A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
16th January 2022
John 2.13-25
A popular internet meme, in Christian circles at least,
involves an artistic depiction of the cleansing of the Temple.
involves an artistic depiction of the cleansing of the Temple.
The text that accompanies it reads:
“The next time someone asks you ‘What Would Jesus Do?’
Remind them that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip
is within the realm of possibilities.”
It’s funny, it’s snappy, and it nicely punctures the façade
of Charles Wesley’s ‘Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild’.
The subtext is clear:
Christians might be all, ‘turn the other cheek’…
but don’t count on it!
Sometimes they can get shouty and punchy too.
But I have to say that I find this rather disturbing,
and the reason it disturbs me,
is to do with a podcast I’ve been listening to, which I’ve mentioned before,
about the rise and fall of Mars Hill church in Seattle,
whose pastor Mark Driscoll notoriously promoted
what he described as a more aggressive form of Christianity.
His critique of mainstream churches was that they promoted a weak, passive faith,
and that if people who lived in the ‘real world’ were to find Christ,
they needed to meet a Christ who could hold his own under any circumstances.
In other words, they needed a Christ
who could flip tables and chase people with a whip.
In support of this macho, cage-fighter Jesus,
Driscoll turned to the book of Revelation,
a text almost certainly known to the author of John’s gospel.
Driscoll says:
‘In Revelation (the last book of the New Testament),
Jesus is a prize-fighter with a tattoo down His leg,
a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed.
That is the guy I can worship.
I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ
because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.’
Similarly, in his sermon on the cleansing of the temple,
delivered against a backdrop image of a large whip,
Driscoll says the following:
“Here comes Jesus and he is furious, he is angry…
Now some of you will be very surprised to hear that Jesus got angry
because you have wrongly perceived
that Christianity just means that you be nice.”
What may not surprise you, hearing this,
is that his 15,000 strong church closed down in 2014,
over accusations that its pastor engaged in persistent bullying
both of staff members and of people from the congregation.
Now, I need to be careful here,
because I am very aware that only one who is without sin
should cast a stone at another for their sin,
and so I don’t want to get too drawn into a direct critique of Mark Driscoll,
who I’m sure has many redeeming qualities.
My critique, rather, is of the attempt to shape Christianity,
as a religion of hyper-masculine aggression;
this is a project which I think fundamentally undermines the witness of Jesus
as the one who’s life, death, and resurrection bring an end to violence.
What is at stake here, as far as I’m concerned, is something that really matters,
because it takes us right to the heart
of what it actually means to be a Christian.
Here at Bloomsbury we have long taken the view that we are a ‘peace church’:
we have our peace candle lit each week,
we sell white poppies in the run up to Remembrance Sunday,
and we hear sermons on the importance of taking nonviolent action.
Of course, not all Christians agree,
with many Christians drawing on Augustine’s Just War Theory,
to argue that there are circumstances where it is entirely appropriate
for a Christian to engage in violence and warfare.
Indeed, many early Baptists took this position,
and fought on the side of Cromwell in the wars of the seventeenth century;
similarly many from this church
fought in the two world wars of the twentieth century,
and many of us will know, love, and respect people
who serve in the armed forces today.
So, to suggest that we worship a nonviolent God,
made known in the person of a nonviolent Jesus,
and that this means those who follow that revelation,
should also be nonviolent people,
is not an uncontroversial statement.
Some of you may remember a few years ago,
Bloomsbury was involved in putting together a debate
entitled ‘Who Would Jesus Shoot?’,
which explored in detail the discussions around Christian nonviolence,
and I’ve put this on our church website if you want to listen to it again.[1]
And it strikes me that any attempt to argue for Christian nonviolence
must grapple with what is going on
in the cleansing of the temple,
which is the single event in the ministry of Jesus,
where he gets anywhere near an act of violence.
What revelation of God are we seeing here,
as God is revealed in the life and ministry of Jesus?
And what does it say to us
about how we might live as followers of Jesus?
This is one of those rare stories that appears in all four gospels,
although its placement in the timeline of Jesus’ life is different in John
compared to what we find in Matthew, Mark and Luke.
In the three synoptic gospels,
the cleansing of the temple occurs at the end of Jesus’ ministry,
and it is the trigger for the events that lead to his crucifixion.
But in the fourth gospel, it comes right at the start of his ministry,
immediately after the sign of water into wine.
