Tourist Trap

 

Have you ever gone on a trip to someplace new and been caught up in excitement with how beautiful it is or how exciting or how new it is?  The first time going to West Edmonton Mall, maybe, or the first time at a movie theatre, or going to Redwater for the first time to play a hockey game.  Playing tourist brings out more than our cameras, it brings out a childlike playfulness.  Just like some of Jesus’ disciples in our reading today.

“Wow, look at that!  Look at the gems! Look at the marble! Look at the windows!  Look at the gifts people have given to our amazing temple!”  If they had cell phones, they would have been snapchatting while they took it all in.

They were caught up in the glamor and the glory and probably, if they were deeply honest, a bit of nationalistic pride.  Maybe some of them were dreaming of the day Jesus would become king, move in and take over the whole place.  The Temple, heart of their faith and their spirituality, the house of their God, would one day be their playground.

Buildings can be like that.  A beautiful building with amazing architecture can create a sense of awe when you wander in.  No wonder they were having a childlike response to their sacred landmark. 

The Temple had a long and checkered history.  King David, the one who killed Goliath, had wanted to build it, but God wanted to stay in a tent.  King Solomon, his son, built the first temple, and it was glorious.  One of his many times great grandsons made the mistake of doing a tour for Babylonian travellers, and showing off all the gold and treasures the temple had accumulated.  Next thing they knew, the Babylonians came back with an army, ransacked the temple, stole the people and the gold and destroyed much of the city.  It would take a long time before it was rebuilt.  The temple had just finished being renovated before Jesus came, by Herod the Great, and had a beautiful golden vine carved on the outside.

And yet, this didn’t impress Jesus much.  While the disciples gazed and exclaimed in excitement, Jesus recognized that the second temple was just as fragile as the first one had been.  Jesus knew that the prophets who wrote Isaiah saw the destruction of the first Temple as a sign of how far the nation had strayed from its true purpose, to be in relationship with God.  The temple was supposed to be a place of peace and mercy, a refuge from injustice and quarrelling. A place of calm and stillness, healing and holiness.  A place of joy and music and halleluiahs.  A place where the lion could one day lie down with the lamb.

Jesus wanted to warn the disciples from being too focussed on what the Temple was instead of why it was there. 

We can get focussed on the what instead of the why too.  Our buildings need roofs and furnaces and stoves and heat, which is important, but the why is more important.  We need a place to gather together to heal, to sigh, to learn, to sing, to pray, to hold each other in love and in light.  We need a place to remind ourselves that God is with us, we are not alone.  We need a place where we can experiment with giving radical hospitality to people of all ages and stages, where we can recapture some of the joy and playfulness we had when we were children, the curiosity, and the openness to God in our lives.

Jesus challenged his disciples to look past the glamour of a tourist trap to the real purpose of the Temple, and how the best of buildings, the holiest of buildings can still be fragile and fleeting. And Jesus dared to tell the truth about the Temple, and about his country.  The people were fixated on power and money, and resentments were common.  The ordinary people resented the Roman occupiers, the leaders resented challenges to their power and control, and this meant people were simmering at the brink of violence.  The temple was doomed, they just didn’t know it yet.

Our society, our province and our neighbors to the south are also simmering.  With the release of more Epstein files, with the frustration with the attack on our human rights in our province and our children’s human rights, with the increase of measles and tuberculosis in Alberta, with rising food prices and a global economy that adds up to what is being called a polycrisis, there is a feeling of frustration and helplessness for many.  One minister in the states wrote on Friday, about the politics in the states:

Power is not rooted in goodness. It is rooted in grievance, nostalgia for white dominance, patriarchal entitlement...

This is not a political analysis. It is a moral one…

We cannot force the reckoning justice calls for, but we can refuse to pretend that the absence of justice is anything less than a moral failure. We can stop waiting for institutions that have already failed to do what they have no intention of doing. We can choose, in our own communities and families, to name what is true: This is not normal. This is not acceptable. And this is not what a just society looks like.

Jesus refused to pretend with his disciples.  He refused to pretend that the Temple was the vision Isaiah preached about where the lion lays down with the lamb.  God is calling us to trust in a better dream than tourist traps covered with gold or marble.  God is building a world where human rights are valued, where all people, despite their differences, children and adults alike, are treated with justice and love.  God is about to create a world where there is no weeping or distress, where the lion will lay down with the lamb.  May we know and trust in God’s promise for us all. Amen.

