House Cleaning (or Whipped Into Shape)

At first glance, it’s hard to see it any other way. Jesus seems to have thrown a fit. (See The Cleansing of The Temple- John 2:13-22. There do seem to be aspects of Jesus’ behaviour that would have undermined his credibility as a proper Sunday School teacher.

How are we to view this? Christian apologists over the centuries have tried to downplay Jesus’ apparent burst of anger here by calling it something else. It was, of course, ‘righteous indignation’, not anger per se. It was ‘a passionate protest’, even ‘a symbolic gesture of messianic purification.’ All of these are decent thoughtful interpretations. The Gospel of John is in fact quite clear in interpreting the temple cleansing metaphorically: the “temple”, we are told, is Jesus’ own body enduring a portion of the necessary death-resurrection cycle! But it also seems to me that there’s no getting around it: Jesus was, as they sometimes say, pissed off. Was that a GOOD thing?

There is medical evidence to suggest that the kind of personality that repeatedly represses his or her anger is the kind of person that gets quite sick. So for a time, the dominant psychological theory said pretty much categorically that if you’re angry, you need to express it. Punch pillows. That sort of thing. And yet ‘expressing’ it constantly or cavalierly only made things worse, much increasing the amount of irritability, irrationality, and ill-health that got spread around in ourselves and in society. Since practice makes perfect, a much-practiced rage produces a near-perfect rage-aholic. Nurturing revenge fantasies increases blood pressure and other heart disease risk factors. As the old Chinese proverb puts it, “The person who seeks revenge should dig two graves.” Two graves at the very minimum. If you happen to be a head of state intent on starting a war somewhere, we’re talking easily scores of thousands of graves.

What we do with our anger matters. Maybe Jesus showed us the middle way- neither repressing anger nor letting anger go randomly unchanneled.

Now I suppose if you were one of the money changers in the temple at the time, you would think Jesus WAS ‘out of control’. You might even conclude that Jesus was being quite violent. I don’t think that was the case. In my opinion, what Jesus was about there had nothing at all to do with personal grudges or revenge fantasies or throwing temper tantrums. Jesus’ life and teachings as a whole consistently represented just the opposite- the forgiving of others, the love even of enemies. Overcoming evil with love is THE bedrock ethic of Jesus. And forgiveness- it is FAR more essential to our long-term health and ethical wholeness than is our anger.

But: are spontaneous bursts of anger sometimes appropriate? Well, maybe. If so, when? Why? To what end? Is anger okay when it’s channelled to embolden a broad, unselfish purpose, but not okay when it nurses individual grudges and feeds petty self-aggrandizement?

Maybe Jesus’ demonstrative whip-welding house cleaning wasn’t a spontaneous act at all. Maybe it was planned. Pre-meditated. Maybe Jesus had long pondered and prayed about how exactly he was to direct his passionate longing for social justice, and the Holy Spirit led him with clear intentionality to this very moment and place, to a moment and place in which he engages in a dramatic act of civil disobedience. He could have known it would have an impact, that it would be powerfully transformative for many as well as extremely dangerous to himself personally.

If that WAS the case, if he DID plan it that way, what was Jesus trying to accomplish? And why did Jesus pick the Jerusalem temple, of all places, to express himself so vehemently? The whole temple cult of required blood sacrifice could well have caused Jesus, who believed in a God of love and loved God’s creatures, no end of grief. The blood of pure and innocent doves, goats, and cattle were being sold and slaughtered there every day- it was as if one had to twist God’s angry arm and appease God’s angry wrath with the spilling of more and more blood. “I hate, I despise your ritual sacrifices! I require mercy, not sacrifice!” said the Old Testament prophet Micah way back when. Jesus was right in sync with that in-your-face yet compassionate prophetic tradition.

Jesus was also protesting economic inequality. The majority of the peasant pilgrims who came to the temple were extremely poor, yet the priestly establishment rigged the system so animals had to be bought in the temple marketplace at fixed high prices if they were to pass inspection as unblemished offerings. A high commission was also charged on the exchange of Roman money required for monetary offerings- the commission alone cost two or three days wages. This atmosphere of unbridled capitalism had taken over the house of God, making quiet, focused prayer impossible. Even the very design of the place was rigidly insider/outsider- it did not allow Gentiles to enter at all- never mind that the temple’s original intent was to have been a beacon of light to all nations. Even among the Jews, only the most wealthy elites were allowed to approach its innermost sanctums.

