THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT SUNDAY 3^RD MARCH 2024

OPENING SENTENCE-

The statutes of the Lord are just and rejoice the heart.

HYMN

COLLECT FOR PURITY

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open,

all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden:

cleanse the thoughts of our hearts

by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,

that we may perfectly love you,

and worthily magnify your holy name;

through Christ our Lord. Amen.

SUMMARY OF THE LAW

Our Lord Jesus Christ said:

The first commandment is this:

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is the only Lord.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,

with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.”

The second is this: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”

There is no other commandment greater than these.

Amen. Lord, have mercy.

CONFESSION

God is love and we are God’s children.

There is no room for fear in love.

We love because God loved us first.

Let us confess our sins in penitence and faith.

God our Father, we confess to you

and to our fellow members in the Body of Christ

that we have sinned in thought, word and deed,

and in what we have failed to do.

We are truly sorry.

Forgive us our sins,

and deliver us from the power of evil,

for the sake of your Son who died for us, Jesus Christ, our Lord.

ABSOLUTION

God, who is both power and love,

forgive you and free you from our sins,

heal and strengthen you by the Holy Spirit,

and raise you to new life in Christ our Lord. Amen.

LENTEN PROSE sung by Billy Dewar Riddick

COLLECT

Merciful Father,

we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves,

when we are discouraged by our weakness,

give us strength to follow Christ,

our pattern and our hope;

who lives and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, world without end.

Amen

PROCLAIMING & RECEIVING GOD’S WORD

FIRST READING PSALM 19 read by Kate Lidwell

God’s Glory in Creation and the Law

To the leader. A Psalm of David.

The heavens are telling the glory of God,
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
 and night to night declares knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth
and their words to the end of the world.

In the heavens he has set a tent for the sun,
which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy,
and like a strong man runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens
and its circuit to the end of them,
and nothing is hid from its heat.

The law of the Lord is perfect,
reviving the soul;
the decrees of the Lord are sure,
making wise the simple;
the precepts of the Lord are right,
rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is clear,
enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the Lord is pure,
enduring forever;
the ordinances of the Lord are true
and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey
and drippings of the honeycomb.

Moreover, by them is your servant warned;
in keeping them there is great reward.
But who can detect one’s own errors?
Clear me from hidden faults.
Keep back your servant also from the insolent;
do not let them have dominion over me.
Then I shall be blameless
and innocent of great transgression.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable to you,
O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

SECOND READING 1 CORINTHIANS 1:18-25 read by Peter Boreham

For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

GRADUAL HYMN

GOSPEL John 2: 13-22 read by Reverend James Clark Maxwell

Hear the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to St John chapter 2 beginning at verse 13:

Glory to Christ our Saviour

The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

Give thanks to the Lord for his glorious gospel

Praise to Christ our Lord

SERMON

Anger is a powerful emotion that we all have. We all have different anger buttons that get pushed from time to time. What makes you angry; what makes me angry? Some things that make me angry are quite deep and profound, whilst others are trivial and selfish. I really get angry at any form of injustice and cruelty, especially towards children and animals. Poverty in the world at large angers and upsets me, particularly after witnessing it first hand in Africa and more recently seeing images on my computer screen of malnourished children and adults in Yemen. The ecological damage – the harm to the environment, to sea, animal and human life, due to the mismanagement of creation- angers me. Other things that anger me are: people who trample over you in order to achieve their own ends; people who seek to be offended and play “the poor me syndrome” in our blame culture, where increasingly people seek to find faults in others; shop surveys; people who spoil the countryside by leaving litter around or treating it as a dumping ground. We all have different anger thresholds and what angers one person may not another. Are we ever justified in our anger? Was Jesus’ justified in his anger in the temple in today’s Gospel account?

Before attempting to answer those questions, it is worth noting that this temple story features in all four gospels, indicating its importance. John puts the temple account at the beginning of the gospel because for John, it is a metaphor for the ministry of Jesus in its totality. What John understands is that Jesus came to renew the Jewish faith; to challenge the institutional views of God and to bring passion and purity back into the worship of God. More than likely though this account happened in Holy Week as Jesus was going to Jerusalem for the Passover.

The Passover was the greatest of all the Jewish feasts. The law laid it down that every adult male Jew, who lived within fifteen miles of Jerusalem was bound to attend it. But it was not only the Jews in Palestine who came to the Passover. By this time Jews were scattered all over the world, but they never forgot their ancestral faith and their ancestral land; and it was the dream and aim of every Jew, no matter in what land he stayed, to celebrate at least one Passover in Jerusalem. Astonishing as it may sound, it is likely that as many as two and a quarter million Jews sometimes assembled in the Holy City to keep the Passover.

