The Temptation of the Temple

On the cover of your bulletin is a picture of a Bathtub Mary. I love Bathtub Marys. The lawn art of devotion, the folk shrine of purity. My favorites are the plain ones. Metal tub half-buried with some gravel inside where there should be grass. The Bathtub Marys where there is nothing but a statue and a tub with some gravel; the shrine is a simple enclosure for the statue of the Madonna of Lourdes.  No paint, no flowers, no decorations. 

              I like it most when it is plunked down in the front yard.  It’s as if Mary has a blessing booth, a shrine for all, a place of public visitation.

Maybe it’s the Protestant in me that loves the simple ones, but I do. I admire the more elaborate as well. Madonnas in a field with walkways, raised altars, flowers, other yard art, a forest gnome or two.  This Bathtub Mary reminds me of Disney movies like Bambi or Snow White or Cinderella: she has a cast of creatures gathered round her.  The other Bathtub Mary option is what I would call the Latin influence.  Here Mary is engulfed in striking colors and flames.  This is good too.  Flames and colors . . . oh my! 

Okay, I like them all. 

For many years we have as part of our garden a statue of the older, rounded, laughing Buddha.  My grandchildren tend to rub his bald head for luck.  As a family we are an equal blessing/opportunity lender.  On my desk are statues of Horus, Shiva, and St. Cecelia.  I am sure such a canopy of religious deities will give the orthodox concern.  But if they come to our house, our dining room is filled with Russian icons.  Better safe than unfortunate.

Religious devotion, acts of penance and pilgrimage, shrines and altars, this doesn’t come easy to our Protestant hearts.  The closest we get without much fuss is the guardian angel.  We like those.  Don't see them here in the sanctuary, but you can find them on TV.  The Hallmark Channel paved the way for this. Yet, substitute guardian angel for patron saint and we are close to apoplectic. Feast Days and medallions, prayer cards and candles and we start getting nervous and say things like idolatry and superstition. 

We really get nervous with the idea of a holy place, holy space, holy site.  On my first visit to Israel, I was accosted in the airport when I gave the wrong answer to the security team.  What holy sites did you visit?  To this simple question I gave a qualified answered.  As a protestant I don’t see myself as visiting holy sites per se, archeological, historical, sites of traditional devotion, of course, but holiness conveys a material understanding of grace that is contrary to my theological view.  Yes.  I actually said this; and, yes, I was whisked away to a small closet with a very large man who asked more questions to determine: indeed, I was truly only a danger to myself.

Probably our true fall apart though is relics.  The bones of saints encased in altars just send us packing.  A famous quote of Luther is insightful.  There are enough splinters of the true cross in the altars of Roman churches to fill a forest.  We chafe at the idea of a bone of a saint which is revered, and this act of devotion leads to the timely and beneficial intervention by said saint in the courts of heaven.  We may enjoy an Indiana Jones movie about the grail, or a Dan Brown book about sacred bloodlines, but such is for entertainment not faith and confession.  Bad theology!

This will sound strange, but religion scares us.  You would think being in a church, in a faith community, and thus by extension, a religion that we would be okay with this, but religion makes us nervous.  If you listen to a lot of folks today, they will say things like, I like to find God in nature, outdoors.  Or I am more spiritual than religious.  Religion is a bit like Karaoke, there is a part of you that wants to sing, but the doing it is terrifying.  We want to have a transforming, empowering, uplifting, vibrant faith, but we almost want it to somehow happen randomly, unexpectantly, out of the blue.  Religion feels too controlled, contrived.

Maybe it’s the rule aspect.  Religion means rule, or set of regular practices, rituals, rites.  The word religion, which defies any one root word, seems to be all these “r” words smashed together.  Religion is regulated rites and rituals where we are redeemed, restored, reborn.  Being a Protestant, a protester, maybe this just doesn’t work with rules; we are in essence protesting the abuse of religion, how can we practice religion as we are protesting religion? 

It's taken a fair amount of time, but I am no longer fear religion.  While not a big fan of needless rules, I have discovered the art and practice of ritual, the devotion to a discipline as life changing.  In fact, I believe it is what changes us for the better.  Religion is what Nietzsche called the long obedience in the same direction. Truly good things only come from devotion.

If you have played a musical instrument or spent a long time with a sport, you know, mastery is not magic; it’s long hours, days, weeks of practice.  Great things are born of devotion.  They happen only after a long time. Devotion, religion, rule, self-mastery is the only way to achieve great things.  Religion is the way to achieve great faith.

