Holy Disruption
Sermon from the Third Sunday in Lent + March 3, 2024 + Pr. Craig Mueller
To get our attention, a U.S. Air Force airman set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington as an act of protest against the war in Gaza.
Preachers want to get your attention. Commercials want to get your attention. The media wants to get your attention. Politicians want to get your attention. To break through the noise. And the status quo.
And sometimes it takes a disruption.
How could I do it? Inspired by Jesus, I could walk around the chancel. Knock down the candles. Some of you would come after me with a fire extinguisher. Clear away the communion vessels, as they clash to the ground, wine spilling everywhere. It would be a desecration spectacle. And I’d lose my job! If the offering basket were full of coins, imagine me spilling them all on the floor with a racket. That would be some kind of disruption!
The scene in the temple is such a scene. It must have been seared into the memory of the early Jesus followers. All four gospels tell it. Though in John it is at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. In the other synoptic gospels, it is early in the week before Jesus dies.
Jesus is the table turning prophet. Driving out all the animals there for sacrifice. Imagine the squawking, the mooing, the cooing. The confusion, the spectacle, the mess. Challenging the temple marketplace in which the poor are exploited, Jesus then sends coins spilling everywhere. He overturns tables. And our usually chill, self-controlled, gentle, humble Jesus creates a disruption in the holy of holies.
Jesus has spent a lot of time in the temple. Surely, he loves the temple. God is there in a mystical, otherworldly kind of way. Yet when religion becomes a marketplace of buying and selling. When it becomes transactional. And when idols become gods, to recall the Ten Commandments. Idols of greed and power and wealth. Jesus stands with the prophets. And does everything he can to protest. And to disrupt things as they are.
What will it take to get our attention? What will it take to break through our cynicism, our apathy, our pride?
Lent is trying to do its work on us. We’re sailing through life. Attending to our agenda. Blocking out the news that troubles us. The violence on the South Side that seems unending. The lives lost in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the escalating humanitarian crisis. Turning away from the unhoused, the migrants, the refugees in our city, on our streets, in our neighborhood.
Lent in its starkness, simplicity, and deep honesty calls out: stop. Confess your sin. Review the Ten Commandments. You have not loved God with all your heart, soul and strength. You have not loved your neighbor as yourself. Lent disrupts our safe and tidy ways of thinking, the routines that become blinders.
Consider the cross as a disruption. Consider Christ crucified. Paul writes today that the cross is foolishness. Christ in his death, in his vulnerability, in his self-emptying is the power of God and the wisdom of God. To trace the cross on your body is to identify with God’s holy disruption. We find our lives through losing them. Through the path of surrender. Through the path of service. Through the path of justice.
It may seem there is a lot of law today. Things we need to do. Things we need to change. Things we need to repair. Though Martin Luther contrasted law and grace, reminding that salvation—healing and wholeness for ourselves and the world—is a gift of God, and not something we earn . . . think also of the law as a gift. For our freedom and for our thriving. The law—the Torah—is for us the path, the way to joy, the way to purpose, the way to life. As we sang in psalm 19, the commandments of the Lord rejoice the heart. They give light to the eyes. More desired are they than gold. Sweeter far than honey.
On that positive note, I need to bring us back to disruption. Disrupting the status quo is our lifelong spiritual agenda. Not just in Lent.
Holy Trinity’s strategic planning team is working hard these months. Discerning a path for our community which is not simply more of the same. But a bit of a disruption. An aspirational agenda in the coming years that challenges us to take risks, to embrace change, and to be open to the Spirit’s call to us in this place and time. I hope you are eager to hear more in the coming months!
The cleansing in the temple in John has another kind of disruption. The locus of divine presence is no longer limited to the temple and its worship. Jesus’ body is the temple. The earthly temple may be no more, but Jesus’ death and resurrection is the sign of God’s abiding presence with us. Christians may still gather in sacred places to worship, but in another way the body of Christ is our holy of holies. The body of Christ we receive at this table. And the body of Christ that you are. You are the temple of the Holy Spirit, as Paul also writes.
So let’s be about holy disruptions. God empowering us to think outside the box. Sometimes protesting and overturning tables. Sometimes disrupting the apathy that infects our lives.
Spiritual writer Richard Rohr writes that a disruptive revolution and liberation begins with each of us presenting ourselves—with all our imperfections—to the Spirit. Our legs as pillars, our bodies as temples.
And then he quotes a twelfth-century Hindu mystic and poet, Basava, who said,
Listen, O Lord of the meeting rivers,
Things standing shall fall,
But the moving ever shall stay.
“The moving ever shall stay.” It contradicts so much of our religious sensibility, Rohr goes on. What we usually think is: “Stay the same. Don’t move. Hold on. Survival depends on resistance to change.”
Yet the Spirit persistently says: “Foment change. Keep moving. Evolve. Survival depends on mobility.”1
Are you open to a little disruption in your life? May this holy Lenten disruption be good news. As we will sing, “grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the living of these days.”
1 Richard Rohr, https://cac.org/daily-meditations/a-disruption-of-the-spirit-2020-08-19/