This is no accident, because placing these two incidents side by side:
the blessing at the wedding in Cana of Galilee
and the condemnation of the Temple system in Jerusalem,
has the rhetorical effect of asking us to consider them together,
and it creates the beginning of an answer
to the question of where the presence of God can be found.
One might have expected that God would be found in the temple,
but it seems that the presence of God made known through Jesus
is rather to be found in the abundance of wine at a wedding reception.
I’ll resist enquiring too deeply as to whether this wedding party with lots of wine
could in fact have been considered a work event,
and will instead concentrate on what it meant
for a national system of governance to have so lost its credibility
that it deserved righteous condemnation from Jesus!
Who says times have changed!?
In those times, the institutions of the state and the faith
were deeply intertwined,
even more so than in our country where Bishops still get seats in House of Lords.
In the first century, the national influence and importance of the priests,
was much more like this country in the middle ages,
with civil power and religious power in a symbiotic relationship.
And in that context, the Temple should have been the place of divine encounter,
it should have been the place where God’s blessing was made available for all,
and it should also have been the place that defended justice for the weak,
the place where the vulnerable could come for sanctuary.
Certainly, it should have been a house of prayer,
but from that prayer should have flowed the abundant blessing
of new life and hope for all those seeking God.
But the revelation of God in Jesus
was that blessing of abundance was not, in fact, found in the Temple in Jerusalem,
rather it was experienced at a party in Cana of Galilee.
The Temple had become a place where the wealthy could gain easy access to God,
but the poor faced often insurmountable costs to purchase their sacrifices.
The Temple was not a place where God was available to all,
it was a place of benefit for the few, not the many.
Wine at a wedding, given freely to all, regardless of who they are,
is, it seems, a much better sign of God’s intent and God’s grace.
There is something important here that the author of the gospel wants us to grasp,
about the revelation of God in the person, life, and ministry of Jesus:
and this is that God will no longer be contained or constrained
within religious or structural systems;
the blessings of God were no longer the exclusive property of the elite,
the abundance of God was no longer the preserve of the capital city in the south.
Jesus’ condemnation of the sellers of cattle, sheep, and doves,
and his overturning of the stalls of the moneychangers,
was a symbolic action to demonstrate a deeper condemnation
of the system that required their presence in the first place.
It’s noteworthy that what Jesus said as he enacted this visual parable,
is different in John’s account compared to the other three gospels.
In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus declares,
“It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’;
but you have made it a den of robbers." (Matt. 21.13; Mar. 11.17; Lk. 19.46)
In the fourth gospel, by contrast,
Jesus makes no mention of either prayer or robbers.
Instead he cries:
‘Take these things out of here!
Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!’ (Jn. 2:16)
In John’s version of this story, it isn’t a critique of corrupt mismanagement,
but rather of the entire financial system
that had grown up around the presence of God;
it is a condemnation of the principle of buying forgiveness.
The presence of the animal-sellers and moneychangers
was a function of a system which said
that you had to make certain sacrifices in the Temple
if you were to be cleansed of your sin
and restored to a right relationship with God.
And the message of Jesus cleansing the temple
was not that the animal-sellers or moneychangers were inherently wicked,
they were simply providing an essential service,
for the smooth running of the temple system.
Rather, it was that very system itself came under Jesus’ condemnation,
because the witness of the sign of water into wine
had been that the blessings of a restored relationship with God
are to be freely and abundantly given to all,
and not contained and constrained within an economic system
which privileged the wealthy, and disadvantaged the vulnerable.
When Jesus says, ‘Stop making my Father's house a marketplace’,
the Greek word used here is emporion,
from which we get our word ‘emporium’
meaning a ‘centre of commerce’ or a ‘place of trading’.
The trigger for Jesus’ action in flipping tables and grabbing a whip,
was not sinful behaviour on the part of those trading in the temple,
but the very economic and religious system
that required their presence in the first place.
So when we look at who, or what, is under judgment here,
we find that it’s not individual people being whipped for their corruption.
This isn’t Jesus taking an action of anger
against acts of personal dishonesty.
Rather, it’s an act of condemnation against the system
that has turned the free and abundant grace of God
into an economic transaction that generates profit for the priests,
advantages the wealthy,
and keeps the poor far from God’s presence.
It would be very easy at this point
to find ourselves making analogies with Martin Luther,
railing against the selling of indulgences by the Catholic church,
and there are some strong similarities,
but where we need to depart from Luther,
is in the alignment he made between corrupt Catholicism
and what he regarded as Jewish legalism.
