A House for All People

Well, let's talk about one of the most famous ghost towns in Santa Cruz County. You might know it as Holy City. How many of you have ever heard of Holy City before? Most of you, right? Well, if you're not familiar with it, Holy City right now is just kind of a bend in one of the roads around Summit Road and Highway 17. But back in 1919, an ex-fortuneteller and carnival mind-reader who called himself Father Riker and his wife, who guess what she called herself? Mother Riker, you're not wrong. They started a religious commune here. They called it the Comforter and the New Jerusalem promised by Jesus. And humbly, they admitted that they were the true masters of religion and the only true philosophy.

By the 1930s, hundreds were in Mother and Father Riker's cult. They would often show up both dressed as nuns wearing crowns. They preached celibacy, except for themselves. Vows of poverty, except for themselves. They demanded that all their followers give them all their money. And when people tried to leave, they sent goons to track them down, beat them up, and drag them back to the cult. The goons also were dressed as nuns with crowns. No, that's not really true, but imagine that. Eventually scandals shut the place down, including charges of murder and polygamy. And I mean, we laugh at it today, except similar headlines continue to dominate the news. Year after year after year, all continuing manifestations of what you could call toxic religion, a disease always lurking in every church.

Now obviously no church is perfect, no pastor is perfect, including me. But here's how I define toxic religion. First it's controlling, it's hyper-authoritarian, it's hyper-exclusive, if anybody outside the group. It's exploitative of followers for money, for power, for sex. And in a Christian setting, it almost always goes with a legalistic theology, legalism meaning being focused on rules as the means of salvation and transformation instead of the gospel, instead of the grace of God. Now, if you look at this list, it might sound uncomfortably familiar to some of you because you spent some time in your life under this kind of a toxic system.

This can erupt just in families that are very religious or in churches or in small group Bible studies or on the mission field or in all sorts of different settings. You can have this sort of toxic religion system. Maybe you've been hurt by a church leader, let down by a similar church system. I am so sorry. And I want you to know that you are loved and you are seen and you are advocated for by Jesus Christ Himself.

As we continue our series, "Seven Verses Jesus Loved," leading us up to Easter, we're starting to get into the later phase of Jesus' ministry. And you'll notice that Jesus starts to take on a social issue. The only social issue who ever really takes on, Jesus only takes what you could call an activist stance on one thing. And it's surprising if you think of all the causes in the Roman Empire that Jesus could have taken a public stand on back in his day, what he becomes publicly identified with, publicly known for, is his loud stand against toxic religion. Especially in today's story, the famous story of the cleansing of the temple.

Now, you got to be careful about the story because it's actually been used by toxic religious leaders to defend what they do. When I was a kid, most of the time when I heard the story of the cleansing of the temple, which is in all four gospels, it was kind of like, "Say goodbye to gentle Jesus. Say hello to angry Jesus." Like he transforms from Gandhi into Indiana Jones. Whip is his weapon. He has a temper tantrum. You could say a temple tantrum, and the hour for mercy has passed and the day of judgment is here. And this is a pervasive image.

You know, one of my interests, one of my hobbies, you could probably guess if you've known me for a little bit, is art history. I just love it. I love going to art museums. So according to one art historian, every single known classic painting of the cleansing of the temple shows Jesus as violent and hurting people. Hurting people. Let me just show you some examples. The Acobo Bassano, famous Italian painter, painted Jesus whipping a man, as you can see. El Greco painted several people writhing in pain under his whip directed to them. In this one by Giotto, looks like Jesus is about to punch this guy right in the nose. Remember, Jesus lashes people who are completely terrified of Jesus. In every image of this event in art history, Jesus violently hurts people. Every single one, complete fiction.

