The Third Sunday in Lent-Year B

Lent 3 B 2021 March 7, 2021 One of the greatest technological gifts to the parents of young drivers is Apple’s Find My Friends app. With the touch of my finger, I can see a map with dots for each member of my family suggesting the general location of each one of their phones. I use this app multiple times a day just to check on my people. They, on the other hand, like to call me a stalker for this practice. The other day, Mary Margaret was headed to school in some nasty weather. I asked her to text me when she got there, but I told her that if she forgot, it would be ok. “I’ll be watching you,” I told her, meaning that I’d be watching her little blue dot travel downtown on my app. Her brother immediately started laughing and then repeating my lovingly parental words in a creepy, stalker voice: “I’ll be watching you!” Our Old Testament reading for today is the passage from Exodus which gives us the 10 Commandments. Throughout the centuries of our faith, the 10 commandments have taken on a life of their own, and at times they seem to point to a God who ominously, threateningly punitive. If you step a toe out of line and break any of these 10 rules, then I’m going to get you. I’ll be watching you! The Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor writes about how these are really more like the 10 teachings; how the 10 teachings were originally given to the Children of Israel while wandering in the wilderness, and they are about how they are to live corporately. Rather than thinking of them as a check-list for individuals, we should think of them as a road map for what it means for a whole people to be faithful to God and to live together in community. The passage begins: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of slavery…” And these 10 teachings are to help the people to keep from being enslaved by other things. These are 10 teachings to help the people continue to live in freedom. The 10 commandments are not so much about obedience and punishment; they are about how we can live meaningful lives in community with each other and with God. And then there’s Psalm 19. One of my seminary colleagues reflected this week that she had heard Ellen Davis, who is an Old Testament professor at Duke, speak on today’s psalm. Davis told this group that Psalm 19 is a psalm about integrity that is written in 3 parts; and the 3 parts are about the cosmos, the Torah, and me. In the first part, the psalm talks about how you stay in sync with the cosmos. The second part talks about how you stay in sync with Torah or scripture. The third part talks about how you stay in sync with yourself. Psalm 19 talks about the life-giving quality of God’s law or teachings, how they “revive the soul,” “give wisdom to the innocent,” “rejoice the heart,” and “gives light to the eyes.” Finally, in our gospel reading for today, we have John’s version of Jesus’s cleansing of the temple. Unlike the other gospel writers, John situates this episode at the beginning of Jesus’s earthly ministry. At first glance, it may be difficult to discern how this angry Jesus fits in with our other two readings for today. But I think it points to the freedom offered in following Jesus, freedom within a new-visioning of the original teachings or commandments of God. The Anglican priest and poet Malcolm Guite has written a sonnet on the cleansing of the temple that has helped me engage this gospel passage in new ways. Cleansing the Temple by Malcolm Guite Come to your Temple here with liberation And overturn these tables of exchange Restore in me my lost imagination Begin in me for good, the pure change. Come as you came, an infant with your mother, That innocence may cleanse and claim this ground Come as you came, a boy who sought his father With questions asked and certain answers found, Come as you came this day, a man in anger Unleash the lash that drives a pathway through Face down for me the fear the shame the danger Teach me again to whom my love is due. Break down in me the barricades of death And tear the veil in two with your last breath.i Your invitation this week is to think about the freedom that comes both through the law and through Jesus’s re-visioning of the law. To invite Jesus to restore in each one of us our lost imagination and to restore us to the fully loving presence of relationship with God. (reread sonnet) i. https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/the-cleansing-of-the-temple/