It COULD have been a spontaneous heart-felt reaction, kind of a crazy fit of zeal against the oppressiveness of it all. Such an interpretation endears Jesus to troubled souls everywhere. Twenty-plus centuries of certfiably crazy saints and slightly bonkers ‘beautiful losers’ have been drawn to this Jesus who didn’t quite function as he’s supposed to in society, and yet had something valuably counter-cultural to say and show it.

Of course, any unstable, hot-headed crank can overturn a few tables. Or holler at their spouses. Or upset a meeting in a burst of impatience or long-repressed resentment. None of these kinds of things are very helpful at all.

But what IF Jesus had carefully planned it from the start, not a temper tantrum, but a Holy Spirit-inspired creative act of public guerrilla theatre? What if it was a long thought out and prayed over, Jesus’ best next-to-the-last non-violent tactic against terribly entrenched cruelty and unfairness? I’m drawn to this particular interpretation.

“Experiencing indignation is one mode of being connected to others”, says Beverly Harrison. If we don’t feel anything at all, we just don’t care, we’re connected to nothing and to no one. But if we follow the Christ who upset the money-changers tables, we HAVE to care, we have to feel that things in life matter. “Anger is a vivid form of caring… It is evidence, therefore, of the grace of God.” (!) And though I don’t believe in making fetishes out of any of our emotions, least of all anger, with all its destructive overdone potential, nevertheless I realize anger can, at times, be cleansing and freeing and good. God gave us our emotions for good reasons. It just helps to understand something of the purpose for which they’re given. Anger’s not a great thing to just let rip willy-nilly. It needs to find its most useful channel and best calling.

Every time we pray, “Thy will be done!” and really mean it, we should be harnessing our anger for the good. Did we mean it when we prayed and sang it this morning?

But some may still be saying. DOES it really matter? Was it WORTH it for Jesus to have made this scene, to have gone momentarily bonkers in this act of defiance? What did it achieve besides making Jesus hated even more by those in authority who had vested interest in the status quo? Wasn’t this protest a futile gesture? A highly-disturbing absurdity?

So it seems yet today for many. We raise our voices, we join protests, we write letters to those in power, we direct plays, host fundraisers, act out our little scenes, and do the only things we know HOW to do again and again and again, trying to utilize our gifts to transform society and to built up the beloved alternative community. But where does it get us? Mostly our efforts appear to be futile: business as usual the very next day, or worse: maybe we face the wrath of those who don’t like one bit what we’re trying so very hard to do.

Speaking truth to power has never been a cakewalk. “Yet as followers of the Christ who threw his weight around in the temple, we cannot do anything less. We have a go. (And another, and another.) And we keep trusting that no effort we make will be wasted, that small deeds of compassionate outrage will continue to accumulate and eventually have their cumulative effect. We have no guarantee that we’ll see the results during our own lifetimes. But by faith we keep doing what we have to, knowing that each act of compassionate defiance, of angry love is received and blessed within the hidden management of the kingdom of God.”
-Textweek paraphrased sample material

I believe that when anger is directed against things instead of people, things, for example, like exploitation OF people, then we are onto something good. But anger has to be channelled, handled with care, sometimes curtailed, lest it get misdirected and become violent.

Ephesians tells it to us clearly: “Be angry. But do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger.” May it be so.

WHOSE & WHAT KIND of Cross?

I’ve been thinking a lot about paths we take in life, and how, when we don’t stay focused, we get confused, distracted or lost along the way.

The paths we take in life do very much matter. This is especially true when we go through big transition times in our lives. After a job ends, a child leaves home, or a spouse dies, we of course have to adjust to a whole new reality. Even as very GOOD changes come about: graduating, having a child, entering into retirement; in each instance, we remain for a while in an uncomfortable place and time of adjustment. “We’re (tempted to) think that making transitions in our lives is a two-step process,” says Tony Robinson. “There’s the old thing, and then, there’s the new. One reality ends, another begins. Actually, making transitions is always a three-step process. Step one- endings. Step two- adjustment. Step three- new beginnings. Because when former attachments, long-established patterns, relationships even, come to an end, we enter a kind of no-man’s land. We're traveling the territory of the "muddled middle" then, a via regativa, a betwixt and between time. We may not like that in betwixt time, but it’s necessary and impossible to rush. We have to be strong to adequately tolerate it. But it does us good when we accept, even honor such in between times. However uncomfortable, they tend to be times that motivation, innovation and revitalization best and most frequently simmer.

