toured the country on two separate occasions. It’s a terribly difficult balance to maintain your integrity. It’s shallow…

I didn’t get as many 14 year old girls wanting my autograph because let’s face it, trumpet players are far less impressive than drummers (eh Marcus).

There’s too much show going on and on top of that for ‘worship’ to be competing for the money of teenagers with disposable income, just doesn’t seem right to me.

And I used to think that the fact that there were people selling animals so that people could worship God in the temple, was like selling worship songs or self-help Christian books. It felt the same, and perhaps there is crossover, but it’s not a one for one correlation. The simple fact is that it was right to exchange the money (and even at a fair profit I’m sure), and it was really useful to be able to sell animals to those who don’t own sheep etc. So this kind of commerce was not in and of itself evil.

So was the problem then that there shouldn’t have been any selling in the temple? I’ve also heard people using this as reason to not sell cakes (or Christmas cards even — though not at this church) in the foyer for fundraising. Turning God’s house into a marketplace. that’s what made Jesus angry, that people were selling stuff in the temple, though I’m sure the commotion and distraction that it would’ve caused was reason to get angry and yes, even the fact that there were ‘robbers’ charging exorbitant amounts for the sake of convenience : yep that was reason to get angry.

But, if that’s as far as we go with the story, then I think we’ve really missed the point of why the story is told in the first place : especially in the gospel of John.

Let’s look at the story again.

Jesus comes into the temple and sees a whole lot of people trading, some making hefty profits. The place is a riot of bargaining and manipulating. It’s not a particularly prayerful atmosphere. It was not a sacred space anymore, it had been transformed into a marketplace where the focus was not God’s worship, but on getting the best deal in transactions. The vendors it seemed were opportunists it seems, who preyed on the vulnerability of the people who came to the temple to make an income. They weren’t offering a service to the community. Nope, they were simply taking advantage of the convenience thing. Could they have done it outside the temple grounds? Quite probably. But Jesus comes in and is appalled. Gets angry and starts booting people out.

The people who look after the temple are understandably upset by this and they call Jesus into question. Jesus says his thing about house of prayer and orders people to stop making his father’s house a marketplace.

The leaders ask Jesus for some I.D. by asking him for a sign. Jesus says that if they tear the temple down then he will rebuild it in 3 days. They thought he was talking about the temple itself, but he wasn’t, he was talking about how he would be crucified and then would rise again from the grave. Jesus was the new temple.

Now this is the important thing in the story. Effectively it is at this point that we see that Jesus is redefining the way that we worship God. Until that moment worship was centralised, in one location that people had to come to. It was also pretty much exclusively for the Jews, there were even signs on the wall that warned the gentiles not to come in to the inner courts of the temple because there was a good chance they would be struck down by God.

As the movie said, it’s at this point that the worship of God is no longer restricted by the walls of a man made building. This story is the turning point of history, it is here that the old ways are left behind, and the new

But wait there is more. When we think about this temple idea we see that according to Paul we, a gathered group of people are the temple of the holy spirit, the church is the new temple : not the building, but the people.

And the question is, how are we affected by the phrase from Jesus, that we the people are a house of prayer not to be turned into a den of thieves and robbers or a marketplace? is it a bit abstract maybe?

I think there are a few threads we can draw together here.

Let’s not take the sanctuary of us coming together lightly. Look around. The faces you see are the building blocks of the temple, Jesus is the cornerstone. Do you get it? if we want to look after God’s sanctuary: look after each other. If we want more reverence for God in the sanctuary : revere one another.

Let’s not inflate the importance of this building. The temple that Jesus cleared was destroyed by the Romans about 40 years later, it’s only remnant is the wailing wall. Yet the temple of the body of Christ covers the world.

Let’s be careful to facilitate worship as a community and not create stumbling blocks for those who join us. We are the sanctuary now.

Let us be more than just a structure or system of people, but be people who are by our very form, able to pave the way to holiness and mystery of God.

Let us be God focussed and not method focussed. Our worship is mostly our living, not our songs. Let’s pray, and pray more for this group of people are the house of God.

Let’s bear this in mind as Andy leads us in our response.