“Stop making my Father’s house a market place” John 2:16

Since the financial crisis of 2008 the market place has come under increasing scrutiny and criticism as the place where the dreams and hope as well as the jobs and economic security of our country and indeed the world is fashioned.

Examples of greed, corruption and the unregulated perusal of profit have left billions in our world individually worse off, nations bankrupt, remember Iceland, or on the edge of insolvency, Greece and Spain and for our own nation a massive deficit that is still affecting the quality of life of all most every citizen in our country.

I say almost every citizen because last week saw the much talked about release of a book called the “Flat White Economy” by leading economist Douglas McWilliams.

It seems that according to McWilliams since the financial collapse of 2008 what he terms as “The Flat White Economy” has spawned four times more jobs than the City lost in the crisis. London is now growing one and a half times faster than Hong Kong as a result, a driving force behind this triumph of lifestyle and economics, being immigration.

The problem is that this growth is not necessarily felt in such positive terms in the rest of the country or even London.

We can certainly see here in West Hendon and Colindale the effects of the growth of London – the appearance of a myriad of tower blocks and small boxes in which human beings will strive to live, but without much thought to the infrastructure that is needed to support and enhance the quality of our life, roads, sewers, GP surgeries and schools.

It may be that the City’s champagne and supercars lifestyle has been swapped for bicycles and bohemian flats, the other side to this tremendous growth is the cost of living, and the reality of poverty both of which seem to be inextricably rising.

Last week secure tenants of the London Borough of Barnet in West Hendon were informed of the increased rent and service charges that they will now have to cover in their new flats. It is a very worrying time for many households in our parish and could for 90% of them put the dream and hope of living in this community to and end. It is hard to know how hard working and retired residents of West Hendon, some of whom have lived here almost all their life can afford these massive increases in their rent and service charges. The fear is that they will be driven out of this community by the staggering rises in the cost of living on West Hendon as a result of “Regeneration”.

So what has this all to do with Jesus entering the Temple with a cord of whips and driving out the money changers, the sellers of pigeons, sheep and cattle?

St John, from whose gospel we take the account of this episode in the life of Jesus, places the cleansing of the temple at the outset of Jesus' ministry, immediately after the changing of water into wine at the wedding of Cana.

By linking these two events together, St John the Evangelist is keen to show that in Jesus the old order is being replaced. The Jewish Cleansing ritual of his day, in the water that is changed into wine and the demise of the temple worship, with its associated belief that animal sacrifice can make us right with God, are signs that God is making a new beginning in Jesus.

This may well be true but what is equally the case is that Jesus enters the Temple and turns over the tables of the money changers because they are corrupt. They are using the system to line their own pockets, in this case animal sacrifice that is at the heart of Temple worship in the 1^st Century and the desire of the people to live a better life, to find righteousness with God, who come to the Temple.

Of the two it is not clear which is the more obnoxious to Jesus who behaves so out of character, or certainly the characteristic that we are most comfortable with namely the Jesus gentle and mild and the faith that should be kept personal and not be spoken of in public.

To take advantage of people at the very point when they are holding on to their dreams and hopes is cruel, as cruel as is the plight of many of our children and grandchildren who cannot afford to live in the community they were born due to the escalating costs of that living.

But we cannot simply put this action of Jesus down to a symbolic act, a demonstration against the corrupt market place of his day. For the Temple is also the worshipping heart of the Jewish community of which Jesus is part. Social Justice and Worship of God are linked together.

“Stop making my Father’s house a market place” cries out Jesus over the noise of curses, bleeting sheep and distraught cattle. According to Matthew, Mark and Luke Jesus also says  “My house should be a house of prayer”

The cleaning of the temple is certainly about social justice, in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke it is this event that precipitates the political intervention of the Roman empire and the crucifixion. But it is also about the quality of  worship being offered to the people. 

In this mornings reading from the Hebrew scriptures we recall God giving Moses the 10 commandments in Chapter 20 of the book of Exodus.

Notice how the 10 commandments begins with God's self-announcement and the requirement of worship in the first five commandments verses 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8. The remaining 5 commandments are about the consequences of the worshiping  relationship with God; the positives and the negatives, or another way of saying it the social and moral consequences of right worship of God.

Last week in our lent course “Everybody Welcome” we started to look at how we make our worship, our church building and our program of activities throughout the year more accessible and visible to those around us. 
We explored the impact of our worship on the community, and one measure is the number of those who attend. It is not surprising that our most attended services are Easter and Christmas, the challenge before us is to make our worship throughout the whole year meaningful and transformative, and yes see those of our parish more than twice a year!

This evening we look at “our Temple” the church and ask how we make it more inviting? what are the very practical things that we need to do so that we indeed keep the church as the house of prayer and not allow it just to become another market place.

We meet for an hour at 5.00pm – come and join in the debate.

Faith was reckoned to him as righteousness. Romans Chapter 4 verse 22

What is St Paul getting at?