Symbolically, Lent is just such an honorable in-between time; a temporary do-without, neither fish nor fowl time, a necessary, often-uncomfortable, slow-simmering transitional time.

The season of Lent is a time tailor-made for facing new challenges. It was tough for the disciples to stay right there with Jesus as HE began to transition, as he began to turn his face toward Jerusalem, to non-violently confront head-on the threatened principalities and powers, those persons in positions of authority who were hell-bent on persecuting him and preventing his New Kingdom (or Commonwealth) from gaining adherence.

“Jesus began to teach his disciples that the Son of Man (or you can say ‘The Human One’) must undergo great suffering”. But what KIND of suffering is he talking about? He’s NOT referring here to the kinds of suffering ALL people to varying degrees endure in life, such as illness and the ravages of aging. In this wider context of a hurting humanity, Jesus was ONLY and ALWAYS about ALLEVIATING suffering! Most of the stories about Jesus up to this point in the gospel were HEALING stories! AlleviAtion of suffering, NOT, and in NO SENSE, any kind or degree of honoring, celebrating, or promoting suffering for its own sake. Jesus was not a masochist. He didn't mean to promote suffering or victimization of any kind; just the opposite. And yet: he knew that a particular KIND of suffering, that of persecution, would be coming his way, and coming too for his disciples, coming as a bi-product of keeping their focus on the godly, not the god-awful way.

So: given that no one, not even Jesus, WANTS to be persecuted: “Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.” Wouldn’t YOU do the same thing if your friend told you he was going to get brutally persecuted and killed? Wouldn’t that seem, at first hearing, just a wee bit awful? Wouldn’t you want, if you could, do anything BUT? “Then turning and seeing that his disciples were wavering, wondering what to believe, Jesus also rebuked Peter, saying, “Peter, get out of the way! Satan, get lost! You are setting your mind not on divine things but on all-too human things.”

Last Sunday I shared Dorothy L’s childhood horseback-riding story, of how her horse suddenly tried to take a quick short cut straight up the hillside, and she fell off. We’re all tempted to try to take shortcuts in the way we go as Christ’s disciples. But these shortcuts don’t work. We fall off our horse. We don’t get to the place we wanted to go.

So calling the crowd with his disciples, he said, “If any want to become my followers, then LET GO of your old ways, your old selves, and take up your own crosses.” Step 2- transition adjustment time- carry crosses. Notice please whose cross he instructs us to carry. Not somebody else’s, not even his, but OUR OWN. We live in a world in which all kinds of people carry, and even get hung up upon the wrong kinds of crosses. Oppressed people think they are to carry the cross of their oppressors. Battered women think they’re to carry the cross of their abusers. Jesus was never a promoter of carrying such crosses, and certainly not of being hung upon any such! He opposed all kinds of victimization! But since his means were consistent with the end he envisioned, he knew there would be consequences, side effects, reactionary backlashes by the threatened status quo. THAT kind of suffering, he showed us how to endure. Which in turn made it easier for us to get through transitions, grief, loses of other and of all kinds. But we were originally being tutored in how to endure a particular kind of suffering, that of persecution, because THAT was the KIND Jesus knew would be a byproduct of going his truth-telling non-violent kingdom-building way. He didn’t LIKE the side affects, but he showed us how to endure them. He showed us how to get through Lent and past Good Friday, the ONLY real way to Easter- step 3- new beginnings.

“For those who want to save their old lives will lose them, but those who are willing to lose their lives for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will find them.” “Finding yet losing, losing yet finding: this was the central paradox at the heart of Jesus’ teaching and living. Hoard you life and you will find that it somehow escapes through your clutching fingers. Share your life and you will find a whole new dimension of happiness has been born inside you.

“Jesus saw clearly that there was a contest going on in each of us; a contest between a false self and an authentic self.” -Textweek

It was always a question of what KIND of self. It was never about an inflated individualized ego. But neither was it ever a question of eliminating a sense of selfhood in all entirely.

