Occupy Temple Court

A sermon preached by the Rev. Scott D. Nowack on March 11, 2012

at First Presbyterian Church, Kilgore, Texas.

Occupy Temple Court

Exodus 20:1-17

John 2:13-22

A lot can change in the blink of a decade.

In 2001, business author Jim Collins wrote the book, Good to Great, as a sequel to his other groundbreaking work, Built to Last. Both books were aimed at profiling companies that had "made the leap" to greatness and were "built to last" well into the future.[i]  One example from these books was Circuit City.  Ten years ago Circuit City was the leader in the retail electronics industry.  It blew ahead of General Electric, the long-time standard bearer.  The stock value for Fannie Mae was well ahead of companies like Coca-Cola.  Blockbuster Video, Borders, and Circuit City were running on all cylinders; the future looked so bright that there was no limit on how far they would go. 

Ten years later, these thriving companies, the standard bearers of their industries, went far, very far, so far that they went over the cliff and crashed in the valley below.  Blockbuster, Borders, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Pontiac, Hummer, Newsweek and Circuit City have all closed up shop.  Other companies have been bailed out hoping to adapt and change, while others are still heading straight for the great abyss of bankruptcy and closure.

In 2009, Jim Collins, with a humble spirit, wrote a new book entitled, “How the Mighty Have Fallen”.  He re-examined his research to find any warning signs that indicate what happened to these companies, what caused their fall from prominence.

In this book, Collins proposes five stages that mark the decline of once-great companies.  As I share these stages with you, I think it’s fair to say that parallels can be drawn to the decline of the Christian church in Western culture.

Stage 1: Hubris born from success. A successful company begins to believe its own press and becomes enamored with itself. The company becomes dogmatic about its products and practices and fails to question their relevance when conditions change.
Stage 2: The undisciplined pursuit of more. The company strays from the disciplined creativity that made it great in the first place, making leaps into places outside the original realm of success and growing so fast that excellence is sacrificed for expediency.
Stage 3: Denial of risk and peril. Leaders begin to deny that anything is wrong, and refuse to hear bad news, putting a positive spin on everything. They blame external factors instead of taking responsibility.
Stage 4: Grasping for salvation. The company begins to look for a quick fix to its problems, and begins grasping at straws to stop the decline. Common "saviors" for a company in this position are the hiring of a charismatic leader, radical restructuring, focusing on a revolutionary new product, or other reactive behaviors and strategies.
Stage 5: Capitulation to irrelevance or death. In this stage, the company's spirit and financial strength have eroded to the point of despair. Leaders and team members give up hope and the institution slides into insignificance and eventual death.[ii]

These five factors can eventually put any business out of business.  But leaders can stop any decline by taking drastic action to get the company back to its core principles, values and practices.  The best leaders and the best companies are able to come back because they are invested in a vision for creating something great.  They never give up hope for a brighter future.

            Mr. Collins could easily be describing the troubles of the temple of Jesus’ day or the condition of the church in our own town.  Jesus has come to work and he means business.  His entrance is an ultimatum to the powers that be: the mighty will fall. 

            This episode in the scriptures about Jesus appears in all four Gospels.  While the others place the story in the context of Holy Week, John includes at the beginning of his gospel.  The fact that it is in all four gospels tells us that this was a key event of Jesus’ life.  It served as a powerful reminder to the early church that “any institution that claims to be of God is doomed to failure if it refuses to pay attention to God’s own core purposes and values”.[iii]  The business of the temple had gotten away from its core purposes and values.  They were following the same steps of decline followed by the companies that failed in the past decade.  The temple had lost its luster.  It had lost its purpose.

The sacrificial system in the temple had evolved, over the centuries, into an efficient machine for fleecing rich and poor alike, earning a great deal of money for the insiders who ran it. If you went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, your goal was to sacrifice an animal, according to the law of Moses. You could bring your own sacrificial animal, of course, but many who had journeyed from afar found it easier to purchase a beast locally, at a steep markup.

The law said you had to present a perfect animal, without mark or blemish. Unless you purchased a pre-approved animal within the temple precincts, you had to bring your offering before an inspector, who would tell you whether or not it made the grade. The inspectors were in cahoots with the animal-sellers, who knew how to grease their palms with silver. Rarely did they grant approval for a sacrificial animal brought in from the outside.

There was something else. If you had journeyed from one of the lands of the Jewish diaspora -- Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, even distant Rome -- the coins jingling in your purse would have been imperial coins, engraved with the Emperor's likeness. Such graven images violated the Second Commandment, and so were forbidden within the temple precincts. In order to buy yourself a sacrificial animal, you had to first exchange your Roman money for image-free Judean coins. The money changers, who had a monopoly, charged exorbitant commissions, but the poor pilgrims had no recourse. They got them coming and going, those temple merchants.

The reason Jesus raged through the temple had nothing to do with the proximity of money to a place of worship, as some modern commentators have assumed. His anger was sparked by injustice: the fact that the temple had been transformed into a corrupt machine for cheating pilgrims out of their life savings.  What enraged Jesus was that pilgrims to the Passover who could ill afford it, were being fleeced at an outrageous rate by the money-changers.  The exploitation of the pilgrims by men without a conscience moved Jesus to immediate wrath.

So Jesus walks right in and drives out the sellers who have turned the temple court into a shopping mall.  “Jesus was occupying Wall Street, as it were.  He announced a foreclosure on the temple but, like a passionate and visionary leader, announced that a new initiative would take its place.  The temple would be destroyed, but a new one would be raised up: the temple of his own body.”[iv]  Jesus came to do for us what the temple could not.  Jesus gave life away rather than collect power for himself.  With his actions in the temple, he took on the prevailing religious worldview of his day risking death on the cross knowing that this was the only way to save the world.  Jesus displays for us that to go from good to great is the path of suffering and self-denial and not the exploitation of others.

Jesus’ actions challenge us as a church today as to “whether we are faithful to his call or ready for a fall.”[v] 

If Jesus were to come occupy our church, what would he want to drive out in order to accomplish his purposes through us?  What practices or programs or perceptions do we need to discontinue in order to be Christ in our time?  What would it mean for Jesus to put our church out of business in order to start something new?

Jesus wants to challenge us as a church family to discern the leading of the Holy Spirit in this time and place.  We can no longer afford ‘business as usual’.  What patterns and traditions are getting in our way from being Christ’s church in 2012?  What is Christ’s main focus for our ministry here?  By what core purpose and values do we serve?  How we answer these questions will determine our viability as the body of Christ in our town and the world?

             May we be the leaders and disciples of Christ willing to take drastic action to get back to our church’s core principles, values and practices.  May we be willing to invest in a vision for creating something great.  We will never give up hope for a brighter future.  Amen.

---

[i] Collins, Jim. Good to Great. New York: Collins, 2001.

[ii] Collins, Jim. "How the Mighty Fall: A Primer on the Warning Signs." Book Excerpt. Bloomberg Businessweek website. May 14, 2009.

[iii] Jesus Puts Business Out of Business. March/April 2012, vol. 24, No.2. of Homileticsonline.com (Canton: Communication Resources, Inc. 2012) p.16.

[iv] [iv] Jesus Puts Business Out of Business. March/April 2012, vol. 24, No.2. of Homileticsonline.com (Canton: Communication Resources, Inc. 2012) p.17.

[v] [v] Jesus Puts Business Out of Business. March/April 2012, vol. 24, No.2. of Homileticsonline.com (Canton: Communication Resources, Inc. 2012) p.17.