“The Creeping Worldly Norm"

John 2:13-22
The Lenten season is meant to be a time when we come back to the realization of what is urgent and central to our faith, what is the source of our peace and joy. It is a time to reconsider what is important to us, what is more likely to contribute to the fulfillment of our lives and the soothing of our souls. Lent does not arrive this year or any other year in a vacuum, but in the midst of competing claims about how we should live our lives, about who we should be.

All around, the streams of social change are running wild---so many choices that may not be good for us, but we are free to choose. What was known and accepted yesterday as the “in-thing” is now passé. The pressure, however subtle, is in our faces to be on the cutting edge, to be up with what’s happening now. This doesn’t mean what is happening now is an asset to the lives we want to build, or should want to build. While temptations are as old as humankind itself, media, technology, fast travel, and communications are agents that make it feel as if temptations are more powerful, that change is happening at lightning speed. Yet what this change brings is no more superior to what we already have than are things, which are imported, are better than things made right around the corner. Fast change is inevitable, I suppose, but not always good.
And the change we see today is often driven by greed, the hunger for power, notoriety and selfishness. Virtually nothing seems sacred and worth holding on to, and nothing appears exempt from the demands of the marketplace.

The temple need not ignore the market place, but is must clearly and intentionally stand separate and apart from it and not become gobbled up by it, and it must be our home base for building up resistance to the onslaught of anti-human values.
Without the temple’s role, we can become unraveled and left to behave like wild animals. With all the things we hear are happening, near and far, we need a place of retreat and renewal, and it was no less so in Jesus’ time. The pressures to adopt the ways of the world were no less evident. What goes on beyond these walls in the name of living has too many pitfalls that potentially distract us from lives that leave affirmative legacies, which shape communities in ways that leave them stronger than we found them. It takes a special discipline to resist greed, to resist a quest for power, to resist shortcuts, to resist corruption. But none of this is new.

As is so evident as we contemplate Jesus’ challenge, upon entering the temple and finding it had become virtually a shopping mall. Even in this ancient context, where the need was just as strong for a sacred place to which persons could retreat and be revived, we find the norms of the world were creeping in. The wall of separation between the sacred and the profane had fallen down. The nurturing, the acceptance, the teaching of unadulterated truth and caring, were threatened with compromise by the unbridled norms of a sinful world. What was the “right thing” by the world’s standards was becoming the right thing in the temple, and Jesus would have nothing of it.

We, too, are often attracted to this co-mingling. More and more, we want the church to remind us of the world. But if we get what we want, it may be too late when we realize that the rhythms and ethos of the world are what makes us feel lost and aimless.
That is why Jesus shows a rare anger and outrage. He feels too much is at stake to approach this situation with a calm voice. He knows how much our hope depends upon our response to a higher calling. We who yearn to respond must have a sanctuary of refuge to find communion with God and with each other. But if the temple is indistinguishable from the world; if the commercial values that obtain here as they do out there, where is our solace and our place of spiritual rest?