Clearly the person of Abraham is important to him as he dedicates a whole chapter to him in this letter to the Romans. Abraham is of course a great hero scripture and of the story of God’s dealing with humanity and is held in great reverence by all of his children who share his faith in God – Jews first Christians next and Muslims last.

The words of St Paul in his 4^th Chapter of his letter to the Christians in Rome are important to us too as this little phrase holds both the power to inspire and encourage us in our journey of faith, however it can also be misunderstood and this can too can inflict terrible harm to us and our relationship with God.

St Paul states that God reckons the faith of Abraham to him as righteousness.  what does this mean? Does it mean that faith itself is the kind of righteousness we perform and God counts that as good enough to make us right before him  - righteousness?

Such praise of Abraham can have the opposite affect of that to encourages us as we consider the great feats of faith that Abraham displayed in his life. For example what are you like in the presence of someone who is a hero to you or someone you hold with the greatest respect? Usually we find ourselves struck dumb, unable to think straight and if expected to hold a conversation we appear as a tongue tied youth on their first date! I remember when I met and shook the hand of Pope John Paul 11 I wanted to say something but when it came to the moment I just stood there grinning life a fool I fear! I relied on my friend beside me to speak for me as I was rather over whelmed with the encounter.

And here is one of the dangers of our reading of St Paul and the praise he heaps upon Abraham – we feel unequal to the task and feel a failure. Have we shown such faith, such determination in the face of hopelessness? how can our few years of service or faith be placed alongside the one hundred and more years that Abraham showed his unwavering faith in God with out it seeming insignificant, insufficient and if so un deserving of the promise of righteousness with God that St Paul point to?

So such a reading of St Pauls words this morning are not going to help us but deflate us or turn our faith in to a competition, a race that we must strive by our own efforts to not just finish but win.

So what are we to make of these words of St Paul concerning Abraham and how his faith was reckoned, counted to him as righteousness?

Is it like a high street transaction, we have £10 but the suit we want costs £150? So God knowing that £10 is all we have, and knows how hard it was for us to come by that amount, and gives us a mangers discount and we are able to take the suit home because God has in his mercy said he will count my £10 as if it was £150 and cancels the missing £140?

The danger of this thinking is that it encourage us to see God being there to make my faith sufficient for the righteousness reckoned, necessary or needed we might say for me. The danger here is that we see the way to salvation as fulfilling duties, filling an otherwise empty balance sheet with good works. And with all this striving leaving me still as the one who is not worthy, the one whose efforts will never be enough and although it is good that God will ultimately grant me his righteousness it is a transaction that limits and diminishes me.

The consequence of this thinking is to either see the life of faith as an unfair test or one that encourages me to be a kind of self made millionaire that denies the truth that all I have is from the grace of God, and indeed I am incomplete without him in my life.

The Justification that St Paul is pointing to is something very different - not God's seeing any righteousness in me, but his reckoning to me his own righteousness, for you and me through Christ by faith.

If this is the case then What does it mean to say that faith is reckoned as righteousness?

To answer this I want to take you back to the writing of John Bunyan in the 17th century. In a prison cells he wrote a book called Grace abounding to the chief of sinners. Here is an extract:

One day as I was passing into the field . . . this sentence fell upon my soul. Thy righteousness is in heaven. And me thought, withal, I saw with the eyes of my soul Jesus Christ at God's right hand; there, I say, was my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, he wants [lacks] my righteousness, for that was just before [in front of] him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse, for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself, "The same yesterday, today and, and forever"

Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away; so that from that time those dreadful scriptures of God left off to trouble me; now went I also home rejoicing for the grace and love of God.

What is at the heart of St Paul's writing is that it is Christ who is our righteousness, Christ is your righteousness, Christ is my righteousness and so that righteousness is not something to be earned, or even thought of as  "ours"  but Christ's.  It's the same yesterday today and forever. It doesn't get better when your faith is strong. It doesn't get worse when your faith is weak. It is perfect. It is Christ. Look away from yourself. Rest in him. Lean on him.

faith connects us with Christ who is our righteousness and, in that sense, faith is counted as righteousness. Faith sees and savours all that God is for us in Christ, especially his righteousness. That's what faith does.

During these days of Lent we have an opportunity to spent more time with one another than our usual allotted hour on a Sunday morning. This lent, beginning today we will meet again at 5.00pm to look together at our life together in this church, using the research of Bob Jackson in his course Everybody welcome to reflect together how welcoming we are? The sad truth Bob reveals is that 90% of people who try out our churches fail to join them. Making Welcome central to our life is necessary if we are to attract new members so the work of Christ can continue in the years to come.

Welcome and hospitality are central to the gospel and our Christian calling, let us aspire to gospel standards of welcome and hospitality and put them in to action. 

Lent begins - the desert awaits

The Desert awaits                                                                         

Ready for those who come

Who come obedient to the Spirit’s leading

Or who are driven

Because they will not come any other way.

