Tit for Tat

John 2:13-22

The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, "Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!" His disciples remembered that it was written, "Zeal for your house will consume me." The Jews then said to him, "What sign can you show us for doing this?" Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." The Jews then said, "This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?" But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

I’ll do almost anything to get a good deal. I cut coupons, I shop around, I buy generic, and you’ll see me in the back of the store, rifling through the clearance rack, but only if it’s an extra 50% off. I’ve also joined that “Groupon” website - you know the one where you get special deals for restaurants and museums and movies. Some people call me “cheap,” or “stingy,” others “smart,” and still others just understand that, yes, I’m a poor seminary student. I don’t let go of the few dollars in my pocket easily. I want to receive a lot in exchange for what I give.

And unfortunately, I find myself doing this in other ways, too, in ways that aren’t directly connected to my finances. I want to know what I’ll “get” from that long drive to visit my family, or what will come out of my time spent having coffee with a friend.

If I work hard in my classes, it’s not good enough that I’ve learned the material or grown spiritually; I want the A. If I spend “quality” time with my son, he’d better be learning a new skill, like learning to count, or learn to recognize the difference between green and yellow, or know the ABC’s by the time I’m done. Heck, I often find myself coming to church and thinking, “Gee, I wonder what I’m going to get out of the service today.”

In our world, everything seems to have to have some “point,” some purpose. I have to “get” something out of it, or it’s a waste. A waste of time, or of resources, or of money, or energy or whatever.

And I don’t think I’m alone here. I think that we all live our lives in a frenzied consumerist economy. We all have this expectation that If I give you something, I should expect something from you in return. We give our time to our workplaces, and receive a paycheck in return. We give money to charities, and we expect them to use it wisely, sure, but we also expect a sense of self-satisfaction to come over us after we send that check in the mail.

If I tell my husband, “I love you,” I have this expectation that he will respond in kind by saying, “I love you, too.” We live in a “tit for tat” world, one where there is “no such thing as a free lunch” and where everything comes with a price of some kind.

It seems like our brains are just wired for this. We live in a world that seems to define for us what we should want, and then tells us what we have to give up in order to get it. Do you want a slimmer body? Just take these pills, or follow this exercise regimen, or eat our specially made menu of food items, and for $195 a month you can look just like Angelina Jolie, or Brad Pitt, or any one of the other celebrities that the media has told us we need to look like. Do you want to be respected and admired? Just put down $3000 and with a $500 lease you, too, can drive the fancy car with the shiny rims, and finally get the respect you deserve.

Or maybe you can go to school for years, spend your time studying and take out mountains of loans and tack your walls full of diplomas. Or you can just spend that extra hour a night at work so your boss will finally recognize all your hard work.

Now please don’t misunderstand me, in and of themselves, there really is nothing wrong with going on a diet, driving a nicer car, or going to school. But it is when we live our lives with a kind of economic expectation, when we expect an exchange of goods or feelings or whatever in every encounter, I think we’re missing out on something, something big.

We’re spending all our time acquiring stuff and accolades and friends and culture and lawn tools and power machines and purse collections and fancy shoes that we’re missing life altogether.

This is what our passage is about today.

Maybe that’s why we feel so uncomfortable with this passage. This is Jesus acting the opposite of what we expect. This isn’t the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” that we’re comfortable with. Jesus is angry here, really angry. Something absolutely wrong is going on, and John wants to emphasize it, which is why he places this event at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. So what is it that has Jesus so riled up?

It’s not about Jesus’ rejection of the “old” way of worshipping God and replacing it with some “new” way. It’s not about Jesus rejecting Judaism or the Temple, or even sacrifices themselves. Jesus is challenging the same element in his own culture as is in ours. It’s about our economic brains or culture or logic or whatever you want to call it. It’s about our insistence that we have to “get” something out of everything we give. It’s about how we feel like we don’t deserve something if we haven’t “paid” for it in some way.

John places this at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. John wants us to know that Jesus’ actions here are foundational to everything he is going to do afterwards.

Let’s take a closer look at what is going on in this passage:

This passage reveals a series of exchanges. The time for celebrating the Passover is near, and so Jews from far and wide are coming to this central place, to the Temple, to offer their sacrifices to God. The Passover was and is the holiest time in the Jewish calendar, a time for remembering the Exodus from Egypt - a time when the Hebrews, enslaved by the Egyptians, were granted freedom.

This celebration is about God’s liberation, God’s absolute Grace toward the Hebrews, the amazing Gift of freedom for God’s people.

