The gospel of John has such a distinctive telling of the story of Jesus' life and ministry. The synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all place this incident with Jesus cleansing the temple toward the end of his life in those final days before his crucifixion. Only John chooses to place it as an inaugural event in Jesus' ministry.

In chapter two of John's gospel we are given Jesus' first two public acts, which for John define the nature of Jesus' messiahship. We are given the wedding in Cana when Jesus turns water into wine and Jesus wreaking havoc in the temple. These two seemingly disparate events serve notice that the boxes that we choose to live in and shape our reality from are about to be challenged into taking on new shape.

At first glance this text brings the message of Jesus' condemnation of the trade going on in the temple and it is tempting to merely marvel at the dramatic anger of the scene and decide to cancel next week's bake sale. But the actions of these dove sellers and money changers were not wholly impure in themselves. Among the approved rituals of temple visitation was sacrifice of animals; and people who wanted to make donations had to exchange their Roman currency to avoid defiling the temple with the image of the emperors who were viewed as God-like in the eyes of Romans.

It was not the actions themselves that Jesus was seeking to condemn but the underlying assumptions that inhabited them. Jesus is dealing with the greatest challenge facing all institutions that seek to worship God.

The risk that the actions engaged in by the institution begin to overshadow the God for whom the actions were initially designed to serve.

Jesus was serving notice in the temple that what is to be worshipped is not the rituals and actions of the temple but the God for whom it was all created. The temple in itself is not sacred, it is the presence of God that makes the space and its activities sacred.

Sometimes our frail spirits lose this ordering of things and we begin to believe that it is our actions that make things sacred; that what we do creates the body of Christ; that God is dependent upon us to live and move and have being in the universe. We become so consumed and impressed by our own ability to create programs and be busy that we feel as if we are in charge of the church.

In all of the noise and busyness we can even lose track of God and begin to believe the divine does not exist at all. And without the existence of God, the church stands in an untenable existence. This leads to an atheistic anxiety

which causes us to increase our busyness and our programming to make the whole enterprise useful whether there is a God or not. Perhaps the gospel is too little to go on, a risky endeavor in which to place our business future. If we offer enough yoga classes and the rest perhaps no one will notice whether God is present or not.

We can start down the same paths in our individual lives. Sometimes we feel an existential emptiness within ourselves, a sense that something is missing, a hole that needs to be filled. Many of us try to fill that hole with a hyperactive life of activities and achievement.

But career accomplishments and hobbies cannot be neatly placed into that empty space. This realization leaves some of us despairing for answers as we run on the treadmills of our lives. If our actions cannot expunge this emptiness what in the world ever can?

Jesus comes flying into the temple tossing tables to and fro to wake us up; to rouse us from our ritual reverie;

to clear the dull business-as-usual look in our eyes as we go from task to task in the house of God and in this world of ours which belongs to God. When we recognize that God is alive and in our midst there is much more at stake than filling our schedules with activities no matter how well intentioned.

The writer Annie Dillard penned these famous lines,

"On the whole, I do not find Christians...sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issues life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return."

Churches are not places where we seek to provide a variety of pleasing activities for the community. Worship is not about listening to pretty music and perhaps pondering a few new thoughts from the sermon. We cannot sprinkle a little piety on top of it all like confectionery sugar on a donut and call it the body of Christ. When we call ourselves the body of Christ it is a reminder that we are not in control, that we are about seeking to be a part of what God is doing, not seeking to have God be a part of what we are doing.

It would do us some good to have Jesus storm into the Holmes Room and flip over our table of opportunities to remind us that the first principle of our existence together is not to be found on our sign up sheets but in the depths of the divine.

All too often programs are our puppet God which we proudly make dance like a marionette with strings. But worship is not about a pleasing experience for ourselves it is about an offering unto the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent creator of the universe. Our Wednesday evening programs in lent are not about civic do-goodism, but about listening for God's cry for justice in an unjust world.

These are not things to be taken lightly.

A friend of mine has talked about a large church that he served that was famous for its vast program opportunities from A-Z, a hustling and bustling place. They realized one day that their biggest concern was not about keeping people busy there was more than enough of that to go around. As they discussed new programs for the church the question they started asking themselves was "Does this provide primary access to the holy?"

Of course it is not easy for us to keep focused on the holy in our lives. We like the Judeans in the temple would like a sign of God's holy presence at regular intervals to keep us on track. If only we could make appointments with God to touch our lives on Mondays, and Wednesdays, and Fridays every week.No wonder we are so faithful to our scheduled programming, that is something tame and domesticated we can count on being right on time. But we gather together as community to remind each other of things that can get lost in our individual lives.

Let us remind each other of the primary actor in this drama, that what we are about is being with God, seeking to please God, to serve God. Simple words, they almost do not lack enough sophistication for us to take them seriously.

But if we are not careful this God will draw us out to a new place, a new way of being; to a radical relationship of connection to the first principle of the universe. It may come with extraordinary, extravagant gifts of grace like turning water into wine or it may come with the upheaval of all our neat and intricate schedules and timetables and best laid plans. God is always on the way, seeking us out. How long do you suppose we will hide?