Jesus went into
the temple, and began to cast out them that sold therein, and them that
bought; saying unto them, It is written, My house is the house of
prayer;
but ye have
made it the den of thieves.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SAINT LUKE 19.45, 46
Is there a place for commercial activity in the
church? Go to one of the pace-setting evangelical mega-churches, and you
may well find coffee bars, food courts, gift shops, athletic programs, day
care, auto repair and convenience banking, in buildings indistinguishable in
style from shopping malls; and with worship that consists in soft rock
praise choruses, ‘special music’, videos, and upbeat, therapeutic ‘messages’
relevant to the felt needs of the worshippers. Mega-churches are doing
this, because they have decided to package, market, and sell evangelical
faith to the religious consumers of America, using every tool that
management theory and social science provide. The danger in this
evangelistic strategy is that they may turn the bread of eternal life into
fast food for the soul, complete with empty calories and spiritual
trans-fats.
Go to the liberal protestant churches, on the other
hand, and you will rarely find such blatant commercialization. Worship is
usually conducted with a little more decorum; and if there is a gift shop,
the religious knick-knacks are in somewhat better taste. Yet the working
theology of such churches has been largely emptied of any distinctively
Christian content; and under a thin veneer of religion they purvey the
pieties of the secular world. If evangelical churches are literally
commercializing their religion, the liberal churches are doing so
metaphorically. Each may gain the world, but the danger remains, of losing
their own soul.
Surprisingly, however, there is a place for commerce
in the church; and today’s gospel and epistle lessons show us what it is.
The gospel lesson begins with Jesus approaching
Jerusalem for the last time. Looking down from the Mount of Olives he saw
the holy city; and the Temple itself, where God dwelt among his people
surrounded by a massive complex of buildings, glittering in white marble and
gilt bronze. Its courts were thronged with worshippers from around the
world, and armies of priests and levites attended to its sacrifices; its
treasury overflowed with wealth, and its officials walked in the corridors
of power: for the Temple was the heart of Israel, the centre around which
all Jewish life was organized. No mega-church of today could rival it.
Jesus loved the temple of God, and the holy city; but
the sight of it filled his eyes with tears; and he said, in broken phrases
of grief: “If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the
things which belong unto thy peace! But now they are hid from thine eyes”.
In Israel’s tradition, Jerusalem is the city of peace, within whose walls
God preserved his people in peace. But Jesus wept, because this city of
peace did not actually know the things which belonged unto its peace.
Deluded by a false sense of security, it was in fact headed for disaster, as
Jesus foresaw:
“For the days shall come upon thee, that thine
enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep
thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy
children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon
another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.” This
prophecy of Jesus was fulfilled within a generation, in the year 70, when
the legions of Rome destroyed the city and its temple, and deported its
people into slavery.
Jerusalem’s problem was ignorance, a refusal to know
“the time of its visitation”, and “the things which belong unto
[its] peace.” It is not that they were not told of these things. In
his gospel Jesus proclaimed the time of their visitation by God’s mercy; and
taught them the will of God for their peace; but his words fell on deaf
ears. They did not want to know. Wilful ignorance of the truth, then as
now, has dire consequences: rejecting the knowledge of salvation, Jerusalem
drew upon itself judgment.
You may well wonder how this could happen, in God’s
own city, the place of the Temple. In fact the Temple was the heart of the
problem, the centre of resistance to God’s saving will. The corruption of
every nation always begins in the corruption of its religion. The temple
was a perfect hive of religious activity: but there was no room in it for
the word of God; no place for repentance. Jesus found its courts filled
with the buying and selling of animals to be offered in sacrifice: a sign
of the corruption of Israel’s religion, its pandering to worldly agendas and
ambitions at the expense of the service of God. So with divine authority, “Jesus
… began to cast out them that sold therein, and them that bought, saying, It
is written, ‘My house is the house of prayer’: but ye have made it the den
of thieves”. And then, as St. Luke tells us, “he taught daily in the
temple”. Where buyers and sellers had done their business, the word of
God, unadulterated, unpackaged, unmarketed, was now proclaimed instead.
What Jesus drove out of the temple was one kind of
commerce. What he put in its place, however, was another kind of commerce,
a holy commerce between God and man, transacted in Jesus Christ, a commerce
in teaching and prayer. For in Jesus Christ, the word of God comes down
from above, teaching man God’s will, in which lies our peace. And in Jesus
Christ, the man’s word of prayer ascends on high, seeking peace according to
God’s will [1].