Note: Since I preached this on Sunday, November 16, it was brought to my attention that The Economist published two excellent articles in their Nov. 1 2025 edition, "By Invitation" written by Peter York, author of "Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World's Most Colorful Despots", and "Palace Intrigue" that highlights the parallels between what is currently happening at the White House and what happened in Versailles and other national buildings when in the hands of the dictators. They are found on pages 17 and 78 of the magazine and readily available in public libraries including Athabasca's Alice B. Donahue Library.  Although I had not read them, the conclusions are eerily similar, including a photograph of the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles similar to my photo which I took in 2017.

Lost In the Details

There’s a congregation in the states that had someone ask, “What was the hardest time this congregation ever faced?” The consultant, knowing that the church was established before the Boston Tea Party, thought it might be in the American Revolution when the British shot the minister’s wife.  Or maybe it was something that happened in the civil war, or in the World Wars, or the Spanish Flu, or even the Covid pandemic.  “Nope, sir, the hardest day was when we were flimflammed back in the 1860’s by our new minister. He said that the end times were near so we all sold our farms and put on white robes to go wait on a high hill for Jesus to take us to Heaven.  The hardest part of that was going back down the hill to buy our places back.”  Seems silly, but it happens again and again in the news.  It happened again this September and October, thanks to an enthusiastic TikTok pastor.  He was so convincing that people fretted about how they would find a way to get their pets raptured with them.  The shame and embarrassment they felt after the dates passed was as intense as it was back in the 1860’s.

It's easy to get caught up in the details, to play the prediction game.  It’s easy to go skimming through the Bible, picking a verse here and there until we’ve built up a case that has turned our opinion into cold hard fact.  The Sadducees were masters at analyzing scripture.  They knew their bibles inside and out, and these smart Sadducees were the ones with all the power and the wealth in their society.  They were smart men, however, and realized as they listened to Jesus teaching in the temple, that he was gaining a reputation of being smart, authentic in his faith, and convincing to ordinary people.  They watched the scribes and pharisees question Jesus, and they tried to trap Jesus in a question of their own. A question designed to prove that their belief was right and anyone else who believed differently was childish or even ridiculous.  How could there be a resurrection when it would lead to conundrums like the scenario of the woman with seven husbands?

Jesus didn’t get caught up in their details.  He didn’t step into their trap.  He talked not about verses but about relationships.  Not an analysis of marriage, but of how God is in relationship with human beings.  There is no past, present or future when it comes to God and the tribal ancestors.  If the pharisees wanted to get caught up in the details, they could, but that was not what Jesus cared about.

All scripture, according to Jesus, was about loving God with all our hearts and souls, and loving our neighbors as ourselves.  It goes straight to the heart of our faith.  It’s a big ‘why’ question.  Why do we have faith?  Why do we have church?  Because God loves us, and because we need reminders of that love.  You don’t get a bigger why than that. 

All too often we get caught up in the details, the how questions.  How will we get to heaven?  How will we act in Heaven? How will we know when Jesus will come again?  How will we fix the church?  How will we bring in new members.  And often, we come up with solutions to the how questions that don’t consider the bigger why questions.  It’s like when we have a hammer and we assume every problem can be fixed with pounding a nail in.  That’s great when we have a broken bookcase, but when we are having problems with our furnace, a hammer is not going to help.  Switching from how questions to why questions is not easy, but when we know our why, that can change how we fix our real problems.  It pulls us away from details and helps us see the big picture.  And as Jesus showed the Sadducees, the big picture is where God is.  Not in the details of which man is going to end up with a wife.

Churches often get caught up in how questions.  People have been absolutely convinced that bringing in an organ will grow a church.  People quit a church because it dared to bring in an organ, I think this was in a Presbyterian church back in the 1890’s.  Some campaigned to get rid of pews.  Some campaigned to install pews and get rid of chairs.  Some pushed to get PowerPoint into worship, some pushed to get it out.  During the Great Depression, a United Church in Edmonton didn’t want Methodists joining them because they would want a honky-tonk piano for worship, and pianos were only for bars.  Some people thought that using overhead slides would appeal to the youth, back in the 1970’s.  All these are hammer solutions to how questions.  They don’t work.

A big how question many Christians are concerned with is heaven and hell. Reverend Doctor Chuck Currie wrote, “Instead, we need to be more concerned with what happens here on earth. Christianity is a faith for the living. But we treat it as a faith for the dead, even when Jesus taught us to pray that the Kingdom come here on Earth. In spending so much time worrying about what comes after this life, we ignore what is occurring in our world today.”

Paul, too wanted to shift his friends in Thessalonia to shift from worrying about the ‘how’ of the second coming. Instead he goes to the why, “Therefore stand firm. Hold fast to the traditions you received from us, either by word of mouth or by letter.  May our Savior Jesus Christ and our Abba God-who loved us and in mercy gave us eternal consolation and hope- console your hearts and strengthen them for every good work and word.”

