Bill Allison was chair of the pulpit committee when First Baptist Church, Siloam Springs, Arkansas called me as their pastor in 1991.  His son John was once a member of Cliff Temple when he was a student at the Baylor School of Dentistry.  Before that he did his undergraduate work at Baylor University in Waco.  Bill once told me of John starting from Waco to Arkansas for Thanksgiving but only making it as far as Waxahachie before his car broke down.  He got it towed to a repair shop but it was 6:00 p.m. the day before Thanksgiving.  The part they needed wouldn’t be available until the day after Thanksgiving.  So, John called his dad, told him his dilemma and said, “Help me decide what to do.”  John suggested he could make it back to Waco and just stay there for Thanksgiving.  Bill said, “No, your mother wants you to come home.”  So, at 6:00 p.m., the night before Thanksgiving and with snow beginning to fall, Bill got in his car in Arkansas and started toward Waxahachie, some 400 miles away.  He finally got there about 1:00 in the morning and found John waiting in the very place where he called home from.  They transferred the dirty laundry and all the other stuff students take home for long weekends from John’s car to his and started back.  About 9:00 a.m., fifteen hours after he first drove off, Bill made it back home with the son he’d rescued, just in time for the Thanksgiving feast.

Bill and I laughed about his own personal Planes, Trains and Automobiles Thanksgiving.  Then, he summed up the whole meaning of his midnight drive to get John and bring him home this way.  “That’s what you do when you’re the father who loves.”  What we do when we’re stranded, what we should do, is call out to our father, “Help me decide what to do.”  What he does is come and get us, and our dirty laundry, and take us home.  God is in the business of helping people who are stranded find a way back home. 

Which must have been what made Jesus angry enough to cleanse the temple that day.  This couldn’t have possibly been the first time he’d “found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables.”  He’d been in and out of the Temple since before he could probably remember.  But, for some reason that day, he’d had enough and he made a scene to make a point.  Those who sold animals for sacrifice to worshippers were taking advantage of them, exchanging currency at exorbitant rates and such.  Matthew’s record of this event records Jesus as saying, “‘It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers (Matthew 21:13).’”  A house of prayer, Jesus said.  God’s house is the one place, of all places, where people who are stranded should be able to call out to their father, “Help me decide what to do.” 

That’s the way life is, isn’t it?  We don’t always make the best choices.  Even when we do, sometimes, things happen to us beyond our control.  Either way, we fall down, get knocked down, end up stranded. 

This past Sunday afternoon I made one of the worst choices I’ve made in a long time.  Cameron was recently given one of these little electric motor scooters that only goes about twenty miles per hour.  I’d watched him whip around on it and it looked like a lot of fun.  So, I decided to try it out.  Of course, I had not allowed for the fact that this thing really wasn’t built for forty-eight year old people whose gravitational center has shifted significantly since they were fourteen.  I only made it to the end of the driveway before the laws of physics clashed with my physique.  When I turned into the alley it just turned right over and spilled me out onto the concrete.  How you can make an eight-point landing all at once is still a mystery to me.  But, all points are well marked now.  It felt like I left the entire left side of my face on the pavement.  It really hurt.  There is no way to tell you how totally humiliated I felt.  How fast I fell still shocks me.  I’m even more shocked at how quickly I got up and got out of there and into the house.  I was pretty sure I was going to need to cry and didn’t want the whole neighborhood to see a grown man do that, too. 

It hurts when you fall, doesn’t it?  No matter why you fall, whether you make bad choices or someone pushes you over, you still get bruised.  You still bleed.  It’s still humiliating.  But, what do you do when you fall so badly you can’t pick yourself up?  You need a place to get back up and help doing it.  Jesus said that’s what his Father’s house was meant to be.  And, that’s what made Jesus so angry.  His Father’s house had been corrupted for lesser purposes.  In the very place people who had fallen down should have found help getting back up, they were only getting knocked down again, taken advantage of.  So, he made “a whip of cords (and) drove all of them out of the temple . . ..  He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.  He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here!’”

