RELIGION OR GOSPEL John M, Buchanan

Jonn 2:12-22 Broad Street Presbyterian Chir’
February 19, L976 Columba, Thio

Second Sunday in Lent

We expect to pay as we go in this world and sometimes it turns out that the
very best moments are moments of grace, We live Life-on-the~run and plot each hour
of each day in order to get it all accomplished, and sometimes the very best moments
are the unexpected interruptions, In this suicidal style we inflict on ourselves,
sprinting from one engagement to the next, beauty is often a serendipitous accident
that grabs us by the scruff of the neck and forces us to listen to a Bach Chorale;
to submit to the colors of a sunset or the icy crystal of a winter sky; to receive
the embrace of a child or the touch cf compassion from a caring friend, The very
best moments are moments of grace, One evening last week I was standing in the
lobby of a school, having dispensed with parental duty by attending a concert. We
had to hurry to get there: I had work to do, calls to make, this sermon to outline,
And in the midst of my self-inflicted anxiety grace made an appearance, From
across the room it came: an eight year old yelling, "Mr. B., Mr, B., I haven't seen
you for a long time! "punctuated by a wonderfully enthusiastic hue around the mid-~-
section, as if we were long lost friends, which we are, in a way. Mary and I have
spent a few hours on the beach together bet I haven’t seen her much since last
summer, She bears the burden of our friendship. For some reason I'm not sure I
understand, I am important to her, And Tf left the lobby cleansed of frustration, a
little more at peace, having experienced a very special moment, because grace had
happened,

Grace is the distinctive Christian word, It is the only word we really know,
Preachers have to remind themselves constantly that the language of theclogy is a
foreign language for most of the people to whom we are addressing our pulpit gems.
For oné reason or another most of the words we love to use are empty. "Redemption,
sanctification, incarnation, atonement" ~ we tog a lot of pulpit time simply de-
fining terms, It is true, as well, for our distinctive word, Grace: we use it to
describe the charm of the hostess, the skill of the ballerina, the coordination of
the athlete, the humility of the defeated candidate: and, we Christians submit, it
is the best word to describe God and His relationship with us.

the classical definition, one more time, sounds something like this. Grace is
the overwhelming generosity of God which we have no reason to expect, It is the
totally unmerited, undeserved love of God which He extends to us in spite of who
or what we are, The most helpful definition I know uses the metaphor of the school-
room, Ordinarily the teacher is the judge, The student is the performer, The goal
is for the student to earn the approval of the teacher in the form of a good grade,
Grace is when the teacher walks into the classroom on the first day of school and
says to the students: "I have already given you a grade, Each of you has an A in
this course, Now let's get down to the business of learning the subject."

Religion, notoriously, has trouble with the idea of grace, One of the deepest
of fuman needs is to find acceptance from something, someone other than self, The
rele of religion in the history of the human race is to be the vehicle for per«
suading God to be accepting and benevolent. Its forms range from a rain dance, to
a sacrifice for fertility, to the prayers of the devout for the forgiveness of
sins, Behind it all is the assumption that God may be persuaded to love us. The
stakes are very high, obviously, And once the assumption is made that people can
persuade God to do what they want Him to do, religion becomes a very powerful
phenomenon, When the stakes are ultimate, the eternal destiny of the soul for

- 3.

instance, people are inclined to work at religion rather feverishly, and to do whet
their religious authorities tell them to do. Those people have a good thing go:zs:
power, authority, esteem, respect, wanith sometimes, They come, inevitably, to
have a terribly personal interest in the institutional structures of religion. it
is in their interests to keep alive the notion that they own, not only the keys to
the kingdom, but the knowledge and the whereabouts to open the door, The worst

thing one can sugrest to a professional yeligionist is that the product he is sell-

ing is as free as the air,

The Old Testament tells the story of the faith of a people constantly trying
to become a relision, It begins with an act of grace, God takes the initiative
and selects a people, and leads them out of their bondage and zives them a land,
Their laws and customs and rituals were the way they were to respond to this in-
credible graciousness of God, Of one thing they are sure, and that is that God will
be faithful in His grace. He will not forget them, He cannot stay angry with them
for long, even when they break the laws and neglect the customs, He keeps on loving
them, and by that grace winning them back, That grace note may be heard throughout
the literature of these people, Psalm 139 expresses amazement at the way this God
pursues His people in love even when they are fleeing from Him,

