So, you might’ve heard that I was in Costa Rica at the end of February. If you’re new to Medina UCC, you may not yet know that our church has been sending groups to Costa Rica for 16 years. Our church members together have built at least 23 homes in Costa Rica so far. The group we work with is called Mercy Homes, and this year we built Mercy Home #237. Following our leaders Maximo and Carlos, we built a home for two elderly brothers who had captured the hearts of their neighbors. Last I heard, their ages are somewhere around 90 and 94, maybe more maybe less, no one seemed very sure about it. The younger brother Chano maintains their homestead, taking care of his older brother Santo along with two cows, a goat, some dogs and cats, and a bunch of free-range chickens. Amazingly, we were able to build them a new safe and sturdy home in just four days, with updated solar power and a gravity-fed water supply to make life a little bit easier for them. It was a reminder for us to be grateful for our own homes, and an opportunity for us to see what we could accomplish together.

One of the hardest workers on our team was a person who didn’t even come with us from America. His name is Eduardo, and he was our bus driver. Technically, his job was only to drive us wherever we needed to go, but Eduardo showed up from the beginning ready to help with construction. He worked just as hard as the rest of us every single day. One afternoon we even found ourselves waiting on the bus because it was time to leave, and Eduardo was still in the house working. Our crew was sad when he had to leave us midweek and take his bus elsewhere. There was a long goodbye with a lot of hugs. Eduardo didn’t have to do any of it: sweating alongside us, getting to know us, sitting with Santo and listening to the stories we couldn’t understand. I don’t need to know much more about Eduardo’s faith than that. He was living his faith by embracing the opportunity to help and be with his neighbors. Not just Santo and Chano, but also our group from America.

This kind of lived out faith, or lack thereof is exactly what Jesus was flipping tables in the temple about. This story is not about Jesus hating the temple. He and his disciples spent a ton of time there, and Jesus even weeps over the destruction he knows is coming someday. But Jesus is frustrated by something, set off by the sight of sellers and money changers there. It may seem logical for us to assume that those sellers must have been ripping people off, but our guide for this season, AJ Levine – a Jewish scholar of the New Testament, points out for us that Jesus doesn’t say that.  Jesus says that they have made the Temple into a robber’s den, and a robber’s den is not a place where you go and get robbed. The robber’s den is the place where robbers come back to, to hide out in safety and count up their loot.

If we dig a little deeper, we will find that Jesus is quoting Jeremiah – the prophet who warned Israel that they would soon be destroyed by Babylon. Specifically, he’s quoting Jeremiah 7:1-11 and here’s what God sent Jeremiah to say back then:

“Amend your ways and your doings and let me dwell with you in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.” For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave to your ancestors forever and ever. Here you are, trusting in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, “We are safe!”—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight? I, too, am watching, says the Lord.”

God sees through the robbers that are hiding in plain sight. You can’t fool God with enough ritual or religious piety. Jeremiah isn’t denouncing the sacrificial system or the inner workings of the Temple. His concern is with people who keep showing up to God’s house to get God’s blessings, without repenting or changing their behaviors which hurt themselves and their neighbors. The Bible is full of these kinds of declarations, that our worship means nothing to God if we go on sinning against our neighbors, oppressing them and shedding innocent blood. The point of worship then and now is not just to go through the motions to appease God, but to repent for how we have done harm to others, and to strengthen our resolve to change our ways.

We heard two versions of this story today. The gospel of Mark (Ch. 11) tells us that Jesus drives out the sellers and the buyers and overturns the tables of the moneychangers and the chairs of those selling doves. He also doesn’t allow anyone to carry things through the temple. To understand why that matters, it’s important for us to understand that the Temple was not a church. Churches are generally quiet and orderly places for reflection, except maybe during youth group. But the temple was not a church. It was a complex the size of twelve soccer fields placed end to end. The temple was a tourist attraction, a destination for both Jewish people and lots of other people! Pilgrims came from many nations to see it and make sacrifices. The outer courts were loud and crowded, especially during times like Passover.

In the outer courts of the temple, animals were sold because of how far some people traveled to get there. If you had a long journey to Jerusalem, you wouldn’t bring your own animal with you. Animals would not only slow you down, but they could be injured, or stolen, or die along the way. So, the practice at most temples of the time was for people to buy their animals when they got there. Try to imagine all the smells and sounds that would add to this sacred space. If you were a Jewish person who came needing to pay your temple-tax, then you needed to get the temple-approved currency which had no images on it. Having money changers on-site was like having them at the airport when you arrive in a new country. It’s a convenience, and a necessary one. This noisy, crowded, massive environment is where the table-flipping happens. Imagine it less like a Christmas Eve service, and more like downtown Medina the week before Christmas. People are busy getting ready for a holiday, checking off their last minute to-do lists, and it’s a little hectic. Given the size of it, Jesus couldn’t bring everything in the temple to a stop, but he certainly may have slowed things down. If no one could buy sacrifices or exchange their money, then they couldn’t carry out their rituals.

