CALLED TO BE DIFFERENT
Rick Richardson is a professor at Wheaton College and the author of a book called Evangelism Outside the Box. He tells the story of a pastor named Dan who realized that his preaching was getting stale. So, with the support of his pastoral team, he took a part-time job at a nearby Starbucks coffee shop. And before anyone even thinks to suggest it, I am NOT taking a part-time job at The Pampered Palate!
So Pastor Dan when to work at the local Starbucks. Much to his surprise, all 21 people he worked with believed in God. Not one of them was an atheist. They were all very positive toward God and toward spirituality.
Yet Pastor Dan was surprised to discover that while they believed in God and were interested in things “spiritual,” he also discovered that they were NOT interested in Christians, Christianity, or the church. No one wanted to hear Dan’s proofs for God, his invitations to church, or his ideas about salvation. Most of them thought they knew what Christianity was all about and had decided they didn’t want it. They were what some people call “post-Christian.”
You see, at some point along the journey of their lives, each of them had experienced a breach of trust related to Christianity. Maybe a Christian friend had been hypocritical or pushy. Maybe when they were young they had attended church and found it boring or irrelevant. Maybe they had watched a T.V. evangelist or two and had been completely turned off. Or, maybe they had experienced a tragedy in their lives and felt that God was distant or uncaring.
The people with whom Pastor Dan worked were not interested in the church. The biggest thing Dan learned was that if Christians are to have meaningful spiritual conversations with these people, the first thing that must be addressed is the issue of integrity. And we’re going to get to that issue eventually. But for now, let’s start with the story of Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem.
In the passage I read from the gospel according to John, Jesus enters the Temple in Jerusalem not long after he turned water into wine at a wedding feast in Cana; also not long after he called his first disciples. Note that Matthew, Mark and Luke say that Jesus entered the Temple less than a week before his crucifixion, and that he only went to Jerusalem once. John says he entered the Temple near the beginning of his public ministry, and that he went to Jerusalem no less than six times. What gives? Which of the gospels is right and which of the gospels is wrong?
Perhaps the answer is neither. Matthew, Mark and Luke tend to emphasize Jesus’ Galilean ministry, while John concentrated more on Jesus’ Jerusalem ministry. Maybe they’re only looking at things from different points of view.
What did Jesus do when he entered the Temple in Jerusalem? You know the story. He flew into a rage. He overturned the tables of the money-changers and he drove them out with a whip of cords. This is a pretty big incident for the gospels to not be of one accord. Some suggest that Jesus cleansed the Temple twice: once at the beginning of his ministry and once near the end. Chances are, that’s not the case. If Jesus had cleansed the Temple at the beginning of his ministry as John suggests, the religious leaders likely would have done him in much sooner. This incident seems to fit better at the end of Jesus’ ministry than at the beginning. It’s also been suggested that the author of John died before his manuscript was completed. Some other author put his notes together and that’s why we have this confusion. But wouldn’t another author have been familiar with Matthew, Mark and Luke? Wouldn’t he have known when Jesus did what?
William Barclay suggests an alternative solution. He sees John as someone who is more interested in the truth than in the facts. He isn’t so much concerned with writing a chronological biography of Jesus as he is in revealing Jesus as the Son of God – as the Messiah the people had long awaited. Perhaps that helps to clear up some confusion.
So Jesus entered the Temple and flew into a rage. He upset the tables of the money-changers and he drove them out with a whip of cords. Why was Jesus so upset? These people were making a profit at religion’s expense.
It was the time of the Passover, the greatest of all the Jewish feasts. Custom dictated that every adult male Jew who lived within 15 miles of Jerusalem was expected to be there. It was the dream of every Jew – regardless of where he lived – to spend at least one Passover in Jerusalem. Experts say that it’s possible that as many as two million Jews could have been in Jerusalem for the Passover. Talk about overcrowding!
There was also a tax that every Jew over 19 years of age had to pay. It was called the Temple tax. It was paid so that Temple sacrifices and Temple rituals could take place on a daily basis. In those days, the Temple treasury likely contained the wealth that the Vatican possesses today.
The Temple tax was one-half shekel. That amounted to about a day-and-a-half’s wages for a common laborer. Now all coins were valid, but not all coins could be used to pay the Temple tax. The Temple tax had to be paid in Galilean shekels or in shekels of the sanctuary. Other coins were considered unclean. They might be used to pay ordinary debts, but not one’s debt to God.
Here’s where the money-changers came into play. They sat in the Temple courts and changed foreign currency into sanctuary shekels. The catch was that they charged people a tidy sum to do so. They were making a profit at religion’s expense.
Besides the money-changers, there were also the sellers of oxen and sheep and doves. Frequently a visit to the Temple included the offering of a sacrifice. But the law said that any animal offered as a sacrifice had to be perfect and unblemished. Temple authorities appointed inspectors to make sure the animals were perfect and unblemished. They, too, charged a fee. Naturally, they wouldn’t approve any animal brought in from the outside, so people had to buy their sacrificial animal inside the Temple courts as well. And that animal might cost 10 to 20 times as much. It was nothing short of extortion. That’s what moved Jesus to righteous indignation.