But when they prepare to enter Jerusalem and go to the temple, their economic brains are put into high gear. They are locked into a system that will enslave them, and will enslave us, if we’re not careful.

First, they must exchange their coins. For a small fee, their local coins would have been exchanged for a “purer” Tyrian shekel. This wasn’t because their coins would have had images on them and the Tyrian shekel wouldn’t. Both had pagan images on them. But the high priests of the Temple only accepted the Tyrian shekel for the Temple tax because it was considered to be made of the purest silver. The moneychangers would charge a small fee for this service. This is their first economic exchange: their own local currency in exchange, for a small fee, for the “purer” Tyrian shekel.

This Temple Tax was expected of all good Jews, with exceptions for the poor. Many Jews did this because they believed it was just the right thing to do. And tithing, I think, is the right thing to do. But so often we do it with expectations in mind. We give, but we still want something in return, even if its just the good feelings that come when we write that check. We can imagine that these people felt this way too: “I’m a good Jew because I have paid the tax.” This is similar to how many of us may feel when we tithe to our church or donate money to the local public radio station or buy girl scout cookies.

We want to give without expecting anything in return, but so often, we do expect a tit for our tat. This is yet another exchange: Paying the Temple Tax is an exchange for the feeling that you are doing your duty, you’ve met expectations, you’re in “good standing” with your faith tradition.

Then we have another set of exchanges: the purchase of the animals needed for their offerings to God. So they’d exchange their Roman denarii or local currency for cattle and sheep if they were wealthy, or for a pair of doves if they were considered poor.

Ideally, these animals were considered gifts to God, an offering of love and an expression of worship. But I can picture myself in this situation. I’d want to think of these animals as being offered as sacrifices to God because I’ve done something wrong. I’d want to look upon my doves or my lamb and think of them as replacements for what I deserve. After all, I’ve worked hard for the money to buy this, and I want something tangible to come out of all my hard work.

I’d like to think that if I just offer this one thing to God - maybe my Sundays, or 10% of my income, or if I give up chocolate for Lent, I will have done what I need to do to be right with God, or to be a good Christian. It’s a very human attitude: I will have met the requirements. I will have made a proper exchange. Again, John gives us another picture of our economic brains. Yet another exchange.

Then those who have come to celebrate Passover would take their offering to the priest who would offer it up to God in their stead. The Jews didn’t think just anyone was worthy of offering his or her sacrifice to God. A purer, holier person had to do it. How often do we think that our gifts, our talents, our little pittance offerings aren’t good enough for God? How often do we think that we need something more, something worthier, than what we have? How many of us think that our offering isn’t enough. This is yet another side of our economic brains.

And the reality is that none of us have enough. If we try to keep playing this game, this “tit for tat,” this “this for that” economics, we’re all going to run out of resources, and quick.

And it is this that gets Jesus all riled up. He’s ANGRY. We are not comfortable with this Jesus. We want the Jesus who is meek and mild and accepting. But, it’s clear that the one thing that makes Jesus the most angry, the thing that causes Jesus to react the most dramatically out of all of the testimonies in our Gospels, is that the house of God has turned into a house of trade. A marketplace. A place where you have to come with something in order to get something. A place where you have to have in order to get more. This isn’t what the Temple was about. It was supposed to be a place to meet God. It was supposed to be a place to express your love for God, and that could be where you gave an offering of sheep or cattle or doves. But here, it seems to have become a requirement.

It has become a place where the economic brain and the exchange of “this for that” attitude has been reinforced, instead of a place where God’s grace has flourished and grown and exploded beyond the Temple walls. The offerings were supposed to be responses to God’s grace, but instead, they have become tools of exchange for consumers, a philosophy of supply and demand.

This passage is about Grace. And boy, if we’re totally honest, are we uncomfortable with Grace. We hate the unfairness of Grace. We hate that the prodigal son gets a party when we’ve been good and faithful and working all along. We hate that the workers who started at 5 in the afternoon get paid the same amount as those of us who started at 8 in the morning. And, if we’re really honest with ourselves, we are extremely uncomfortable with the fact that we, too are the ones who don’t deserve all that we have, and so we join in on the rat race to try to prove to everyone else, and even to God, that we deserve what we’ve got.

We try to “pay” for our grace, for our encounters with God. We try to prove to ourselves and to others that we’ve earned it. Don’t we feel so much better about ourselves when we’ve paid that final car payment, or gotten the raise after we’ve devoted our hard work and time to that important project? Aren’t we terrified to come before God with empty hands? I know I am.