That is the true business of God’s people, willing what God wills, as set
forth in God’s word; willing the eternal good, which is God’s will. As
today’s collect puts it, in asking for such things as shall please God – in
willing his will -- do we obtain our petitions – the peace and happiness
which he gives. That is our business; and anything else is thievery and
fraud.
In today’s epistle lesson we find ourselves in
another city, Greek Corinth, one of the great commercial cities of the pagan
empire, notorious for its wealth, its luxurious lifestyles, and its sexual
decadence. (You should imagine something like Atlanta, only without Ted
Turner.) Yet in this unlikely place, the gospel of Jesus Christ had been
preached and believed. Formerly, St. Paul reminds the Christians of
Corinth, they had been led astray in the service of “dumb” and speechless
“idols”; but in the gospel of Jesus Christ they heard the word of the living
God, teaching them the knowledge of salvation; and by his Spirit they had
believed that word, and confessed Jesus as Lord. And they had been richly
endowed with manifold gifts of the Spirit, certain capacities for knowing,
speaking, and doing that bore witness to the truth and power of the Word of
God.
The gifts of the Spirit are necessarily manifold. As
St. Cyril of Jerusalem says, “One and the same rain comes down on all the
world, yet it becomes white in the lily, red in the rose, purple in the
violets and hyacinths, different and manifold in manifold species”. “For
the rain does not change…but adapts itself to the thing receiving it and
becomes what is suitable to each”. Likewise the Spirit gives himself
according to each man’s diverse capacities, and brings them to fulfilment in
proportion to his faith. So “there are diversities of gifts”, some
greater, some lesser; but all are to be honoured, for “all these worketh
that one and the self-same Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he
will”. They come from the same Spirit, and contribute, each in its own
specific way, to the common good, and to the glory of the one who gave
them.
Every gift is different; and no one has the capacity
to receive them all. It is only in and through the shared life of a
community, comprehending a diversity of gifts and vocations, that we are
able to possess a measure of the truth, and a measure of the good.
Therefore, the life of the church is a life of holy commerce, a communion of
saints in spiritual gifts and goods. In the unity of the Spirit what is
given to one becomes the common possession of all; and what is done by one
becomes profitable to all, through charity, “which seeketh not her own”.
For no one receives any gift of the Spirit purely for his own sake, but the
sake of the whole Church.
Today’s lessons show us, that there is not only a
vertical commerce between God and man through Jesus Christ, a commerce in
teaching and prayer; but also a horizontal commerce between Christians in
the Church, a commerce in spiritual gifts. The eternal good which we know
by faith in God’s word, and which we hope for in prayer, we must also will
for one another, and share with one another, in love and charity. Without
this commerce the Church is impoverished and dies, and ‘her children within
her’; but where this commerce flourishes, the church grows rich in the
things which belong unto her peace. And so for the sake of holy commerce,
the Church must drive out all other trade in worldly appetites and
ambitions; it must reserve the house of God for the sharing of the gifts of
the Word and Spirit, and not allow it to become a den of thieves.
At the beginning of this sermon, I made some sharp
remarks about the commercialization of religion in evangelical and liberal
churches. I said nothing about traditional Episcopalians: but we have no
reason for to be complacent. We may say the right things, and even believe
them; but the point is to do them; and there, I am afraid, we fall short.
All too often we are distracted from our soul’s true business, and know not
the time of our visitation. Let us pray for Christ to come again, to
cleanse the temples of our hearts from their commerce in worldly appetites
and ambitions; to make them houses of true teaching, and fervent prayer,
and mutual service, in faith, and hope, and charity. May he purify our
hearts, enlighten our minds, and make us partakers of his peace. Amen.
[1] Hooker. Laws. V. xxiii. P. 115.
The
term “commerce” or “commercium” is in fact part of the traditional
language of prayer, and is found, for instance, in the Gelasian
Sacramentary. Richard Hooker speaks of this “commerce” in a notable
passage on prayer, that also alludes to Jacob’s ladder (Gen 28) and
John 1.51:
“Between the throne of God in heaven and his Church upon earth here
militant if it be so that Angels have their continual intercourse,
where should we find the same more verified than in these two
ghostly exercises, the one Doctrine, and the other Prayer? For what
is the assembling of the Church to learn, but the receiving of
Angels descended from above? What to pray, but the sending of
Angels upward? His heavenly inspirations and our holy desires are
as so many Angels of intercourse and commerce between God and us.
As teaching bringeth us to know that God is our supreme truth; so
prayer testifieth that we acknowledge him our sovereign good.
…Prayer…showeth our concurrence with [God] in desiring that
wherewith his very nature doth most delight [viz, to impart virtue
unto things beneath it]”
