The City of Disruption

City of Disruption

A Sermon on John 2:13-22 and 1 Corinthians 1:18-25

By Griff Martin

For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith

On the Third Sunday of Lent

March 4 2018

Incarnate God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing Resurrected reality we can all together experience. Be present here in this space and in these words God for if you are present here then nothing else will matter, but if you are not present here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Risen Christ and the Comforter.  Amen.

I am a One on the Enneagram with a very strong 2 wing… to quote Suzanne Stabile I  have “a judging and comparing mind which spots imperfection and I struggle to see imperfection as inevitable while fearing they tyranny of the critical voice in my head”, and I desire to make everyone happy…. which means that I am always holding this deep tension of the way that I think things should be, which I truly believe is not only the only way but also the right way and then this constant desire to make everyone pleased, to fix things and to be liked by everyone in that fixing… and more often than not the way I see things and how I would make you happy are not the same thing, hence the ever present tension in my life and every wrinkle on my forehead and lost hair on my head.

You add to that I am a bit of a control freak, I have a slight tendency towards OCD, I love efficiency and when things run in order and I love an organized system that makes sense to me and I am a planner and a fixer… You can see I am a real joy to work with….. Which might be why some of my favorite friends in Baton Rouge once gave me a t-shirt that read (I will clean this up a bit)  “Jesus loves you, the rest of us think you’re kinda a jerk.” 

I try hard to be very aware of this…aware that my way of seeing things is never the only way… that my really good idea needs to only be shared if I am asked to share it…. Aware that my system might only work for me and even then might not work as well as I think it does…. Aware that it would be awful to always get my way…. Aware I can be wrong more often than I like to admit… Aware that I can become so driven to do something that I bulldoze my way through it and fail to notice that harm that might cause. 

For instance my beloved son’s bedroom. Neither of my children inherited my need to bring order to rooms or closets… they prefer the ‘it can stay where I throw it’ method of organization. So a few weekends ago I had put Jude’s laundry away and in doing so realized that he had taken everything out of his closet because he was looking for a football jersey. I did what I thought was needed and cleaned and organized things and then once again reminded him of this genius system: you hang things up, you put dirty clothes here, it’s easier to find pajamas if they are not mixed in with your shirts and so on… and he nodded as if I was speaking Greek to him. The next day I went into his room and found the closet once again completely torn apart, Jude walked in right behind me and looked at me and then said, “I think its probably a good idea if you had some alone time in here.”

I actually think that is often what God says into my soul….. because I bring all of this mess of being me into my spiritual life, my devotional life and my pastoral life… just one example I have lead many a conversations in multiple churches I have served over how we could make communion more efficient (think about that)…. I think God often walks into the systems I have created, the order I have brought both of which God probably sees as messes… and looks around and simply says to me, “I think its probably a good idea if you had some alone time in here…. Look around, you did it again.”  This my spiritual desert, this is my Lent.

Which means that I am someone who really understands these Scriptures we sit with this day, this third Sunday of Lent. These are texts that land a little too close to home for me, if I can truly find my way into them… if I realize that I am not Paul preaching the cross, this foolishness and power of God, I am the one who needs to hear that sermon, he is preaching to me…. If I realize that I am not Jesus turning over tables in the temple, but I am the one whose tables are being overturned… I don’t hold the whip, Jesus still does… The truth is when Jesus comes into the temple I relate more to being the target of his wrath and not the righteousness of his cause. 

Because I understand that temple set up that Jesus seems to be just so upset about and you do too if you think about. Sheep, cattle, doves and coins… it’s not that they had no place in the temple, all of those belonged there, they were objects that were needed in worship. You needed an animal to make a sacrifice and you needed coins to pay your temple tax, these were simply functions of the temple. So I can see the priest in what I believe is probably very compassionate and well meaning thinking “You know if we offered the sacrifices for sale here and we had folks to convert your coins, that would make things much more efficient, that would help things run smoother, and for the average person (man) that is coming to the temple we just saved them from having to go three places, we made this easy…we organized this into something that works.” This made sense, it allowed them to be in a position of power, and in all this planning and making this work they did not even notice that they lost the sacredness of the place. 

Which is one of the real dangers of so many of our systems- worldly and religious- it puts us in positions of power and it makes us not even notice what we are missing, often missing the other and in doing so losing the sacred. 

And one day Jesus and the disciples are in Jerusalem and it’s near the Passover, which means that this system is running at it’s best….come to the temple, buy your sacrifice and exchange your coins for the right currency so you can pay your temple tax, getting people in and out of the temple…. And in walks Jesus. 

To disrupt everything.

