Exodus 20:1-17
John 2:13-22
I was a late bloomer, and went back to college at 40, so I sorta managed to keep up with popular music until about ten years ago. That was when I took a clergy friend with me to a Pearl Jam concert and realized that pretty soon, a significant percentage of the audience would be using mobility assistance devices. Folks are bringing their grandkids to Dave Matthews Band concerts, and DMB is actually a generation after me!
I guess we can’t all be Mick Jagger.
These days, when the Grammy nominations are announced, I don’t recognize half the musicians, and if I watch the ceremony, which I have made the mistake of doing at times, I usually find a reason to be offended by the sexuality of the performances. I think they are just raunchy. And I definitely have not adjusted to the cognitive whiplash when someone is on the Disney Channel one week and swinging on a wrecking ball dressed like a dominatrix the next.
I am now officially an old geezer. I might as well join AARP, even if I can’t afford to retire.
Of course, this happens in every generation. Jesus has words for “this generation,” and Socrates may have originated the line “kids these days.” Still, I do sometimes wonder what my own parents were thinking when it came to popular music when I was a kid.
If I didn’t get any afternoon delight, and it turned out that tonight wasn’t the night, if Captain Jack didn’t get me high tonight, I could always just whip it good, with nods to the Starland Vocal Band, Rod Stewart, Billy Joel, and Devo, the plastic suit and flower-pot hat-wearing band on your Order of Service.
I always think about Devo’s biggest hit when we get to today’s lectionary reading, when Jesus disrupts commerce in the Temple complex, one of American Christians’ least favorite texts, right up there with that Socialist nonsense in the Acts of the Apostles where the followers of Jesus share resources. The cleansing of the Temple story is bad enough in that it suggests a connection between our religious life and our economic lives, but it also betrays the notion of Jesus as a pacifist, the Breck-shampoo model surrounded by international children and lambs, because this is Jesus absolutely going off, complete with a whip.
Maybe we can just spiritualize it and pretend it isn’t actually about religious greed and economic exploitation.
If we are honest, economic justice is a theme throughout scripture. The first labor dispute comes when Jacob agrees to work seven years for Laban in exchange for Rachel’s hand in marriage, only to lift the veil and find that he has married her sister, and has to work another seven years. The prophets of Israel and Judah spend as much time talking about economics as they do about religion. So does Jesus. He may say that there will always be poor among us, but he praises the widow who gives what she can and condemns the rich who give less than they should, he lets the righteous but rich young man walk away when he clings to his wealth, and in the parable of the other Lazarus, not the resurrected friend but the poor beggar, Lazarus ends up in heaven while the rich man who ignored him in life ends up in another place.
Of course, it was easier to do justice economically when economics was “I have a goat and extra milk and you have a vineyard and extra wine.” False weights were bad enough, but let’s try a short sale based on an analyst report that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual function of the company or a hedge fund tearing through a company, looting the pensions of folks who have worked hard for years, or a financial instrument used to speculate on crypto-currency, the emperor’s new clothes created to enable criminal and sociopathic behavior and literally based on nothing.
It is true that Jesus as portrayed in the gospels addresses spiritual matters, and there is a layer of the spiritual in the cleansing of the Temple, but Jesus also consistently addresses the question “How must we live now knowing what we know about God?” For the Hebrew conception of God was not a pantheon of capricious meta-humans like the Greek and Roman cultures that dominated the region, not deified warlords like Caesar Augustus or freakish human/animal hybrids. Yahweh, who should not be depicted, longed for relationship, offered compassion and grace, demanded that is return we are offer compassion and grace to one another.
The extortion of Temple commerce, the transaction that demanded a people crushed by Roman taxes and Temple taxes, by land speculation and drought pay for livestock to slaughter, all to support the lifestyles of the rich and priestly, was a bold evil, just as so much of our economy today is boldly evil. And during Lent, if at no other time, we are called to repent of both our willing and unwilling complicity. For scripture tells us that the fasting that pleases God is not giving up chocolate for a few weeks and eating fish on Friday. What pleases God is fasting from injustice.
How do we do that? How do we do that practically? How do we stay dry when we are up to our neck in an ocean of evil?
Well, first it helps to be a little crazy, crazy enough to believe we can do better. Reinhold Niebuhr, the great 20th century Protestant theologian, referred to this as “a sublime madness,” as recorded by Chris Hedges in his 2015 book “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of revolt.” Hedges, Pulitzer Prize winner and Presbyterian minister, goes on to say “The rebel, dismissed as impractical and zealous, is chronically misunderstood. Those cursed with timidity, fear, or blindness and those who are slaves to opportunism call for moderation and patience. They distort the language of religion, spirituality, compromise, generosity, and compassion to justify cooperation with systems of power that are bent on our destruction. The rebel is deaf to these critiques.”
I am deaf to those critiques. Tell me “Effective Altruism” marries greed with good deeds and I will show you Sam Bankman-Fried, the movement’s poster boy who will be sentenced later this month for seven felonies, including fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering.
I know my small actions do not equal a rebellion, but rebellions start with small actions and growing awareness. This is one reason, as we journey toward Golgotha, that I refuse to see Jesus as the victim of a sadistic god, but instead see him as the triumphant survivor of human violence, and that violence is ultimately greed, the greed that sought to protect the Jewish elite from disruptions to a system they were gaming, the greed that had Rome crush any disruption to their system of unearned profit.
So I buy less from Amazon these days, for they are a union-busting company. There are still things that are impractical to purchase elsewhere, but I do my best. Though I still have money on my Starbucks card from a couple of years ago, I’ve turned off auto-refill. That might be harder if there was a Starbucks between home and work, but I’d still try. I never shop at Hobby Lobby, a company that aggressively supports turning the United States into a theocratic dictatorship, one where I would most certainly go to the gas chamber. I left Twitter when the millionaire’s son turned it into a haven for whiners and white nationalists.
I support the efforts of this church and the United Church of Christ to divest from fossil fuels and reduce our carbon footprint. I’ve made the same decision for my own home, though it was a more expensive option.
These are small things, and your small things might be different from my small things. You don’t need to storm through the Temple and whip it good, though, you know, a little civil disobedience never hurt. Just do something. Live our faith. And when people ask ‘What would Jesus do?,” remember that flipping tables is always an option.
And hey, who knows what might happen… I actually found a new artist I like in this year’s Grammy nominations, a moody folk-pop singer from Vermont, and as best I can tell, there is nothing raunchy about his work.
Amen.