“The false self is an omelette of raw ego mixed up with many distortions, false goals, pride, fear, desperation, and a greedy exploitation of all things and people.

“The authentic self is the flickering light of a deep beauty within us, it is a little christ reaching upwards and outwards, wanting to share itself with others and with God who is the miracle at the heart of all experience.” -Textweek

We meet the true Christ along the way, trying to teach us that by losing life we find it.

"For what will it profit us to gain the whole world but lose our own best lives and truest selves?”

The wider context is that of discipleship, of ever and always leaving old ways behind and following in a new way of healing and forgiveness, of alleviation of all unnecessary suffering. Taken out of context, we get to thinking Jesus is saying that he (and we) should just accept whatever suffering that comes our way as God’s will. Nothing could be further from the truth. But the old ways of the world, of the principalities and powers, will be thrashing about, doing thier god-awful damage yet for a while. And we still have get past the difficult side effects of faithfulness. We don’t have to go it alone. The Lenten transition path, the via negaiva, the wilderness way, the way of the cross: it has been gone on long before us, and will be followed long after. Even we who are here now, because we ARE the Body of Christ here now, go the ancient via negativa together. It is the part of the path that is bathed in shadows. It’s the murkier, low-lying section of trail we have to get through or around. On it, we look squarely at what is real, even when what is real is a very difficult thing. And somewhere along the prayerful way, we befriend the darkness. We get willing and able to be present to things that have only gotten in the way before: pain, emptiness, and sadness. We exercise our spiritual muscle along this path, knowing by faith what is beyond it. Let us not be afraid to carry our own crosses through.

Lead Us in The PATHS

“Lead me in the paths of right living for your holy name’s sake.” -Ps 23
“Teach me your ways, O God. Lead me in your paths.” -Ps 25


This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about paths (passageways, ways and means, directions, routes, trails, tracks)

This is important stuff, because however much we may have some very positive end in mind, and I think we’re pretty clear about our purpose, our vision, our goals here at Broadview Church, without a consistent, every-day means of orienting ourselves TOWARD that goal, we will, I can pretty much guarantee it, get lost along the way- or distracted or confused. We have to find the paths that actually get us, as a faith community, to the places we mean to go, and in a manner in which we mean to get there. To mean well is not enough. Well-meaning people are, as they say, a dime a dozen.

I remember the first time I went backpacking with my sister in the North Cascades. It was early summer. We were happily hiking up steep switchbacks leading southeast from somewhere above Marblemount towards Stehekin. We kept going higher and higher until we realized we were fully above the tree line, walking on snow, and that though the view was absolutely spectacular, we could no longer see the trail beneath our feet- it was completely buried in new snow. Somehow we had to get over the pass in front of us, but we didn’t know where the trail led through. My sister and I did our best to orient ourselves toward the end we had in mind, which in our case was Stehekin, and the ferry called the Lady of the Lake that would carry us down Lake Chelan to what there is of civilization on the other side of the Cascades. Orienting ourselves to that goal meant keeping in mind our southeasterly direction and making our way through the lowest lying passable terrain that still took in that same direction. Then on the other side, and this was the harder part, really, we had to somehow- mostly by trial and error in our case- find the trail again below the snowline.

When the path one is walking upon can no longer be seen with the naked eye, some other means of ‘seeing’ the way has to be employed. This may not seem like a situation we find ourselves in every day, but in a way, it is. Every day of our lives, if we want to get to godly instead of god-awful places in life, we have to orient ourselves around God. To focus on the godly goal, and to know that getting there will take some faithful, focused, and skillful traversing.

More low-lying sections of Western Washington trails, especially during springtime, often get flooded by melting snows. So it may be necessary to make or to take a trail around the trail, to traipse through on a higher drier makeshift route because the permanent route is temporarily way too muddy.

Maybe this is where poet Robert Frost says it best:
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


The paths we take in life matter. My friend Dorothy remembers riding on horseback along trails that used to traverse vast unfenced hilly parts of South Texas. Once, however, her horse was in a hurry, and went straight up a rather steep incline. Dorothy’s saddle wasn’t positioned tightly enough underneath her, so she fell off. Horses know what direction they’re inclined to head in, both in their going out and in their coming back home. But they also are known to take short cuts when they feel like it, whether good for the rider, or for the eroding land underneath their hoofs, or not.

