‘B’   //   Lent 3   //   3-15-09   //   Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian Church

 

Scriptures       Exodus 20:1-17   1 Corinthians 1:18-25

          Psalm 19              John 2:13-22

 

As we begin these transition months of my departure from Northside – and your transition and mine into new ministerial vistas – I invite us all of us this Lenten season of letting go to practice what it means to give up our claims on one another, and to explore how we are claimed by our one God and, by extension, by each other.

 

Perhaps we could learn something from my seminary roommate’s experience with claiming and being claimed. Something he learned at his own wedding ceremony – the very same year and day, by the way, our own Jean Wend and Tom Weeks were wed by Northside's pastor at the time, Peter Boeve. (For the curious, the date was July 14, 1990.)

 

A native Scotsman, my roommate Mark was wed in the church his father pastored in Southern California. It was a brutally hot summertime day. Even in the air-conditioned sanctuary, the flowers and groomsmen both were fading – and fading fast.

I single out the groomsmen, due to what transpired near the end of the wedding service.

 

The choir was singing a popular version of The Lord’s Prayer. When they began to peak with, “And thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glor- …”, a loud thump echoed through the sanctuary.

 

Down on the floor went a groomsman: Mark’s younger brother. A couple of minutes later, another groomsman, Mark’s youngest brother, hit the deck in vicarious atonement. Both were quickly revived – their only injury their own embarrassment.

 

It was at this point that the wedding officiant – Mark’s father – stepped forward to address the assembled. Reserved as ever, and in his thick Scottish brogue, he drily intoned, “I’d like to issue a brief disclaimer here. Aside from the passings out, the ceremony was only a half-hour long.”

 

The groom thought the whole matter quite humorous. The bride … cried.

 

For what Mark’s bride, barely post-adolescent, did not yet understand was that, in all the ways we try to claim our rightful place in the universe – the perfect wedding, the perfect wedding party, the perfect special service or acts of service – we become the most human and the most loveable -- not to mention the most loving -- when we allow disclaimers to be made on our behalf. In other words: when we allow ourselves to be claimed.

 

Claimed by grace – that we may not make a work out of our faith. Claimed so that we may know, in all our efforts to show God how good we are, we need always set that extra place at the Seder meal for God to show us how good God is.

 

Disclaimers. What we can appreciate of God’s grace when we just … let … go. When we relinquish our rightful, justifiable, entitled places that present themselves as godly, holy living, and which are all the more insidious to us because they pose in that way.

 

 

What I heard are ten of the finest disclaimers ever made known to humanity. Ten ways to relinquish … renounce … resign from particular actions that would stand in the way of God’s claim on us.

 

Disclaimers … from thinking and acting as if we were God.

 

Scary prospect, our disclaimers. Scary, the prospect of letting go: of our expectations, of our resentments spawned by these expectations, and even of our claims of what we think it means to be church.

 

 

Let us take our cue, as always, from Jesus. We hear today what enrages our Lord the most: the central place meant for worship of God – for reinforcing God’s claim on us – has now become a place for laying claims on the market economy and the benefits it may bring to us.

 

Not to be too hard on these sellers of cattle, sheep, and doves – as well as the moneychangers, who seem to get all the bad press in the retelling of this story. We can certainly identify with them. For they are people involved in doing things right: that is, performing public services with the blessings of the religious authorities. And yet, they are at the same time people who have lost the vision for doing the right things.

 

 

 

Our dedicated outreach partnership with SOS Community Services is all about this release – all about letting go. Truly embracing this organization for our – repeat, our – prophetic presence in the community means we must circumscribe, a la the Ten Commandments, our life in a particular way, and clear, a la Jesus today, the temples of our hearts of some of the singular claims we make on doing good deeds.

 

It means letting go of doing some of our cherished random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty, that we may be set free. Set free, to be shaped and molded and forged into the justice-seeking body of Christ God has intended for us, all along.

 

It means we must issue a disclaimer, here … on our prized and privileged individual ways of life.

 

 

 

It is, instead, Lenten surgery – followed close behind by the therapy of discipleship. Discipleship that grounds itself in response to that ultimate claim of allegiance Paul offers forth today: “We proclaim Christ crucified.” Discipleship that asks us, in effect: What are we willing to pay a price for, in our lives? To suffer for? To die for?

 

Not you … Not me. But we!

 

For therein lies the key. The key to the ultimate disclaimer we are called to proclaim: Giving of ourselves – beyond that, giving up of ourselves – for the benefit of the whole, in partnership with others to mend the whole.

 

The whole of God’s world. Recognizing, in apostle-speak – also to the church in Corinth: “in Christ God was reconciling the world to God’s self.” Not in us – but in Christ. For only when each of us releases our felt claims on our lives can we join together his Jerusalem journey of longsuffering hope.

 

 

God has set the framework for us – in the form of ten commandments. And the spirit of Christ has torn asunder the portrait of greed we Americans painted for ourselves within that framework, so that we may go back to the proverbial drawing board and fill that frame anew.

 

Or perhaps the Psalmist metaphor today of a wedding canopy is more fetching – and more edifying – for our world-weary souls: “In the heavens God has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom for his wedding canopy, and like a strong man runs its course with joy.”

 

And so, in the spirit of my Scottish roommate’s more mundane wedding canopy: “I’d like to issue a brief disclaimer here.” The disclaimer that – safe as we are under God’s sovereign, overarching canopy of grace – we can, this season of Lent and beyond, release our claims on our life and each other that we can find our lives claimed by God and by each other.

 

          Whoever has ears to hear … let them hear.