This is an angry Jesus we’re not accustomed to seeing in most of the other gospel accounts about his life.  That ought to tell us something.  Nothing reveals a person’s true character more clearly than what tends to make them angriest.  Jesus’ anger reveals something very significant.  He has the right to expect the purist of motives in everything we do in his house or in the name of his Father.  When his Father’s house became polluted with lesser causes, Jesus cleaned it out.  And, it didn’t go over well with those whose personal security was tied directly to their ability to manipulate and oppress others in order to enrich themselves, even in the name of God.  So, they questioned Jesus’ authority, “‘What sign can you show us for doing this?’”  In response, Jesus said something the disciples wouldn’t understand until after his resurrection.  “‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’”

Again, Jesus’ disciples didn’t get it at the time.  I can appreciate that.  When things are noisy and there’s a lot of anger in the air, even if God speaks, it’s hard to hear much less understand.  Can’t you see them pushing up their sleeves and shoving overturned tables aside, getting ready to defend their Jesus?  They weren’t really listening to Jesus.  It’s hard to listen when you’re getting ready to fight.  We rarely appreciate what God is trying to tell us except in retrospect, when the dust has settled, no matter what stirred it up in the first place.  Even my fourteen year-old son tried to warn me about riding the scooter.  “Watch the bump at the edge of the driveway, Dad!”  But, I was too busy revving my motor, fantasizing about Harley days that I’d never had.  Even if I’d heard him clearly, I wouldn’t have minded.  I had places to go, things to do, spills to take.  It’s hard to listen, even to those who love us, when we’re right in the middle of trying to get where we want to be or we’re defending our territory or there’s a lot of anger in the air and the dust hasn’t settled yet.

It was until later that the disciples finally understood what Jesus meant when he said, “‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’”  It was on down the road, “After he was raised from the dead, (that) his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the . . . word that Jesus had spoken.”  Too bad someone had to die before they really listened.  But, listen they did, and believe.  Jesus had been trying to tell them, he’d get knocked down but he’d get back up.  Death would knock him down but God would pick him up so that, when death knocked us down, we could get back up, too.  “‘I am the resurrection and the life,’” Jesus once said, “‘Those who believe in me, even though they’” get knocked down, they will get raised back up again (John 11:25). 

There is a story about an old man who once passed by a monastery every day on the way to his village.  Every day he carried a heavy load back and forth, just trying to survive.  The monastery was way up on a hill, removed from the daily traffic of people who lived normal, everyday lives.  The old man often thought to himself that it must be nice to live up there where it was beautiful and quiet.  One day, as he was passing by, a monk came out of the gate at the monastery on his way to town.  The old man stopped him and said, “What is it you monks do up there all day in that monastery?  It looks like it would be a wonderful and peaceful place to live.  What is it you all do every day all day, up there?”  The monk thought for a minute and said, “We fall down and we get up.  We fall down and we get up.  We fall down and we get up.”

Falling down is part of life’s posture.  It doesn’t matter why or how you fall, it still hurts.  You still bleed.  It’s still humiliating.  And, by the way, there will always be folks with plenty of post-traumatic stress advice after you’ve fallen.  Did you try the brakes?  Did you put a foot out?  Honestly, it all happened so fast I didn’t have time to find the brake handle or put out my foot.  All I ended up with was time to hurt. 

Falling down is part of life’s posture.  It’s also part of prayer’s posture.  In fact, when it comes to the physics of prayer, if you will, you can’t get up unless you first fall down.  My father’s house, Jesus said, “‘shall be called a house of prayer.’”  A place where people get back up after they’ve fallen down.  And, a place where they fall down so they can get back up.

When we’re stranded, when we’ve fallen, what would we do without a place and a time when we could fall down at our Father’s feet and cry out, “Help me decide what to do!”?  Where would we be without a father who would come and get us any time of day or night and pick us up, and all our dirty laundry, too, and take us home so we won’t miss the feast at his table?  My Father’s house, Jesus said, will be that place for you.

Someday, someone might ask you, “What is it you do down there at that church house anyway?  You sure spend a lot of time down there with all those other people.”  Maybe they think all we do down here is polish our halos and preen our angel wings.  But, we know better, don’t we?  Someone might ask, “What do you all do down there, at that church house?”  And, you can tell them.  We fall down and we get up.  We fall down and we get up.

We fall down and we get up!