Now something does happen at the temple. It is described in all four gospels. In not one does it say Jesus was violent. In not one does it say he hurt people. In not one does it say he has kind of an out of control rage and starts punching people in the face. So what really happened on that famous day? This is really important for a lot of reasons. First of all, this story is used by people to justify violence. In fact, I recently read someone arguing for civil war in America, and as justification he used the story of the cleansing of the temple. He said, "Maybe civil war is the temple cleansing we need right now." So you've got to understand what really happened here to guard against that interpretation.

But secondly, when correctly understood, this really is such a beautiful story for those who have been abused by a toxic religious authority. It shows three ways that Jesus takes a stand against toxic religion, and I think you're going to be so encouraged by this, set free by this, and the first one I'll mention very quickly, Jesus sees past pretense. Jesus sees past pretense, past the facade, past the front. So we're going to go to the Gospel of Mark chapter 11 starting in verse 15 to start this story. It says, "On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts." So when he enters the temple courts, you know what we like to do is to have you sense these stories, to see them, to feel them emotionally.

So what is he seeing? It was awe-inspiring, and to put this into some perspective, you may have seen St. Peter's Square in Rome. It can hold 360,000 people. The church plus the square are 5.7 acres, the second largest religious complex on the planet right now. The Jerusalem temple platform was 36 acres over six times the size of St. Peter's Square. Twenty-nine American football fields can fit inside of it. Massive and beautiful. The first century Jewish historian Josephus who saw it in person partially described it like this. He said, "It was covered with plates of gold, and at sunrise reflected that fiery splendor and made those who look upon it to turn their eyes away just as they would at the sun's own rays." Amazing place. But Jesus is not overawed by it. He always sees past this pretense. It does not impress him.

Here's why this is important. Maybe you have been hurt by someone everyone else admires. Jesus sees past the facade. Jesus stands with you. He sees the reality behind the mask. And then Jesus literally makes room for the excluded. He makes room for the excluded. Watch what happens next. So Jesus enters the temple courts. It begins to drive out those who are buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those selling doves and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts.

All right. Really important to figure out what's going on here. The place he enters, this was the massive square that you first walked onto when you got to the temple, was called the Court of the Gentiles. Gentile is the Jewish word for non-Jew. So this is the one place up on the Temple Mount that an African, an Arab, a European, a Roman, a Greek would be able to go up there to be close to the temple and worship. But really they could only look at the temple because there was a fence. There was a barrier around the actual temple itself with numerous warning signs. Archaeologists found this one from the first century. So Jesus would have seen this very sign on that day of the cleansing of the temple. Here's the translation. "No foreigner is to enter within the barrier around the temple in enclosure. Whoever is caught will be himself responsible for his ensuing death." And we'd like to invite you to the welcome party after the service. I mean, this is intense.

Now watch this. In Jesus' day, the Gentiles were squeezed out even from their own area, the Court of the Gentiles, by merchants selling animals, mostly doves, to the pilgrims who were there to present them as temple sacrifices. And they were sold at vastly inflated prices. I found a rabbi a few years after Jesus who said the price for a dove was inflated 100 times normal. So this was very much like buying garlic fries at a giant's game, just super inflated prices. And there were money-changing booths because what happened was you could only spend special sacred temple money on the temple mount. So you had to get your normal filthy lucre exchanged for temple money, move over one step and just give the temple money right back to buy a dove or a lamb for a sacrifice. He was all a racket.

And Jesus says, "Enough!" And that brings me to the whip. Only the Gospel of John mentions it, and it says Jesus drove out the animals with it. In other words, it was a switch that Jesus used to herd animals. In fact, the Greek word used there for whip is often used for something like a broom made of straw, you know? So Jesus is making cords, but not necessarily, you know, out of leather. They could have been cords made out of rope and so on. It's a switch that he's using to herd the animals out, right? I mean, think about it. If Jesus had been truly violent, like in all the paintings, do you really think the Roman soldiers would have just looked on passively? They would have instantly arrested him. He was herding animals out and bringing people in.