People were making a profit at religion’s expense. They were making God inaccessible to the humble and the poor. Yet the fact of the matter is it was all perfectly legal. In fact, it was the way things had been done for generations. We might even say that it represented the status quo.
That’s the point that struck me as I thought about this passage last week. Jesus upsets the status quo. We can talk all we want about where this story fits in the chronology of Jesus’ ministry. We can talk all we want about the justification for Jesus’ anger. We can talk all we want about how wrong it is to make a profit at religion’s expense. All are valid points and all are worthy of discussion. But the point I want to talk about is how Jesus upsets the status quo. The faithful, it seems, are called to be different.
Deep, deep down, I think everyone knows that. According to a recent Gallup poll – called the Mood of the Nation poll – 59% of all Americans surveyed expressed dissatisfaction with the moral and ethical climate of our nation. Only 7% identified themselves as being “very satisfied” with it. Perhaps we have a problem here. Listen to this.
One day, a certain employee received an unusually large paycheck. It was way more pay that he was supposed to get. He decided not to say anything about it. “Finders keepers, losers weepers,” right? The following week, his paycheck was significantly less than the normal amount, and he immediately confronted his boss. The supervisor asked, “Why didn’t you say anything when you were overpaid last week?” Without batting an eye, the employee replied, “Well, I can overlook one mistake…but not two in a row!”
Does that story typify us? Are our ethics declining? According to the American
Religious Identification Survey, our FAITH is declining. The percentage of people who call themselves Christian has dropped more than 11% since 1990. This shift was explored in a recent U.S.A. Today article. Barry Kosmin, one of the authors of the religious survey, said that in 1990 – when the first survey was conducted – many saw God as a “personal hobby,” and that the U.S.A. is a “greenhouse for spiritual sprouts.” After the latest survey he says, “Today, religion has become more like a fashion statement, not a deep personal commitment for many.”
Diane Mueller of Austin, Texas grew up a United Methodist. She says she’s simply, “totally disengaged from the church, and (from) the Bible, too.” Sunday mornings for her family mean playing in a park, not praying in a pew.
Dylan Rossi is an ex-Catholic and a native of Massachusetts. He believes he’s typical among his friends. He says, “If religion comes up, everyone at the table will start mocking it. I don’t know anyone religious and hardly anyone spiritual.”
Yet this one tops them all. Kendall Harmon is an Episcopal priest in South Carolina. He says, “A couple came into my office with a yellow pad of their teenage son’s questions. One of them was, “What is that guy doing hanging up there on the plus sign?” What is that guy doing hanging up there on the plus sign?
Like I said, we’ve got a problem. Many are falling away from the church. And look at our own church attendance in the past six months. I’ll bet it’s down close to 25%. What’s happening? And it’s not just us. I’ve talked to other ministers and they’re facing the very same problem. God-fearing Christians are quickly becoming a distinct minority.
Remember that opening story I told you about Pastor Dan at Starbucks? Many of those people had been turned off by Christians themselves. It reminded me of a story in Thomas Cahill’s book, How the Irish Saved Civilization. In it he speaks of the Roman Empire and the influence of Ausonius, a poet who rose to wield some political power. Ausonius once wrote, “Doing the expected is the highest value – and the second highest is like it: receiving the appropriate admiration of one’s peers for doing it.”
Ausonius was a Christian. Yet as Cahill described him, “His Christianity (was) a cloak to be donned and removed as needed.” Did you catch that? “His Christianity (was) a cloak to be donned and removed as needed.” Do Christians today have a similar problem? Many who are disgruntled with the Christian faith today think so. Many believe there is little difference in the behavior of those who claim to be Christian and the behavior of those who do not. In the book unChristian, 84% of the young people surveyed claim to know a Christian personally. Yet get this. Only 15% see the lifestyles of Christians as being different than anyone else. Have we forgotten that Jesus upsets the status quo? Have we forgotten that we are called to be different?
So what are we to do? I came across an interesting solution in my devotions last week. In chapter six of John’s gospel, the story is told of Jesus feeding the 5000. When he goes off alone to pray, the crowds track him down. Jesus says to them, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life.” They say to him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Jesus answers them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”
To do the work of God, we must believe in him whom he has sent. The Greek word for “believe” here is “pisteuo.” It means, literally, “belief in a special sense, as faith in the Divinity that lays special emphasis on trust in his power and his nearness to help, in addition to being convinced that he exists and that his revelations are true.” In other words, we don’t just believe God exists. We seek to live into his ways and we trust him to guide our very lives. Christianity is not a cloak to be donned and removed as needed. It’s more like the air that we breathe. We suffocate without it.
A man named Bernard Bailey once said, “When they discover the center of the universe, a lot of people will be disappointed to discover (that) they are not it.” We are called to be different. If we could only learn to place God at the center of our lives, perhaps that would make all the difference in the world. Amen.
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