But slowly, relentlessly, the laws and rituals and customs become the way to
earn it - rather than the way to respond to it, Slowly, relentiessly the Law
multiplies and instead of serving as the Vay a man can live out his pratitude for
God's graciousness, it becomes the means by which God may be persuaded te be
gracious, Occasionally men rise up in Israel to remind people of grace and inevit-
ably become the enemies of religion, Thus Hosea: "I desire steadfast love and not
sacrifice, the knowledge of God, cather than burnt offering," And Amos, "I hate,
I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though
you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them.,,
But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness Like an everflowing atream,"
God, according to the prophets, didn't care much about the formalities of religion ~
particularly those formalities which were designed simply to make people feel good
about themselves, What He wanted was religion that. was honest and authentic and
which was expressed in justice and compassion and love in the middle of life, The
Old Testament is the story of the tension between Gospel - the news of God's gracicus-
nese, and the religion it spawned. And no where is that tension as eloquently
described as in the New Testament Lesson this morning,
“ Tt is not, by the way, a very soothing passage, hose who prefer their
religion comfortable and insipid, and their Lord gentle and mild, had best avaid
the second chapter of John,

In the Fourth Gospel Jesus travels to Jerusalem at the beginning of His
ministry,We know the end of the story so we know that He will come again, later, to
die, For now, it is an initial visit: a trip to the Temple, the very citadel of
His people's religion, Historians have been able to piece together what He saw
there,

Rvery adult male Jew was required to pay an annual Temple Tax of half a shekel -
the equivalent of two days’ wages,

When a man came to the Temple with his tax in hand he entered through a series
of courtyards ~- the first of which was the Court of the Gentiles, open to people

-~ 3

of all nations, It was here that the tax was paid at booths constructed for that
purpose, But what he had in his hand in all provability was a Roman Denarli or a
Greek Drachma, both of which bore the likeness of an emperor - a "sraven image",
that is to say, And so there were other booths at which he could exchange his
money into Jewish coins for a small service charge,

in all probability the man who came to Jerusalem to pay his tax would also wish
to visit the Temple and to worship there, which meant making a sacrifice. I£ he
brought along a lamb, or bullock or a pair of pigeons for that purpose they had ta
be inspected to assure that they were without blemish for another fee, If he had
brought none, however, he could move on to the next booths and purchase a pre-
inspected sacrificial animal: lambs and oxen for the wealthy, pigeons for the poor,

It must have looked and sounded Like the Ohio State Fair on a busy day. As
usual, the people who got hurt by it all were the poor, the ones who couldn't afford
to buy a lamb to eat let alone slaughter sacrificially, As a result of this system
the religious institution, The Temple, was immensely wealthy: so wealthy in fact
that Roman officials often turned to the Hiph Priest to finance a pet public
works project,

But worst of all it was this - this whole tawdry exploitive, commercial
bazaar - that was stamped indelibly in the peoples’ minds as religion, This is what
had become of the faith of Abraham and Isaac and the people wandering through the
wilderness, The God of Psalm 139 whose love chased His people with divine per~
Sistence looks like a potentate whose friendship is for sale to the highest bidder,
Here, in its very worst sense, is wnat religion can become,

didn't like what He saw, and with cold intentionality made a whip, turned over the
tables of the profiteers, knocking coins all over the place, and physically ejected
the livestock salesmen from the court,

Sometimes faith picks a fight. Sometimes integrity gets very angry, Jesus

That story has always made me nervous, If we didn't already know it, it is a
not very subtle reminder that there is a fine Line between responsible churchmanship
and making the church an end in itself: a reminder that the conflict between Jesus
and institutional religion is at the heart of the Gospel story; that religious
leaders plotted His arrest and engineered His trial and finally browbeat the Romans ni
into executing Him as a trouble maker, It is a reminder that grace is a very _
fragile idea in the hands of religious people, _ ohn

We Live in a very religious culture, Church historians Like Martin Marty Wwe
Suggest that we are among the most religious people who have ever Lived: that part
of the uniqueness of American culture is an opaque pietism the sociologists are
calling Civil Religion. We baptize every public event with pious gestures and
season public utterances with religious allusions, People who don't set foot in a
church or haven't opened a Bible in twenty years become irate at the elimination of
the gesture in public education. Belief in God is big business: insipid religious
literature and movies are very profitable,

€,S,Lewis wrote a barbed response to the amorphous interest in religion in
general: ",,,religious people - that is, people when they are being religious, are
not interested in religion, Men who have gods worship those gods: it is the
Spectators who describe themselves as interested in religion." (Punch 7/9/65, in
Marty, The New Shape of American Religion.)

