March 11, 2012

Clay Nelson

Lent 3     John 2:13-25

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This morning I would like you to enter your time machine and set the year for when you were a teenager. Now push the transport button. Are you there yet? Now what is your reaction when you question your parents and they answer, “That’s the way things are?” Now, back in the time machine and set it for a time when a teenager, perhaps your child or nephew or niece was challenging your authority and you answered, “that’s the way things are.” When they tell you to piss off, what is your reaction?

Challenging authority is a complicated issue and our feelings about it depend in part on whether we are the challenged or the challenger.

As I reflected on the story of Jesus versus the moneychangers, my thoughts got caught up in Jesus as the challenger. While the other three Gospels put this story into the last week of his life, John puts it nearly at the beginning. He uses it as a warning shot across the bow, that here comes a troublemaker. Don’t tell Jesus “that’s the way things are” unless you are prepared for a serious case of acting out with whips and overturned furniture. 

What was he challenging in this case? The story just before it gives a clue. He had just turned massive jars of water for purification into wine. It wasn’t just to extend the wedding breakfast. It was to blur the lines between sacred and secular, pure and impure. His tantrum at the temple was about using the purity laws to screw people. The priests were putting up barriers to God where none existed.

Simply put the moneychangers took Roman currency, which had the emperor’s face on it (a graven image), which made it “impure” thanks to the Ten Commandments and exchanged it for “pure” temple currency the priests provided (for a price). The faithful needed animals to sacrifice but they couldn’t buy them with impure money. The system worked much like exchanging Kiwi dollars at the airport for Aussie dollars. The difference between the sell and buy rate is how the currency exchanger makes money. They also usually attach a fee on top of that. 

While we don’t have to travel to Oz the Jews at the time had to go to Jerusalem to make an animal sacrifice in the Temple during the Passover to follow their faith. It was the Law. The priests exploited this spiritual practice in two ways. First they got a cut from the moneychangers by providing the currency and then from those selling anything from doves for the poor to lambs and cattle for the 1% as rent for space within the Temple walls. On top of that they got to keep the sacrificed animals for themselves or to sell back to the poor buggers who provided them in the first place. It was one hell of a business plan deeply invested in “the way things are.” Jesus was incensed enough to be the first #Occupy Wall Street protestor. Apparently he did not see making God a profit centre as good for anyone’s spiritual health. However, challenging the priests’ income stream would eventually not be good for his physical wellbeing.

Frankly, I like this Jesus who challenges authority. While some may see me as an authority figure, I prefer to see myself as a troublemaker, challenging the status quo. Unfortunately, that isn’t as true as I’d like it to be. When I was younger I was more like the moneychangers and animal vendors, willing to go along with the system to get my piece of the action. The best way to do that was to keep my head down. If I did challenge the system I tried to wipe clean my fingerprints. As I’ve gotten older I seem to be regressing to my adolescent self who is rarely satisfied by the way things are. Not that, in thinking about it, I ever was. What’s different now? Those in power and what they might be able to do to me are less likely to inhibit me. Perhaps, I have come to see that the emperor has no clothes. While I would prefer to avoid the consequence of my challenges, I have come to understand that there are worse things.

The way things are is not the way we are, although it may seem so. We are a product of the culture that formed us. Many of our beliefs came from somewhere else beginning with our parents. We have all been brought up in a culture that has worn deep grooves into us about the way things are and how we are to be inside that context. The problem is, it is a pretty tight box. Sometimes those grooves feel like chains keeping me locked away in someone else’s ideal of life. And if it isn’t working for me, I don’t think it works for anyone, not for women or men, not for people of colour or Pakeha; not for gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender or straight. No one wins in a system of embedded belief, which dictates, “the way things are.”

The truth is what we don’t know is immeasurably larger than what we do know. Only 4% of the universe is even visible to us, while 96% of the universe is dark matter, hidden from the naked eye. While we receive 40 million bits of information through our complex nervous system every second, we can only be conscious of about 40 of those bits. The rest of it goes into our subconscious, into the darkness we cannot see.

Given this enormous disparity between what any one of us can know, and what is yet still a mystery, how can anyone claim to know reality and “the way things are” with any certainty? Those who do claim certainty are not about knowledge but power and control. They may repeat their views over and over in hopes our minds will numb enough to believe them. Or they may appeal to what they would have us believe are higher authorities such as scripture and tradition to validate their views. But as Leonardo di Vinci pointed out, “Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.”

When what authorities say are the way things are doesn’t match up with our realty and experience we face a moment not unlike Jesus at the Temple gates: to be or not to be a troublemaker. 

At such times we may simply have to speak truth to power by simply reminding them that reality is so much bigger than any of us will ever know. There is no such thing as “the way things are.”

More likely that won’t be enough. More likely we will have to overcome our anxiety about challenging authority further by making a commitment to above all else to the mystery, even when we want desperately to hold onto something solid.

It may require honouring the complexity of the human condition and our propensity to err frequently, and to hold that sacred above all else, even above our desire to win, to be right, or to tell someone we love who is desperate for answers that “yes, this is how it is.”

Perhaps the antidote to authority’s increasingly tyrannical explanation for “how things are” might simply be a promise to our selves to choose vulnerability over certainty: a promise to live more fearlessly with ambiguity. A promise to respond with curiosity and openness to everything, rather than to accept anyone else’s version “of the way things are.” And a promise to remember that in challenging authority we are simply expressing the universal desire to be who are.

To challenge authority is simply to challenge assumptions, our own and those of the world around us. It’s one of the most essential creative habits, because to open our doors of perception, to expand our consciousness and access a more creative realm, we must unhinge the blinders that keep us from seeing more.

To challenge authority is the route to knowing who we are. That is where I believe I will encounter God. I suspect the more of us who have that encounter, the more just and loving will be our reality. 

And if the price we pay is to get in trouble? Well, get used to it. It’s the way things are at St Matthew’s.