Jesus is coming from his ministry in Galilee, where he has observed all of the animosity between ethnic groups like Jews and Samaritans, and seen how the wealthy are neglecting the poor, and has met all the outcasts and lepers on the fringes of society just trying to survive. As AJ Levine says, “There are times we may find that business as usual is not only inappropriate, it is obscene,” and the duty of a prophet is to be the one who interrupts and says, “this cannot go on being our normal!!” Perhaps what Jesus has seen is the maddening contrast between human attitudes inside places worship, and human attitudes outside of them. This frustration makes me want to flip tables too. How can we sit so comfortably in worship, knowing that all around us, people struggle for their survival?

This conversation came up in the pool during our R&R at the end of our trip in Costa Rica. We had just come from building this very simple home for two people who will continue to live their lives in very difficult conditions. We Americans got to fly there on a plane to do that, and now we found ourselves lounging at a resort, with access to just about anything and everything we probably could have wanted. The contrast was glaring, and a group of us struggled with our feelings about it in the pool. One the one hand, we value self-care, and experiencing the beauty of creation, and refreshing our spirits. On the other hand, we felt guilty because we are very privileged, and there are many people who will never get to enjoy the kinds of things we do.

It reminded me of another time when Logan and I went to visit some friends at their family’s lake house. They drove us around the lake in their boat, and we observed that there were many of these massive waterfront mansions, just sitting there, empty. I remember feeling sick, thinking of all the times we had struggled to pay for our housing over the years, and wondering why some people got to have an empty mansion, while other people don’t even get a home.

There is inequity all around us. It’s here in America too, not just in Costa Rica. Most of it we are so used to, we barely notice it anymore. Most of it is beyond our capacity to change, at least in the short term. Most of it is complicated and has no easy answers, and we don’t have the bandwidth to think about it all to be honest. But this story about Jesus inspires me to remember that we are not supposed to get comfortable with it. I think Jesus was returning to Jerusalem, frustrated like the prophet Jeremiah by the presence of so much unnecessary injustice among God’s people. He would not solve all of it in one afternoon, but still Jesus disrupts the activity of the Temple to make sure it doesn’t get forgotten.

During one of their busiest weeks, with people coming from all over to atone and purify themselves before Passover, Jesus flips the tables that were essential to carrying on business as usual. So, when some of those pilgrims got there, they would find Jesus, taking up space in the temple and teaching anyone who would listen. Word would have spread as people gradually stopped what they were doing to listen to him and as the priests came looking to find out what was holding the people up. Jesus created an interruption and a spectacle, and the people were so engaged by him that no one could stop it. According to Matthew Mark and Luke, this is what turns the chief priests against him. He has stepped on the holy toes of decorum during a week when they couldn’t afford that kind of disruption. Rome was watching, and everyone knew they needed to be on their best behavior, yet there he was, teaching people to turn kingdoms upside down by living the way of love.

Because showing up for rituals is not the point, our transformation is, and when we stop taking that seriously, then we miss out on what our houses of prayer are for. AJ Levine puts it like this, “The ancient Temple, and the present-day church, should be places where people not only find community, welcome the stranger, and repent of their sins. They should be places where people promise to live a godly life and then keep their promises.” As we discussed that afternoon in the pool. I don’t think the answer is to lose ourselves in our frustration. There are powers and principalities that we don’t control. But we can stay angry at systems of injustice, and we can repent, turning our own lives towards the radical gospel that is life abundant for all people. We should be wary of becoming complacent. We should challenge ourselves to be less complicit in those evil systems.

We should make a difference where and when we can, with the zeal that consumed Jesus, according to the gospel of John. Zeal, which means passion – that feeling that would not allow him to be silent, and that consumes him as he declares “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” In John, this moment happens early, and it’s a revelation for the disciples about who Jesus really is. John’s Gospel opens by telling us that Jesus is the word made flesh, and now in chapter 2 says that when Jesus talks about rebuilding the Temple, he was talking about himself.  John’s gospel was the last to be written, and scholars are pretty sure the temple was already gone when he wrote it. The Romans demolished it about 40 years after Jesus’ death, to squash another Jewish rebellion, leaving Jesus’ followers to wonder, why did God let that happen?

For John, the answer is that Christ’s body is now where God resides. Jesus was a walking, talking, kind of Temple, with hands that braided a whip and washed disciples’ feet. A body that Jesus gave up, to show us how to be his body now. The work of Christ is ours to continue, as best we can. I like to think of it as John Wesley did, “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” You do not need to fix everything, but you can continue to learn, to repent, to change, and to work for justice by flipping tables and disrupting injustice wherever you have the opportunity. Doing this will bring us one step closer to the vision Jesus quotes from Isaiah, that God’s house shall be called a house of prayer for all people, where all are inspired to do what is right.

As I said to our group as we gathered to dedicate the house in Costa Rice, this faith is not passive, it is active. It requires us to act with intention, and never to settle but to stay on the move. For it is somewhere in the midst of being Jesus’ hands and feet that we will receive blessings, find answers, and enter into the wisdom of God. So, whether you build houses or flip tables, keep being the body of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit in you. Keep learning about what harms you neighbor and repenting of your role in it. Keep challenging yourself within community so that you can be transformed to transform the world. Amen.