This is what Nicodemus asks right after Jesus’ encounter in the Temple. He wants what Jesus has to offer, and wants to know how he can get it, what he can do to achieve it. And Jesus basically tells him that there is nothing he can do. He says, “You must be born from above.” Nicodemus responds by basically saying, “How the heck do you do that? And I think that’s exactly the point. Jesus says that it’s not about what Nicodemus can or should do, but about what He is going to do. It’s about receiving, not about exchanging.

Jesus is so serious about this that when asked for a sign, or for justification for the havoc he is raising, he says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” Those around him are in a state of disbelief: this is an impossibility. They say, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” They immediately go straight to their own human powers and abilities. They go to their default setting, which is thinking in economic terms.

But Jesus doesn’t think in those terms. John tells us that Jesus isn’t thinking about a place, but his body. This is a temple that has nothing to do with the quid pro quo of economic exchange. This is a temple that has to do with relationship.

And Jesus’ ministry begins in the Gospel of John with this usurping of expectations, with this emphasis on the relationship, and continues his ministry in this same vein. The disciples are expecting great wealth and power and prestige from the coming of the Messiah, but what they get is a broken man hanging on a cross like a common thief. They certainly do not get what they expected. But they are given more than what they expected.

They are given the freedom to live their lives in the arms of the one who loves beyond any economic expectation, any consumer perspective, any system of exchange of goods or attitudes or accolades or anything that can be earned. God’s Grace is that big.

When we give up our “exchanges,” our “tit for tat,” our false assurance that we’ve done our duty and we can check “good Christian” off of our list and then claim to just move on with our lives, when we can do that, then we can live in the freedom that God wants us to live in. We can experience the true joy of grace and peace and love, and then we can respond with our tithes, our talents, our time, our gifts. But the Grace, always, always, always, comes first.

Thanks be to God.

Resuregano

Mark 1:9-15

9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 11 And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." 12 And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13 He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. 14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, 15 and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."

First, a disclaimer: So I’m going to attempt to talk about suffering. But to do this, I need you to join me out on the high wire. I need you to come with me to do a little bit of tightrope walking. It’s a fine balance that we must strike between seeking suffering and ignoring it altogether. If you go too far on one side, you’ll end up thinking that God wills suffering and that you can’t be a good Christian without it. If you swing too far on the other side, you’ll start to think that suffering is always evil to the core, and that there is no chance of redemption or healing or resurrection. Like trying to hold the divinity and humanity of Christ, or trying to balance the spiritual with the physical, it’s a tightrope walk - if we go too far on one side or the other we’ll fall. So, for the record: I am not advocating that we seek out death or suffering. Nor am I saying that we should ignore that it exists. And, well, if we do end up falling on one side or the other, God’s grace will be there to catch us.

So. Here we go...

I’m a terrible swimmer. My mom put me in swimming lessons as a kid, and when other kids were passing out of levels every two weeks, moving on from freestyle to backstroke to the butterfly, I spent two whole summers in the fourth level, trying to figure out how to coordinate my breathing with my arms swinging and my legs kicking. Kids years younger than I were literally leaving me in their wake.

When we’d play that game - you know the one where you line up at one end of the pool and you all take a deep breath at the same time and then push off from the wall, swimming under the water to see who could hold their breath the longest, I was always the first one up, only a few feet away from where I had started.

I hated the feeling of being overwhelmed, completely surrounded by water. I hated not feeling in control, and instead of surrendering to the currents and the weight of the water all around me, I fought it. And my head would bob right back up to the surface again. It was my own fear that limited my swimming experiences. When kids would be diving in the deep end, or swimming far out on a sand bar on Lake Michigan, I was wading in the shallow end, waiting for them to come back in for lunch.

I was terrified of drowning. Terrified of being out of control. Terrified of the oppressive weight of all that water. I couldn’t figure out how to let it hold me, how to be in it. How to not freak out when the water came up over my head.

These last few weeks it feels as though my family and I have been pummeled. Or maybe, to stick with the water metaphor, we have been drowning under the weight of water all around us. The powers of the universe, or evil, or fate, or just life, have been throwing us into the deep end seemingly every time we turn around. We’re finding it hard to breathe, to keep our heads above water, to find the side of the pool to hang on to and rest. Lots of deaths. Lots of disappointments. Lots of heartbreak, all condensed into a few short weeks. We are bruised deep. We’re limping a little. Our breathing is a bit labored. We are hunched over, flinching at every turn, waiting for the next round of bad news: another has passed away, or another is in the hospital, or yet another is abusing or being abused. These are all little and big deaths. They’re weighing us down and tripping us up.

