Lent: The Liminal Space | Week Three | Luke 19:45-48 | March 1st, 2026

This week, Joel focused in on the “cleansing of the Temple” in Luke 19. Jesus moves from weeping at the city gates into the Temple courts. While we often view the "cleansing of the Temple" as an act of rage, Luke reframes it as an act flowing out of deep grief. Jesus wasn't just moving furniture; He was interrupting a pattern where utility had displaced the presence of God. The religious systems of the day had colonized the Court of the Gentiles—the only space where outsiders could encounter God—with insider commerce and religious transactions.

Joel suggested that what we do with sacred space reveals who or what we actually worship. Our bodies, our time, our relationships, and our homes were designed for holy encounter, yet we often repurpose them for mere utility or "to-do" lists. Jesus clears the space not to punish us, but to restore us. He is reclaiming the vineyard from tenants who have forgotten that they are stewards, not owners.

Transcript

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Good morning, everybody. How's everybody doing? Good, pretty good, good. Um, yeah, I just want to second the uh March 1st thing, man. I um had a couple come over yesterday and we we were talking through uh an upcoming wedding, and we got to just sit on a front porch and enjoy the weather. It's funny though how quickly I can go from like, golly, I'm so cold. And then I was sitting outside yesterday for like five minutes, and I'm like, I can't wait till Christmas again. It's so hot. It's like it was hot. I was like, golly, man. Anyways, so fickle, but man, I'm so it just seems like uh, like John said this morning, it just changes everything. Like when the sun is out and it's warm, I don't know, it just kind of changes everything. And so we're we're thankful for that today. Um if you have been coming here or you've been here before, I just want to say welcome back. We're glad that you're here. If it's your first time here, we're so glad that you came. We know that there's so many incredible places to worship in Nashville, and so we're just honored and humbled that you're here with us this morning. Just to bring you kind of up to up to speed, we are in the middle of, we're kind of still in the beginning of our Lent series entitled The Liminal Space. And we are observing Lent together as a family as we do every year. But what we're doing this year for Lent is a little bit different on Sunday mornings. We're using uh this time to really examine what is commonly referred to as Holy Week, the last week of Jesus' life. And we're going through our entire Lent series, kind of looking at the events that happen in that week, because unfortunately, they don't get a lot of airplay. Like it doesn't really get a lot of time during Lent. It kind of gets saved up for Holy Week, and then before you know it, like we're out of it. And so we wanted to really look at closely in a granular way what is happening in those last events in that last week of Jesus' life. And I just want to say, like I said last Sunday, if you're somebody who grew up in a background that was kind of high church, a bit more liturgical, you're familiar with and even love observing the church capital C calendar, it might feel a little strange to have Holy Week kind of take up all of Lent. But we just want to say, like I said last week, it's all good, it's gonna be sweet, it's a little bit of a change, but it's okay. Um, but it's only been a week, so it could be a total train wreck. I don't know. Um, no, I'm just kidding. I know it's gonna be beautiful. Last week, we took a look at Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem that led him in that moment to weep, right? And when you see it, if you're not familiar with the story, it can be easy to kind of view it as Jesus is crying, happy tears. It's kind of like the culmination of all of this stuff in this sort of kind of like coming home moment. But that's not why Jesus is crying, is it? It says that he's weeping. The word is clao or a claus in the Greek word there. It's this audible sobbing that we hear and see from Jesus. He is crying over, lamenting over the brokenness of the people of Jerusalem, his disciples, looking at the city of Jerusalem, knowing that they don't fully understand who he is and what salvation is actually going to look like. And it leads him to weep. Something I didn't point out last week, which I was kind of realized, I don't even think I realized it last week, I realized it this week during study, is that the word that we see of Jesus weeping is the same word that we see used describing the crowd at Lazarus' tomb. So it's not the word that Jesus, when it with the shortest verse in the Bible where it says Jesus wept, that's actually not the word used there. That is kind of more of a solemn, like kind of quiet cry that Jesus is doing at Lazarus' tomb. What we see the crowd doing at the