Silent No Longer
Third Sunday in Lent, March 7, 2021
Exodus 20:1-17 • John 2:13-22
Today’s Gospel story of table-toppling Jesus appears in all four Gospels. In John’s Gospel, it appears early in Jesus’ ministry, after he turns water into wine at the wedding feast. In the synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – it appears late in Jesus’ ministry during the final week of his life. It is something, isn’t it, when we see this sort of unsettling story of Jesus in all four of the Gospels? The Gospels’ authors may describe it differently; there may be different emphases. But it is important enough to be referenced in all four of the Gospels.
At the Passover, Jerusalem would have been packed with hundreds of thousands of people making a pilgrimage to the temple. An exploitive economy had grown up around the temple. The moneychangers were charging a rate of interest that hurt the poor the most, and those who sold doves – the sacrifice of the poor – were marking up the prices. It was a little economic system that surely met a need, but that did so at the cost of exploiting people, especially the most vulnerable. The religious authorities had acquiesced to its existence. They remained silent knowing of its exploitive practices.
Enter Jesus. In a grand display of holy outrage, Jesus makes a whip of cords, drives out the animals, pours out the coins of the moneychangers, flips over their tables, and names this unholy economy. And Jesus confronted the authorities who remained silent in the face of exploitation and injustice, and he yelled at those selling the sacrifice of the poor: “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”
Jesus’ actions show that true worship is not worship that ignores and remains silent before economic, social, and political forces that take advantage of the most vulnerable, and that fail to uphold the dignity of God’s people. True worship, Jesus shows us, is a worship that speaks truth to power. True worship seeks a social life and order that honors and keeps the covenant among God’s people, a covenant handed down by God who is at the center of temple worship – the God who brought God’s people out of Egypt and freed them from Pharaoh’s bondage, giving them the law that they might be liberated and live in solidarity with one another. Despite such a gift, injustice abounds, the poor are taken advantage of, and the temple authorities remained silent and content to allow things to remain as they were.
The first episode of the PBS documentary “The Black Church” focuses on the economic, social, and political institution of slavery in the American colonies. Enslaved peoples were brought here, kept in awful conditions, sold as chattel, and were forced to spend their lives in inhumane conditions. While Anglican missionaries in the colonies advocated for slaves to be recognized as human so that they could be baptized, there was no recognition that their humanity should entitle them to freedom. While black slaves were allowed to become Christian, their white slave masters taught them only a version of Christianity that showed Jesus as meek, mild, and submissive. The slave trade, the exploitation of human beings, was a social, economic, and political system that the Church colluded with, sometimes through its vocal support of slavery and other times by virtue of its silence.
According to Rev. Dr. William Barber, “Slavemaster religion had a strange morality that somehow you could worship on Sunday and still have slaves on Monday. But as we would say today, those preachers were not practicing religion. They were practicing racism under the cover of religion. We still see some of that today.”
Yes, this kind of religion in America didn’t go away with the end of slavery. Many Christian church leaders left unquestioned social, economic, and political systems that kept black Americans in subjugation, oppressed by Jim Crow era laws, and disenfranchised through the Civil Rights era. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote:
‘In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular. ... So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent--and often even vocal--sanction of things as they are.’
The temple authorities were silent in the face of the exploitive economy at its doorstep – things as they are. White churches and Christians were silent in the face of the dehumanizing institution of slavery – things as they are – in the era of Jim Crow – things as they are – through the Civil Rights movement – things as they are – and today. Things as they are.
Silence in the sanctuary effectively “sanctions things as they are,” and that kind of silence is as political as speaking about things as they should be – things as God has promised. If the table-toppling Jesus teaches us something, maybe it is that we cannot justify silence. We have learned that we cannot be silent to things as they are. We cannot be silent in the face of systemic racism and racial disparities in income, health, education, employment, and opportunity. We cannot be silent before a criminal justice system and criminal laws that lead to racial minorities being incarcerated at higher rates than white Americans. We cannot be silent before these realities and live into our Baptismal Covenant. We cannot be silent before these realities and participate in the mission of the Church. We cannot be silent before these realities and build Beloved Community. We must speak against injustice. We must act against injustice. And, so, let us; and “may the words of [our] mouth[s] and the meditation[s] of [our] heart[s],” and the work of our hands, “be acceptable in your sight O Lord, [our] strength and [our] redeemer.” Amen.