The Passover was a time for peak business for all the religious artefacts traders, selling lambs, oxen and pigeons for sacrifice and appropriate food for that season and all the other bits and pieces that would be associated with temple worship. Temple worship was at the heart of Jewish society. To the extent that there was a tax that every Jew over nineteen years of age must pay. That was the Temple tax. It was necessary that all should pay that tax so that the Temple sacrifices and the Temple ritual might be carried out day by day.

As William Barclay in his commentary points out, the tax was one half-shekel. We must always remember, when we are thinking of sums of money, that at this time a working man’s wage was about less than 4 pence per day. The value of a half-shekel was about 6p. It was, therefore, equivalent to almost two days’ wages. For all ordinary purposes in Palestine all kinds of currency were valid. Silver coins from Rome and Greece and Egypt and Tyre and Sidon and Palestine itself all were in circulation and all were valid. But the Temple tax had to be paid either in Galilean shekels or in shekels of the sanctuary. These were Jewish coins, and so could be used as a gift to the Temple; the other currencies were foreign and so were unclean; they might be used to pay ordinary debts, but not a debt to God.

As you can well imagine pilgrims arrived from all over the world with all kinds of coins. So, in the Temple courts there sat the money-changers. If their trade had been straightforward, they would have been fulfilling an honest and a necessary purpose. But what they did was to charge one ma’ah, a coin worth about one pence, for every half-shekel they changed, and to charge another ma’ah on every half-shekel of change they had to give if a larger coin was tendered. So, if a man came with a coin the value of which was two shekels, he had to pay 1 pence to get it changed, and other three pence to get his change of three half-shekels. In other words, the money-changers made four pence out of him–and that, remember, was one day’s wage.

The wealth which accrued from the Temple tax and from this method of money-changing was fantastic. The annual revenue of the Temple from the Temple tax has been estimated at £75k, and the annual profit of the money-changers at £9k. The fact that the money-changers received some discount when they changed the coins of the pilgrims was not in itself wrong. The Talmud laid it down: “It is necessary that everyone should have half a shekel to pay for himself. Therefore, when he comes to the exchange to change a shekel for two half-shekels, he is obliged to allow the money-changer some gain.” What enraged Jesus was that pilgrims to the Passover who could ill afford it, were being fleeced at an exorbitant rate by the money-changers. It was a rampant and shameless social injustice–and what was worse, it was being done in the name of religion.

Besides the money-changers there were also the sellers of oxen, sheep and doves. Frequently a visit to the Temple meant a sacrifice. Many a pilgrim would wish to make thank-offering for a favourable journey to the Holy City; and most acts and events in life had their appropriate sacrifice. It might therefore seem to be a natural and helpful thing that the victims for the sacrifices could be bought in the Temple court. It might well have been so. But the law was that any animal offered in sacrifice must be perfect and unblemished. The Temple authorities had appointed inspectors (mumcheh) to examine the victims which were to be offered. The fee for inspection was one pence.

If a worshipper bought a victim outside the Temple, it was to all intents and purposes certain that it would be rejected after examination. Again, that might not have mattered much, but a pair of doves could cost as little as 4 pence outside the Temple, and as much as 75 pence inside. Here again was bare-faced extortion at the expense of poor and humble pilgrims, who were practically blackmailed into buying their victims from the Temple booths if they wished to sacrifice at all–once more a glaring social injustice aggravated by the fact that it was perpetrated in the name of pure religion.

Furthermore, the hiero (the holy or sacred) included the whole temple complex and these vendors were almost surely located in the Court of the Gentiles, the outer precincts of the Temple. Previously they were located in the Kidron valley, but the scholar Epstein says that the high priest Caiaphas permitted his supporters to move their stalls to the temple as a way of avenging himself against rivals in the Sanhedrin, if this is the case, then there were a large number of people offended by this commerce in the temple. Caiaphas rivals were not alone in their opposition to this offense in the temple area. Nobody stopped Jesus emptying the temple of commerce perhaps because many were pleased to see it go. Imagine though how angry Caiaphas must have been to have his authority challenged in this manner.

Now we begin to get some understanding of why Jesus acted as he did. Jesus loved God, he loved God’s children, and it was impossible for him to stand passively by while the worshippers of Jerusalem were treated in this way. It would be wrong to say that Jesus got caught in the heat of the moment. He made a cord which would take time. This was no heat of the moment event but rather it was an act of disruption. This act cut to the core of the historic Jewish faith and all it stood for. It was a moment of crisis for the people of God. Jesus was saying that the old way of doing faith was no longer appropriate; that the heart of faith had been lost in ritualism, that it was passion for God that sold out, not pigeons for sacrifice.

