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Third Sunday of Lent
Exodus 20.1-17
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of theland of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other godsbefore me
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1 Corinthians 1.18-25
The message about the cross is foolishness tothose who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
 John 2.13-22
 Zeal for your house will consume me. Destroy this templeand in three days I will raise it up
1.Ten freedoms2.The temple3.Britain as temple4.Confident nation5.Saving and the future6.Disappearing nation7.Restoring the temple
We are on our way to Easter. We are following the readings for the fiveSundays of Lent that take us to Palm Sunday. We have heard that God hasbrought man into covenant with himself, that God regards man andcreation as good, and that his covenant with them will not come to an end.Last week we heard that the promise of God has brought a new societyinto being, and will sustain the society that lives from this promise. Thecovenant given to Abraham sustains his people to this day. In Christ allother societies have received this same promise that God will sustain us,and within this covenant we will be able to receive all men as goodcompany, and to give ourselves to others and so create new covenantswith them.
1. The commandment of God
 This week we hear the words spoken to the people of Israel at Sinai,recorded in the Book of Exodus, ‘I am the Lord your God’. For the thirdweek running we are confronted with this absolute assurance that God hasgiven himself to man, that God loves and esteems man and knows himand sustains this relationship with him in which man may if he desires,freely acknowledge God. The ten commandments constitute a singlestatement – I am your God. We hear it also as an invitation and question –Shall I be your God? We can put it the other way around – Do not have anyother gods. Why give yourself away to any other ‘gods’? Altogether thesecommandments tell us not to idolatrise, not to accept any substitutes. Youwill find these commandments written above the altar of almost everychurch in the City of London, because the builders of these churchesrecognises that this covenant and commandment is the basis of all societyand human transacting.
 
 Man is the image of God, literally the
eidolon
of God. Every human beingis, and all humans together are, the image of himself that God has chosen.Let us accept no substitutes for him. We can spend our lives attemptingto give this image away, and substituting other images for it, but wecannot finally succeed in doing so. We can mar this image, let it becomedistorted by rage and unrecognisable, but we cannot shake it off. Wecannot so abuse our bodies and destroy our souls that God no longerrecognises us as his own. Nothing substitutes for God, and nothingsubstitutes for man who is the image of God. We may attempt tosubstitute for man in many ways, but all are destructive, none aresustainable. By indicating what it excludes, these commandments set outthe freedom that belongs to God and man his creature. The sabbathindicates the limits God sets on our power to compel other people to ourpurposes. We fail to know the limits of freedom if we misuse the name of the Lord, if we despise our parents or forebears, if we kill, commitadultery, steal, are untruthful or avaricious. In this covenant with God wemay discover freedom from the compulsion to substitute means for ends,by subordinating people, who bear the image of God, to any other‘economic’ logic.
2. The temple of God for man
Our gospel reading from the Gospel of John tells us that Jesus entered thetemple. The temple is the place in which man may go to pray and speakwith his Lord there. The temple is the house of prayer for all nations:anyone may come to it, receive a hearing from the God of gods, andreceive the justice that he has not received anywhere else. The temple isthe house in which God make himself present to man. It re-distributesfrom the poorer to the richer, releases the poor from their debts when theyask for forgiveness, demonstrates to the rich how to exercise generosity,and so maintains the unity and functioning of that society.Was the temple cleaning and empowering the people of Israel in theirrelationship with God? Did this House of God enable and support aconfident population? This is the question that Jesus puts to the priesthoodand the temple regime. The answer is given when Jesus enters the templeand drives out those he finds selling animals and changing money there. The people of Israel were being exhausted by the financial burden of thesacrifices that constituted access to the temple. The way to the mercy and justice of God was blocked by a caste of intermediaries that were milkingthose who came to them, de-motivating and separating them from God. The temple mechanism had gone into reverse, so that it is nowdistributing in the wrong direction, not trickling-down but siphoning upfrom poorer to richer. Jesus sees that the people of Israel, to whom the covenant has been given,are being excluded from access to the promises of God by a cabal. Zeal forhis Father’s house consumes him: love for God’s chosen people, thepeople of God’s household, drives him. Jesus enters the temple to cleanseand restore it as the place in which Israel may pray and worship God, andthis is what this is what his passion, cross and resurrection effect. Christtears down a faulty dispensation that separated man from God and fromhis fellow man, and in its place rebuilds the relationship of man with God
 
so that man can truly live with God in permanence. Christ is our access toGod and so our temple.All other temples function only as they point to Christ. Last week we sawthat houses are only worth anything if they serve to produce children andso reproduce society. Let us first consider British society as though it weresingle temple and household, that serves to keep all the relationships of which the nation is made up in good health.
3. Britain as temple of God
 The British economy is a reflection of British society. We could even saythat the economy is what our society is, and it is an expression of whatother countries and other economies believe our society is. We could claimto have invented Capitalism in the City of London. The practices of tradeand commerce, and the free flow of information and goods and servicescame into existence here. Foreigners brought their savings here not onlybecause they were confident that it would grow, but that they would beable to get those savings out again. They believe that there is such a solidtradition of legal transparency and public accountability here that theirmoney could never simply disappear. They believe that our society hasbeen so formed by the virtues of honesty and self-control, that they areconfident of our public ability to hold one another to account. We have thelaw and legal system that produces good and impartial unbiaseddecisions, so there are not different prices for different people. What hascreated this belief about the City of London? It is our slow formation thathas resulted from our long exposure to the Christian tradition that hasmade us honesty, even when it is not to our short-term advantage, andhonesty is what market transparency and market efficiency are. Withoutthis tradition of virtues that built a trusted market here, London would stillbe just a village on a muddy river.Recent decades have seen massive economic growth around the world, agrowth that since the mid-nineties seemed to have buoyed up the wholeUnited Kingdom. But the economic crisis that we are now experiencing isserious enough to make us ask how much of this has been true growth?Has this increase in prosperity been the result of any growth in ourindustriousness or productivity? Along with this ostensible increase inprosperity we have also suffered a massive loss in the first andfundamental economy of the family, the economy that reproducespersons. This primary economy is secured by marriage, the institution thatgives us the confidence to reproduce children and to support themthrough the long years in which they become public members of societyand confident economic agents. Could it be that in the last fifty years wehave experienced a significant loss of social capital because we havefrittered away the institution that generates it? In order to make sense of our economic situation we have to examine the confidence and socialcapital of our nation as though they were economic assets.Old people lend to young people. We have lots of old people who want tolend to young people, but we do not have lots of young people. We have agrowing shortfall of young people, and this is the reason why we areexperiencing a banking crisis and why, if the crisis goes away this time, itwill assuredly come back again. Now since this conclusion may seemcompletely implausible at first hearing, I will take a little time to set it out.
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