March 16, 2003

Pastor Christa von Zychlin

Our Savior’s Evangelical Lutheran Church

Hartland, WI.  53029

Teleology

So, why are we in this war with Iraq?

Why are we doing this?

What’s the goal, the real reason, the end or purpose of it all?

 It’s such an important question.  It’s definitely a political question

But it’s also a human question,

When anti war crowds begin attacking the embassy in Yemen, where one of our members is doing his best to serve our country…

When we’re getting e-mails at the church, please pray for my godson Greg in Kuwait, please pray for my nephew Timmy in Iraq… and I’m thinking what’s a kid named Timmy doing, heading for a place like Baghdad…

 When we are getting the first reports of half starved Iraqi’s including soldiers, laying down their weapons & welcoming American troops

And conflicting reports of Iraqi’s who are both anti Saddam AND anti American, shooting at their so-called liberators

When our fierce loyalty to our beloved country makes us proudly cheer every soldier on CNN who looks in the camera & says, I’ve got a job to do, and by God, I’m going to do it… and then I’m going to come home. 

“Yeah.  You go,” we think.

 And yet when we see hundreds of thousands of protestors, American citizens like us, international friends & relatives in places like, Milwaukee, Chicago, Germany, Denmark saying, no blood for oil, no American “takeover” of the world, no killing of innocent families and forcing thousands of real, flesh & blood human beings to flee their homes; When we hear church missionaries around the world saying, how will Muslims ever be able to come to know Jesus when the only thing they hear about so-called “Christians” is that they come with tanks and 2-thousand pound bombs ?

 Why are we doing this? What’s the goal, the real reason, the end or purpose of it all?

It’s a huge political question, it’s a tremendous humanitarian question and it’s an absolutely  necessary theological question for people like you & me who are trying to live as crucified followers of Jesus, this Lenten season which has now also become, whether we think it necessary or not,  a season  of  war.  And it’s our war.

 TELEOLOGY is the word that came back to me this week as I read the Bible with CNN sirens going off on the TV's & radios around me.

 TELEOLOGY, it’s a word I first stumbled across in my Philosophy 101 class many many years ago,

From the Greek word TELOS meaning the goal, or the reason or the end or the purpose of it all.

TELEOLOGY is the study of whether there even is a goal or reason or end or purpose for all of creation & for human life within creation.

 Another way you could put it I think is to say, whose business is it? Or is it anybody’s business, what we human beings are up to here on this earth.

 Again and again, especially in these troubled times, we hear in the Word of the Lord that we human beings ARE God’s business.  That God created you & me with a goal ,a reason , an end & a purpose in mind. It is GOD’s business how we live our lives as individuals and as families and as citizens of a country and as members of a local church community.   CNN, Saddam Hussein & his sons, Timmy marching towards Baghdad, you & me praying for our soldiers & donating money for war refugees it IS all God’s business.

 Tonight in the Gospel Jesus storms into the temple.  Why does he storm into the temple?  What’s his goal here?  17 tells us:“Zeal for your temple shall consume me.” Says my standard version of the Bible.  The updated version we also use around here says more simply :”Love for your house burns in me like fire.”

 But I like that word ZEAL, we don’t use it much anymore but it’s a useful word.  The word “love” can be way too soft for days of war & violence.  Love is too gentle a word for Jesus who in the gospel of John doesn’t just pick up a whip that he finds lying around, but he actually makes a whip from  rope and uses it – watch these verbs – to drive out the animals from the temple, to pour out the coins of the money changers and over turn the tables of those who – get this—those who THOUGHT that they were doing

 God’s business in the temple of the Lord.  They thought, but they thought wrong.  Because they had the teleology wrong- they forgot the reason for the temple’s existence in the first place.  As a place for God to meet God’s people.

 Here’s the way the temple system worked:

 First of all the temple was a big place, more like a huge county courthouse than our modest little church building, and it had a huge economic impact on the whole city of Jerusalem, as pilgrims and tourists and people who wanted to get right with God came from around the whole world to the one place that Jewish law taught you could come, to offer your sacrifice, your cow or your sheep, or if you were lower middle class, your more modest doves, to be burned on the altar,  in order to get right with Almighty God.

