Dear Church: A Letter on the 53rd Sunday in the Pandemic (A Sermon)
Photo by @hansoncrafted on Unsplash.
To my beloved congregation at Seattle First Baptist Church,
Today marks the 53rd Sunday of worshipping virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout this past week, I have reminisced about the first week of March last year. Lent had just begun. Our compassionate church nurse Sue Ross had reminded us in worship a few weeks running to wash our hands and try out elbow bumps and waves as a form of greeting. We had heard a little about the virus that would come to change our lives over the next year, but we didn’t have a lot of information. During staff meeting that week, we started to talk about how to know when it would be the right time to close the church building...and the right time turned out to be several days later. For a couple weeks, you may remember, we streamed live from the Sanctuary with the help of our fabulous videographer Kellie. But then as states began to issue stay-at-home orders and Washington was falling into line to do the same, we decided we would be best off recording worship from our own homes.
What a year of learning this has been. I wish I could tell you it has been easy, and joy-filled, and endlessly creative...it has been from time to time, but that’s not the norm right now. It’s also been lonely, full of longing for connection through coffee hours and shared meals and hugs and high-fives during greeting times, and passing communion plates and hearing you proclaiming while I preach. I wish I could tell you that the technology has cooperated, and we’ve gotten all the updates to computers and cameras and programs in time, and that we’ve always been blessed with the right internet bandwidth we needed...but that’s not the whole truth either. Often, especially for the first four or five months, it felt like we were doing everything last minute--Zoom system updates and increasing hard drive capacity and more words that I honestly don’t understand because they are computer-ese. I wish I could tell you that I know when things would go back to something-like-normal...but I don’t know. What I do know is that we will continue figuring it out together, as a community who loves and cares for each other.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to speak in binary terms here, saying that the year has been all bad or all good. Neither would be true, and I’m pretty sure y’all understand that. I’m being honest...and that’s the best any of us can do. This last year has been deeply challenging, adding a level of loneliness and isolation to lives that were already complex and full. And still, as we experience some hope with the administration of the vaccine, we still grieve the lack of companionship in our day to day, no handshakes, no pleasant smallness of being a part of a large crowd, no communal singing, no shared dinners around a cozy table. Beloved ones, you have been through so much, individually and in your families and friend-groups. And as a congregation, we are continuing in going through a long-range planning process that leads us to contemplating our identity as a church and our place in the world. And it is an honor for me, as one of your pastors, to accompany you in this journey of adaptation, as each of us in this congregation have learned how to be honest with ourselves, and with others, about what we need, about our boundaries, about how we move forward together as a congregation.
It is in this spirit of honesty that I invite us to consider our text today from the gospel of John chapter 2: 13-22.
13 The Festival of the Passover was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. 15 Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. 16 He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” 17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” 18 The people in the temple then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The people then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he was speaking of the temple of his body. 22 After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.
Photo by @imagebook on Unsplash.
Whew. This is quite a Scripture story. I’m sure many of us have heard this Scripture preached many different ways, so let me give some short disclaimers regarding common interpretations:
Jesus and his disciples traveled to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, as was the custom in their tradition. Let’s remember that Jesus probably worshipped at the temple whenever he was in Jerusalem--it was a sacred space for him! When they entered the temple’s courtyards, they found a common sight: people preparing for worship. Having money changers and animal sales was by no means odd or alarming. The temple tax could only be paid in temple coinage, not with money bearing the seal of the Roman Empire, so people had to exchange their coins. And since animal sacrifice was one of the traditional worship practices at the temple, having ritually-clean animals to buy and sell was also not out of place. So on the surface, there was nothing out of the ordinary going on in the courtyard...simply people going about their routine, doing what they normally did, comfortable in the way things have always been done.
And then Jesus comes in. He enters the temple grounds and senses something is off--perhaps the reasons for the programming have been lost, the purpose for the market and exchange has been superseded by something. Surely the people present for temple worship thought they were doing their best in preparing to honor their God, surely they were not consumed with cynicism and trying to exploit God’s name. They were just human, as you and I are human, trying to do their best, going about their daily lives, comfortable in their behaviors that, as one Bible commentator put it “enabled them to meet institutional goals.”[1] Do we not do the same sometimes?
And in comes Jesus, itinerant teacher and convicting preacher, turning over tables symbolizing that there’s no room for exploitation in God’s worship. Just to be clear, the problem was not the practices of animal selling and exchanging money in itself; Jesus was not decrying the temple-centered Jewish practice, saying that his new Christian practice was better. Those interpretations, though often heard in Christian churches, lend themselves to anti-Jewish sentiment, and that’s not ok. We have to remember, as with all Biblical texts, that this is one story out of a whole gospel that has its own political and theological agenda. The story is more complex than the binary of “animal sacrifice and money changing bad, new Christian worship good.” Nothing is ever that simple.