May we too learn to start with the why.  The why of growing resilient hearts to strengthen our ability to act with healing and compassion in a world fixated on hammering solutions onto each other.  May we find our hearts consoled and our courage to do good works strengthened by God’s almighty Grace and love. Amen.

Out on a Limb

Have you ever wanted to do something crazy or impulsive?  Take a risk? Be adventurous?  Most people may enjoy adventure between the covers of a page, but in reality, it’s not much fun.

Christians tend to get into adventures rather like Bilbo or Frodo Baggins in the books by Tolkien, quietly because they have to, not because they want to.  They take after Zacchaeus, our hero in Luke 19.  Climbing out on a limb, because he just had to see Jesus.  His need for connection outweighed his common sense, and he did something outrageous and scandalous.  Men didn’t have a lot of garments to protect their modesty back then.  It’s one thing to be a child that climbs trees, it’s totally different to be an adult doing it.  Even now, the sight of an adult in a tree, unless they are a logger, would probably have people questioning the sanity of the climber.  It’s noble and daring to climb a mountain as an adult, a tree, not so much.

Zacchaeus was not in the tree because he was a flasher or an exhibitionist with great legs.  He was there because he couldn’t see over the crowd.  He also had the physical disadvantage of being short, but he also had a job that made him an outcast in his society.  He was called a traitor for working as a tax collector for the Roman Government.  People shunned him, ignored him, and turned their backs on him.  It must have been very lonely.

So Zacchaeus went out on a limb to see Jesus, but then he almost fell out of the tree with excitement.  Jesus saw him and invited himself over for dinner.  People muttered their disapproval, and Zacchaeus, like someone meeting Taylor Swift or Tom Cruise for the first time, started babbling with excitement.  “Oh Jesus, this is what I do” and rattled off a list of how he tried to collect taxes fairly.  For those of you who like bible words, the ancient Greek doesn’t have one word for “I did” and another for “I do”, so we don’t know if Zacchaeus did all these good things in the past and is telling Jesus about it, or if Zacchaeus is telling Jesus how he will change his life in the future.  Either way, his words would have surprised the crowd that scorned him.

Was Zacchaeus changing his ways, or was Zacchaeus spilling how he was secretly undermining the system of Roman oppression from within?  We’ll never know, but it does make me wonder what impact his actions had.  He was a leader of tax collectors, and going out on a limb to handle people’s taxes fairly was not just about being a nice guy, it was about being radically focused on abundance, something that Jesus preached a lot about.  It’s at the heart of loving our neighbors, trusting that there is enough so that we don’t have to cheat or steal or lie about money.

It wasn’t just Zacchaeus doing something different, it also challenged the townspeople of Jericho, the ones who excluded Zacchaeus.  The ones who chose to believe he wasn’t good enough or didn’t deserve the attention of someone as honored and respected as Jesus.  The ones who were outraged that Jesus would turn that nasty tax collector into his dinner host.  It would be like if Taylor Swift met up with her fans then asked some stranger who had never heard of her to go partying with her after the concert!

Jesus went out on a limb for Zacchaeus.  He showed with his words and actions that this slimy little traitor was worthy of respect.  And he respected that Zacchaeus wasn’t afraid to look silly to get what he needed.

Most of the people that made a lasting impression on us were not afraid to go out on a limb for what they cared about.  Artists do it all the time, and the braver they are, the more they are respected.  We respect the Group of Seven, for example, because they went out on a limb for their art.  Even though people called their paintings ‘hot mush’ and ridiculed their riotous use of color and their rejection of traditional European styles, the Group of Seven didn’t stop experimenting.  We remember their adventurous spirit that had them travelling all across Canada to explore different landscapes. We remember these pioneers of Canadian art more than we remember their critics.

It's not easy going out on a limb, but when we live in interesting times, we are called to do just that. And today we pay our respects to others we remember who also did just that.  A United Church minister wrote, “While our denomination might not have an official… definition of what constitutes a saint, it is a universal human experience to hold in our hearts and memories people who have… made a difference in our lives... They may be loved ones whom we knew intimately, or they may be public figures we never met. All Souls’ Day contains room for all of us, broken and blessed… they were flawed, complex, imperfect humans who noticed a particular need or issue with piercing clarity and then stubbornly followed that clarity in ways that were inconvenient and exasperating for the authorities of their time and dangerous to themselves. How might we be called to be these kinds of saints?”

We live in challenging times.  God calls us to rise to those challenges, to see our neighbors as potential saints, and to go out on a limb for justice when human rights are being trampled.  When storms rage, when people are hungry, when disasters happen, when people are struggling with fear and anxiety, we are called to be a church of bold, daring and loving disciples. May we hear the call to go out on a limb, and love those who go out on the limb for us, that we may build a more beautiful world for all.