And we’re carrying them with us, inside of us, even now, like a millstone or one of those scuba diving weights that send you straight to the bottom of the ocean.

We have death that we carry with us. It’s inside of us, deep in our bones. It’s loss and fear and disappointments. But I want to be clear: I’m not really talking about sin here, though. It may be a result of sin, but it’s not our sin. It’s not something we had a choice about. It’s our suffering. And if you can let it go, and heal, and move on. Great. Please. Do it. Let it go. Move on. Heal. Go back up to the surface and take a big deep breath.

But for those of you who can’t. For those of you, who, like me, will be hobbling along for some time now, hanging out at the bottom of the ocean for a little while longer, I want us to sit close, to lean in, to hear the words in our Gospel reading today.

‘Cause you know what, some of us - no, I’m willing to bet, all of us, if we’re honest - we all have pain that we will carry with us, carry inside of us, forever.

My brother-in-law and good friend just lost his brother - who was only 37 - a little over a month ago. When he has expressed his grief, many people have encouraged him, saying things like “time does heal all wounds” and “it’ll get better.” These are all good sentiments. They come from deep love and care and concern for my brother-in-law. And they may very well be true. But what if they’re not? What if the grief doesn’t lift? What if he carries this loss inside of him forever? Or for what feels like forever. Where’s the hope in that? There HAS to be hope within, inside of, the pain, even as it’s happening here, and now, not just beyond the pain. Otherwise, we could rush through our sorrow or our fear or our humiliation to get to the other side and be happy again. But that’s not how it works. Or at least, not how it’s worked for me.

Sure, we cover over the pain with time, or numbness, or distractions. But it’s always there, always ready to surprise you with tears or anger or frustration at the least convenient times. The death is always there. Scar tissue always stays scarred.

So isn’t it crazy that we use the death imagery of being overcome by water in our baptisms? When we are baptized, we are not just “washed” clean, but ritually sent into the depths; we are dead with Christ. Funny how something as necessary and life-giving as water can also mean distress, pain, and even death.

In the Hebrew Bible, feelings of distress and fear of death are often depicted by images of being overcome by water.

And in the New Testament, Romans 6:3-4 says, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We have been buried with Christ in baptism, into Christ’s death...”

• Colossians 2:12, says “When you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.”
• Galatians 3:27 says that we who are baptized are “clothed ourselves with Christ” - clothed with both the glory and the suffering of Christ.

And When James and John come to Jesus later on in Mark 10, and ask to sit at Jesus’ right hand, wanting to live in his glory, Jesus refers to his death. He says, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” Essentially, Jesus asks, if you want to sit on my right hand, you will need to suffer what I suffer. You will need to enter into a baptism of sacrifice, service, and death.

So, isn’t it crazy that we baptize babies - these beautiful, helpless, hope-filled and fleshy new lives? Even infants are ritually “sent into the depths” in their baptisms. And I don’t think that this is because of any morbid fascinations of our church fathers. We baptize babies because we know that life and death are so very closely entwined. No matter how careful and protective the infant’s parents are, this child will suffer. This child will experience little deaths, moments of pain, and maybe even long stretches of sorrow. But what an act of faith it is to come up to that baptismal font, to bring your child forward, and say, “God’s grace is sufficient. God’s power is made perfect in weakness” - maybe even in death, maybe even through a death on a cross.

If we read the story of Jesus’ baptism carefully, we’ll see that this is no fairy tale; there is no defeat of evil, no satisfying happily ever after, not even a clear hope that the Super-Hero Savior is now going to swoop in and fix everything. You may say, “Well, that is because this is the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.” But everything we need to know about how this ministry is going to turn out is given to us in these seven short verses. It’s a micro-narrative. The end is included here, in the beginning. The pain and the sorrow that will result for Jesus and his followers in his work here on earth is all mixed up with the glory and the peace and the joy.

• Jesus’ baptism is a symbol of both death and new life
• Jesus is put under the water, signifying death
• But Jesus comes out of the water and the heavens are torn apart, and the Spirit descends like a dove upon Jesus. And Jesus hears “This is my son, The beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Initially this sounds like a lot of life. A real affirmation. A glorious moment. But any good Jew hearing this would think back to another very important time when they heard God refer to a “beloved son” - that of the story of Abraham and Isaac, when God tells Abraham to walk up Mount Moriah with wood and flint and a knife to sacrifice his only “beloved son.” They would hear sacrifice and death, as well as glorious life in this one short phrase directed towards Jesus.