 If you were a good religious person like Jesus, who would have walked the 75 miles or so from Capernaum to get to the temple in order to celebrate the high Jewish holy day of Passover, you wouldn’t have been able to bring a sacrificial  animal with you too easily, and not just any animal, but a perfect specimen, so throughout the years some enterprising people had set up shop so that you could buy an animal- a perfect specimen, close to the temple gates.  So far, good entrepreneurial skills, at work, you see a need, you fill it. Pretty soon there’s competition, you’ve got lots of buyers & sellers, hawking prices & quality with loud voices.

 You make some money, you provide a service, everybody’s happy.

But then there was another layer of marketing added on , that little Biblical commandment against making a graven image – so it was taught that you couldn’t use Roman coins – which had a picture of Caesar on them - to pay for your holy temple offering, you had to use these special temple shekels, a little like (but not to be confused with) the ridiculously expensive coins you use as tokens at Chucky Cheeses’. 

 So you have whole outer courtyard of the temple, filled with mooing cattle, baaing sheep, doves in cages, all the smell & dung & flies that goes with that sort of business, and everywhere, the sound of money, money, money. 

 Nothing wrong with any of that until you think about the teleology of the place, the goal, the reason, the end or purpose of the temple:

 Remember?

 As a place to meet God.

 And zeal for that purpose fills Jesus.

 So that when some poor pilgrim from the other side of Galilee finally made it to the temple, looking forward to the chance, for some of a lifetime, to get right with God, to pray for the things most important to one’s heart,  like the health of a mother, the well being of a son in war, the success of a new business, the forgiveness of a long hidden act of violence or cheating,

 What does the poor pilgrim  see?  Cows, sheep, doves, dung, flies, and the demand for money, money, money.  Get your two for one cattle special here.  Buy your temple shekel from us.

 And Jesus is furious.  Stop making my father’s house a marketplace.  It’s not a marketplace.  That’s not the telos.  The temple of God is a place to meet God.

 Then Jesus says the heart stopping thing.  The business-as-usual ending thing.  The thing that many Bible students believe is the one thing that actually got Jesus crucified.

 Knock this whole temple down, he says, destroy this whole huge mega-billion dollar industry (in today’s dollars), and I’ll have what’s important up & running again in three days.

I’ll show you -- a place to meet God.

 It took the disciples until after Jesus’ being hung up to die, after his getting up from the dead to figure out what he meant.   Jesus Christ is the new & ultimate temple of God. In the person of Jesus Christ on the cross, and today through his body, the church, ordinary people can now meet God anytime, anyplace, under any conditions, wherever 2 or 3 are gathered in his name.  No shekels needed.  Just the sacrifice, already taken care of now, of Jesus’ own blood.

 Today, I believe that Jesus’ zeal for his temple must live on in us & our church.  I believe that Jesus wants to pour out, drive out, overturn that part of you and me and our church  that would in any way impede the ability of others to come to meet God in his truest temple, Jesus. 

 And today, in the middle of what for better or for worse, is perceived as a “Christian country’s war” against “a Muslim country’s weapons” we dare not forget that God’s business is always bigger than the business of this congregation, bigger than the business of the brave soldiers & the entire sophisticated United States military organization, bigger than the whole world’s marketplace & oil structures.  God’s business, God’s purpose is that

all people, including Milwaukeeans, Chicagoans,   Germans & Danes,  Iraqi’s , Kuwaitis, Palestinians and Jews would some day enter his temple, through an encounter with the living Lord, Jesus Christ,  with no  merchants blocking the way.

 May God’s zeal for his temple  his burning love for ALL people consume us, too.  (As one founder of an international relief agency prayed it:  Jesus!  Let my heart be broken by the same things that broke your heart.” ) Because that is the telos, the goal, the reason, the end & the purpose for which God has made us & redeemed us with his truly innocent blood. 

 That’s his business & as Christians, now it’s ours too. AMEN.

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