Margie Quinn
I was six months into my last job at Westminster Presbyterian Church when the pandemic hit. This being my first job out of seminary, I already had no idea what I was doing. Then in March 2020, at the onset of lockdown, it appeared that none of us knew what we were doing. The physical church building shut its doors and for the rest of the year, the sign that read “Westminster Gathers Here” could have very well read, “Westminster wants to gather here, but it’s complicated so we’re gonna press pause on gathering here, and we know many of you are emailing us wondering why we can’t just gather here, but we are going to creatively figure out how to gather here metaphorically so that none of us feel isolated.”
We pondered alternatives to doing church the “normal” way. You know what makes people feel seen and connected, together even when we’re not together? Zoom. Have you ever tried to sing a hymn with sixty other people over Zoom? Have you ever prayed on Zoom, your roommate watching tv in the other room, the neighbor’s dog barking incessantly outside of your window? Have you ever preached in an empty sanctuary, having to hold back the “Can I get an Amen’s?” because no, no you can’t?
The pandemic left many of us asking, “What does it mean to be the church today?”
In our passage this morning, this question could have easily slipped out of Jesus’s mouth as he left the Temple in a huff, clearly distraught that the place he had traveled to in order to observe the Passover feast, didn’t feel like church. Why didn’t it?
Let’s break it down: In every other gospel reading, this story takes place at the end of Jesus’s ministry but in John, it takes place at the beginning, occurring right after Jesus turns water into wine at a wedding. It is as if John wants us to know from the jump that the Word became flesh and lived among us; not above us or away from us, not only in a Temple with us, but outside of one, too.
We gotta get a few things straight in this story. A lot of people misinterpret who they deem the “bad guys” in the Temple. This story paints the Jewish people as greedy money changers, selling animals and making the church feel more like a marketplace than a house of worship. In reality, these people were actually necessary for the functioning of the Temple. Money changers were there to make sure that the people coming had the right currencies. The temple tax required a half shekel. You couldn’t pay with any other currency so just like my favorite Vietnamese place in Nashville, you could go to the ATM in the store and get cash.
The animal sellers were there because a major ritual in the Temple was the sacrificing of animals. You could bring your own animals in, yes, but depending on where you lived or what you did for work, that may not have been possible. The animal sellers were there to facilitate the use of the temple, not stand in the way.
And, in reality, Herod had begun a massive restoration and expansion of the Temple in order to win over his “ungrateful” subjects. So we’re 46 years into that project, which may feel about the same amount of time that construction projects at churches feel. Really, things going on in the Temple walls made practical sense. They all served as ways to ensure that people could be in the building together to worship.
And, not to be misinterpreted either, Jesus does not enter the scene as an outsider opposing the Jews, but as an insider himself. We often make the mistake of stripping Jesus of his Jewish identity, an enemy of the Jews, but he is a participant. A faithful parishioner in his own right, Jesus looks around at the hoops people have to jump through to even worship together–making sure they have the right currency, paying for animals who don’t have any blemishes so that they can sacrifice them–and gets angry. Don’t you love Angry Jesus? “No!” he says. “We shouldn’t have to make a marketplace out of a place of worship! And we shouldn’t have to rely on experiencing the presence of God in a building. Here’s a little foreshadowing for y’all: The Zeal for your house will consume me.”
Destroy this Temple, he demands, and in three days, I’m gonna raise it up. The people hearing this are thinking, as I would, that he is going to literally destroy the building, His fellow Jews respond: This has been under construction for 46 years. We had to do countless capital campaigns to fund this thing. It has smelled like paint in here forever. You’re not knocking this thing down. And there’s no way you could raise it up in three days.
But, we quickly learn, Jesus wasn’t speaking about the physical temple. Scripture says he was speaking of the temple of his body.
Jesus challenges the very physical location where his people gather and literally shakes the foundation of their faith. Like the prophets in the Old Testament, Amos and Jeremiah, he challenges the church’s authority and offers his own spiritual hot take: You don’t need to look for the presence of God in here, because you’re looking at him right here.
Jesus is the place where God’s presence dwells now. Like the prophets, he serves as the mouthpiece for God but he doesn’t just speak God’s word, he is God’s word.
Church happens here, within us, he seems to be saying. Church is the bodies we inhabit, the love we give toward self, neighbor, enemy. Church may gather here but then Church goes out of here, to be the literal body of Christ in the world.
When the Samaritan woman asks him about the proper place to worship a few chapters later, Jesus responds by blowing her understanding of worship open. Worship can’t be restricted to any physical site, he tells her, it happens in spirit and truth. God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth. Notice how he doesn’t say “God is bricks and mortar…”
The surprise in today’s gospel reading is that Jesus says that the transcendent is present in his body. The gospel of John makes this claim, that a human body — unique but also a lot like your body or mine — is the holy place of God. Jesus was not just “wearing” a human body like a set of clothes. He was a human body, as inseparable from his body as you are from yours. And God was inseparable from him.
So, what does it mean to be church today? Is church this sanctuary filled with gorgeous morning light? It is the bread and juice you take week after week with people you like and people you don’t? Is it the beds you make for our homeless neighbors on Thursdays at Room in the Inn? Is it the holy music you hear from such gifted voices on Sunday morning? Certainly Vine Street gathers here.
And also: during the pandemic, I came to realize that church happens out there, too. It happened in the Bruegger’s Bagels parking lot, where me and a group of high school girls would sit in a giant circle, yelling our stories from the week, pulling down our masks to laugh. It happened at every park in Nashville, when I would meet with our youth for “Walk, Bike, and Worship.” It happened when we drove around to every Senior in high school’s house, in a line of cars, honking and leaving gifts in their yard, shouting “Congrats!” at them as they waved from a window. It happened on the steps of the church one Christmas Eve, singing in the freezing cold as snow fell.
I can’t know where you feel the presence of God. But today I feel the freedom, through Jesus’s words, to look around for it outside of church. This week, it happened at the Capitol as hundreds of people–students, clergy, parents, doctors, teachers–gathered to advocate for safer gun laws. It happened at a vigil last Sunday night, when people from all over Nashville gathered to honor the life of a non-binary teenager killed that week. It happened in the sunset on my drive home. It happened when my puppy looked at me with love, even though I’m not always good at looking at other people with love. God’s presence was in all of this. Church happened here, too.
This Lenten season, we don’t have to limit the presence of God to one place. We can trust that the presence of God made manifest in the body of Christ begins and ends in the body. And, as Mary Hinkle Shore writes, “we follow the body of Jesus as he travels to Jerusalem, as his hands braid pieces of rope into a whip to herd cattle and sheep out of the temple, as his knees bend to the feet of the disciples to wash them. We watch him eat and drink with his friends, and we follow him to the garden, where the bodies of his disciples unsuccessfully fight off sleep while Jesus sweats through a prayer that he might not have to endure the torture in his immediate future. We see him beaten, crucified, taken down from the cross, and laid in a tomb. And in the stories of his resurrection, he is still a body — huggable, touchable, scarred, and eating.”
Still a body. A body, who, as John says, was raised from the dead after three days, not to build another Temple but to be the Temple. In our passage this morning, it says, “His disciples remembered that he had said this.” After he was raised, his disciples remembered that he said his body was the temple. Will you remember that he said this? Will you try to embody the presence of God with me? The presence of God in you–I see it. The presence of God in me–can you see it?
May it be so.