Which should not surprise us… this is God incarnate after all and if we have been paying attention to the Old Testament, we should have understood by now that God loves to disrupt things, especially things we create, especially our own institutions. So it’s no surprise that Jesus does the same.

And pay attention to Jesus’s verbs here…. Verbs in which we, the church- the powerful- those who have the privilege of creating systems- we are the objects of these verbs. 

Drove them out.

Poured out their money.

Overturned their tables.

Yelling, “Get this out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

And suddenly they knew… and suddenly we know too… you see sometimes all it takes is the outside voice, which often sounds like and often is the voice of God to call us out. A sick and diseased institution or system can’t heal itself or even see it’s own wrongdoing, nor can a sick and diseased soul. It takes an outside voice.

You are caring about the wrong things, you’ve lost the sacred, you’ve lost your call, you’ve lost everything. 

And that is just the start of this text, this demonstration of disruption which might as well be the entire Gospel story and in many ways it is… pay attention to the exchange that Jesus has with the religious leaders, with us: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Because this is all so much bigger than your realize, this is bigger than any of us could ever possible guess, it’s a new temple. 

And it looks nothing like you would expect. 

And even for those of us who know the rest of the story, the truth is it still looks nothing like what we expect. 

Because it does not look anything like efficiency, or any system of power or control, or any story that we would ever write on our own…. It goes against everything we know and understand… it’s a promise disguised as a paradox… it’s as countercultural as anything we know…. And the truth is we still avoid it… in our second text, Paul’s words to the Corinthian church “it’s foolishness that destroys the wisdom of the wise.” 

And it will put an end to all the systems and order we work so hard to create.

It’s the very cross of Christ. 

Which is our Gospel mandate.

When the most powerful become powerless, when efficiency is replaced with surrender, when self is put aside for others, when love and justice outweigh competition and comfort, when death is embraced because it’s only their that new life can be found, when hope is found in the darkest of situations, when powers and principalities are overturned, when Godself stretched out on a Cross and surrendered everything and said “this is the way.”

The Cross changes everything.  This is the great disrupter and as disruption it is our very salvation. 

And today is one of those days where we need to keep reading in our text because after Paul reintroduces this great disruption, the Cross, Paul then turns to the church and offers us these words: “Remember your call…” 

Because that Cross is our call. It is our only system. It is the only way. Choosing powerlessness. Seeking surrender. Allowing love and justice to our guides. Embraces death because there new life is found. Going into the dark places because there hope is discovered. Choosing to empty ourselves instead of building up. Putting other ahead of self. Demolishing the systems we have so carefully constructed. 

Stretching ourselves on the Cross because we understand that is the only way.

Walter Brueggemann shares a story of an Anglican diocese in Canada, a story that is too familiar these days, or at least starts that way. The church had a school and folks began to acknowledge the sexual abuse that had happened in that school years and years prior. The church was eventually sued for a long term practice of sexual abuse of children in the school. The church lost the suit and was forced to declare bankruptcy. The church tried to do the right things-payments to the victims, authentic apologies to the victims, family and community. All who had been involved were dismissed. The day after the church declared bankruptcy the bishop called a press conference about the future of the church. And these were his words:

“We have a book and a towel, a table and a cup. And we are back in business. We have a book that tells the story of God’s transformative power. We have a towel whereby in vulnerability we enact transformation. We have a table where all are welcome. We have a cup of life poured out in forgiveness.”

In other words, we have the Cross and the message of the Cross.

And that is all we need. Yet often to be reminded of that we have to have some tables turned over, we have to be reduced to the point of foolishness, we have to sit in our own systems and look around and realize, nope this did not work. 

And I am certain that some of those systems are the systems of hierarchy and exclusion, of power, and of violence that dominate our news these days

But I am also certain that some of those systems are in play here at our church which also deal with hierarchy and power and exclusion and trying to maintain a status quo.

And I am certain that they are in our own hearts as well and they deal with the exact same… hierarchy, power, elusion, trying to maintain status quo. And they deal with how we parent, how we love, how we treat our partners, who sits at our table, how we do our personal finances, our calendars, the boundaries we put on our hearts, our ability to hide our vulnerability, our shame…. 

We need a disruption. Because church we can’t disrupt the world until we have been disrupted.

It might be time to allow Jesus to walk in here and turn some tables…. To find what is foolish and will expose us… to find our way back to the Cross of Christ.

Because that is all we truly have. We have a book, a towel, a table and a cup. We have the Gospel. We have the cross.

And may the Gospel disrupt our very souls, disrupt our church, disrupt our religious institutions so that we may go and disrupt the world. 

*artwork: Cleansing of the Temple, by Peter Koenig, stedwardskettering.org.uk