The Third Sunday in Lent

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

Listen. God is ready to speak. We don’t hear it today but the way God prepares to speak is truly awesome, awe-inspiring. Thunder rolled. Lightening flashed, the earth shook, and the bush burned but was not consumed. Not the still, small voice that Elijah heard. And Moses stands before God. And God speaks. These are the words God speaks, "I am the Lord your God…"

And God begins to reveal what it means to “walk in the light of the Lord God.” One of the central convictions of Jewish and Christian faith is that human life is to be lived before God and that such life has an order and structure, constituted by God’s commandments.

And lest there be any doubt about it, read Matthew 5:17 where Jesus tells us, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill.” The true meaning, the true power, the true impact of living within a God ordered life is made known to us in Jesus of Nazareth. He is the light of the world.

As the hymn goes, if you want to “walk as a child of the light, if you want to follow Jesus”, this is how you do it. You order your life according to the Word God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai. That’s what Jesus did. And he changed the nature of life. And when we do, it changes the nature of our lives.

The teacher Walter Brueggemann writes. “These commands might be taken not as a series of rules, but as a proclamation in God’s own mouth of who God is and how God shall be ‘practiced’ by this community of liberated slaves.”

“I am the Lord your God…” that’s who God is, and the next three commandments are about how live in relationship with God. The next have to do with living before God in relationship with those around us – our neighbors, our families, our people, and even those we do not consider as “our people.”

Reformer, John Calvin, described “three uses for the Ten Commandments. First, in showing us how we are to live before God and with neighbor, they expose our sin, cutting through our self-deception that we really are ‘good’ people and revealing some of the many ways in which our lives are not what they could be.

Ahhh. And that brings us to Lent – this season of repentance and reformation, our own reforming into being and living more like the one created and called by the Lord your God.

Second, Calvin says, “the Commandments serve an important civic function in that they restrain sin, which is never simply individual but always corporate, social, and institutional.”

What street scene of violence or distress or illness did you walk by, keeping on your way? Who did you NOT phone? Who did you NOT visit? Who did you show NO care or compassion? Corporately, socially, institutionally, why are we a people conditioned and trained to “walk on by’?

Finally, “the Commandments are our guide as we journey in our life before God and our life with our neighbors.”

They don’t show us what we must do or how we must live in order to receive God’s grace. They light our way and show us how we could live as people who have already been freely given God’s grace in Jesus Christ.

What happened to Jesus in our gospel reading today? Why did he get so riled up? The gospel of John today gives us a view of Jesus so clear that any portrait of a "gentle Jesus, meek and mild" smacks up against this Jesus: Jesus as an enraged, whip-wielding zealot.

He was

• Mad at the temple being turned into a marketplace.
• Mad at the money-changers who had turned a holy obligation into a lucrative profession.
• Mad at the Passover pilgrims, who saw the temple as a place to transact a business deal, not to remember God's holy works and feel God's holy presence.
• Mad at the priests, who had let their love of law and ritual take precedence over their love for God.
• Mad at all the pointless sacrifices that caused the temple mount to swim with the innocent blood of dead animals instead of shine with the living Spirit of God.

He was mad because he saw that the temple had been made profane. The worship of God was perverted; God’s people were cheated. God’s creation was violated. God’s people were not honored. God was neither being honored, nor God’s way being lived. And Jesus got mad. And Jesus cleaned house.

The Word of God on Mount Sinai tells God’s people the way to honor God and God’s people and God’s creation. And it does so for us today as well.

Some good Lenten questions for us raised by the scriptures today:

Do you have the ability, the faith, to get whip-cracking mad for God's sake? What do you have to see or to know or to feel to get you to act, to move, to take action, and to do the work needed to be done so that the one who tells us, "I am the Lord your God…" is honored in your life and in the life of the world? What needs to be cleaned out of our selves, our churches, our institutions, and our society in order to once again let God’s Holy Spirit blow free and breathe its Life into all life?

I commend to you the work of Lent. Listen. Hear what God’s Spirit is saying to the Church. Hear what God’s Spirit is saying to you today. Don’t just walk on by.