As we saw last week with the stone water jars,
Jesus was not condemning Judaism,
he was restoring it,
bringing it back to what it was always supposed to be,
which is a religion of grace,
founded on the gift of God’s presence to all people.
What was judged was not Judaism,
it was the Temple system;
which had turned the gracious gift of the covenant
into a transactional system to the benefit of the privileged.
This condemnation of the Temple becomes even clearer
in the exchange which follows,
where Jesus makes a parallel between the Temple and his own body.
It’s important for us to realise
that Jesus is not here casting himself as a temple-destroyer.
He does not say that he will violently destroy the temple.
Rather, he says to the priests,
‘destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up’,
and we are invited, as readers of the gospel,
to realise that he is speaking not about the Jerusalem Temple at all,
but of his own body, the new revelation of God’s presence on earth.
The Temple had become a system of violence,
a system of oppression,
and the original readers of John’s gospel would have known
that the temple was, in fact, destroyed by the Romans,
some thirty years after the death of Jesus.
And the author of the gospel is inviting his readers
to make a comparison between the violent end of the temple system,
and the violent death of Jesus on the cross.
The oppressive system of religious exclusion
that had grown up around the presence of God in the Temple
met its violent end at the hands of the Romans, never to be rebuilt.
And although the body of Jesus,
the nonviolent revelation of God’s abundant grace for all,
also had its moment of violence at the hands of the Romans on the cross,
the testimony of the faithful was that this was not the end.
The cleansing of the temple is therefore to be understood
as an enacted parable of the crucifixion,
as a sign of the new way that God is present with people.
No longer is God to be made known through exclusive institutions,
no longer is God to be sold for profit,
no longer will God be complicit in systems of exploitation
Rather, God is found in the abundant sign
of wine, freely given to all,
and the blood of Christ on the cross, freely given for all.
And the people of God, the church of Christ,
continually need to re-hear and re-learn
the lesson of the cleansing of the Temple,
if we are to remain faithful to the revelation of God in Jesus.
It is too easy, I think, for us to become focussed
on the preservation of our institutions,
too easy for us to seek the preservation of our Temple,
too easy for us to fall into the trap
of monetising that which God would give freely to all.
Over the years here at Bloomsbury,
we’ve had to decline or terminate bookings
from groups who are charging to supply a religious experience
which we believe should be freely available.
And it is of fundamental importance to us
that access to worship in our church
is never a matter of payment.
The wealthy do not get more privileged access to God than the less wealthy.
But as we consider Jesus’ enacted parable of judgment
against the Temple in Jerusalem,
we do need to ask ourselves honestly
whether there are barriers
that nonetheless creep into our institutional life?
We need to keep ourselves honest
about, for example, our attitudes towards wealth and education,
or race, gender, and sexuality.
On the whole, I think, Bloomsbury does pretty well
at keeping the barriers to full inclusion in church life quite low.
I could certainly point at other churches who preach a prosperity Gospel,
who will only elect middle-class people to leadership,
and who exclude either explicitly or implicitly
on the basis of certain essential characteristics.
But only those who are without sin,
can cast stones at others for their sin;
and none of us are without sin.
So this is an invitation for us to consider our own situation,
and to begin to identify those barriers
that we continue to construct or perpetuate within our own community;
barriers which keep people from God,
the negotiating of which turns the house of God into a marketplace.
And it is an invitation for us to think once again
about what it means for us to be followers of Jesus,
the one who absorbs the violence of the cross
turning the certainty of death into the possibility of new life.
It is in invitation for us to consider what it means for us to be a people of peace
who nonetheless take action to challenge those systems of oppression
that embody oppression and exploitation in our society.
If the blessing of life in all its fulness, that we say we believe in,
is not experienced abundantly by all, without exception,
(and I’m afraid it is not),
then we still have a task before us.
Our involvement in London Citizens,
is one of the best ways I know
of turning the world as it is, into the world as it should be.
It is a mechanism for challenging the injustices of our city in the name of Christ,
and building a society where the poor and vulnerable are lifted up.
From welcoming refugees, to promoting fair employment practice,
to lifting people out of fuel poverty
to addressing our carbon emissions,
to building a community where all are listened to
and where the voices of the oppressed are raised up,
the partnerships we have through community organising
take us close to the heart of Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem.
There will be plenty of opportunities this coming year
for us to take our place as a church alongside others
as together we embody the good news of Christ
in a world of inequality and injustice.