• And then Jesus is immediately sent into the wilderness - a barren, dead, deserted place. A frightening place, a place where no one goes alone for surely bandits or animals, or just plain exposure will threaten to take one’s life.
• He is there for forty days, tempted by death itself.
• And yet there is also life here in this desert, for the angels wait upon him.
• But we are thrown back into a world of death when we learn that John has been arrested - because we know what that will lead to. But there is life, yet again, when Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee, “proclaiming the good news of God”

• Jesus says, “It’s time! The kingdom of God is near!” - life is here!
• Andin the same breath he also says, “repent” - realize the death in your life, the big and the little deaths that you have caused.
• And we are left in a liminal space, this place of in-between-ness. When Jesus says, “believe in the good news,” we are left holding both the life and the death in our hands. We are left with the hope of the future, the hope that is not yet here, but soon to come.

This passage is one that swings us from life to death and back again. Or perhaps, they aren’t two different places, or two different concepts, but tied up so intimately with each other that it’s artificial to try to sift them apart. Jesus’ baptism is a moment of both life and death, all mixed up together. The story of Jesus’ baptism is also the story of Jesus’ death on the cross. There isn’t a linear, straight path from struggle to life here. It’s a big life/death mess. The cross, the symbol of a horrid and humiliating death is also our symbol for hope and new life. And that’s what our baptisms are - recognition that this faith journey is a big life/death mess - but that the Grace of God is there to give us the hope of the future, the hope that is not yet here, but soon to come.

We don’t suffer “in order to” accomplish anything. We don’t go through heartache just so we can “learn from it” and move on. It’s not about “whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Although strength or learning or growth may be an outcome of suffering, it’s not the reason WHY we go through it. So, you’re asking, why DO we go through it? I don’t know. I’m just an intern. Ask the real pastors. You get what you pay for. But what I do know is that there is life - not just after the pain, but in the midst of it. God doesn’t put us through trials to toy with us, or to make us grateful, or to teach us some important life lesson. God certainly doesn’t put us through trials to punish us. This is not a mathematical equation. Pain + God does not equal “good Christian” or “lesson learned” or “stronger faith.”

(Although, again, I want to emphasize that these things can and do come from pain. But that is not WHY we suffer. Remember, we need to balance on that tightrope a little while longer.)

Pain is just pain. And it sucks. God doesn’t will it. God doesn’t want it. But here it is.

And yet.

When we hold death inside of us, when we carry the weight of it inside of us, what if we saw it as staying underwater just a little bit longer? Can we trust that God is holding us, even in the midst of stress, death, fear, whatever is holding us down? The surface of the water is right there; the seed, buried in the soil, will sprout. We don’t need to freak out. We just have to wait. And it’s often a painful wait. We have to trust that we won’t drown. We have to trust that the earth will not completely crush us. We have to give up things we thought defined us.

But while we’re waiting, we can hold on to the life that is still there; it’s just hidden among all that death. But even if the trust isn’t there, or we just can’t hold on anymore, even if taking the next breath is a strain, God is there. And God is holding on to us.

I’m a lazy gardener. I stick stuff in the ground and I see what it does. Or I put plants in pots, and forget about them until months later. This dead stuff here, came from my house. These used to be violets, and these are mums. They came from seeds that had to die in order for the plant to be grown. And now, they look pitiful. They are pitiful. This thing right here - that’s oregano. It’s looking pretty sad.

But I like to call it “resuregano” because sure enough, if you look close enough, you’ll see a little bit of green amidst all that shriveled, dried up death. That green, that life, has been in there all along, deep in its taproots, even in the dead of winter, even when the snow weighed down its leaves and the winds broke its stems. Even when the soil froze and hardened and the ice sealed it over. The life is just now starting to sprout. But it has been in there all along. Amidst the pain and harshness of winter. Amidst the rains and this dead grey Pittsburgh sky. It’s been there. Waiting. And also just being. Just existing.

When we are pummeled by all the deaths around us, may we be able to sit in it, to find the life within it, to find the hope even in our despair. That’s what the writer of Mark leaves us with in this passage. Just hope. That’s it. And yet, that’s it. The kingdom is coming. But it’s also right here - right here when the waters overwhelm us, right here when the soil has buried us, right here when the winter has frozen us to the core. This “hereness” of the kingdom is what enables us to say, with Paul, “we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.” It’s what enables us to say, along with Jesus, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” - for even as he breathed his last breath, he called out for his Father, for the one who gives life and hope and peace to us all. Just as the kingdom of God was in that moment of despair, so is it in all of ours.

Thanks be to God.