Refuge

A reading from the Gospel according to Luke, chapter 19, beginning at verse 41.

Luke 19 · chapter mention

And when Jesus drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace.

But now they are hidden from your eyes, for the days will come upon you when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side, and tear you down to the ground, you and your children with you.

And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.

And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold, saying to them, It is written, My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers.

And he was teaching daily in the temple.

The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him, but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were hanging on his words.

The gospel of the Lord.

Praise be to you, O Christ.

Grace, mercy, and peace are yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.

Amen.

Where God builds a church, the devil builds a chapel.

And where Jesus claims a heart as his own, the world shows up to contest that claim.

These statements explain how it could possibly be the case that the Lord Jesus would arrive at the epicenter of all things good and godly, at the very temple in Jerusalem with the divinely commanded worship in the midst of the Lord's own chosen people.

And yet, when Jesus showed up there, he found not a house of prayer, but a den of robbers.

Suffice it to say that no one set out to turn the Lord's house into a hideout for bad guys.

So we probably need to imagine that this is the kind of thing that developed slowly, inch by inch, over time.

I picture it like this: that those who were selling their goods initially had their sales booths across the street from the temple gate.

But sooner or later that section of the street filled up, and a few intrepid individuals brought their booths and tables and set them up across the street, next to the temple gate, inching closer.

And soon, once they were there, it didn't seem to be anything but a matter of convenience and efficiency and productivity to move the sales tables inside the gate and set up in the temple courts.

It happened like that, this kind of slow infiltration that, if left unchecked, eventually winds up bringing the outside in and changing everything.

The world had brought its characteristics into the church.

So that when Jesus showed up in those temple courts, he said, in essence, something like this look, I expect to encounter greed and sales reports and spreadsheets out there.

And out there in the marketplace, I am not surprised to discover people being thought of as dollar signs and valued for as much money as you can shake out of them.

But what about in here?

How could it be the case that the den of robbers had moved inside to the place which was supposed to be a refuge from all of that?

A place that was supposed to be the Lord's own house for the Lord's chosen and holy people, the house that was supposed to be a place of prayer where nothing would ever come between the Lord and the worshiper, the soul who was there.

Friends, the interesting thing to ask is if this could happen in the temple in Jerusalem, then is it possible that the same thing could also happen here and now?

Well, have you ever heard somebody suggesting that if the church wanted to be able to reach people, it's gonna need to change, and that the change that is proposed is for the church to take on some characteristics of the world?

I've heard those statements and I've seen how they play out.

In fact, they even change the shape and the form of the buildings.

Have you perhaps driven by a large warehouse-looking building with a name like Elevate on the side of it and found yourself wondering whether it's a CBD dispensary or the local megachurch?

Could it be the case that churches have been turned into venues that look like coffee shops or concert halls or places for lectures and classrooms and the like?

Should the church's song sound like a cold play concert and its preaching resemble a TED talk, as I have heard much of the worship life in America described.

See, none of these changes or the decisions that led to them happened instantly overnight.

It was a long, slow infiltration.

And always, always driven by good and noble motivation, this desire to reach the lost, because we can sense that there is a sort of pendulum here.

And if the church becomes so out of touch with the world it can no longer communicate the gospel, that is certainly a problem.

Yet it seems to me that the pendulum can swing in the other way.

And that perhaps is where the danger is right now.

That the church begins to resemble the world to the point where the two are indistinguishable and interchangeable.

And if there is no appreciable difference between the world and the church, well then why would anyone need or want to keep coming to church?

If you are looking for a den of robbers, and at this point, let's soften that to say, if you are looking for a place where you can get together with like-minded people and share ideas, or if you are searching for a sense of community, well, those are things that can be found in many places in this world.

And if the church thinks that that is its only task and goal, then it reduces its gospel mission and becomes nothing more than a social engineering project, occupied by the concerns of the shopkeeper.

How do I get customers?

How do I keep the customers satisfied?

And once that is the case, well then the gospel potency and power that is supposed to set the church apart from the world is lost.

Though even if that gospel potency and power is lost, I am not by any means suggesting that such methods do not, quote unquote, work.

They certainly do work just as much as it worked in the sense of making marvelous prophets to set up tables within the courts of the temple.

And with the right hyposthetics and feel-good messaging, you can gather together a crowd.

You can get people together, which is why statistics don't always lead you in the right direction.

You can have a preacher who gains thousands of followers tuning in to the message every week.

But but if that message is not the gospel in its full power, if that message perhaps is more of Jesus as the pick-me-up, the life coach, the booster, well then the church is resembling the world.

And it matters not how many people gather there, for the refuge is gone, and the house of prayer is lost.

So if it is possible for the church in our day to be infiltrated by the world and to take on the world's characteristics, then I should also state clearly that Jesus still retains the power to drive out those who sell and to reestablish the Lord's house as a place of prayer.

And the way in which he does so is exactly the same as the one that he used when he was there in Jerusalem in the temple.

You see, after Jesus drove out those who sold, he didn't leave the space vacant with a four-rent sign put up on it.

Instead, he drove out those who were selling so that he himself could set up shop right there in the temple courts to carry out his business, which is the preaching and teaching of the gospel.

Look what it says.

He drove out those who sold, and then it says, and he was teaching daily in the temple.

Jesus filled that temple with the gospel proclamation that was supposed to be there.

And get this.

The people noticed the difference.

For we are told that they were hanging on Jesus' words.

Now that's a reaction that Jesus got a lot.

It's a reaction that is the natural response to the hearing of the gospel.

It's a reaction that goes like this.

Now, this guy Jesus, what I hear him saying doesn't sound like what I've heard elsewhere.

You see, I've heard plenty of people giving me programs that will help me to get and better and improve my life and meet my goals.

And I have encountered the messaging that tells me that I am fine as I am, so tell myself to accept me the way I am.

I've encountered countless ads promising quick fixes at small costs.

But what this Jesus is teaching isn't anything like that.

For one thing, he has the nerve to tell me that I'm actually far worse than I imagined, even by nature sinful.

And yet, when he does so, the truth of his words rings honest in my heart.

But for another, he doesn't then tell me that the path out of that is for me to claw and scramble my way, working hard to get better.

Instead, he says, I will come and take your place, and my life, my righteousness shall be yours, and it shall be given to you not on the basis of what you earn or deserve, but on the basis of a freely given gift, on the basis of divine grace.

I am the one who pays back not the wages of sin with death, but gifts you with eternal life.

I am the one who comes with this message that says, God has accomplished what you could not on your own and given you every good gift in Christ to change you entirely from the inside out, to make you as pure and as holy as Jesus Himself is, and to set you on the path that leads you through this life to his eternal dwelling.

People who hear those words have ears that perk up and say, Now that is different.

Tell me more about this.

Tell me more about this Jesus who has gone to prepare a place for you, a mansion of your own in his father's house.

Tell me more of Jesus who promises you that though you will have trouble here and now in this world, you can take heart because he has overcome the world.

Tell me more of this Jesus who covers my failures and my sins and my regrets with his perfection and with his forgiveness.

That gospel message is still the only power in all the world to save.

And it remains a message that when it is proclaimed, is distinct from what you hear in the world around you and marks the church out as a refuge, as a place where you come.

And here God's kingdom reigns.

Grace operates and rules the day.

And Jesus gathers his people together.

It's really a marvelous thing when we come together.

So many of the distinctions that we draw in our worldly ways of thinking, they just all dissolve.

We draw distinctions between young and old, this generation, that generation, youths and adults.

We draw distinctions between social classes and between economic statuses, rich or poor.

We filter and sort people based on the quote-unquote success of their life, whether they're overachievers or wildly inefficient.

We label people as chronically joyful or tragically depressed, but when we gather together here, Jesus draws no such distinctions.

He just draws all of us together to himself to shape and form us as citizens of his heavenly kingdom and to lift us up with that powerful gospel that reaches out to find us and take hold of us and never let us go.

When you find a place like that, where you can hang on Jesus every word, well then you know you found a refuge.

And it's not long before you say the things that I hear you saying.

Things like, Pastor, I don't know how anybody makes it through this life without faith.

Or, Pastor, I don't know how anybody faces death without a shepherd to lead them through that shadowed valley.

You understand this, that the church is meant to be a refuge, a place where Jesus' words are front and center, and we can hang on them.

And when we hang on Jesus every word, then this becomes a house of prayer.

In a very literal sense, you can think of this building as a building that was built specifically for this purpose, that God's people would gather together, and as we do so, we would together lift our prayers before our Heavenly Father.

This is what Christians do when we gather.

Jesus speaks to us in his word, and then we respond in our prayers and in our petitions.

Now, when I was a kid, I always thought that the prayer of the church was the longest, most tedious, and frankly boring section of the service that there was.

It felt like a cruel trick to play on a kid.

You just got through that really long sermon.

Then you get a stretch break as you sing, create in me, but that lasts only an instant, and then the pastor's back to droning on and on in this prayer that seemed to take forever when a kid is just thinking about Sunday lunch.

My childish way of thinking didn't realize that the prayer of the church is perhaps what we could call the refuge within the refuge.

For I didn't understand that when the church gathers together in that prayer, think about what's taking place.

Here we come, and for this one moment in our week, all of our concerns, all of our worries, all of our troubles, all of our anxieties, as well as the worries and concerns, anxieties and needs of others that we weren't even thinking about.

We gather them all together and we take them to Jesus and we say, Here, you handle this, Jesus.

And Jesus doesn't begrudge the ask.

Instead, he says, I was waiting for you to say something.

So here, let me gather your concerns, let me take them into my most capable hands.

I've got this.

So that you can go in my peace, knowing that everything will work out according to my good will, as I have planned and ordained it.

See, that's a moment of refuge, a rare moment, where for once we can find space to breathe and relief from all of those troubles that seem to chase and haunt us.

So we come together and we offer our prayers, and Jesus bestows his peace upon us, and then he sends us out from this house of prayer with that peace following after us to make our way through the world for yet another week till we come back again, weary and stained, and once again Jesus is here to lift us up.

Once again, Jesus is here to give us peace.

Once again, Jesus is here to gather us into this refuge, this place where our hearts long to be.