Brought
Exodus 20:1-17; John 2:13-22

March 15, 2009


When I was a young boy growing up in the 1950’s, my father went to church twice on Sundays - once to drive us there; twice to pick us up. In effect throughout the city were the blue laws, similar in Regina, during which only a few stores were allowed to be open. All you could get were milk, bread, and eggs at certain convenience stores. My father would pick us up and keep driving into East Baltimore where there were a whole string of bakeries and delicatessans open every Sunday - Jewish delicatessans. They weren’t open on Saturdays.

Now what does that say about the sacredness of the Sabbath that we could drive about two kilometers from fast to feast, from a holy day into a shopping day with the folk who first celebrated Sabbath? Obviously, there is no real conflict, but it does show that being sacred depends upon who you are, where and when you are.

Keeping the Sabbath is also the fourth of the Ten Commandments, and remember, Jesus had something to say about the purpose and intention of the Sabbath which we never seemed to get right - Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath. We took that principle and ran hard with it and today there is no Sabbath for anyone.

Someone is always self-righteously thundering about keeping the Ten Commandments, a heavy burden indeed, but it all depends still on who, when, where, why and what it involves. You shall not kill, sounds simple. During the Vietnam War, clergy all over the US responded to pacifists’ objections based on the Sixth Commandment - oh, the Hebrew means, “do not murder.” Killing in war is allowed - soldiers, civilian bystanders, children - all for democracy.

If the Ten Commandments are so self-evident and so weighty, then all I have to do with regard to the Sixth Commandment is mention three names and let you figure out the spiritual math - Curtis Dagenais, Chris Pauchay, and Robert Lattimer.

What we have lost is not the moral weight of the Ten Commandments, for typical of human beings we have worked hard to crush one another with their weight when it suits us. We have lost the joy and freedom of being in the sacred presence of God. We no longer pay attention to the presence of God, just claim God is in the rules.

What most remember about the Ten Commandments are perhaps the list of commandments themselves - today’s unelaborated lectionary reading - and some remember Moses breaking the stone tablets in anger at the golden calving of the Israelites at the foot of Sinai, a dramatic scene which Charlton Heston did well.

That’s too bad, because what happens around Mount Sinai is much more interesting. The chapter before the spelling out of the Ten, Moses leads the wandering Israelites into the wilderness of Sinai and they encamp about the base of the mountain. Moses goes up and down to have conversations with God, and on the third day (interesting day from a Christian perspective!) arrangements are made for Moses to bring the people out of the camp to meet God. However, there were all sorts of personal preparations and cleansings to be carried out, and precautions about just how far to stand off so that they are safe and don’t see and feel more than they can handle.

God does come down onto the mountain in the midst of fire, and there was thunder and lightning and a dark thick cloud enveloping the mountain. Moses spoke and God answered in thunder. Moses apparently knew Thunder-ese. After Moses read out the Ten Commandments, the people were not so happy to have heard and seen God. “You speak to us and we will listen; but don’t let God speak to us, lest we die.” That’s what it means to see God - fire and smoke for body, thunder and lightning for voice. When the Bible talks about holy, it means something completely set apart and radically different than the normal and ordinary. God is too holy to see up close.

So in a very real way, when the Sabbath is a day we are supposed to keep holy, we are only playing at being holy. A day of rest is a different kind of day and as human beings we need it, but it’s not approaching God’s holiness. Perhaps it is in the Temple that we can approach God’s holiness.

The Gospel of John has that infamous incident of Jesus driving out the money changers from the Jerusalem at the beginning of his ministry, not at the end as in the other Gospels. This was Jesus’ most unholy moment, at least by most of our standards, for human anger is a normal and often necessary occurrence, but it is seen as one of our most human, and so, not divine moments.

In my Grade 12 year there was a great deal of earnest discussion about the Vietnam War going on around us, and whether participating in an unjust war was ethical, and for that matter, when participating in any war is ethical by our religious standards. One afternoon at a joint colloquium of several classes, a startling rejoinder came from the other class. Referring directly to this incident in the Temple, they stated with mathematical precision that since Jesus became angry and even violent - that warranted fighting in a war and killing the enemy. We were speechless. Something we had all held holy was snuffed out using our own resource. As with so much of the holy, the words had been taken right out of our mouths.

Perhaps we should be reading Mark’s version for Mark adds one tiny detail that changes what is holy. After he has overturned the tables of the money changers and the pigeon sellers and held them back from carrying anything through the temple grounds, he taught, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”

It is that little phrase “for all nations/peoples” that weighs for us the holy. The Jews had a simple system of dividing the world and humanity in two: Israel is the Nation, the People; everyone else is part of the Nations, the Peoples. In the Jerusalem Temple the outer court was called the Gentile Courts, the place where non-Jews, Gentiles, you and me, could come and pray. For certain, the further you went into the inner sanctuaries the more restrictive these sections became. Yet, there was a fundamental way of thinking that if God were the Creator of the universe, then all people should and could pray and worship. The great Temple built that theology into its architecture.

However, where did the profiteering entrepreneurs set up shop? In the Gentiles Court, which of course could easily be dispensed, because after all Gentiles weren’t real believers. They don’t really pray anyway. That’s what made Jesus mad. How can you be a holy people and do holy things - keep the Sabbath holy, follow the Ten Commandments personally, pray at all the right times in the right places - if you do not treat other people as holy? All human beings pale before the holiness of God, we are all ordinary, plain, and to use the term anthropology uses as the opposite of sacred, profane.

We gain sight of the holy, comprehend God’s nature a bit, when we treat other people as being equally holy. When you respond to someone else as a saint, it rubs off on them, and it rubs back onto you. My wife and I traveled down in October to St. John’s Abbey and stayed in their guesthouse. The business card with contact information on it cited their purpose for hospitality, the welcoming of strangers from the Rule of Benedict 53. “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ.” That’s where the Commandments really begin.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan