He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. A long, long time ago, in the year , there lived a man named…Augustine. He tells his story in a book titled The Confessions — he simply pours it all out, the good, the bad, and the ugly…saint and sinner…all of it…and how God met him in the middle of it.
Fast-forwarding sixteen hundred years to this past Sunday, I was preaching at a congregation that I had preached at one other time, one year ago. A woman came up to me before worship began and told me that she needed to speak with me. So we arranged to meet back up after the service. We sat together in the back of sanctuary, the worship space.
This was her 3 rd time visiting this congregation and she told me that had spent very little time in church throughout her 60 years. In the span of just a few minutes and speaking quickly, she spoke of the sin in her life, some of which had happened over 30 years ago.
She then told me that she was too much of a sinner to be in church and then she fell quiet. So, you may be asking yourself, what do St. Augustine and this woman have in common — across time, gender and life situation? Augustine wrote, all those many years ago, that sin can be described as what comes from the mixing up of what God has given us to use and what God has given us to love.
His argument is that God means for us to love God and use things but somewhere along the way we use God and love things… we use God and love things. We have mixed up use and love. Jesus is furious. The temple has become a marketplace, a place where God is being used and everyone is part of using everyone else as a commodity, as currency, as cash. Relationship has been transaction. I wonder, though, if our rightful place in this story is in the position of the sellers — the ones who use God and love things so much so that in our use of God we end up using each other in such as way that our relationships are transactions.
