On Saturday afternoon last week I had about an hour to show Nancy around Brownfield, the little West Texas community where I was raised.  That is about thirty minutes more than should take to look around.  But, I hadn’t been there in years and she’d never been there so it actually ended up taking us about forty-five minutes to see the place.  For her, it was an interesting journey to a part of my life she’d only heard about but never seen.  For me, it was a journey back in time.  I felt as though I were in some kind of a time warp.  Though the faces of the people I knew have grown older, the face of the community itself has changed little and it was absolutely fascinating to me how every corner held some memory.

There were warm memories, of course.  Life for most middle-income whites in Brownfield in the 60’s seemed very Leave-It-To-Beaverish.  The Vietnam War and Civil Rights movement seemed to have all but sidestepped us there.  Lots of clean-cut neighborhoods filled with three bedroom brick.  Nice schools.  Movies on Saturday afternoons at the Regal Theater.  But, there was a sadness about what I saw driving around last Saturday, too. 

When I was growing up, finding a place to park on the downtown square on Saturday afternoon was nearly impossible.  That was the day the Mexican braceros who labored on the cotton farms all came to town to do their week’s shopping and it was always curb to curb humanity.  But, the laws that made their undocumented presence possible have changed and the small family farms that once drove the economy have either been ransacked by drought or absorbed by giant corporate farming operations run by high-tech machinery demanding few workers.  What business was left on the square was all but finished off when a giant retailer moved in a few years ago and built a super store on the edge of town.  The old Regal Theater is even up for sale.  You can park anywhere you want to now on Saturday on the brick-layered streets on the square in downtown Brownfield. 

The most poignant part of it all for me, though, was when I walked back into the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church where I spent nearly every Sunday morning and Sunday night from the time I was seven until I was seventeen.  The same sanctuary where I made a profession of faith, twice, and was baptized, twice.  The same sanctuary where I “surrendered” to the ministry and in which I was later licensed to that work.  It was then that I realized how different things can look, both physically and spiritually, from the perspective you have only when you look back. 

That sanctuary seemed cavernous to me when I was growing up.  I now know it’s barely half as big as this room in which we worship.  And, as I stood there I couldn’t help but appreciate how childhood and teenage problems that seemed cavernous, then, were, in retrospect, much smaller than I imagined.  And, how things I never dreamed I’d face have profoundly changed the course of my life’s dream.  But, what I think I’ve come to appreciate most of all, in reflecting on my journey back in time, is that, though our lives change and take courses we never dreamed, God never changes and is faithful to the course He has determined for us.  Every step I can trace from this point in my life back to the days when I first walked into that church follows a path marked out by the faithfulness of God who has been at work through it all bringing His purpose to bear in this world and in my life.  Have you noticed, however, how that is something we most often can perceive only when we look back?

And, have you wondered what must have gone through the disciples’ minds when Jesus started behaving the way He did that day He drove the moneychangers out of the temple?  This was a side of Jesus they’d not seen much, if at all.  Here He is, “making a whip of cords,” and threatening to upset the local economy every bit as much as any WalMart does an old downtown square.  And, then, when challenged about His authority to do so responds with words that made no sense at all to those who only heard what Jesus said and not what He meant.  “’Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!’”  Jesus was claiming His authority to purify the temple because of a unique relationship He had with God.  In His own way, Jesus was identifying Himself as the Messiah, the very Son of God.  As God’s Son, as God in the flesh, He had every right to cleanse the temple because it was His temple. 

When I was in college I had a roommate one year who was nothing less than a pig.  Now, when I first got to college, I was rather sloppy myself.  But, since my sister wasn’t there so I could pay her a dollar to clean my room the way I had in high school, I had to take care of things myself.  And, I had become something of a fanatic about keeping that closet they called a dorm room clean.  But, not my roommate.  Clothes fell right where he took them off.  Trash everywhere.  It was a mess.  He was a walking, talking, oinking, human cyclone.  For the most, part I just cleaned my side of the room and tried to ignore his.  But, one day I’d had all I could take and I cleaned my side and then ventured across that invisible line to his side of the room and cleaned it, too.  Needless to say, when Mark got home that night, it didn’t go over well.  It wasn’t that he minded his side being clean.  It was who did the cleaning that bothered him.  To him, I had no right to venture into his territory without his permission and rearrange his stuff.  And, he was right.  I had no authority where I had no ownership. 

By Jesus’ cleansing of the temple, He is simply claiming authority where He has ownership and is declaring, in no uncertain terms, His personal right to venture into the most sacred areas of our lives and rearrange things at His will without our permission.  It’s His way of reminding us of who owns what and who has authority where and that His presence in our lives almost always causes a reordering of some kind.  And, it’s good to be reminded of that no matter how painful the reordering or cleansing may be.  Just as then, so it is now, that this building and the church that meets in it are His temple and so are our bodies and He has the right to demand cleansing wherever He chooses and the authority to rearrange things just as He pleases.  And, anytime we forget who owns what we are never far from using what is God’s for our own selfish purposes.  Every sin, at its core, is an argument with God about who owns what. 

