Sermon for the 10th Sunday after Trinity, 2021

“My house is the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.” With these words from our Gospel lesson, Jesus rendered judgment on the Jerusalem Temple when he entered the Holy City in the final week of his earthly ministry. As we learn in Mark’s account of our Lord’s cleansing of the Temple, Jesus’ righteous indignation led him to physically enact this judgment by overturning the tables of the money-changers who had set up shop in the Temple precincts. Likewise, in John’s Gospel, we get the detail that Jesus made a whip of cords that he used to drive out the money-changers and all their animals. This scene, perhaps more than any other, gives the lie to any notion of a sweet, gentle Jesus who simply went around saying nice things and loving people; rather, it demonstrates Jesus’ uncompromised zeal for his Father’s house, which would provoke such outrage from the chief priests and the scribes that Jesus’ fate on the cross was thereby sealed. The significance of this incident in all four Gospels’ account of the life of Jesus should make us stop and pause and consider why this incident provoked such emotion from Jesus, and consider what parallels we can draw to our present situation here today.

In this account of the cleansing of the Temple, Jesus was primarily outraged by the fact that part of the Temple precincts, meant to be a place where Gentiles could come and pray, was starting to look more like a market or a bazaar than a place of prayer. And while none of us gathered here this morning may be guilty of wanting to commercialize sacred space, we may, on further reflection, in fact be equally guilty as the chief priests and scribes in perverting the intended purpose of the church on account of our failure to root our own identity fully in Christ, whose desire was and still is that his house would be a house of prayer. And yet, as we will see, it is far too easy to resist and reject this calling. This morning we will walk through what I see as the most prominent deficient way of understanding the church today, which, like the money-changers and animal sellers operating in the Temple in Jesus’ day, threatens to distract us from the true work of what the Lord has called us to be, before considering what it means for us to live into this divine calling of being a “house of prayer.”

My main point this morning is this: while most of us presumably have little interest in replacing the back pews of our sanctuary with a place where we can sell doves and trade foreign currencies, we all too readily participate in the commodification of God’s worship when we view his church as a consumer good. Such a consumerist approach to the church emphasizes a “what’s in it for me” attitude and seeks an approach to faith and practice that promotes feelings of comfort, happiness, and psychological well-being. That the prevailing individualistic, consumerist ethos of our therapeutic society, imprinted upon each of us from birth, would make its way into the culture of American Chrisitanity is hardly surprising. And yet the many ways that this self-serving attitude towards the church can be seen shows the surprising extent to which its tentacles have infiltrated our souls.

We may, for instance, be guilty of treating the church as a commodity when we treat it as a voluntary society, a social club that exists primarily to help us network and find community. Now community is, of course, a very important part of the Christian life; one of our own values, after all, is “Together in Life,” and we earnestly desire to create a “thick” culture and a shared life where meaningful friendships can flourish. It is right and good to seek deep relationships with others. But if we simply left this value in isolation or in a place of preeminence, we would be no different from the Rotary Club, the PTA, the homeschool co-op, or any other number of very good organizations where like-minded people can find community and purpose. More problematically, approaching the church this way reduces our worship of the Almighty God to a self-serving means of meeting our relational needs. Our best couple friends move away, we have a fight or a falling out with another person in the parish, we can’t stomach the diverse views of the people around us and--poof--we’re off to the next church. Even more forebodingly, as Carl Trueman writes, “The days when Christians could be both respected by their society and faithful to their beliefs are drawing rapidly to a close. The terms of membership in civic society and in the church are becoming increasingly antithetical.” The costs of church membership, therefore, will increasingly be felt in our post-Christian society. Perhaps surprisingly, though, recovering a vision of the church as a house of prayer in fact provides for an even deeper community that transcends any superficial connections we might have with one another. Because we go to the altar together, we have a shared life in Christ, brothers and sisters in the Lord and co-heirs with Christ. In this way, then, we discover our deepest community when we prioritize following Christ, rather than making the relationships themselves our central pursuit. For, we will find, if we make our church into a social club, we have every reason to expect that, having failed to live up to our calling, Jesus will soon appear to overturn the tables in our midst. 

Or, perhaps, we find ourselves falling into a consumerist approach to the church when we see it as a vehicle for various social and political causes. In our present polarized times, it is all too tempting to find our identity in our political tribe, whether left or right. Politics has in fact become a substitute religion for many; political leaders from Obama to Trump have inspired levels of devotion often reserved for religious figures. In particular, we have seen how various political movements have aped a lot of the basic ideas of Christianity, redefining sin, redemption, and progress in their image. It is a sad reality that we often feel more kinship with non-believers of our own political party than we do with our brothers and sisters in Christ who have differing political beliefs. Brothers and sisters, it should not be so. To be sure, Christians can and should have political opinions and work for the advance of truth and justice in our world. But this activism in the world must flow from our shared life at the altar, from the pages of Scripture and the lives of the saints, rather than from the program of any one political figure, party, or philosophy. Treating the church as an arm of any secular political agenda, then, substitutes a false idol for Christ. If we make our church into a political action committee, we have every reason to expect that, having failed to live up to our true calling, Jesus will soon drive us out with a whip of cords.

