Pastor Lisa Horst Clark

March 10, 2018

    Matthew 21: 12-17

Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers.”

The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they became angry and said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read, ‘Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies  you have prepared praise for yourself’?” He left them, went out of the city to Bethany, and spent the night there.

Table-Turning Monday

I was talking through with our visual arts team about the plans for Lent and the Sundays and they suggested that this Sunday I have a table here on the chancel to flip.  I don’t know if I’m the table-flipping kind.  Table arranging: yes.  Table stabilizing: I would be happy to put a small piece of paper to adjust a table so it doesn’t fiddle when you lean on it.  But table-flipping is not my usual style.  I sometimes don’t know what it means to have that kind of anger, that kind of certainty, that etched determination that the world as we know it needs to change, to turn, transform, and to start over so that we can start closer to God’s realm of heaven.

I thought, however, I would give it a try this week.  So earlier this week I got one of those short, light, folding tables that we sometimes use in the atrium and I set it up here on the chancel in a completely empty room and I tried to flip it over.  There is no one here.  There was no one to be shocked, no one to be angry, no one to respond in the least and I had revved myself up.  And so then, when I finally did, I turned it over and it fell with a bang and then it rolled down the steps and it rolled all the way into the front pew with a smash.  And you can imagine in our acoustics, I nearly gave myself a heart attack, so horrified I was by my own mild rebellion, where nothing was harmed and there were no witnesses.

And so it made me wonder at Jesus, who began his last week on earth with a bang, with a symbol that all was about to be changed and a symbol that would be opposed.  Many years, even if you were very faithful and attended every Sunday service, you could be here for Palm Sunday, when Jesus triumphantly processed into Jerusalem, and then the next time you were here you would have traded the hosannas and palms for hallelujahs, going from the procession into the celebration of resurrection.  And in that week in between, lots of things happened, and I don’t just mean the brutal details of crucifixion, although that is of course a part of the story.  That last week of Jesus’ life had tremendous teachings about what his ministry meant.  This is when he shared his last teachings; this is where he did the things that ultimately made the powers of the time view him as a threat to empire.  These stories have a wisdom about what it means to walk in Jesus’ way of love and yes, shows the profundity of death that reveals the power of resurrection.  And just to put things in perspective, in the gospels of Mark and Matthew a full quarter of the entire gospel is just in that time, in between the procession of palms and before Easter.  There is so much there that even as we are spending six weeks on it my heart is broken about how much we are not going to talk about.  And so, if you feel so moved, I commend to you reading one of the gospels this Lent; Mark is really