Third Sunday in Lent – B

Third Sunday in Lent – B

Years B
Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 1:18-25
John 2:13-22

You shall not make a marketplace of your life, this community, this creation, this religious perspective, this glorious commonwealth.

Those wonderful markers strewn around the country in 1956 to commemorate 10 arenas of life where things can go awry in were to help market a movie. Now they become traditions that must be held onto at all costs. Law has become law has become law, dividing the very communities once held together by what stood behind such law.

Somehow the glory of life keeps getting pared down enough to pass a legislature. The meaning of day and night cannot be put into words, and yet we latch onto one set of temporal propositions or another. Through proliferating law is glory's silence broken and we finally settle for the law and not the glory.

We even market our religion as though it were the only possible revelation of an expansive love that pushes past every one of our sacred moments - even that of resurrection. No matter how broad even we progressive religionists envision life, we are too pale for the colorful dance that will raise all enemies to friends.

Indeed, zeal for someone else's vision consumes us. Evidence America's preemptive entry into Iraq. For whatever good may have once been possible, we have devolved. Zeal, all by itself, becomes marketed as righteousness. Even action against marketing, becomes marketing. What a dizzying, disorienting flurry.

= = = = = = =

a medium is a message
it lops off the ends
one size fits all
average is good enough

a medium whispers
stories behind stories
believable and not
what you see is not all

a medium well
is recommended
to burn out illness
and blood guilt

a medium nurtures
biologic experiments
testing theories
confirming evidence

a medium colors
pale lives
with pigments
life experienced

a medium law
keeps us from
in medias res
and attendant glory

a medium life
bounded by rules
binding with same
unconscious errors