Watch this. And as he taught them another proof that he was not raging, right? He stops and he teaches. This was street theater. This was a public one-man demonstration, very similar to what the Old Testament prophets did before their lessons. Jesus is teaching intensely, passionately, but not violently. And as he taught them, he said, "Is it not written?" And here comes one of his favorite verses. "My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations." Say all nations. All nations. This verse, he quotes here, really ends up setting the tone for the whole rest of the Jesus movement from this moment forward through the whole rest of the New Testament, opening up the Jesus movement to everybody.

So I want you to see the context here. Jesus is quoting Isaiah 56, where God had said, and this was centuries before Jesus, "Let no foreigner who is bound to the Lord say, 'The Lord will surely exclude me from His people,' and let no eunuch complain, 'I am only a dry tree.'" Now we're not familiar with the term eunuch, but in ancient times, often to serve in royal courts and all kinds of ancient cultures. If you're going to be an advisor to the king or a teacher or even a servant, if you were a man, you had to be a eunuch. And that means to have your reproductive organs removed or damaged, destroyed. And you'd be like, "Why would anybody do this again?" Well, in those days, believe it or not, this was a way of advancement for people born in lower classes.

People would voluntarily do this so that they could get these roles. And eunuchs could end up being actually very influential. Many of the most famous people in history back in antiquity were eunuchs because they rose up to that position. You know, they were no threat to the king's harem, and so they were able to serve that way. But often eunuchs would regret this alteration. You can imagine, "I'm only a dry tree. I'm never going to have kids." And not only that, but in many religions, including ancient Judaism, eunuchs were excluded from temple worship. So they were on the outside looking in to religious worship and to family. And God says to them, to the eunuchs, "I will give a name better than sons and daughters, an everlasting name that will endure forever. I will also bless the forerunners who commit themselves to the Lord, who serve and love His name. I will bring them, the forerunners and the eunuchs, to my holy mountain of Jerusalem and will fill them with joy in my house of prayer." Not on the outside looking in.

And then here's the verse Jesus quotes, "My temple will be called a house of prayer for all nations, all peoples." And then watch this, "For the sovereign Lord who brings back the outcasts of Israel says, 'I will bring others too besides my people Israel.'" And this is the passage Jesus is quoting here, and He's quoting it in the court of the Gentiles. He's quoting a verse about making room for the outsider, for the excluded, for the Gentiles and the eunuchs. And this concept just captured the imagination of Jesus' followers for the rest of the New Testament, verses like Galatians 3:28. Let's read this out loud together, all right? There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Aren't you glad that's in the Bible? Praise God!

This became a massive—Christianity was the first religious movement to ever see the world this way because they understood Jesus makes room for the excluded from day one. So here's the question, am I joining Jesus in this mission? Because just like then, let's be honest, the human tendency of religious people, and I would say of all people, frankly, no matter if you're religious or not, is to silo and cocoon ourselves into increasingly pure groups. We're seeing it all over our culture right now. But you see Jesus throughout His ministry, He's stepping over those boundaries to the Samaritans and to the Gentiles and to the lame and the blind and those who are in the disabled community there in His day. All these people who were excluded, He's constantly upsetting the pure by reaching out to those people.

So how can we like Him build bridges instead of barriers? So a few years ago here at TLC, after one of the services, I get into this fascinating conversation with a man who grew up in a Jewish atheist home, brilliant cardiologist working in another city. He was educated at Princeton and Oxford, and he told me this, "René, the anti-Semitism that I encountered as a Jewish man from Christians kept me from examining the claims of Christ for 25 years." He said, "I used to quote Gandhi, 'I love your Christ, but not your Christians.'" Then he said one man, a professor of his at Princeton who was a Christian, started inviting him to dinners with his family just as a friend. Didn't talk about faith or anything, just like, "Let's get to know each other." Then invited him to concerts. They shared a taste for the same kind of music and eventually invited him to church.

