The Third Sunday in Lent-Rev Melanie Lemburg
Lent 3 B 2021
March 7, 2021
One of the greatest technological gifts
to the parents of young drivers is Apple’s Find My Friends app. With the touch of my finger, I can see a map
with dots for each member of my family suggesting the general location of each
one of their phones. I use this app
multiple times a day just to check on my people. They, on the other hand, like to call me a
stalker for this practice. The other
day, Mary Margaret was headed to school in some nasty weather. I asked her to text me when she got there,
but I told her that if she forgot, it would be ok. “I’ll be watching you,” I told her, meaning
that I’d be watching her little blue dot travel downtown on my app. Her brother immediately started laughing and
then repeating my lovingly parental words in a creepy, stalker voice: “I’ll be watching you!”
Our Old Testament reading for today is
the passage from Exodus which gives us the 10 Commandments. Throughout the centuries of our faith, the 10
commandments have taken on a life of their own, and at times they seem to point
to a God who ominously, threateningly punitive.
If you step a toe out of line and break any of these 10 rules, then I’m
going to get you. I’ll be watching you! The
Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor writes about how these are really more
like the 10 teachings; how the 10
teachings were originally given to the Children of Israel while wandering in
the wilderness, and they are about how they are to live corporately. Rather than thinking of them as a check-list
for individuals, we should think of them as a road map for what it means for a
whole people to be faithful to God and to live together in community.
The passage begins: “I am the Lord your
God who brought you out of slavery…” And
these 10 teachings are to help the people to keep from being enslaved by other
things. These are 10 teachings to help
the people continue to live in freedom.
The 10 commandments are not so much
about obedience and punishment; they are about how we can live meaningful lives
in community with each other and with God.
And then there’s Psalm 19. One of my seminary colleagues reflected this
week that she had heard Ellen Davis, who is an Old Testament professor at Duke,
speak on today’s psalm. Davis told this
group that Psalm 19 is a psalm about integrity that is written in 3 parts; and
the 3 parts are about the cosmos, the Torah, and me. In the first part, the psalm talks about how
you stay in sync with the cosmos. The
second part talks about how you stay in sync with Torah or scripture. The third part talks about how you stay in sync
with yourself. Psalm 19 talks about the life-giving quality of God’s law or
teachings, how they “revive the soul,” “give wisdom to the innocent,” “rejoice
the heart,” and “gives light to the eyes.”
Finally, in our gospel reading for today,
we have John’s version of Jesus’s cleansing of the temple. Unlike the other gospel writers, John situates
this episode at the beginning of Jesus’s earthly ministry. At first glance, it may be difficult to
discern how this angry Jesus fits in with our other two readings for
today. But I think it points to the
freedom offered in following Jesus, freedom within a new-visioning of the original
teachings or commandments of God. The
Anglican priest and poet Malcolm Guite has written a sonnet on the cleansing of
the temple that has helped me engage this gospel passage in new ways.
Cleansing the Temple
by Malcolm Guite
Come
to your Temple here with liberation
And
overturn these tables of exchange
Restore
in me my lost imagination
Begin
in me for good, the pure change.
Come
as you came, an infant with your mother,
That
innocence may cleanse and claim this ground
Come
as you came, a boy who sought his father
With
questions asked and certain answers found,
Come
as you came this day, a man in anger
Unleash
the lash that drives a pathway through
Face
down for me the fear the shame the danger
Teach
me again to whom my love is due.
Break
down in me the barricades of death
And
tear the veil in two with your last breath.[i]
Your invitation this week is to think
about the freedom that comes both through the law and through Jesus’s
re-visioning of the law. To invite Jesus
to restore in each one of us our lost imagination and to restore us to the
fully loving presence of relationship with God.
(reread sonnet)
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