I am no longer afraid of religion, but the religious still scare me.  I fear the zealot.  Zealots make me very, very nervous.  A great threat to our nation and world today is the union of religious zealotry and nationalism.  The images today of political rallies where there are crosses and people being baptized, and conspiracy theories laced with apocalyptic language and bible quotes.  That makes me nervous.  As Dylan said, You don’t count the dead when God is on your side.

Our reading today is set in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem is without a doubt the place of greatest religious zeal I have seen.  Walking through the city and its four quarters, each one has a pulse of deep tension, hyper focus, and zealotry.  The closer you get to the Old City the more intense it gets.  There is something about the three religions of the book all wanting the same real estate, all wanting this holy site, it creates a fevered delirium. 

Surprisingly I am now drawn to the tension, to the devotion. The first time I waded through the swirling mash leading to the Holy Sepulcher, it made me angry.  How can this be an act of faith, such chaos and madness?  Now I am starting to get the push and pull, the draw and the dispersion, be it with a reserved caution. 

In our little reading today, you can find this tension.  Mary grew up in Jerusalem, was raised in the temple, only left the temple when she was too old to remain an attendant; Mary, who was sent to Nazareth to live with Joseph, keeps coming back to the city, to the temple.  The angel tells her about the child, she heads back to the city.  Time for the birth of the child, she heads back to the outskirts of the city.  Her last story, the last story of Mary is when she and Joseph and Jesus come back to the city when Jesus was a boy.  All of Mary’s stories are either coming to or leaving from Jerusalem.

This is a common theme and it's good to pause and wonder, why this?  Why is Jerusalem and the temple the common thread binding her stories together?  It could be Jerusalem is the historic place of Israelite worship and the center of the world for Judaism.  So where else would you imagine the child born to be the Messiah to be found? 

But it's not; it's the opposite.  The angel comes to Nazareth; Jesus is born in Bethlehem; and he is raised in Galilee, not Judea.  The gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke only depict the adult Jesus as spending the final week of his life in Jerusalem. Jesus goes anywhere else.  But not Mary.

Mary seems drawn back, tempted as it were by the temple. Perhaps Mary was tempted to let personal faith, her piety, her devotion, perhaps Mary was tempted to take her religion and make something of it.  This is the temptation of religion, where something creating self-control in you becomes something to control others.  Granted it starts off as well intended, trying to help people, give people the aid we have found. But when religion becomes control of others, the exclusion of others, it is no longer true and good and beautiful.

In our reading Mary leaves the city and heads to Nazareth.  It is almost as if she is accepting her exile, leaving a former life behind, being obedient to a direction far from what she expected.  Considering the legend of her never wanting to leave the temple, was this a moment she was tempted to enter the religious world of her childhood now as the mother of the Messiah?  Was she tempted by the temple but resisted the draw?

This is part of religion, the zeal of devotion, we don't really get.  I like Bathtub Mary’s as part of folk art and just the idea of having a shrine in your yard makes me happy.  But that is a love of folk art.  And it's fair to say, I don't need to warn you or challenge your zeal for shrine making.  It's just not us. 

We are highly unlikely to be tempted to use religion as a means of controlling others, predicting events, or determining the choices of others, defining others as good or evil. Religion as deeming who is worthy of grace is no longer grace: this we get.  The temptation of temple, what Mary might have struggled with, the quiet theme of each of her stories, is not our struggle.  We struggle to have religion at all, let alone too much.

              We need to find religion, the gaining of self-control, the practiced faith freeing us from fear.  We need to be more religious so to attend to our heart. We must gain a devotion where we devote ourselves to scripture, the discipline of daily prayer.  We need to learn how to fast.

              The greatest need of the church today is devotion, religious practice.  I find when hardship comes in life and you need to draw deeply from faith and ritual, people are just lost.  We have filled our lives with distractions and lost the power of attention; we have filled our minds with platitudes and lack wisdom to meet the contradictions of life.  We need to practice the rule of faith: worship, fellowship, the teachings of Jesus, acts of service; we need this religion to break out of our virtual worlds, our isolation.

              Reading Mary's stories, I can see how tempting it was for her to let deep religious practice become imposed religion.  She could have stayed in Jerusalem and gained power.  And while there are people today in our country who are using religion to do just that, it is not our struggle.  We are not trying to control others, imposing our faith as a rule, spewing answers of conspiracy as prophecy. I shudder as I remember the people who stormed the capital with crosses and bibles in hand, who speak of God and Jesus falsely, with venom and hatred.  That is not religion; it’s the abuse of it.  The zealot has no true hope but fear.

              Having no religion is not freeing. We need devotion to worship, to scripture.  We need not be a zealot to be devoted.  True religion leads to freedom; we need to overcome our fear of it.  Amen.