Deconstructed

a sermon for the third Sunday in Lent, Year B

Exodus 20:1-17 and John 2:13-22

Let us imagine, if we can, the situation of the Israelites as they camp out at the base of Mount Sinai as told by this morning’s Scripture from Exodus. They have just endured the trauma of the escape from Egypt and a three-month extended camping trip in the wilderness. They have left everything. Granted, they did not have a whole lot as slaves in Egypt; but nevertheless everything that they had known for several generations. Now they have next to nothing. Even the manna that they eat to survive, the bread-like substance that falls from the sky each day, can’t be saved from one day to the next.

They have also just cheated death. After an initial easy departure due to the havoc caused by the Passover on the Egyptian households, the Israelites ended up having to flee for their lives. The chariots and horses of Pharoah’s mighty army, symbols of how incredibly strong he was compared to them, had pressed down ruthlessly upon their little band of refugees as they ran across desert sand on sandalled feet. But Moses had stretched out his hands at the Red Sea and the waters mysteriously receded so they could walk through to safety.

And, perhaps most important, they are finally free— free from the backbreaking brickmaking work of their forced labor. Imagine what that feels like! They’re free from occupying their role as the lowest rung of the ladder in Egyptian society, free from their persistent haunting thoughts that God had forgotten all about them. But God had remembered them and had liberated them. Now no one was over them, no other people put them down.

So imagine all of this and then realize that they find themselves, once again, at the bottom of something. This time it’s the bottom of a huge, imposing mountain which they’re forbidden to go near or touch. It’s all wrapped in smoke and booms and thunders with God’s presence like the inner chamber of the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz. There they are…and then down comes their leader Moses with…a set of laws that they are supposed to follow?

Now just imagine that! You go from being at the bottom of society, subject to Pharoah’s whims and decrees, only to be handed a new set of laws and commandments three months into your freedom. I can’t help but think of the enslaved people of this country, who endured more than two centuries of forced menial labor, who only came to emancipation through a bloody Civil War, only to find themselves bound by Jim Crow laws and segregation and voter suppression schemes to keep them down. I imagine the Israelites were dumbfounded. Is this really what their new life of freedom and dignity is going to involve?

As it turns out, these laws are not supposed to do that at all. The Ten Commandments,  which form the core of the law that Moses delivers at Mt. Sinai become the way the Israelites’ freedom looks. This is not so much a handing down of rules, but the beginning of a new covenant, a renewed relationship between God and God’s people. With the ten commandments, or ten words, as they are more accurately called, God raises up God’s people to a beautiful way of living that will set them apart. Through their acceptance of them, the Israelites will become God’s treasured possession, like the most valuable jewel in a crown that God will wear. For with these Ten Words, God is tearing down all of the oppressive systems that the world devises, and is raising up a new covenant of respect and responsibility for all people, one where everyone is cared for and integrated in a productive society.

Other ancient cultures had codes and laws but what the Israelites received was different on a number of levels. One of those is that it lacks a set of clear consequences; that is, if you disobey these rules what will happen. These commandments exist unto themselves, and motivation for following them isn’t fear of what God will do if you don’t, which is often how I fear we mean them when we try to hang them on a courthouse wall. The motivation for following them is enjoying the gifts of the life they safeguard, in simply being the new community God is raising up.

In a way, it’s kind of like how we treat good manners. There is no specific punishment that will come to you if you have bad table manners. No one is going to reprimand you in public if you chew with your mouth open, or if you dive in before everyone’s served, or if you dominate conversation. But if you demonstrate politeness, if you pass food and not hog it, if you leave your napkin on your lap, then people start to feel safe and honored in your presence. The Commandments are much more serious than table manners, of course, but the concept is similar.

Martin Luther explains this expertly in his Small Catechism. He says the eighth commandment don’t just forbid us, for example, from saying false and hurtful things about our neighbor, but requires us to interpret our neighbor’s actions and words in the best possible light. It safeguards everyone’s reputation and dignity. The seventh commandment isn’t just about not taking what doesn’t belong to us, but doing everything in our power to help our neighbor keep her property and means of making a living. It safeguards fair trade and a healthy economy.

