Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Texts: Exodus 20:1-17, Psalm 19, 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, John 2:13-22

Dear Friends in Christ, God’s grace and peace be with you.  Amen

I grew up in a loud family. Even on good days, we would use our outdoor voices when we whispered. It seemed easier that way. When we argued – it was thunderous. It was St. Louis in the 1960s. Summers were beastly hot. There were eight of us in a modest sized home, without air conditioning, so the windows were wide open, and tempers were near the surface most of the time. So when we were mad, which we frequently were, it was undoubtedly clear to the neighbors that things were boiling.

It’s not that we didn’t love each other. We loved each other deeply and loudly. So if one of us felt hurt, or challenged, or insulted by another, we let it show, with a vengeance.

Anger and love are not mutually exclusive emotions[i]. I think they fuel each other. The more deeply we love, the more fiercely we will confront things that threaten us or that which we hold dear. Like Mother Bears, we fight to protect those things closest to us.

Today, we meet an angry Mother Bear Jesus, who can’t tolerate seeing God’s people living under occupation, being forced to find God’s presence in profit-making enterprises, rather than seen as embodied in community or human form. His anger may seem out of character for us.

In John’s gospel, this story comes very early in Jesus’ ministry. It’s right after the first sign of Jesus changing water into wine. Jesus goes from turning around a community celebration by offering the finest wine in extravagant abundance, and then follows it up by violently disrupting the gathering place outside the temple. Why the sudden change of mood?

You might remember that before Jesus changed the water into wine, he seemed reluctant, wondering whether it was really time for him to begin to change things, to restore things back to what was God’s design. By the time he comes to Jerusalem to prepare for the Passover, he seems to have decided it was time. It’s not just water and tables and expectations that are turning, it’s time for the whole world to turn over and turn back to the ways God intended. His Mother Bear instinct kicks into gear as he embarks on driving out ways of injustice and intolerance.

Maybe we need some of that fire in our own willingness to change the world. We don’t have to look far to find cause for our anger. Children go to bed without food. Wars rage. The climate suffers. Politicians turn a deaf ear to those most in need. The rich remain isolated from the poor. The least seek shelter. It’s enough to wish we could snap a whip and make things right.

It’s time to turn the tables over on systemic racism, on institutions that profit from incarcerating people, or building weapons, or using manufacturing methods that pollute ground water. It’s time to overthrow zoning laws that favor profit over affordable and accessible housing[ii], school systems that tolerate bullying and intolerance[iii], and employment models that pay full-time work less than a livable wage while those on top earn 1000 or 10,000 times as much[iv].

And if we couldn’t fix all those big problems, we would at least like to drive out the dysfunction and brokenness in the families we live in. We’d overturn the generational trauma of childhood homes filled with rage, or those with decades of repressed anger, heaps of broken promises, shame or untold secrets which have damaged us in ways we’ve never understood. The world needs to be turned upside down.

Maybe Jesus is feeling the weight of all that needs to be put right. In acknowledging the injustice, the brokenness and the shame he recognizes that there will be changes that won’t be as delightful as pouring fresh wine from purification tanks; won’t be as easy as a walk on the lake.

He begins his ministry by describing that Temple walls will fall, and he himself will die. Perhaps he lashes out in despair.

But I suspect it’s despair based on love more than anger: Love for God’s people. Love for those who have tried to live honorably, but keep getting caught up in a system bigger than they are. Love for those who never had a chance. Love for those on the margins. Love for those who come with two turtle doves, and those who are willing to sacrifice the fatted calf, but who still don’t feel worthy of acceptance. Love for those who appreciate the goodness of God’s ways, and those for whom forgiveness and reconciliation feel foolish and unreliable. Love for those who have known God’s love from birth, and those who still think it a strange and mysterious thing. I suspect that everything Jesus does is based on a Mother-Bear, jealous and desperate desire for all of us to live in love from the start.

Some of you know that Exodus 20 includes one of my favorite lines in all of scripture. I know lot of people find it confusing, or even offensive, but I find it beautiful.

I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, we hear, which sounds out of character for our God, but hear it out — I brought you out of slavery into a life of goodness. I form you in love. I knit you into communities and relationships, into families that shape and hold you, and give you the best that they can.

But those families, even in their best attempts, may still be horribly dysfunctional and messed up–such that when one generation is miserly or repressed, their children’s children will still be uncomfortable  as they correct for the damage. When addiction or abuse ravages one generation, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will still feel the pain. When people re-enslave others who were born to be free, their descendants will be burdened even three and four generations later–trying to untangle the bonds of racism, and make reparations for broken treaties, and undo the damage of the past.

I am jealous for your love, God says, zealous for your devotion, your willingness to live as I’ve created you to live, and because I created you for communion, the damage is severe when it’s broken.

But (and this is huge), I also knit you together in so much love, that goodness will reach into the thousandth generation. Every act of charity, every kindness, every smile, every attempt at forgiveness, every effort towards justice, will bring benefits not only to those who offer them, but to the lives of those who live 1000 generations after.

Friends in Christ, do you know how long 1000 generations is? 100 generations is probably over 2-3000 years – so before Jesus.

1000 generations? 25,000 years ago: way, way back, millennia before Moses and Abraham. Hunter and gatherer stage. God forms us so deeply in love that the smiles and goodwill gestures cave dwellers shared with one another have trickled down into your DNA, allowing you to know God’s blessing. God knits us so tightly in loving relationships, that even in the loud angry arguments that filled my St Louis neighborhood in the 1960s, love from 1000 (and 999 and 998…) generations ago still pulsed through the veins of that loud family, and filled me with goodness.

God cares for us so passionately that we’re instructed in ways that lead to life, that allow us to honor one another, to work and to rest, to cherish our parents and our partners, to respect our neighbors, to care for the bodies that temple the living presence of God, and to live in harmony with all creation, so that 1000 generations from now people can still praise their creator, and love their neighbor as themselves.

God creates us so tenderly that no matter how brackish the waters of our lives might seem, love pervades the bottle, and we drink the most delicious wine of life, wholeness and hope.

Christ fashions cords to drive out all that keeps us from knowing God’s love. The world is turning toward life again. What foolishness. What grace. What wondrous love is this?

 

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[i] Beautiful reflections on anger and love were shared this week in Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations.  https://cac.org/daily-meditations/when-anger-meets-love-weekly-summary/

Rohr, Richard, When Anger Meets Love: Weekly Summary,” Center for Action and Contemplation, Saturday, March 2, 2024.   

[ii] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/to-improve-housing-affordability-we-need-better-alignment-of-zoning-taxes-and-subsidies/

[iii] https://abcnews.go.com/US/LegalCenter/story?id=2256089&page=1, https://nationalparentsunion.org/2022/10/24/parent-voice-bullying/

[iv] https://www.fastcompany.com/90411122/elon-musk-makes-40668-times-more-than-a-median-tesla-employee, https://www.nbcnews.com/business/corporations/ceos-public-u-s-firms-earn-320-times-much-workers-n1263195, https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/18/ceos-made-a-median-20-million-last-year254-times-more-than-the-average-worker.html