Sermon for the 3rd of March - Third Sunday of Lent

Lectionary Readings for the Third Sunday of Lent

1 Corinthians 1:18-25
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.

John 2: 13-22
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 market-place!’ 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.

Sermon for the Third Sunday of Lent

I went on a walking tour of the neighbourhood of Whitechapel on Thursday, in the pouring rain, and it got me started thinking about the history of this city---of having a home, or not. And about Jesus in His Father's house.

St. George's Church, where we are worshipping this morning, was consecrated in 1864. Designed to seat 1,200 people (the number averages 50-70 today), its total cost was estimated at around £9,000---that included all the fittings as well as the architect's fee of £500. That may not sound like much, but it would be roughly equivalent today to £1,431,000. As for the neighbourhood around us, Aubrey House, just to the west, was attached to a medicinal spring discovered in the area, called Kensington Wells. Completed by 1698, it testified to the salubrious waters and the greenery of its surrounding meadows. Campden Hill Square was laid out in 1826, with most of the spacious houses occupied by 1840. After further land sales and development, including the widening of Campden Hill Road, formerly called Plough Lane, the area took on its present prosperous appearance. This was Kensington, in the west of London, in the 19th century.

In the East of London, in this same period---the 19th century---a very different landscape was emerging.

In the autumn of 1888 five women were murdered by Jack the Ripper. History has dismissed them as prostitutes, but not all were. At least one of the women was well- educated, but choosing to leave her drunken husband to go to the workhouse, she then found herself on the streets. She had to sleep outside that night in Whitechapel, as she had the night before, along with 600 others, in Trafalgar Square.

Hyde Park, it should be noted, was one of the favoured places to sleep for young women who were homeless.

But in the mid-19th century, it was the East End of London that experienced an enormous wave of immigrants who were fleeing starvation in Ireland, between 1845-1852. And from the 1880s onward, of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire and other parts of Eastern Europe who emigrated and arrived there, close to the River Thames and the docks, and so the chance for casual work.

The parish of Whitechapel became increasingly overcrowded. Working and housing conditions worsened; robbery and alcoholism became commonplace. Fifty-five per cent of children born in the East End died before they were five years old. In October 1888, the time of the Jack the Ripper murders, London's Metropolitan Police Service estimated that there were approximately 8,500 people residing in the 233 common lodging-houses within Whitechapel every night.

The nightly price for a coffin bed was fourpence (about £2) and the cost of sleeping upon a "lean-to" or "hang-over" rope stretched across the dormitory was two pence per person.

I dwell on this West-East divide in our city because homelessness is still with us. There are still those who sleep outside because they have no place inside. In Trafalgar Square, still, in Whitechapel, still. Even in the West part of London.

And if we turn our sight even farther East, to the Middle East, the tragedies of war are robbing human beings of life, and for those who are left, of a home. Of many homes. How are the people of Gaza expected to reconstruct their lives, much less their homes?

As we know, to have a home is vital to well-being, to the fullness of life God intends for all of us.

How does this relate to us? How does homelessness relate to us in this season of Lent? Here are a few thoughts.

Jesus chose to share the life of those on the margins of society--the homeless, the unwanted, the poor. He became angry, as in the Temple, when he saw the injustices of the society around him. In this extraordinary incident in John, recorded by all four Evangelists, Jesus sees the misuse of God's house, the Temple. Because weapons were barred in the Temple precinct, he made a whip out of the rushes used for bedding the animals and drove the sellers and money-changers out. The oxen and sheep were sold at a profit for the sacrifices required in the Temple; doves and pigeons were bought by the poor. Roman denarii and Greek drachmas were not accepted as payment for the Temple tax---a half-shekel---so the money-changers exchanged these coins for the legal coinage and in so doing also made a profit.

After this incident, Jesus's disciples remembered the words of Psalm 69: Zeal for your house will consume me.

In the fixation on satisfying the requirements of sacrifice in the Temple precincts, the religious authorities of Jesus's day had forgotten that God's house was above all to be a place of dedication to God, of devotion to God, of worship of God.

Christians, through the centuries, have set apart this Lenten season as a time of self- examination and of penitence---for our individual failings, for our larger society's failings.

This interior discipline has served to prepare us for the great celebration of Easter Day.

This interior discipline can serve to bring us closer to God.

This interior discipline will serve to empower us in greater acts of mercy to our fellow human beings.

The three ages-old Christian practices during Lent are fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. Let me translate those into more modern terms.

To aid in the interior discipline we strive for, Christians have found it helpful to pray more. To set aside more times to pray, or to create a place where in solitude and in quiet, our prayer can be more focussed. Most of us pray; Lent is a time to pray more.

Christians have also found it helpful to fast, in a variety of ways, in a variety of degrees. This is a choice of what helps to train our minds not on the excellence of our dinner, but on the enabling of the body for greater service to others. Some people find it meaningful to give the money they might have spent on a dinner out to a cause that helps others.

And third, Christians have found it helpful to give money to others in ways that are sacrificial. During Lent, we might choose to designate a cause, such as Glass Door, that helps the homeless, for the additional giving of our money.

The way in which we keep Lent will help us to celebrate Easter with a greater fullness of joy, our hearts and minds prepared by the disciplines of Lent.

May we not forget those who do not have a home.

And may God's Holy Spirit help us to help others, through the abundance of His grace.

Amen!