Or, to take still another example, we may discover that we have a consumerist orientation to the church when we see it as just one optional piece of our own individual approach to spirituality. Those who study such things tell us that America is perhaps not secularizing so much as becoming a people who are “spiritual but not religious,” drawing on a variety of religious traditions but actually belonging to or submitting themselves to none of them. We see, therefore, growing interest in Eastern spirituality, meditation, astrology, traditional paganism, and so-called “wellness culture”; in each case, authority is found not in creeds or institutional hierarchies but in what “works” for people or gives them an inner sense of happiness and fulfillment. This spiritual pandemic infects Christians as well. According to The Wall Street Journal, nearly a third of self-identified Christians profess belief in reincarnation, of all things. (Fun fact, this is not actually a Christian belief.) Now while this “spiritual but not religious” approach to life may have some success in distracting from and overcoming what would otherwise be the meaninglessness of life, there is still nothing transcendent or authoritative in these things, as everything is centered on me, my needs, and my truth. Our natural individualism pushes back against the idea that the church might require us to believe, feel, or even do certain things. Nowhere is this pressure more acutely felt than with respect to the church’s traditional sexual ethics; many have walked away from orthodox forms of the faith, or from the faith altogether, because of a refusal to accept the church’s clear and unequivocal teaching on marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman, often out of a misplaced sense of what it means to love others. But, as St. Paul tells us, love “does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth” (1 Cor 13:6). Each of us wants to be our own popes, our own fact-checkers, the masters of our own minds and lives and hearts, and yet for the sake of our souls we dare not set ourselves as judges above God’s Word and God’s church. Of course, we want to avoid the opposite error of blind incredulity and naivete, we should always strive to love the Lord our God with all of our minds, and yet our distinctly American unwillingness to submit ourselves to any tradition or authority beyond ourselves, whatever that may be, undoubtedly retards our growth in humility and holiness and leaves us vulnerable to apostasy. And yet, counter-intuitively, it is in obedience and submission that we are freed of the weight of having to invent our own individual path of discipleship. Treating the church, with all of the practices and doctrines that derive from her apostolic identity and authority, as an optional ingredient in our spiritual diets robs us of the opportunity to find our identity in something so much bigger and so much richer than ourselves. If we make our church into an optional add-on to our spiritual lives, we have every reason to expect that, having failed to live up to our calling, we will wake up one day to discover that not one stone is left upon another.

What, then, is the church supposed to be? Jesus’ words in the Gospel reading point to the answer. When the Temple failed to be a “house of prayer,” as God had intended, it was destroyed in judgment; indeed, in A.D. 70, the Romans razed the Temple to the ground and not one stone was left upon another. But God’s vision of establishing upon the earth a “house of prayer” was not abandoned. As St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Ephesians, we Christians are, in Christ, being built together into “a holy temple in the Lord,” “a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (Eph 2:21-22). The original Temple failed in its calling to be a house of prayer for all nations, but now we as the church have the immense privilege and high responsibility of taking on that same vocation. Thanks be to God, he has not left us without a Helper in this task. As this morning’s epistle reading tells us, also from St. Paul, from his first letter to the Corinthians, each of us has received “the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Cor 12:7). Indeed, all Christians receive spiritual gifts from God, and these gifts are all empowered by the Holy Spirit for the purpose of serving one another, building up the Church, and witnessing to the world. There are, as we see in this passage, a variety of spiritual gifts, but, as Paul goes on to explain, all gifts have a part to play in the work of the building up of the Church, the Body of Christ, the new Temple. That is to say, in our sacred calling of being “a holy temple in the Lord” (Eph 2:21), we have the presence of the indwelling, empowering Spirit who enables us to fulfill our vocation of offering right worship to our God. And what a gift this Spirit is! As our epistle tells us, even our ability to confess that “Jesus is Lord” is the work of the Spirit in us (1 Cor 12:3).

This, I suggest, is the context within which we should understand this morning’s collect: “Let thy merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of thy humble servants; and, that they may obtain their petitions make them to ask such things as shall please thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” In this collect, we are praying that God would help us to pray those things which would be pleasing to him. We are, in other words, to pray that we would rightly use those spiritual gifts that have been bestowed on us. We are to pray that we would become a people who love Christ’s Church not as a means of propping up some other idol in our lives, but as the place where we find our true identity and vocation as people who, transformed by Word and Sacrament, extend God’s reign and rule to all corners of the earth. And, best of all, we can be confident that God will hear these prayers and that, in fact, he has already answered them in giving us his Spirit. So let us take heart: this work that God has begun, in building us together into “a holy temple in the Lord,” “a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (Eph 2:21-22)--even “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt 16:18). Amen.