A couple of years ago, I was involved with a ministry that was being established in an abandoned church in Philadelphia. The church, which had a rich history, had been closed some years before, and the ministry of which I was a leader was seeking a home. We were also hoping that the ministry would bring life to an abandoned church.
I will never forget my first venture into the church. It was in shambles. I had half expected to find disarray, but I was cut to the heart when I entered the sacristy. It looked like it had been ransacked. The drawers that formerly held vestments had been opened and left bereft of their contents. The drawers were still hanging out from their cabinets. Debris from a crumbling ceiling was all over the floor. I walked gingerly on portions of the floor, wondering if the floorboards would hold my weight. I was both angry and sad. This space, which was meant to be a holy place of preparation for Mass, was a disaster zone.
Nearly a year later, as our ministry was getting off the ground and we were preparing for an opening event, I donned a face mask, months before a pandemic was in our sight. I wheeled a vacuum cleaner into the sacristy and began a painstaking process of cleaning it up. I swept. I vacuumed. I closed opened drawers. I tidied. I couldn’t bear the thought of this holy place sitting in such chaos. I considered it an act of prayer.
But perhaps most poignant about this abandoned church was that it was left hanging in the lurch. It had been stripped of its furnishings. Its sacristy drawers had been divested of their vestments. But no one even bothered to close the drawers before they left the building. It was heartbreaking.
We are accustomed to a certain amount of disorder when we read Holy Scripture. From disordered nothingness, God created everything that is. When creation moved from order to disorder, God renewed it once again. When the human race had gone off the rails, God sent a flood to destroy all but a remnant and then re-created. When God’s people went astray into anarchy, God sent them judges to bring back order. He then permitted them to have kings to aid the effort. When the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by foreign nations, God nevertheless sent the Israelites out of exile and back to Jerusalem to rebuild. The pattern is clear: there is a natural tendency to fall into disarray, but God gives order.
What was so disturbing to me about the abandoned church was that it was caught in the middle. Stranded in time between vibrancy and a possible future, it had never moved past its closing. The sacristy had been left in chaos, but nothing had been rebuilt.
Why should this make us uncomfortable? Are we okay with disorder and destruction, to a certain extent, if order and re-creation quickly follow? Perhaps we are less comfortable when God seems to be the agent of chaos or destruction.
The story of Noah and the flood is, in fact, such a story when it starts out. We often focus on the animals, Noah’s family safe on the ark, and the renewed creation after the flood. But what about those who perished? We know the Jerusalem Temple was ultimately rebuilt after the exile, but what about those invading armies seen as agents of God sent to wreak havoc on a people gone astray?
And what about Jesus, the Son of God, entering the holiest place in Jerusalem and overturning tables? Do we not wince a bit at the Prince of Peace overturning tables, emptying the moneychangers’ coffers onto the floor, and wielding a handmade whip in a sacred place? This is a side of Jesus that is bound to make any of us uncomfortable. The response is often to let Jesus’ zeal inspire us to prophetic ministry, where we lust after the overturning of the tables of injustice among us. We use it to justify righteous anger, claiming the example of Jesus himself.
And yet it might be that Jesus’ fiery behavior on the cusp of the Passover hits too close to home because his actions pierce into our own lives. Those confronted by Jesus’ actions in the Temple that day demanded a sign of Jesus. “Jesus, if you are going to wreak havoc in this holiest of places, you better have a good reason for it. Prove it. Show us a sign.”
Right before this point in John’s Gospel, Jesus has already shown his first sign. He has turned water into wine at Cana. Could it be that Jesus has in fact just given a second unusual sign by overturning tables in the Temple?
John has begun showing us a Jesus who is the living Sign of God’s visible presence. Jesus himself is the Word made flesh, Truth revealed in the world. And now this human Sign has just offered a sign that will make anyone squirm just a bit. He has caused a certain amount of destruction in the Temple in a fit of rage. He has left a sacred space in disarray.
But a sign always points to something. Jesus shows signs to make visible who he is and what he is bringing into the world. So, how has his act of violence in the Temple been a sign?
Jesus offers us a clue. As he told those in the Temple that day, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Jesus knew that his life was a sign of something that people would only understand after his resurrection. His life, with the fullness of God’s love, truth, and peace, was unable to be fully held by the world. A world distorted into its own image of hate and enmity would offer a stone wall to the convicting presence of the Son of God. Without even intending it, the Son of God’s very life wreaked havoc on the harmful bent of the world. And when God is finished with such a world, it will be left in shambles.
What do we do with this uncomfortable truth? How do we marry a God of peace with disorder and destruction? What do we do when God enters our lives, disrupts them, and we are left in shambles?
When we let him in, Jesus enters our hearts, those temples of the Holy Spirit, and begins to clean house. Old furniture is thrown out. The worn chairs in which we have become ensconced in our sloth are tossed out, and we are left standing in the room with nowhere to rest. The dirt and debris that have been disturbed when God comes in to clean are enough to make anyone cough. The demons that we have entertained and made our false gods are chased out by Jesus’s whip. And we are left alone, not knowing where to go.
This is so often where we get stuck. Indeed, we have been stuck since before the house cleaning ever began. Like the moneychangers in the Temple, we have been seated at our comfortable tables, engaging in the commerce of the world, without ever evaluating whether it is even ethical or giving life. Jesus’ whip then drives us out of our comfort zones, but we seem to have no roadmap.
What we see is a scene not unlike that church sacristy I encountered. Our lives have been ransacked. Drawers are left opened. But the old things are not there. And nothing new has replaced them.
Or at least this is how we think things are. If we stopped with the scene from John, chapter 2, we would miss the whole story. We would miss the fact that God does not leave things there.
This is what Jesus is saying as a reflection on his most unusual of signs. When those in the Temple demand a justification for his reckless behavior, Jesus offers a mysterious explanation that only makes sense after his resurrection from the dead. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The story is just beginning. It has not yet ended.
Can we remember the pattern that is all over the pages of Holy Scripture? Disorder, then order. Disintegration, then a new creation. Death then life. When we are caught in the middle, between destruction and rebuilding, and death and life, it is hard to see the future ahead. But Jesus gives us a sign that this is where God is leading us.
In the Temple, amid squawking birds fleeing for their lives and neighing cattle, amid tables left in splinters and moneychangers running out of the door, the story is not yet finished. It is only beginning. It will not make sense until the third day and the empty tomb.
God enters our lives, if we let him in. God finds our inner state to be one of stasis. God finds us digging our heels into our old ways, when the old ways no longer work. God finds cold, hard hearts of stone, and he knows that the only way to give us new hearts is to break the old ones down.
But rest assured with this good news: God will not leave the sacristies of our hearts in permanent disarray. God will not leave the vestment drawers yanked out, full of dust and dirt, and God will not leave the room without sweeping the floor and closing the drawers again. God will not leave before kissing our aging heads in love.
God will take the shambles of our lives and piece them back together again. He will heal our broken bones. And when our bodies have been ravaged by death, mark my words: God will raise them up again.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Third Sunday in Lent
March 7, 2021