How is your soul?
At yesterday’s service for Canon Dalton Downs, the Rev. Allison St. Louis spoke of how he would always ask her, “How is your soul?” It is such a simple question, so very clear and so very deep – never-ending depth. It is a most important question. It brings to mind Psalm 43:5:
“Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me”
Truly, if our souls are disquieted, everything else about our being is affected.
What disquiets our souls? Worry and anxiety, anger and frustration, guilt over the wrongs we know we’ve committed against others or against ourselves. The sin we’ve suffered, be it from occasions when we’ve been mistreated or caught up in troubles not of our own making. Lately we’ve been disquieted a lot by the pandemic and politics, both of which involve huge, weighty issues of great importance and require some individual and local response, but over which we have little control or influence.
Where are we to go? To God, always to Him, often in the privacy of our personal prayers – in secret as Jesus says – as well as gathering in community to worship. Our worship includes exposition of His Word and direct communion – literally union with Him. Our altar is a representation, an echo, of the altar at the Temple.
It is holy, set apart for the worship of God. It’s important. We don’t just run up there. We don’t let the kids just run up there. The altar guild and servers treat that area very differently. We would not allow it to be desecrated and we would take steps to restore it if someone did desecrate it. And we wouldn’t be very happy if our gathering were to be commercialized with vendors so that coming to church was more like visiting the farmer’s market.
Now we understand why Jesus is angry. This is the only scene in the Gospels that shows Jesus angry and all four Gospels include it. (We should take note that the other three Gospels refer to such a scene as the conflict between Jesus and the Jewish leaders builds to the crucifixion. John places it in early, we are in chapter two, just after the wedding at Cana and before Jesus encounters Nicodemus. This early account emphasizes this aspect of Jesus’ mission. It is quite possible that Jesus did this more than once.)
Jesus cannot abide the debase villainy and profiteering he sees happening at his Father’s house. We can certainly identify with that.
People are supposed to be at their highest and best frame of mind as they approach the holy of holies. Instead it has become a bazaar, exploiting the pilgrims. Vendors are charging a premium for sacrificial animals because many of these pilgrims have come from far away. Where else are they going to go? The pilgrims can’t use Roman money because it all has idols on it. So, they must exchange it for the local currency – for a heavy fee.
The Temple leaders who have established this, the vendors and the moneychangers are like a cancer – they are abnormal cells bringing dysfunction into that system. They must be driven out. Or, better to say, that sin must be driven out because it is hurting them and distracting the people from their communion with God.
Imagine pilgrims who have come from all around the Mediterranean and beyond – some for a once-in-a-lifetime trip. What will they say about the Temple of the Lord and the high feast days having a flea market atmosphere? How will the sins visited upon them metastasize into cynicism and discouragement as they tell their tale back home?
How do we fight cancer? With surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, immunotherapy, nutrition and prayer. You could say we braid every method and strategy we have into a whip to drive cancer out of our bodies. It does not belong. It must go.
That is a rather stark image, and it gets us very close to understanding Jesus’ urgency in cleaning out the Temple courtyards and how it applies to us. Because, you see, this isn’t primarily about tables and coins and cows and goats. It is about you.
How is your soul?
How is your soul under assault by sin, by temptations from without and those welling up from within? How is your soul distracted by worry and anxiety that, Jesus reminds us, cannot add one day to your life? Ask the Lord to help you see your own list. He’ll show you. We don’t get to make the list for ourselves. We seek it in his written word, through prayer and the counsel of our community in the church.
These aspects of our sinful nature and the sin resident in our world act like cancer. They cause us to dysfunction, maybe at first in one area. Then the dysfunction metastasizes and spreads to other aspects of our lives. Then it can spread to our families and friends. It tries to ruin everything it touches, and it touches everything.
Jesus cannot abide sin because it creates stumbling blocks between the Lord and us. He will forgive it, when we truly repent. He will heal it. But he cannot abide it. The way of sin is the way of death. So he died for us. Every means possible. And he is the Lord of life! He rose for us.
We cannot do this on our own – which is why we need a savior. We need to be saved from this wretched body of sin and death, as Paul calls it. That is precisely what Jesus intends to do, to drive it out with every means possible. That is why we hear and reflect on his Word together, we pray and we confess our sins before we approach his altar, to get the money and the livestock out of the way before we commune – have unity – with him in the bread and wine which are sacraments of his body and blood.
All of this is meant to prepare us for eternal life with Him. (Remember that eternal life includes today.) Only that which is of the Lord will stand. Everything else must fade away – or be driven out.
Clearing our own hearts and as a church community keeps this pathway straight so that others – all others – who come through those doors can see the path to his altar, and to God himself. We’ve physically rolled out the red carpet for them! That is symbolic and we carry it with us wherever we go, to the extent we can clear away the clutter and distractions of sin and the commercialization of everything.
How is your soul? Start there.
AMEN