I particularly love the way one of our confirmands explained the fifth commandment on a test a few years ago: ” ‘You shall not kill,’ the 5th commandment,” is the hardest for me to follow,” he shared. “Almost every day I have an opportunity to give to someone’s life but I sit back and don’t do anything. It is hard in a school environment to stand up and support someone, and it is easier to put them down instead when you’re around your peers.”

With the Ten Words God tears down the hierarchical and oppressive systems of Pharoah and the other empires (and high school societies) and calls us to a higher ideal, his treasured life, and yet we still fall short. Even the good law becomes a trap, a tool that we twist into a device by which we think we can earn God’s favor. Rather than joyfully living into the law’s demands we let it become a checklist of do’s and don’ts that make some people feel in and others feel out.

With this in mind, it is not hard at all to understand Jesus’ actions as he enters the Temple in Jerusalem. What he sees there makes him sick. In all of the money changing tables and people selling animals for sacrifices he sees yet another system, another oppressive system that exploits people. The gift of a relationship with the living God has been twisted again to form a trap, to make people check boxes, to burden them with guilt.

This could be one reason why a growing number of people today identify as “spiritual but not religious.” There is even a large presence on social media of people who talk about and share stories about the abuses of their religions and how as adults they’ve become disillusioned with things they used to believe and be a part of. This trend has a name: it’s called deconstruction. Deconstruction is what happens when you start picking apart your faith and rearranging your beliefs and values. This morning we see that Jesus takes part in deconstruction himself.

There are even some aspects of his religious identity that make him uncomfortable. The temple in Jerusalem comes to signify all that; that is, all the parts of religion that ultimately oppress or exploit people and don’t free them for a life of love and mercy.

So imagine, then, how the religious leaders feel this morning when Jesus drives out the money changers and starts talking about deconstructing the temple! It sounds ludicrous, inconceivable! I remember when the county announced they’d tear down J.R. Tucker High School after they would build a new one on site within a year. It seemed a bit ambitious, but the dangers presented by the old building and the benefits of a new design and architecture would be worth it, and it worked!

For the religious leaders in Jesus’ time, tearing down the temple and rebuilding it in three days seems preposterous. But that’s not Jesus’ point. In critiquing what the temple’s religion has become, Jesus places himself as the new way to be in relationship with God. Jesus will be the presence of God on earth. Not a temple, not a set of laws. Not even a set of holy writings. Jesus and his self-giving love and pure forgiveness of others will embody God’s way for us. And when he is crucified, all our timeworn ways of trying to make ourselves holy and justify ourselves before God will be torn down. When his body is deconstructed on the cross, God himself will feel the brunt of all our exploitative religious systems and doctrines. God will dismantle our understandings of wisdom and power and replaces them with foolishness and weakness. Jesus conquers by losing and wins everything for God by handing himself over.

And therefore Jesus’ resurrection will open up for us a new life that is everlasting, validating his way of peace and justice for all people. When, through our faith, we live into these ways of Jesus,  when the Spirit of God leads us into greater self-giving, God will automatically help us, too, dismantle systems of oppression and hierarchy wherever we encounter them, inside ourselves and in the world.

This week I made a quick trip to my hometown to pay respects to a special Sunday School classmate who died this week at the age of 49. A child with special needs, as they say, Angie never really acquired much speech, and she related to people on a different kind of level, needing us to pay attention to her sign and body language. But God chose Angie to tear down some of my early biases about giftedness and human worth. Through the wisdom of God and her mother and the pastor, Angie was seated each week around the same Sunday School table as the rest of us, which was especially meaningful because during the week she was in a self-contained environment. When I walked into the funeral home, I was greeted by others from my old church who also hadn’t seen Angie in years, but who remembered her and had been impacted by her joy and presence.         God is always wanting God’s people to live as one, to flourish in bonds of mutual respect and love. It is God’s foolishness, and it is greater than our wisdom.

So if you happen to be deconstructing your faith these days, or if you feel abandoned or trapped and wonder where God might be…if you feel the weight of the world’s brokenness and longing, take heart in the God of the cross. And don’t just imagine yourself sought for and gathered up. Trust that you already are. Trust that you already are.

Thanks be to God!

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.