So, who’s up for overturning a few tables in 2022?
[1] https://www.bloomsbury.org.uk/who-would-jesus-shoot/
“The next time someone asks you ‘What Would Jesus Do?’
Remind them that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip
is within the realm of possibilities.”
It’s funny, it’s snappy, and it nicely punctures the façade
of Charles Wesley’s ‘Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild’.
The subtext is clear:
Christians might be all, ‘turn the other cheek’…
but don’t count on it!
Sometimes they can get shouty and punchy too.
But I have to say that I find this rather disturbing,
and the reason it disturbs me,
is to do with a podcast I’ve been listening to, which I’ve mentioned before,
about the rise and fall of Mars Hill church in Seattle,
whose pastor Mark Driscoll notoriously promoted
what he described as a more aggressive form of Christianity.
His critique of mainstream churches was that they promoted a weak, passive faith,
and that if people who lived in the ‘real world’ were to find Christ,
they needed to meet a Christ who could hold his own under any circumstances.
In other words, they needed a Christ
who could flip tables and chase people with a whip.
In support of this macho, cage-fighter Jesus,
Driscoll turned to the book of Revelation,
a text almost certainly known to the author of John’s gospel.
Driscoll says:
‘In Revelation (the last book of the New Testament),
Jesus is a prize-fighter with a tattoo down His leg,
a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed.
That is the guy I can worship.
I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ
because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.’
Similarly, in his sermon on the cleansing of the temple,
delivered against a backdrop image of a large whip,
Driscoll says the following:
“Here comes Jesus and he is furious, he is angry…
Now some of you will be very surprised to hear that Jesus got angry
because you have wrongly perceived
that Christianity just means that you be nice.”
What may not surprise you, hearing this,
is that his 15,000 strong church closed down in 2014,
over accusations that its pastor engaged in persistent bullying
both of staff members and of people from the congregation.
Now, I need to be careful here,
because I am very aware that only one who is without sin
should cast a stone at another for their sin,
and so I don’t want to get too drawn into a direct critique of Mark Driscoll,
who I’m sure has many redeeming qualities.
My critique, rather, is of the attempt to shape Christianity,
as a religion of hyper-masculine aggression;
this is a project which I think fundamentally undermines the witness of Jesus
as the one who’s life, death, and resurrection bring an end to violence.
What is at stake here, as far as I’m concerned, is something that really matters,
because it takes us right to the heart
of what it actually means to be a Christian.
Here at Bloomsbury we have long taken the view that we are a ‘peace church’:
we have our peace candle lit each week,
we sell white poppies in the run up to Remembrance Sunday,
and we hear sermons on the importance of taking nonviolent action.
Of course, not all Christians agree,
with many Christians drawing on Augustine’s Just War Theory,
to argue that there are circumstances where it is entirely appropriate
for a Christian to engage in violence and warfare.
Indeed, many early Baptists took this position,
and fought on the side of Cromwell in the wars of the seventeenth century;
similarly many from this church
fought in the two world wars of the twentieth century,
and many of us will know, love, and respect people
who serve in the armed forces today.
So, to suggest that we worship a nonviolent God,
made known in the person of a nonviolent Jesus,
and that this means those who follow that revelation,
should also be nonviolent people,
is not an uncontroversial statement.
Some of you may remember a few years ago,
Bloomsbury was involved in putting together a debate
entitled ‘Who Would Jesus Shoot?’,
which explored in detail the discussions around Christian nonviolence,
and I’ve put this on our church website if you want to listen to it again.[1]
And it strikes me that any attempt to argue for Christian nonviolence
must grapple with what is going on
in the cleansing of the temple,
which is the single event in the ministry of Jesus,
where he gets anywhere near an act of violence.
What revelation of God are we seeing here,
as God is revealed in the life and ministry of Jesus?
And what does it say to us
about how we might live as followers of Jesus?
This is one of those rare stories that appears in all four gospels,
although its placement in the timeline of Jesus’ life is different in John
compared to what we find in Matthew, Mark and Luke.
In the three synoptic gospels,
the cleansing of the temple occurs at the end of Jesus’ ministry,
and it is the trigger for the events that lead to his crucifixion.
But in the fourth gospel, it comes right at the start of his ministry,
immediately after the sign of water into wine.
This is no accident, because placing these two incidents side by side:
the blessing at the wedding in Cana of Galilee
and the condemnation of the Temple system in Jerusalem,
has the rhetorical effect of asking us to consider them together,
and it creates the beginning of an answer
to the question of where the presence of God can be found.