And he told me, "René, I am a Jewish Christ follower today because one Christian took the time to build long-term bridges of friendship with me, an atheist. Can you do that too? Can you build bridges and not barriers?" This takes intentionality. This doesn't happen by accident. This takes time. This takes relationship. But that is our mission. That's our calling to be like Jesus who sees past the pretense, who makes room for the excluded. And then finally, he stands against the abusers. I mean, he calls them out. So after he quotes this verse, "My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations." He quotes another line from another Old Testament prophet. He says, "But you have made it a den of robbers." Now why would he say that? What's he talking about here? Man, we could go on at length about this, but watch this.

Here's an overhead view of Jerusalem in his day. Here's the Temple Mount area that we've been talking about. And inside the Temple Mount area, you see the court of the Gentiles, right? Now, historians say that in Jesus' childhood, the animal market historically was on your way into town. So on the other side of the ridge, you bought your animal for the temple sacrifice, and then he went over the mountain and went down the road so that the area around the temple wasn't filled with an animal market. You did that kind of discreetly on the other side of the hill so that you could complete your pilgrimage in this kind of more calm way. But in Jesus' day, the high priest at the time, the chief priest named Caiaphas of the notoriously corrupt Annas family, he noticed how much money was being made over here at these historic animal markets.

And he — this isn't in the Bible, but we know this historically — he put his own animal market right inside the temple courts. Kind of no need to carry your animal more than a few steps if you buy it right here, you know, at a premium. And he invented the temple money exchange system, too, and all the prophets went right into his family coffers. So do you see what's happening here is not only the high — is the chief priest squeezing out the Gentiles from the court of the Gentiles, he's also undercutting the economy of his own people, including kind of lower caste priests into his own system. Why would he do this? He totally tracks with what we know of how he operated.

Watch this, that Jewish historian Josephus, he said, "The high priest was a great hoarder up of money. His servants took away the tithes by violence, beating anyone who would not hand them over." Holy city, anyone? It's the same kind of toxic religious system. And nobody could stop them so that the elderly priests supported from those tithes died for lack of food. It's literally the temple — and he's doing it all in the temple — the temple has become sort of a lair for these villains, a den of robbers, and that's exactly what Jesus is calling them out for. And he's quoting here a verse from this passage in Jeremiah. Watch this. It says, "Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, and then come to stand before me in this house, which bears my name, and say, 'We're safe.'" Safe to do these detestable things? Has this house, which bears my name, become a den of robbers to you? But I have been watching, declares the Lord. No one's going to get away with a thing, right?

I was watching a documentary about animal babies, and they showed like grizzly bear mamas guarding their cubs and cheetah mothers guarding their young against hyenas. Check out the look in their eyes. They're like, "You are not touching my babies!" And I imagine that was the fierce look in Jesus' eyes that day. Hands off my babies. He's fighting a predator. I've been watching. The good news is the abusers will ultimately never get away with it, because nothing escapes the attention of our Lord, and His wrath and His retribution will be upon them one day. If you don't see it in this life, they will not escape justice.

Now, how do you think those chief priests took Jesus' critique? Next verse, "The chief priests and teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching." Now, I want to ask you some questions about what you see here. Don't miss this. Who feared him? Shout it out. The chief priests and their cronies. Who were amazed by him? The whole crowd, the people. In fact, I love the original Greek word translated "amazed" here. It's a form of the Greek "ek-ples-so," not "espresso," "ek-ples-so," which literally means "knocked out." Don't you love that? It's like their minds were blown. Mark is saying, "Their heads were exploding," because nobody had ever spoken this way to these toxic religious authorities.