Paul C. Shupe writes in a commentary on this passage,
“For many, Jesus is irresistibly attractive when he is confronting injustice, hypocrisy, and the misappropriation of God’s name. These actions, of course, place him squarely in the great tradition of the OT prophets, whose words and visions thrill and empower us when the weak are exploited by the powerful. The desire to have wrongs righted, looking toward the day when God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven, is deeply rooted in the hearts of those who encounter the living God. And so a powerful and nearly irresistible temptation is placed before us: to take up the whip with him and denounce the principalities and powers! Yet the targets of Jesus’ displeasure in this particularly narrative are not kings in remote palaces, or the forces of empires seen or unseen, or pagan rulers who may never have heard of the God of Israel. No, driven before him are the money changers, whose tables were tolerated, even encouraged, by the temple authorities, who should have known better.”[2]
Beloved ones, in this year of COVID, we have all been shaken out of our routines. Even those among us who continue to physically go to work as essential workers, there are ways our routines have been disrupted. Families have been disrupted, as we recently crossed the horrendous threshold of half a million deaths from COVID in the USA. Disruption is everywhere, and it has been ongoing, and it has not yet stopped. And though the cause of the disruption is tragic, my prayer is that we can move forward as a justice-centered community working to prevent a tragedy on this scale from ever happening again. Perhaps we, as people living in this city and country and world, had gotten so comfortable with how things were that we did not realize we lost sight of what should be the center of our worship: loving God and loving each other. Now, we have a choice: do we return to how things were, holding up the status quo, biting our tongues when something uncomfortable crosses our paths, focused on the preservation of institution over gospel purpose? Or do we choose to learn from the disruption, and advocate for those who need healthcare, childcare, education, and just work conditions, none of which have been guaranteed for all people living in the USA? Do we continue to let the perfect be the enemy of the good before we speak up, write letters, call legislators, correct each other, canvass, vote and demonstrate?
Beloveds, you have been making these choices throughout the past year. You have marched, donated, written letters, fed, clothed, housed, volunteered, mentored, encouraged, prayed, advocated, agitated…every day you make the choice of what to give your time and energy to based on what is at the center of your life. And every day, we as the church must also make these choices.
Friends, after Jesus came through with the whip of cords, the people in the temple courtyard and the temple authorities had to decide what to do. They had to decide if they were going to go back to the way things had always been done, or to recenter themselves on the Holy. We, too, have a choice with what we do with the experience of disruption. This church has a choice about what to do with the experience of disruption. And if that makes you uncomfortable, ok. Good, even. Again, Paul C. Shupe writes, “it is important for us to tolerate and explore through prayer, preparation, and preaching the queasy anxiety of seeing Jesus with the whip of cords in his hands and hearing him with the righteous judgements of God on his lips--knowing that he speaks for us, yes, and with us, but also to us and even against us.”[3]
I will be honest with you, I go about much of my life pretty comfortable. As a white, cis-gender, educated, middle-class woman, I occupy privileged spaces close to centers of power. People like me often have a seat at the decision-making table, and am used to people who share many of my identities making decisions, writing and approving laws, and determining the narratives we tell. Or, to use the imagery of our story today, I may not be the person at the money-changer’s table or the selling stall, but I sure benefit from my proximity to them. There are often times when I have been tempted to celebrate the Jesus full of “righteous adrenaline,” feeling galvanized in my right-ness at decrying injustices around me…not interrogating my own positionality in life.
A few weeks ago, as I was beginning to think toward this worship service, I came across a quote on Facebook that has haunted me, and it was a prayer,
“[God], forgive me for the times I desired a seat at a table you would've flipped.[4]”
God, forgive me for the times I desired a seat at a table you would’ve flipped.
Wow. It still stuns me, sending a shudder through my body every time I read it or ponder it. The honesty of the petition astounds me, and preaches to me, calling me--calling us--to consider our own proximity to power. For me, I think of how the status quo often keeps me comfortable and how “the way things have always been done” often benefits me. I must acknowledge the ridiculously practical aspects of my closeness to power, the everydayness of the way people listen to me, acknowledge my feelings, give up a seat their seat to me, don’t question me or follow me when I visit the bank or supermarket or gym, accept my relationship as valid. I must acknowledge the times in my ministry when I have refrained from speaking an unpopular opinion, worried about how it would be received. When I have been so focused on how something is affecting my own life that I have given up the opportunity to learn and broaden my view.
This quote, this prayer, calls us to ask: What status do we long for so much that it takes priority over participating in God’s just love? Where and when have we been overcome by the desire to influence a policy or a decision such that we lose sight of the center of the gospel? I invite you to join me in this investigation, though it looks different for each of us.
God, forgive me for the times I desired a seat at a table you would’ve flipped.
Beloved church, over this past pandemic year, we have lost a lot: control, plans, time, relationships, jobs, health...loved ones. But even through all of this, disruption and challenge and uncertainty about the future, you have continued to make choices to serve God by serving each other as best you can. Over this last year, we have chosen to acknowledge the profound grief as our lives have changed irrevocably. Loved ones have transitioned on from this life and we have chosen to love each other through the loss. Families and dear friends have chosen not to visit each other due to deep care and concern for the health and wellbeing of many. People have creatively found new ways to organize for justice, ways to keep each other safe while demonstrating, ways to contribute to social movements while maintaining healthy boundaries. Distances that usually could be spanned by a simple airplane flight seem so very, very far, and so we have been inspired to connect in new ways, with Zoom baking and Zoom game nights, and return to older ways of connecting as we simply pick up the phone or write a letter. You have continued to support the ministries of this church with your finances, with your time, with your energy, and with your heart, leading us to new volunteer opportunities; continued feeding programs; and many other ways of living our call to be the Body of Christ in the world. And you also have chosen to rest and recharge when needed. You have chosen to continue participating in church life, heartsick though it made us not to be able to gather in person, and we have had many Zoom meetings where we have asked questions, admitted we need help, wondered at what possibilities and opportunities could be opened up for us via technology and social media. Each and every one of the past 365 days, we have made choices to dedicate ourselves to the world that is possible, that we can bring about as we resist apathy and complacency and center ourselves on the sacred call to radical, restorative, just love.
So as a congregation dedicated to following in the Way of Jesus, let us move forward, through whatever this next year brings, doing the same: doing justice, loving mercy, walking humbly with the Holy and with each other, and working for peace among all Creation.
I pray it will be so,
Love,
Your Pastor,
Rev. Anita Peebles
Photo by @sixteenmilesout on Unsplash.