One might have expected that God would be found in the temple,
but it seems that the presence of God made known through Jesus
is rather to be found in the abundance of wine at a wedding reception.
I’ll resist enquiring too deeply as to whether this wedding party with lots of wine
could in fact have been considered a work event,
and will instead concentrate on what it meant
for a national system of governance to have so lost its credibility
that it deserved righteous condemnation from Jesus!
Who says times have changed!?
In those times, the institutions of the state and the faith
were deeply intertwined,
even more so than in our country where Bishops still get seats in House of Lords.
In the first century, the national influence and importance of the priests,
was much more like this country in the middle ages,
with civil power and religious power in a symbiotic relationship.
And in that context, the Temple should have been the place of divine encounter,
it should have been the place where God’s blessing was made available for all,
and it should also have been the place that defended justice for the weak,
the place where the vulnerable could come for sanctuary.
Certainly, it should have been a house of prayer,
but from that prayer should have flowed the abundant blessing
of new life and hope for all those seeking God.
But the revelation of God in Jesus
was that blessing of abundance was not, in fact, found in the Temple in Jerusalem,
rather it was experienced at a party in Cana of Galilee.
The Temple had become a place where the wealthy could gain easy access to God,
but the poor faced often insurmountable costs to purchase their sacrifices.
The Temple was not a place where God was available to all,
it was a place of benefit for the few, not the many.
Wine at a wedding, given freely to all, regardless of who they are,
is, it seems, a much better sign of God’s intent and God’s grace.
There is something important here that the author of the gospel wants us to grasp,
about the revelation of God in the person, life, and ministry of Jesus:
and this is that God will no longer be contained or constrained
within religious or structural systems;
the blessings of God were no longer the exclusive property of the elite,
the abundance of God was no longer the preserve of the capital city in the south.
Jesus’ condemnation of the sellers of cattle, sheep, and doves,
and his overturning of the stalls of the moneychangers,
was a symbolic action to demonstrate a deeper condemnation
of the system that required their presence in the first place.
It’s noteworthy that what Jesus said as he enacted this visual parable,
is different in John’s account compared to the other three gospels.
In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus declares,
“It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’;
but you have made it a den of robbers." (Matt. 21.13; Mar. 11.17; Lk. 19.46)
In the fourth gospel, by contrast,
Jesus makes no mention of either prayer or robbers.
Instead he cries:
‘Take these things out of here!
Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!’ (Jn. 2:16)
In John’s version of this story, it isn’t a critique of corrupt mismanagement,
but rather of the entire financial system
that had grown up around the presence of God;
it is a condemnation of the principle of buying forgiveness.
The presence of the animal-sellers and moneychangers
was a function of a system which said
that you had to make certain sacrifices in the Temple
if you were to be cleansed of your sin
and restored to a right relationship with God.
And the message of Jesus cleansing the temple
was not that the animal-sellers or moneychangers were inherently wicked,
they were simply providing an essential service,
for the smooth running of the temple system.
Rather, it was that very system itself came under Jesus’ condemnation,
because the witness of the sign of water into wine
had been that the blessings of a restored relationship with God
are to be freely and abundantly given to all,
and not contained and constrained within an economic system
which privileged the wealthy, and disadvantaged the vulnerable.
When Jesus says, ‘Stop making my Father's house a marketplace’,
the Greek word used here is emporion,
from which we get our word ‘emporium’
meaning a ‘centre of commerce’ or a ‘place of trading’.
The trigger for Jesus’ action in flipping tables and grabbing a whip,
was not sinful behaviour on the part of those trading in the temple,
but the very economic and religious system
that required their presence in the first place.
So when we look at who, or what, is under judgment here,
we find that it’s not individual people being whipped for their corruption.
This isn’t Jesus taking an action of anger
against acts of personal dishonesty.
Rather, it’s an act of condemnation against the system
that has turned the free and abundant grace of God
into an economic transaction that generates profit for the priests,
advantages the wealthy,
and keeps the poor far from God’s presence.
It would be very easy at this point
to find ourselves making analogies with Martin Luther,
railing against the selling of indulgences by the Catholic church,
and there are some strong similarities,
but where we need to depart from Luther,
is in the alignment he made between corrupt Catholicism
and what he regarded as Jewish legalism.
As we saw last week with the stone water jars,
Jesus was not condemning Judaism,
he was restoring it,
bringing it back to what it was always supposed to be,
which is a religion of grace,
founded on the gift of God’s presence to all people.
