Sermon Tone Analysis

style='margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal'>I speak to you in the name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit – Amen 

At our house I do a lot of dishes – Kelly is a great cook and so we have fallen into the pattern of Kelly cooking and making the what we enjoy, and I cleaning up – now I don’t totally mind this, sometimes I begrudge the time it takes me away from other things, but I actually enjoy the orderliness of cleaning

            Deep inside me there is the desire to order things

In fact, at the end of the day, once the kids are all in bed, and it is time to relax, I don’t just sit in front of the TV very often

Not saying that I don’t enjoy the TV, but I don’t just sit watching… I usually have on my lap my laptop computer and I am busy playing a game of solitaire

I play a Spider solitaire which is basically a game of ordering things

My mind just works that way, I am generally always thinking in a linear, orderly way

I tell you this because today we have three passages of scripture that speak to us about the ordering of life

            We began in Exodus with The Ten Commandments

Although there are apparently 613 commandments in the Old Testament

The Ten Commandments reign as the most recognized and influential

            Many would say that they are the basis for modern law

                        They are the understanding for the ordering of the world

 

Commandments from God continue to cast an influential shadow during the life of Jesus

/A lawyer asked Him a question, *testing* Him, and saying, 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?” 37 Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’

38 This is the first and great commandment.

39 And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

(Matthew 22:35-40)/

All the Law, all of God’s ordering of the world – and all the teachings of scripture by the prophets, inspired by God, for rebuking the mis-order of the ancient Hebrews

                        All your heart – all your soul – all your mind

                             Or as one contemporary translator put it - all your passion, prayer and intelligence

                                    Secondly - love your neighbor as yourself

 

Most scholars agree that The Ten Commandments can be divided between these two categories

With the first five falling under the first half of loving God with all your passion, prayer and intelligence

1.

I am the LORD thy God, Thou shalt have no other gods

2.      No graven images or likenesses

3.      Do not take the LORD's name in vain

4.      Remember the Sabbath day, the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy

5.      Honour thy father and thy mother

And the later five falling under a relationship to our neighbour

6.      Thou shalt not kill

7.      Thou shalt not commit adultery

8.      Thou shalt not steal

9.      Thou shalt not bear false witness

10.  Thou shalt not covet

Today we also have our reading from 1st Corinthians and the monumental statement about what orders and governs our lives

For the wise, the scribe, the debater of this world, Jews and Greeks – it is foolishness and a stumbling block to logic

But for us Christians, brothers and sisters – *The Cross*… is the power of God

                        It shames the wise of this world; Because Jesus Christ is the VERY source of life

And St. Paul continues by stating that Jesus is Righteousness and Sanctification and Redemption

           

Finally we come to the story traditionally known as ‘The Cleansing of the Temple’

Where Jesus, upon entering the temple and seeing the money changers and seeing the merchants of animals for sacrifices

Jesus clears house – Jesus, in what many call a display of righteous anger, makes a whip out of cords and drives the animals from their stalls and over-turns the tables that a moment ago held the commerce of the Temple

Jesus in the centre of the chaos declares /“Take these things out of here!

Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”(John

2:16)/

Jesus in cleansing the temple is declaring ‘Our Father in heaven – has a proper order – a proper purpose for His house

 

This display of emotion that we commonly understand to be ‘anger’ seems out of character for Jesus

            Jesus, who in a few weeks we will witness, did not offer any physical resistance

                        Even when he was falsely accused and sentenced to death – death upon a cross

Jesus who calmly accepted His responsibility even in the face of the greatest offense to a person – brutal, humiliating death

This is the same man who fashioned a whip out of rope and drove the animals out of the temple and overturned the money tables

            Anger seems so out of character

                        Maybe the term anger is the problem

                                    You see in our modern understanding of anger – we see that akin to rage

                                                And it coming from an out-of-control – harmful perception

But like so many terms that have changed over time – anger is a misunderstood term to our modern ears

            And, in fact, nowhere does it actually say, in all four Gospels that it was ‘anger’

                        The term used was ‘zeal’ or ‘zealous’

                                    This is a word of passion – of intense emotion often associated and followed by action

                                                And Zealous is from the same Hebrew word for Jealous

/ /

/You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me (Exodus 20:5)/

 

Our God is intensely passionate for us – and intensely passionate for how the world is ordered

 

That passion for the ordering of the world – that zeal can still be understood, to our modern ears, as Righteous anger, good anger, healthy anger.

Righteous anger is when people are deeply angry at something that is wrong

·         For example, Abraham Lincoln was angry at slavery.

That was righteous anger.

·         Martin Luther King, Jr. was angry at racial discrimination.

That was righteous anger.

·         Nelson Mandela was angry at apartheid in South Africa.

That was righteous anger.

There is always a time and a place for righteous anger – even, and especially if the cost is high

 

In our personal, day to day, lives when we see any form of injustice, it makes us mad inside.

There are so many examples of injustice that we can’t count them.

Some simple examples are when we see a bully beating up on a young kid,

When we see a thief stealing an old woman’s purse,

When we see a group of girls being catty and mean to another girl at recess,

When hear of abuse in a relationship - The list goes on and on.

The Lord God has wired us in such a way that most healthy human beings are angry inside when we see evil and injustice being done to someone.

We are angry at evil and injustice, just as Jesus was angry that day in the temple

 

Now it is true that the story of the cleansing of the temple does come near the end in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Jesus' outburst in the temple was one of the last straws that led to his arrest, trial, and crucifixion.

And this is the reason that we have it in preparation for Easter, during our time of Lent

But in John's Gospel, the story comes in chapter 2.

It's not near the end but very near the beginning.

What's going on here?

Jesus' passionate demonstration at the temple is the second sign in the narrative.

John’s Gospel which shares the story of Jesus using ‘signs and wonders’

The occasion of the first sign is among family and friends at a wedding in Cana.

Do you remember?

They ran out of wine at the wedding and Jesus told the steward to fill six stone jars with water.

Then he told the steward to taste the water, and the water had been turned to wine.

That story is deeper than wishing Jesus would come to our parties!

John tells us ‘a particular detail’ that we sometimes miss in our fascination with all that wine:

The stone jars were used for the rites of purification.

Jesus turns the purification water into wine.

By the time of Jesus, an elaborate system of purification had been developed.

Some things were considered pure and others impure.

Women were impure seven days after the birth of a son,

14 days after the birth of a daughter.