Preached on the Third Sunday in Lent (Year B), March 3, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22
This homily is a short “starter” homily that encourages the assembly at our 5:00pm liturgy to add their own insights and reflections in conversation with the preacher. Gathered in a circle in the early evening, we enjoy this evening Eucharist as a more intimate form of worship on the Lord’s Day.
The Second Inaugural Address, by Anna Rose Bain
We just sang a portion of Psalm 19, perhaps one of the most beautiful psalms in our collection of these one hundred and fifty extremely ancient hymns. Psalm 19 sings of the splendor of creation, of the sun joyfully running its course through the sky, of the flaming spheres of the cosmos singing a song without music, proclaiming a message without words.
Then there are a couple of verses that sound beautiful, but maybe strike you as a little ho-hum. Verses eight and nine, which go like this:
The statutes of the Lord are just
and rejoice the heart; *
the commandment of the Lord is clear
and gives light to the eyes.
The fear of the Lord is clean
and endures for ever; *
the judgments of the Lord are true
and righteous altogether.
Aw, that’s nice. Right? But wait! One of our national leaders a century and a half ago explored how even these verses are startling and troubling. The leader was Abraham Lincoln, and while he may not deserve the blind hero worship he has received across nearly sixteen decades (and while he is now, in our time, coming in for some valid critique for being a little too pragmatic and equivocal on the issue of slavery), Lincoln was (in my view) an intelligent, if personally flawed, reader of his bible. He seemed to understand, in his bones, how terrible God is, how dreadful, even, God may be. Here is Lincoln’s take on a half verse of Psalm 19, in his second Inaugural Address. He writes:
“Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” (End quote.)
Did you catch the dreadfulness of what Lincoln is saying? Maybe, says Lincoln, maybe God wills that every unearned wage-dollar of every slave must be wasted on a devastating war. Maybe God wills that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” Maybe God wills all of that. And if so, “as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
That’s a lot to take in. But I want to point to this, lest we think Psalm 19 is just a little bit of sweet lemonade among the sour lemon of God’s Ten “You shall not” Words on the fiery mountain; and the sour lemon of Paul’s uncompromising and challenging interpretations of the Cross; and the sourest lemon of all – Jesus fashioning a whip of cords and cleansing the temple. Sweet Jesus, nice Jesus, graceful and loving Jesus – yeah, well, today Jesus fashions a whip of cords. God is terrible. God is dreadful.
When he cleanses the temple in this way, Jesus renders the whole temple useless to everyone, not just to the people running it (the ones he condemns for turning it into a “marketplace”), but the pilgrims, rich and poor alike, who risked their lives and spent their savings to climb the hills to Jerusalem just to pray in this temple. By driving out the money changers, Jesus makes it impossible for a pilgrim to exchange their Roman Empire money, which bears the idolatrous face of Caesar (making it unclean for the temple); so now they can’t go in. And by driving out the cattle and sheep and doves (cattle are sacrificed by those who can afford them; doves are sacrificed by working-class peasants like the parents of Jesus) – by driving the animals out, the pilgrims can’t do their temple prayers properly, even if they figured out how to get inside with their dirty money.
We try to make sense of these terrible stories, like the cleansing of the temple; and we try to make sense of these uncompromising ideas, like the Cross as stumbling block and folly but also the very power of God. We try to make sense of them. Maybe it’s best to borrow a page from Abe Lincoln: we won’t make sense of them if we also try to keep God nice, to hold God down as a just a graceful, gentle Creator.
But then, what use would we have for God if God were merely a gentle giant, like Big Bird or Barney the Dinosaur? Maybe it’s good for us that God is terrible, because we live in a terrible world. Jesus ferociously disrupts the temple practices – the easy, timeworn, ethically compromised spiritual life of his people – because that Way has finally become nearly worthless in the face of their terrible world.
On Ash Wednesday I preached about spiritual warfare, and at least one person was upset by what I said. We are in healthy dialogue about it, this person and I. I need to stand by what I said, in the same way that I stand by what I say tonight: that God is terrible; that God is dreadful. Why, though? Where does this get us? Well, let’s go back to President Lincoln, who had just said that perhaps God willed that the evil of slavery be defeated by a war that was just as terrible as slavery itself. Lincoln didn’t just stop at that idea, that terrible idea. He continued, finishing strong, by saying this:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right — as God gives us to see the right — let us strive on to finish the work we are in: to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
God is terrible; God is dreadful; but not just because God is those things. God is fashioning us into people who strive, people who bind wounds, people who care for those who have suffered the very worst. God does not form us to shrink from a challenge, to recede into a sing-song community of sentimental huggers. Now, we do embrace each other, and oh, the sweet peace – the luscious delight! – of sins forgiven, of friendships restored. Yes. But we are formed by God the Terrible, God the Dreadful, to engage the enemy of peace, the enemy of justice, the enemy of refugees and victims of war. We are formed to stand tall in defiance of the worldly powers of violence and terror, in all their forms.
And so I invite you now, whether you want to or not, to share your own reflections on these provocative readings. Are you at the foot of the fiery mountain, your eyes blazing as Moses descends with those terrible tablets covered with the words “You shall not”? Are you at the foot of the Cross, that dreadful Cross, contemplating the confounding mystery of self-giving love? Maybe you’re a dove merchant just trying to help poor people say their prayers in the temple, and a zealot just ruined your livelihood. Where is God, in all of this, for you?