What was judged was not Judaism,
it was the Temple system;
which had turned the gracious gift of the covenant
into a transactional system to the benefit of the privileged.
This condemnation of the Temple becomes even clearer
in the exchange which follows,
where Jesus makes a parallel between the Temple and his own body.
It’s important for us to realise
that Jesus is not here casting himself as a temple-destroyer.
He does not say that he will violently destroy the temple.
Rather, he says to the priests,
‘destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up’,
and we are invited, as readers of the gospel,
to realise that he is speaking not about the Jerusalem Temple at all,
but of his own body, the new revelation of God’s presence on earth.
The Temple had become a system of violence,
a system of oppression,
and the original readers of John’s gospel would have known
that the temple was, in fact, destroyed by the Romans,
some thirty years after the death of Jesus.
And the author of the gospel is inviting his readers
to make a comparison between the violent end of the temple system,
and the violent death of Jesus on the cross.
The oppressive system of religious exclusion
that had grown up around the presence of God in the Temple
met its violent end at the hands of the Romans, never to be rebuilt.
And although the body of Jesus,
the nonviolent revelation of God’s abundant grace for all,
also had its moment of violence at the hands of the Romans on the cross,
the testimony of the faithful was that this was not the end.
The cleansing of the temple is therefore to be understood
as an enacted parable of the crucifixion,
as a sign of the new way that God is present with people.
No longer is God to be made known through exclusive institutions,
no longer is God to be sold for profit,
no longer will God be complicit in systems of exploitation
Rather, God is found in the abundant sign
of wine, freely given to all,
and the blood of Christ on the cross, freely given for all.
And the people of God, the church of Christ,
continually need to re-hear and re-learn
the lesson of the cleansing of the Temple,
if we are to remain faithful to the revelation of God in Jesus.
It is too easy, I think, for us to become focussed
on the preservation of our institutions,
too easy for us to seek the preservation of our Temple,
too easy for us to fall into the trap
of monetising that which God would give freely to all.
Over the years here at Bloomsbury,
we’ve had to decline or terminate bookings
from groups who are charging to supply a religious experience
which we believe should be freely available.
And it is of fundamental importance to us
that access to worship in our church
is never a matter of payment.
The wealthy do not get more privileged access to God than the less wealthy.
But as we consider Jesus’ enacted parable of judgment
against the Temple in Jerusalem,
we do need to ask ourselves honestly
whether there are barriers
that nonetheless creep into our institutional life?
We need to keep ourselves honest
about, for example, our attitudes towards wealth and education,
or race, gender, and sexuality.
On the whole, I think, Bloomsbury does pretty well
at keeping the barriers to full inclusion in church life quite low.
I could certainly point at other churches who preach a prosperity Gospel,
who will only elect middle-class people to leadership,
and who exclude either explicitly or implicitly
on the basis of certain essential characteristics.
But only those who are without sin,
can cast stones at others for their sin;
and none of us are without sin.
So this is an invitation for us to consider our own situation,
and to begin to identify those barriers
that we continue to construct or perpetuate within our own community;
barriers which keep people from God,
the negotiating of which turns the house of God into a marketplace.
And it is an invitation for us to think once again
about what it means for us to be followers of Jesus,
the one who absorbs the violence of the cross
turning the certainty of death into the possibility of new life.
It is in invitation for us to consider what it means for us to be a people of peace
who nonetheless take action to challenge those systems of oppression
that embody oppression and exploitation in our society.
If the blessing of life in all its fulness, that we say we believe in,
is not experienced abundantly by all, without exception,
(and I’m afraid it is not),
then we still have a task before us.
Our involvement in London Citizens,
is one of the best ways I know
of turning the world as it is, into the world as it should be.
It is a mechanism for challenging the injustices of our city in the name of Christ,
and building a society where the poor and vulnerable are lifted up.
From welcoming refugees, to promoting fair employment practice,
to lifting people out of fuel poverty
to addressing our carbon emissions,
to building a community where all are listened to
and where the voices of the oppressed are raised up,
the partnerships we have through community organising
take us close to the heart of Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem.
There will be plenty of opportunities this coming year
for us to take our place as a church alongside others
as together we embody the good news of Christ
in a world of inequality and injustice.
So, who’s up for overturning a few tables in 2022?
[1] https://www.bloomsbury.org.uk/who-would-jesus-shoot/
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