And, we almost always resent it whenever anyone challenges the ownership of what we believe is ours.  Even God.  And, Jesus knew that.  And, Jesus knew what it would cost Him.  And, that’s why He then said what everyone heard but no one understood.  The Jews challenged His authority to cleanse the temple, to rearrange things the way He wanted, by asking for a “sign.”  Just as if a policeman knocked at your door and asked to come inside your home almost certainly you would demand to see his badge before allowing his entry, the Jews wanted to see Jesus’ badge of authority to cleanse the temple. 

So, Jesus said, “’Destroy this temple, and in three days, I will raise it up.’”  No one understood what Jesus had just said, apparently not even His disciples.  The Jews argued sarcastically, “’This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?’”  They heard Jesus’ words but they had missed the meaning of them.  And, what Jesus meant was that He was going to give them a sign of His authority, all right, but, it was going to be more than even they had asked for.  It would be the sign of His authority over all of life.  And, the sign of His commitment to life for us despite our boneheaded and stubborn refusal to let Him cross that invisible line that we think divides what is His from what is ours.  It was a sign, however, they’d have to wait a while to see.  One that would make sense only when they looked back.  Jesus, the scripture says, “was speaking of the temple of his body.”  Jesus was talking about His own resurrection from the dead, His own return to life, after those he had just angered would put Him to death for attempting to reorder their lives.

Then, the scripture fast-forwards to the most fascinating verse in this text, the one that brought my little journey back in time last week to life, the one that says, “after (Jesus) was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.”  We almost always see things differently in retrospect.  Maturity and experience can sharpen our focus and the passage of time can dull the pain that once clouded our vision.  But, the scripture is telling us far more than that.

About the time I was growing up in Brownfield there was a little toy popular with children called a kaleidoscope.  In these days of three-dimensional video games, this toy wouldn’t stand a chance.  But, this was almost four decades ago.  A toy prism of sorts, a kaleidoscope was nothing more than a tubular piece of cardboard with a simple eyepiece on one end and a rotating clear piece of plastic at the other filled with differently shaped pieces of multi-colored paper.  By putting the end with the eyepiece to your eye and turning the other your world could change colors in an instant.  From red to blue to green and all of them mixed together and then all over again.  For just a brief moment you could actually change the way you saw the world. 

It is one of the most awesome of all the responsibilities we have.  God has actually given us the privilege of choosing the way in which we see the world and our place in it.  If we choose to see the world only in terms of what has happened to rob us of our dreams or disadvantage us or invade and reorder the territory over which we thought we had sole authority, we will likely spend our days angry and disillusioned and bitter and even at war with God.  The scripture says the disciples, after the resurrection, never saw the world the same again.  Looking back, they “remembered” and they “believed.”  From the evidence of what some of them later wrote, from that day forward the prism through which they saw the world and their place in it was the empty tomb from which Christ had been resurrected.  And, the good news they sought to spread even at the expense of their own lives is that anyone who chooses to believe in the resurrected Lord could also come to see the world and their place in it not in terms of man’s awfulness but in terms of the goodness of the God who is absolutely committed to raising again to life what man only tears down to death. 

I’m not there, yet.  I’ve got a ways to go.  There is still big part of me that can stand on the square in downtown Brownfield and, looking at things only through that tiny prism, see a collapsing world economy.  But, that’s also the reason that I made a stop by the sanctuary, the temple, in which I first learned of the faithfulness of God and where I am reminded to discipline my view of this world from the perspective of the God who made it and will redeem it.  To remember that one day, as surely as I am breathing air, a dead man named Jesus got up and walked out of the tomb in which others had sealed Him to rot.  And, because He did that and, if we have trusted our very lives to Him, not only is it true that His resurrection is the prism through which we can now view all of life but it is also true that everything that comes into our lives must pass through that same prism of his resurrection power and be reshaped by it for God’s ultimately good purpose for us.  (See Romans 8:28-30) 

That’s what we are preparing now to celebrate in four short weeks when we gather in this place on Easter Sunday.  The resurrection is not just an event that we see when we look back at history.  It is the central event of history through which we should view every event of our lives now.  Every illness, every loss, every divorce, death of a child or spouse, even our own deaths someday, all of it, viewed through Christ’s empty tomb and the resurrection that made it that way. 

I can’t wait!  There’s no telling what we are living with now will all look like someday.  Having gone to our own graves and stepped out on the other side and turning around to see where we’ve come from and what got us there in that moment of our own resurrection there is no telling what we will see  - - - only when we look back!