- 4 -

Christianity is not, and never has been, a religion among other religions, It
is the way we respond to God's sraciousness, It is a life Lived out of profound
gratitude, Tt establishes institutions for nurture and stimulation, for the sake
of announcing the Good News in the world, and as a place for God to be thanked
regularly, But the moment its institutions become ends in themselves it has become
religion and stopped being Christianity,

Roger Smith said that well in an editorial: “Christianity as a faith is always
in conflict with Christianity as a religion and there is an important sense in
which Christian Faith includes within itseL£ the permanent protest against its own |
teligious forms and expressions." (The McCormick Quarterly, 11/64), ;

Christianity which becomes too religious loses its saltiness, It can ne Loner
fight because it has to protect its investments, It can no loncer be a fly in the
establishment's ointment as its Lord was because it has to pay its btlis like axycry-
one else, Again C,8,Lewis, in the Serewtape Letters diagnosed brilliantly, Some-
where in that delightful satire the devil instructs his nephew to pet his victim -
who has become a Christian ~ into a church and involved in a trivial religious
dispute. It is the best way to cure him of the Gospel!

Opponents of the church, or those who fancy themselves religious without
bothering with the institutional church cannot be comforted much by this incident
either,

Jesus was not ideologically opposed to the Temple, tn fact He was a faithful
practitioner of His religion, It makes no sense at all to talk about Christianity
apart from the church, But it seems to me imperative that people who care about
the church take this incident very seriously, At its best the church knows that
it is @ means not an end: that it must preserve and protect the Gospel and not
itself: that it lives for the sake of its Lord and the world He loved: that any
power and authority it accrues is valid only as it is put to work loving, healing,
teaching, reconciling,

The problem, finally, is not institutional but personal, ‘The problem is that
we have learned enough times and now believe profoundly that "there is no such
thing as a frec lunch": that successful life is a tough negotiation; that having
one's own back scratched really does depend on scratching other backs. We even
structure our social relationships in the same "pay as you go” basis, An invitation
requires an invitation in return, A gift obligates the recipient to reciprocate,
And beneath it all, under wraps but only slightly is something called pride - or
sin. Princeton's Seward Hiltner writes: “Even with a good and needed gift, the
power of the other to give it reminds us of our own dependency." Oscar Wilde once
observed about a certain man that "he did not understand why the man hated him so
because he, Wilde, had never done anything for the man,"

We are reasonable, rational people, accustomed to earnines our own way, Theo-
logically we expect the same reasonability from our God, We would Like very much
to earn what we get, and after we have it to feel that we deserved it, And so grace,
the very idea of grace, assaults us at a vulnerable point, The late Karl Barth wrote
eloquently: "We dislike hearing that we are saved by grace, We do not appreciate
that God does not owe us anything, that we are bound to live from His goodness alone,
that we are left with nothing but the great humility, the thankfulness of the child
presented with many gifts," (Deliverance to the Captives, p.40),

~ 5.

We would prefer to negotiate our way through Life, Yet we know, and are
still learning that the best moments in life are the moments Of @race: the un-
expected gift, the surprise of love, the intrusion-of undeserved veauty,

We would prefer to negotiate religiously, But the Gospel of Jesus Chrisc is
Good News, God's acceptance of us - has been given, God's forgiveness - has been
extended, God's love - has been poured out in the Life of Jesus Christ our Lord,
We are accepted - we are forgiven - we are loved, We are saved, not by our
teligion, but by the grace of God,

Whatever will become of our religion if that is true? May I submit that it
will become authentic, and alive and real#i. Confession, for instance, is no Longer
an act of pious bargaining, but a joyful affirmation of a fact of which we are
certain, namely our forgiveness: hymns become a Way to express a gratitude too
large for words alone: offerings are not relisious dues but gratitude taking shape:
going to church becomes an act of profound celebration: we have been Siven that
which we most deeply need - the love and acceptance of our God, Christianity is
no Longer what we must do to persuade Cod to Love us - but the way we choose to
thank Him for the love He has already siven.

What about religion? I love Kari Barth's simple but immensely susgestive
analysis and I commend it to vou: "Ile are Left with the thankfulness of the child
Presented with many gifts,"

Amen,

& God, even when we cannot and will not understand, give us grateful hearts,
Open us, again, in this Lenten season, to your grace: give us actain the peace
that passes all understanding. And call out of us new faith, nev gratitude, new
joy: through Jesus Christ our Lord,

Amen,