Take Off Your Shoes Sermon Podcast By Marie Duquette

Find video at https://youtu.be/8mUnj38JO3s
Website for more sermons, blogs, and stories at   https://marinawell.com/

Transcript:  Before I begin to read the gospel, I want to mention Jesus died somewhere around the year 33; John’s Gospel is dated closer to 90 AD. By the time they began to read the gospel of John, the temple had been destroyed for 20 years; Jesus had been crucified, risen, ascended into heaven after his resurrection.

So, listen to this Gospel from the perspective of knowing the temple in fact had been destroyed, and knowing in fact, what happened to Jesus after this event.

This is the holy gospel according to John.

Glory to you, O Lord.

 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, with 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.

The gospel of the Lord.

Praise to you, O Christ.

So let’s make sure we have the facts about this gospel story: One – When did this happen? Matthew, Mark, and Luke put this story at the end of Jesus ministry – as one of the catalysts that led him to being arrested as a final straw perhaps that caused that arrest and led to him being crucified by the empire. 

John puts this story at the beginning of Jesus ministry, immediately following the wedding at Cana when Jesus came out as being God’s son, the miracle-worker.

That means that Jesus could have overturned the tables at the end of his ministry. He could have overturned them at the beginning of his ministry, an ill-advised move to start out one might think, or he could have done this act twice. He could have overturned the tables twice. Driven out the moneychangers and animals twice. Unlikely? If you think it’s unlikely, I invite you to consider how many times in the church you have discussed and reconsidered and tried to change the exact same thing. 

Pause

It’s possible he did it twice, right?

Why did Jesus overturn the tables & drive out the moneychangers and animals? He did it out of disgust honestly. He is disgusted at what the people had made of God's House of prayer. And as with most things that get out of hand, the practice of the moneychangers started out simply enough. Judea was under the rule of the Romans. The money in current use was Roman coinage. The Jewish law required that every man should pay a tribute to the service of the sanctuary of half a shekel. A Jewish coin, therefore, it became a matter of convenience to have a place where Roman coins could be exchanged for Jewish half shekels. The money changers provided this convenience but of course, required a small fee for the convenience—not unlike the price a church pays for offering envelopes each year.

The

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Pr. Marie Duquette returns from a year away and speaks to current events and the timeless wisdom of Scripture.  Don't miss this comparison  of Jesus, A. Navalny and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Find full video at: https://youtu.be/8mUnj38JO3s
Website for more sermons, blogs, and stories at   https://marinawell.com/

Support the show

As Pr. Marie Duquette's last service, she talks about Jesus instructing the disciples to go outside the walls, don't build a tent, heal people and be a loving part of the community. 

Continue to follow her on her blog, Marinawell.com.  We will  let you know what is in store for the activist/blogger/writer, Marie Duquette.

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Transcript:
Part of the reason I wrote the Juniper Bog is that frogs get a bad rap in the bible. Frogs are mentioned in the bible a total of 15 times; 14 of those times they are literally, a plague. The 15th occurrence is in the Revelation 16:13 where unclean spirits are described as looking like frogs. And trust me, it’s ugly. 

But during the pandemic, we watched Life in Color on Netflix. Narrated by David Attenborough, it is a documentary about the many ways animals use color in their lives, and frogs were the headlining act. 

And that got me thinking about how much we miss when we don’t look beyond our initial impression of an animal or a person.

Take fugitives for example. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word, fugitive? Maybe it’s Harrison Ford running from a literal trainwreck or hiding in a St. Patrick’s Day parade. But chances are, the word fugitive, all by itself, has a negative connotation. We have laws that forbid concealing people from arrest, concealing an escaped prisoner, fleeing to avoid giving testimony or avoiding prosecution, and they are all detailed in the U.S. Code under the heading: Fugitives from Justice.

But according to Webster, a fugitive is merely “running away or intending flight” and the first example given is, “a fugitive slave.” Which gives me pause. If someone is being harshly treated, abused, held against their will, and they escape, and run, ought we label them as a “fugitive?”

Today’s Gospel is often referred to as the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt. Flight. They have fled Bethlehem as recommended by an angel, in a dream, to Joseph. They are fleeing because Herod has issued an edict that all baby boys under the age of two should be killed; his strategy? If Jesus was a baby boy, and all the baby boys were killed, surely Jesus, who threatened Herod, even as an infant, would be killed as well. 

To protect Jesus, Joseph takes Mary and Jesus and flees to Egypt. They were, by definition, fugitives. We tend to focus on the joyful reaction of angels and shepherds and magi to the birth of Jesus, but the truth is that Jesus birth so frightened grown men in power, that the plot to kill him began while he was still an infant. 

And this makes sense because when the Good News of Jesus Christ , including his birth, is proclaimed in the world, it brings fear and loathing to those whose lives are focused on the accumulation and maintenance of power. 

And that brings me to fulfillment. 

Matthew views Jesus’ escape to and return from Egypt as a fulfillment of Hosea 11:1, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (2:15). It also hearkens back to the first exodus, with Israel being identified as God’s son. 

In verse 18 Matthew cites Jeremiah 31:15 to express the horror of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents. We dare not imagine the blood-curdling screams and inconsolable sobbing throughout the region as little boys were mercilessly killed. Yet the use of this text signals a glimpse of hope. In Jeremiah’s day, as the Israelites were taken into captivity, on leaving Jerusalem they would have passed by Ramah, a town six miles to the north, on the way to Babylon. Rachel, the beloved wife of Jacob and mother of Israel, wept over this national tragedy. If we continue on in Jeremiah 31, however, we will hear God’s words of comfort, his new covenant with Israel, and his commitment to his people’s salvation.  

The third citation, “He will be called a Nazorean” (2:23), claims that Joseph’s decision to settle his family in Nazareth was also prophetically anticipated. Oddly, these exact words cannot be found in the Hebrew Scriptures. Could this be why Matthew uses “through the prophets” in th