True faith cannot be expressed through empty rituals, rather the rituals we undertake must be an expression of the real worship of our lives- everything else is foolishness! By the time Jesus visited the temple that day, the Jewish nation had lost sight of the difference. Their purity issues had become rituals of discrimination: Jews in the inner courts; Gentiles in the outer courts; men in one section; women in another; sacrifices the poor could not afford; sacrifices the rich could afford. In the beauty of the ritual, the heart of purity, the passion for God had been lost and it was this that made Jesus angry and as a prophet and as God’s Son he had to make a stance against this treatment of God’s house as “a den of robbers”.

Was Jesus justified in his anger? I believe that he was justified in his anger in that it was not a selfish anger but one that was generated from a concern for God and his house, and one that fought against discrimination and extortion. Is our anger ever justified? Our anger may well be justified, when it not selfish; when it is genuinely standing up against discrimination, oppression, injustice and poverty. However justified our anger may be, in my mind, anger should never spill into violence. Jesus drove out the animals and upturned the tables as a symbolic act of cleansing.

In this Lenten season we examine ourselves to see if there is anything offensive within us. Are we just going through the motions of worship? Are our rituals empty, devoid of the passion of God? Is there anything in our church life-an exclusiveness, a coldness, a lack of welcome, a tendency to make the congregation into a closed club, an arrogance, a fastidiousness–which keeps the seeking stranger out? True faith cannot be expressed through empty rituals but rather through the real worship of our lives as we show forth justice, kindness, humility, non- oppression, care for the marginalised, and faithfulness in using the gifts and talents that God has given us for his glory. Amen.

NICENE CREED

We believe in one God,

the Father, the almighty, maker of heaven and earth,

of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,

the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father.

Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation

he came down from heaven;

by the power of the Holy Spirit

he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary,

and was made man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;

he suffered death and was buried.

On the third day he rose again

in accordance with the Scriptures;

he ascended into heaven

and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living

and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord,

the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father.

with the Father and the Son,

he is worshipped and glorified.

He has spoken through the Prophets.

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

We look for the resurrection of the dead,

and the life of the world to come. Amen

Lord, you come to your temple with zeal and indignation

come to your church and drive from it

all false piety and misguided priorities

may our words, thoughts and deeds be acceptable in your sight!

God of our salvation

we trust in your promise

Lord you come to places of power

and boldly upset their unjust ways of working.

open the hearts of all in leadership

to the challenge of kingdom values and purposes.

Revive in us all a clean heart

and a right and steadfast spirit.

God of our salvation

we trust in your promise

Lord, you come to traders with a vision beyond profit.

Keep us mindful of the conditions of production

and the social effects of what we consume.

Balance all our trading with your fairness and equity.

God of our salvation

we trust in your promise

Lord you come to our lives with compassion

and searching judgement.

In our frailty give us time to reflect on what is amiss

and in repentance to seek your restoring grace.

Create in us a fitting dwelling place for your glory.

God of our salvation

we trust in your promise

Lord you come to us

inviting us to reach out in love and care

to those most in need.

We remember those families

struggling in this pandemic to cope

emotionally, mentally, physically or financially

and ask that you will meet them at their point of need.

Grant them all the support, help

and encouragement they may need.

God of our salvation

we trust in your promise

Lord you come to us wherever we are,

reaching out to in love to assist us.

We lift to you those countries,

which are wracked by war and disaster,

and pray that in their endeavours

to rebuild and reconstruct their lives,

they may receive all the support and help they need.

Show us what we can do to help

and guard us from all indifference and complacency.

God of our salvation

we trust in your promise

Lord you came to those in pain and distress and offered them comfort and healing.

In the quiet we bring to you those people we know that

are suffering in body, mind or spirit.

Give your healing touch, your strength, your hope and care

to all we have named in our hearts.

God of our salvation

we trust in your promise

Lord you come with the promise of the resurrection

give comfort and hope to all who mourn.

We lift to you all for whom this month

is an anniversary of the death of a loved one.

God of our salvation

we trust in your promise

Lord you come to us

full of joy and expectation

journey with us

and be our stay and guide.

Merciful Father accept these prayers for the sake of your Son,

our Saviour Jesus Christ who taught us to pray together

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come,

your will be done,

on earth as in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread.

Forgive us our sins

as we forgive those

who sin against us.

Do not bring us to the time of trial

but deliver us from evil.

For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and for ever. Amen.

HYMN

BLESSING

May Christ give you grace to grow in holiness, to deny yourselves, take up your cross, and follow him; and the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always. Amen.