Third Sunday in Lent

Lent 3B March 8, 2015 We have a bit of a change this week, in our gospel readings. Today, our lectionary gives us a reading from the gospel of John (where we have been mostly traveling through Mark this year). Our reading for today from John is striking in its difference from Mark and the other synoptic gospels. Today’s story is what is known as the cleansing of the temple by Jesus. In all the synoptic gospels, (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), this story comes at the very end of Jesus’ public ministry, and it is the last straw for the authorities, the impetus for Jesus’s crucifixion. But John’s gospel is different. In John, this story is at the very beginning of Jesus’s public ministry. It sets the stage for it, even. This is interesting because John’s gospel is the last of the four gospels to be written. It is written to a community who is living in a world after the temple in Jerusalem has been completely destroyed. Think about it. The heart and center of Jewish worship is no more. Where do they go to worship God? How do they worship without the temple? By placing this story at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, John is offering a commentary on that. “God is no longer available primarily, let alone exclusively, via the Temple. Instead, as John confesses in the opening verses of his account, Jesus invites us to experience God’s grace upon grace (1:17) through our faith in him. Given that John’s account was written well after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans, his insistence – and perhaps reassurance – to his community that they would find God’s mercy in Christ outside rather than inside the Temple makes practical as well as theological sense. And, to tell you the truth, I think it has the same potential today.”i One of my all-time favorite series of books is C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. In these books, Lewis tells of a mythical land called Narnia, a group of children who get to visit there from our world and have marvelous adventures and their encounters with the Christ-like lion figure in Narnia named Aslan. The protagonists for the first few books are a set of four siblings, who travel to Narnia together and have these adventures. But as the children grow older, Aslan tells them that they will no longer be able to return to Narnia. At the end of the third book, Aslan has this conversation with the two youngest of the four children—Lucy and Edmond. Lucy is distraught at the prospect of not seeing the beloved lion again, but he reassures her that she will see him in her own world. When she is surprised that Aslan is present in her world, he tells her that the whole reason for bringing her to Narnia for a time was so that, coming to know him well here, she would recognize him more easily there. This is part of why we come to church. It is to recognize God more easily when we encounter God out in the world and in our lives. But there is a flip-side to this as well. This past Wednesday, I did a teaching about spirituality and worship. In this teaching, I listed several practices to help make common worship more prayerful/spiritual. Listen to this first one: To worship God with greater ease, we must practice loving God every day of our lives. To see God in worship we need to see God in the everyday, and if we see God in the everyday then we can see God better on Sunday. Imagine, if you will, that you are in Grand Central Station at rush hour and you are scheduled to meet a friend that you haven’t seen in many years, but you don’t have a specific place to meet. This is what it is like when trying to love God only in and through worship on Sundays. What if, dear ones, the true work of the church is equipping her people to uncover God out in the world in our everyday lives? What in our parish, our worship, would we need to change to live more fully into this mission? Today, we’re going to do something a little different. We’re going to pass out index cards to everyone, and when I finish speaking, we are going to sit for a few minutes in silence. Then I want you to take your index card, and I want you to write upon it one place-out in your life in the world-where you will be mindful that you will be actively looking for God this week. It can be as general as your work or your home or more specific to your individual circumstances. (We Lemburgs are going to be doing the stressful work of moving this coming week. So, on my card, I’m going to write, “Looking for God in the chaos and confusion of moving with my family.”) After you complete your card, I want you to hold onto it. And when the ushers come around with the offering plates in a few moments, I want you to put your card in the plate—as an offering of your time and attention to God in the coming week. And then remember and do it. God’s grace is as present for you in your everyday lives as it is here, in this holy place. My prayer for you this week is that you may seek it out and find it. i. http://www.davidlose.net/2015/03/lent-3-b-igniting-centrifugal-force/