Now, why is this distinction important between the chief priests and the crowd? Because listen, throughout Christian history, anti-Semitic Christians have blamed "the Jews" in air quotes, "for the death of Christ." That is unbiblical. That's unhistorical. And it's unholy. As we see here, the Jewish crowd loved Jesus. It was the corrupt leadership class who were incidentally Roman collaborators and needed to collaborate with the Romans to fulfill their conspiracy here against Jesus. They were the only ones who headed in for him. Second, this is a super important application for us. Jesus criticized that leadership very deservedly, but he never, ever shamed the crowd, right? The followers, they loved him. Their heads were exploding in a good way. This guy's awesome.

Here's the application. You and I may see people, friends, family, neighbors, following a toxic ideology, maybe a religious cult. Maybe they're in an abusive church, or maybe they're following some political ideology that you see as off base, and that can happen on the left or on the right. If you shame them on social media, in person, you only alienate them and push them further and further toward the weirdos, and you give them no way out, have a posture of grace toward the crowds like Jesus did. I was listening to a woman who was raised in a cult-like church, the infamous West Borough Baptist Church. You know who they are? They're the ones who always picket funerals of people who died of HIV/AIDS, holding up signs like, "God hates gays." I don't know why you would do that, but she was in that church. In fact, her father was the pastor.

So they were out picketing at some rock concert about the evils of rock music on the day after her father, the founding pastor of the church she was in, had died. But she's out there, you know, picketing the rock concert. And this woman sees a sign held up by Christian counterprotesters across the street. Now these people are not yelling back. They're not screaming back. They're calm. And she said the sign that they were holding up toward them just knocked her out and changed the whole direction of her life. Do you want to see the sign? Here it is. Sorry for your loss. That act of grace on the part of those people treating hate-filled protesters like human beings was a crack that led in the light. She said in the interview I heard, "For the first time in my life, I saw what grace looks like." And she eventually left that church.

The way to de-radicalize people is through radical love. If you just yell back at the crowd, they'll be pushed further toward the corrupt leaders. The leaders need to be confronted. The followers need to be loved. Jesus, you know, at the end of Matthew 11 famously, "Come to me, all you who are weary and heavily burdened. I'll give you rest." That was his posture toward this poor crowd. Listen, if you've been trapped in some life-draining version of Christianity, this story tells us that Jesus says there is something better than that for you. It tells me if I feel pushed away by religion, Jesus welcomes me in.

I'll close with this. A woman named Elizabeth Emily Anderson posted her own story online about leaving a very legalistic church. And you might relate to what she says. She says, "Instead of a stream of living water, my faith had become a barren wilderness, slowly choking out every bit of life within me. Instead of freedom, I was being suffocated by my perfectionism. I finally found the courage to start attending a new church. I'd visited a few times before, but I was too terrified to continue as it didn't line up with my extreme fundamentalist standards. But oh my goodness, as I attended each week, I heard a gospel of grace preached for the first time. I began to understand why gospel means good news. I learned that I have a father who loves me unconditionally. He doesn't get mad at me when I wrestle through my faith and ask questions. And I learned that I'm enough. Not because of anything I do, not for following a legalistic list of do's and don'ts. I'm enough solely because Jesus is enough. This is freedom. This is good news. This is amazingly beautiful. Amen?

How many of you are grateful that's the faith that Jesus Christ calls us to? A faith of freedom and grace and love. Let's pray to our Lord together. Would you bow your head with me? Lord, we thank you so much for delivering us from bondage, from human toxic religion and toxic behavior, sin, our own sin. You deliver us from all of that. And may we build bridges and not barriers like you did. And God, we just want to open you up right now. We don't want to just point fingers at other systems. We invite you in to us as individuals, to us as a community, to turn over tables, do whatever it takes to detoxify our churches and our personal lives from distortions and sin so that we can remove all unnecessary obstacles to a free relationship with you, to an understanding of your grace so that all people can worship you freely and joyfully as you transform them by your grace. That's what we want at Twin Lakes Church. That's what we long for. And that's what we pray for all the churches of Santa Cruz, TLC and Vintage Faith and SCBC and all the churches all around the county and all around the world. And we pray this in Jesus name. Amen.