Through the sagebrush that clings to N Central Washington hillsides, there are deer paths everywhere; we sometimes used to call them cow trails. People can follow them too. They’re like naturally ecologically appropriate labyrinths, because rather than making their way straight up a steep hillside, as horses or riders in a hurry sometimes do, these paths spiral longitudinally around steep hillsides. A deer path or cow trail serves its purpose best by allowing said deer or cow to take its time, to leisurely find food along the pathway. I get this visual picture here of what one of my heroes, American peacemaker, AJ Mustie used to say. He said, “There is no way TO peace; peace IS the way.” “All the way TO heaven IS heaven”, another once quipped. In other words, the means has to be consistent with the end. If our GOAL is peace with God, our WAY has to be peaceful and godly. We need to orient ourselves in the right direction in life, keeping our eyes on the prize. But we also need to respect the process of getting there, to love the way itself, not only the end. Maybe the cows and deer on their roundabout little trails are onto something. Cow trails may eventually get us somewhere, meandering in spirals slowly toward the top or to the bottom of the hillside, but they’re not well-suited for either the horse or human who’s in a hurry.

It’s important to find a path that serves its purpose well. At some points along life’s way, we’ll need to relax, take our time; at other points, we’ll need a much more focused sense of urgency. We may need to take the lowest ground or the highest ground, the quickest route, or the longest way around. It all depends. We encounter different terrain, different weather conditions along life’s way. We have to be flexible. We also have to stay focused. The means needs to stay consistent with the end.

Over time, the experience of various saints and sojourners began to coalesce into patterns, practices, disciplines, and orders others could look to and imitate. The Episcopal author and theologian Matthew Fox is best known for having made newly accessible four ancient medieval Christian vias, or ways; spiritual paths that saints and sojourners have tread upon for centuries. These four ways are the via positiva, the via negativa, the via creativa, and the via transformativa. The via positiva is the way that befriends creation. This is the deer trail, the cow path that meanders slowly along in the sunshine and wildflowers, enjoying the beauty of creation as it is, and doesn’t try to change a thing. This is the way of God incarnate, already realized in God’s created goodness. I like to think of it as Christmas energy- God being born and growing here among us. The via negativa befriends darkness. It is the muddier, low-lying trail that we somehow have to get through or around. This path accepts, examines things that sometimes get in the way, such as pain, emptiness, and sadness. For followers of the Way of Christ, it is seasonally appropriate just now, because it is the Lenten path, the wilderness way, the way of the cross. To go on this path takes the most courage because on it, we look squarely at what is real, even when what is real is a very difficult thing about our own selves. But it’s also a path that we need to go on, because- no pain, no gain- it makes us strong; we exercise our spiritual muscle along this path, knowing by faith what is beyond it, and keeping our eyes ever on that prize. The via creativa befriends our own ability to share with God in divine creativity. It “engages the creative flow of art, music, conversation, and writing.” It is Easter energy, it is resurrection newness, and it only comes in to us in its fullest glory after we’ve gone down the more-challenging Lenten paths of life. And finally, the via transformativa, which is about a God and a people of God making peace and justice in the world, making liberation and love through the never-ceasing movement of the Holy Spirit. It is Pentecost energy.

All of our seasons of Spirit: Lent, Easter, Pentecost, Christmas- have a hard-won wisdom and consistency about them. Our faith forebears were onto something. We have guides to help us walk down these paths. Some are living guides right here among us at Broadview Church.

I have good reason to believe that most of us, if our own hearts are at all in sync with the heart of God as it has beat in this faith community for lo, these eight some decades now, have no fear with regard to our ultimate destination. If we believe in a loving God, we know by faith that we’ll get somehow to that love. But meanwhile, we live in the mean time, and the mean time can be mean. So to get by, we have to orient ourselves to that loving end, ever utilizing ways and means consistent with our getting there.

Jesus is himself credited in the Gospel of John with having said, “I AM the way.” Those four little words contain a wealth of mystery, a cosmic kind of truth. The poet WH Auden elaborated on that cosmic mystery, when he rephrased it poetically: “He is the Way. Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness; You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.”

During the season of Lent that is before us, let us enter the wilderness way of unlikeness and adventure together.