Those are the opening words of a poem by Ruth Burgess. It reminds us of what the desert has come to signify in some peoples writing and thinking.

What image comes to your mind when you think of a desert?

A dry and arid place

A place of extremes heat in the day cold in the night

A harsh and hostile place

A place of death

A place to be feared and not entered into.

Jesus immediately after his baptism, marking beginning of his public ministry, is driven out into the desert by the Spirit. It seems that he may have been unwilling, hence the way Mark uses the word “driven” where as the later gospel writers use the word “led”.

One of the ways in which Christian writers have used the image of the desert, is to associate the desert with those times of life when we seem to loose our faith or hope.

The times when life seems to be come unbearable.

It has been used to symbolise the “dark night of faith” when God seems far from us and we become uncertain of what lies ahead and whether or not we have the strength to go on.  

We live in a time of great fear and darkness. The fear and terror that stalks our collective and individual consciousness continues to add unease and results in paralysis and aloneness.

As time honoured and familiar markers that give meaning and direction in the landscape of our existence are being swept away it does indeed seem that we are encountering a wilderness in our modern life, shifting sands of subjective individual feeling.

One of those familiar landmarks that has been eroded by the advances of the modern urban life is that of relationship. The relationship between ourselves and the environment, ourselves as fellow citizens and between ourselves and God.

 The season of Lent offers us the opportunity to once again take stock and re-evaluate our Christian commitment, to God and one another as we begin next Sunday evening our lent course “Everybody Welcome” by Bob Jackson.  It is a time when we will journey with our Lord into the desert. It is a time in which we will face the same temptations that he faced –

To find ways to live without reference to God our father.

To find other ways for meaning and purpose in our lives that come at the expense of our relationship with God.

As we journey with Jesus this morning into the desert

As we mark this morning the beginning of our Lentern journey

we remember those who have travelled through the desert before us.

In our first reading we were reminded of Noah who in spite of the mocking  jibes and incredulity of those around him built an ark to protect all that was good in the world and preserve it for a new and better future.

He must have known something of the desert experience as he and his family looked out over the unbroken surface of water for 40 days and nights that had swept away all the familiar landmarks of their life and experience.

The sight of the rainbow, itself only possible in the interaction/the juxtaposition between those familiar opposites of rain and sunshine, dark cloud and clear sky, brought hope and promise into the life of a man on the brink of despair and sorrow.

There was Moses who lead the children of Israel through the desert. This  was a time of change and a time of hardship, a time when all the security of life in Egypt was left behind and a future, defined only by promise, was embraced.

But more importantly it was a time for learning how to be obedient to God. It was while the Israelites wandered, apparently lost, in the vastness of the desert, that God made his presence known to them by giving them the Law, the 10 commandments, by feeding them the manna, the bread from heaven, by sticking the rock so that water flowed for the people to drink God provided and ensured their survival.

You may remember Elijah who cried out in his “dark night of faith”  “It is enough O lord take my life”.

He was alone, the last of the prophets and as a wanted man was hiding in the mountains dejected, lost and at his wits end. His cry of despair is just one of many in the pages of scripture of those who long to understand the ways of God and his purposes in their lives, as indeed we in our time long for purpose and meaning in the seemingly random and cruel world of our making.

Then there is the cry of another prophet, Ezekiel who looking out at the seeming hopelessness of life cried out to God “Can these dry bones live?”

It is this cry that those of us who dare to come and stand at the foot of the cross on Good Friday will hear uttered by God in the voice of his own son at the end of the journey we begin today. “My God My God, Why have you forsaken me”.

If we are able to look upon this God forsaken man, we will be able to look into the god forsaken parts of our life and see the love of God the father and with it the possibility of new life being breathed into those dry and arid places; as he brought life and light into the broken and cold body of Jesus.

 

If we dare to journey into the desert, then we will find ourselves on a journey of self discovery and find that we are not alone, just as Jesus found in the desert, in the long cold nights, that he was himself in the company not just of wild beasts but angels too. 

As I look back over the events of my own life, I like so many of you see times of loneliness, brokenness, and loss. Times when it seems that all that I love most in this world slip from my grasp in a moment. It is then that

I am confronted with my own weakness, my inability to shape or control  events and this in itself is part of the test to be faithful to God and trust in his providence.

What we have to learn, what we still need to learn, is that God is never far from us. That the silence of God can be terrifying and may seem as final as death.

But far from being absent God is in the silence,

He is in the “dark night of faith.”

He is in the wilderness and deserted places of our being

And he is there bringing together all things for his glory.

May you have a blessed Lent and use the time to draw closer to God and trusting in him place your hand in his and journey into the desert within.

The desert awaits……….

And whilst we fear, and rightly

The loneliness and emptiness and harshness,

We  forget the angels,

Whom we cannot see for our blindness

But who come when God decides

That we need their help;

When we are ready

For what they can give us.