Lent 2 ~ 10:30 am, Sun, Feb 25, 2024 ~ FBCA

Welcome. Welcome again, I say, to this house of prayer. For all. Not today, but many Sundays we start by singing: All are welcome in this place. Are they? I mean, does it seem like it to them? To all? Can they tell they are welcome? Is this a house of prayer for all peoples?

Often, it can be so helpful to us who are regular pew people (or pulpit people, or choir people) to visit another house of prayer. Go to Church where you can’t sit in your usual pew, or sing with the choir, or preach and pray up front. See what it feels like to be new, be out of place, not know where everything is, or who everyone is. God uses that to help us see better, when we get back here, to our usual place.

On this second Sunday in Lent we look at the second day of the week when Jesus was crucified, Monday in Mark’s Gospel. After entering the city of Jerusalem on Sunday, and taking a look around the Temple before he went back out to spend the night in Bethany, on Monday he comes back to town and heads into the Jewish Temple on a mission. ‘The cleansing of the Temple’ it gets called in our English Bibles. All sorts of merchants, and their customers, get kicked out of the Temple area, and kept out by Jesus! What’s going on here? Well, the Temple was a place of prayers and of animal sacrifices. The buying and selling of sheep and goats and pigeons and all went on in the big courtyard of the Temple, as well as people trading their Roman coins for Jewish money, the only proper money to spend on your sacrificial animals. Jesus shut down this whole marketplace - so He shut down the worship sacrifices and work of the priests.

‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ has Jesus singing the words as He trashes the Temple marketplace:

My temple should be a house of prayer,

But you have made it a den of thieves!

The ways we merchandize things, and market our religion, sell our stuff and try to attract people goes on differently now, but it can still be a threat. A threat to real connection with God (prayer?). A threat to good fellowship among the people of Jesus. More than ever, our religion, as well as all the others, can be freely critiqued and rejected. We don’t always keep the main thing the main thing.

I’ve got the image of a fig branch on our bulletin cover, drawing attention to that strange event of Jesus cursing a tree, on his way to the Temple that day. If we read on, we see the next morning that tree had died and dried up - a real symbol of Jesus’ people, whose Temple activities had gone astray. What good fruit were being produced?

That’s what Jesus asked His siblings in Faith, long ago. And asks of us again, as we review these stories.

In his commentary on the book of Mark, Lamar Williamson, Jr. says: It is not hard to see how denominational headquarters, middle-level leaders, and local church staffs resemble the chief priests and scribes of Jesus’ day; nor is it hard to see how our busy, prosperous churches are like leafy, fruitless fig trees. It may be more difficult to acknowledge that some flourishing programs stand condemned and therefore doomed by the word of Jesus Christ.

Yet, Williamson reminds us that The power of God that withered a fig tree and moves mountains can also bring new life to a church and its leaders, though they be dry from their roots up.

These days of our lives, we need our Churches to be houses of prayer for all people. I keep going back to the writings of Eugene Peterson - who wrote a lot, including a new translation of the whole Bible he called The Message. He was also a professor, in Canada. Before that, but after more than 25 years as pastor of a Presbyterian congregation, he wrote: my primary educational task as a pastor was to teach people to pray. Peterson found that his people were coming, not to get facts on the Philistines and Pharisees but to pray. (The Contemplative Pastor, Word Publishing, 1989, p. 96) I heard one of my own professors of Christian Education say the same thing to us, in class at Acadia, years ago.

A House of Prayer… for all people. The ‘all people’ bit seems to me the challenging theme the Hebrew Prophets and then the Messiah fought to bring to light. Break down the barriers, the tribalism, the ‘us vs. them’ mentality. We are in, they are out - we keep falling back to this. And we are getting it wrong. Did you hear those ancient words of Isaiah today? It was “too light a thing” for God’s servant to work a miracle for Israel. “I will give you as a light to the nations,” God says, “that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” This is exactly what God’s great Servant, Jesus, is doing.

Let me tell you a Brad Jersak story. Jersak is a Canadian preacher, professor and author. A bunch of years ago he told this experience in a sermon he was preaching in Missouri. (Word of Life Church, YouTube, July 3, 2018)

I got on a Southwest Airlines flight where they give you a number and you can pick your own seat, and so I head down the aisle and get a really good aisle seat, so that my right arm could be in the aisle and I could write things. And then I thought: well wait a minute, I want space in the seat between me and the window. So I started manspreading so I’d look really inhospitable. I think, ‘God, please let me be left alone.’ I really hate airplanes and I really hate evangelists with airplane stories.

But I see this man coming down the aisle, and he catches my eye and I’m like, ‘Oh no.’ This is a big guy. I have wide shoulders, and he has wide shoulders, and I think, ‘look bigger, inhale.’ But no, he locked eyes with me; he comes and he sits down. And I notice he is wearing clerical robes. I say, ‘Oh I see you’re religious.’ And he says, ‘Yeah, I am.’

And he begins to tell me interesting spiritual journey experience stuff, beginning with this: ‘I believe God speaks today, do you?’ ‘I do.’ And he says, ‘I believe that God gives us direction and guidance and counsel, so as I was coming down the aisle I was asking God who do you want me to sit with and He directed me to you.’

Missionaries! But we get into a beautiful conversation about our conceptions of God. and I realise this man is devout, he reveres God and he loves God and in fact he listens to God and when he prays God hears him and responds. And the things that God has shown him are primarily this. This is his image of God. We talked about healthy images of God and toxic images of God, and he says, ‘My image of God is that God is merciful, that God is all merciful, that God is especially merciful.’

Did I mention that he’s an Imam from Seattle? And we end up having a five hour flight, talking about our conceptions of God as pure mercy, about the responsibility of preachers to inspire people and lift them up, about our rejection of all violence in the name of God, and the call to be peacemakers one with another. I mean we were so on the same page. But of course the voice in my ear says, ‘yeah, but he’s one of them.’

Jersak decides that he and the Imam are, perhaps, like two toddlers with crayons drawing our picture of God for one another, squiggling outside the lines. And I draw my picture of God and it’s really good, I think I’ve nailed it, actually. And I bring this picture of God to the Father and I say, ‘God, I have this picture of You; would You take it?” And He smiles and hugs me and says it is fantastic, and puts it on His fridge.

But wait, my Imam friend is drawing a picture of God too… some of it looks like my picture, but some doesn’t. He offers his picture to Allah, and wait a minute, it’s the same God?

He smiles, and embraces him. And puts it on His fridge!

How big and grand is this ‘house of prayer?’ Bigger than First Baptist? Bigger than the Baptist Churches in general? Bigger than Christianity? To have fellowship with God is what God wants for everyone, for every human being.

When we come in from the world, from our lives, into a temple like this… watch closely for Jesus’ actions. Let us obey when He shuts things down, and opens up others. When we are fruitful, we will not be cursed and dry up, as we join the movement to bless the world, the whole world of people and creatures and things.