tomb, wailing and weeping and sobbing, that's the word used for Jesus as he's entering into Jerusalem. So it's no secret. When you look at the language here, Jesus has come undone. Looking at the brokenness. Now, as part of observing Lent as a church family this year, we talked about the fact that each week we're gonna be kind of incorporating a spiritual discipline. We're gonna be talking about spiritual discipline during the sermon, and then we're inviting everybody to join with us in that coming week in observing said spiritual discipline or spiritual practice. You might be more familiar with that terminology. And last week we invited everybody into just a time of lament over this last week. And we are sending these out in our weekly email. We'll do a QR code at the end of the service again if you don't get the weekly email. We encourage you to do it. Did anybody like use the discussion God from this past week that Cameo had written for the spiritual practices? Yeah, it's incredible. It is so beautiful and so helpful to walk through these spiritual disciplines. So we invited everybody to actually observe and practice Lament this past week. And so today, the spiritual discipline that we're walking toward, that we're talking about, and that we're inviting everyone into the spiritual practice, spiritual discipline of fasting. Of fasting. Before we get to the invitation, I want to make sure that we have a really healthy biblical understanding of and basis for kind of the theological underpinning of what's happening when we fast, why we fast. And so we're gonna do that today by looking at the gospel of Luke. Now, Luke's gospel, unlike Matthew and Mark and even John's, it inserts and pays particular attention to Jesus weeping in between the stories of his triumphal entry into Jerusalem and then the cleansing of the temple that we're gonna read about in just a moment, that Zach read in our welcome this morning. It's important to note that because Luke beautifully reframes how we might interpret this otherwise. What's happening when we see Jesus cleansing the temple? What happens often when we see Jesus cleansing the temple, if you don't know what I'm referring to when I say that, you might be familiar with it's it's the picture where Jesus is, we we're com, we are familiar with this, where he's flipping tables. He's flipping tables, it says that he fashions a whip and he's driving out the sacrificial animals that are being like in the temple being sold. It's this really intense moment. And what we do, particularly in the modern West, particularly as men, we take this to be this kind of like like real tough guy moment that Jesus is like hulking out. That's not what's happening. This isn't like an invitation for us to be like, we're warriors for Jesus. Like that's not, it's coming out of this deep, deep grief that Jesus is feeling over the brokenness of his people. It is not an act of uncontrolled rage. But it's so commonly misunderstood what's happening here when we look at Scripture. We noted last week that the word that Luke uses for Jesus' weeping, again, is Cleo or Clausen, this audible, unrestrained weeping. This again isn't some single quiet tear as he's entering into the city. And so it's important to know, and Luke points this out through the chronology of how he tells this story, is that out of this weeping that we see, he then comes in and he enters into the temple and sees what's happening here. So it's important to know that that's the basis for what's happening. Jesus coming undone as he's entering in and then coming into the temple. Now, another thing that I didn't really get into last week is the language that I think is important to note. As Jesus is entering into Jerusalem, it says that he saw Jerusalem. He saw the people. His gaze and his grief is centered around something that he sees. Now, Luke tells us he saw, which carries a lot of weight in his gospel. You see, when Jesus sees something, this is this a lot of times we have a disconnect with this because for us, we so often, I've absolutely me first have trained ourselves to like see something, something broken, something sad, and just kind of we've trained ourselves to like, I'm just gonna look the other way and keep going because that's inconvenient. To like, right? Wait, like, I'm not alone in that, right? We've kind of trained ourselves to like see it and then just kind of like try to unsee it. Jesus doesn't do that. When he sees something that needs somebody to act, he acts. And that's what we see here. You can trust when you see in Luke's gospel, and we'll find out in a moment, not just in Luke's gospel, that when God sees something, when he sees brokenness, when he sees subjugation, he is going to act. We see in Luke 5, too, Jesus saw the fishing boats on the beach. We know then that what happens then is he goes and he calls his first disciples. It says, he saw the fishing boats, he saw the faith of the friends of the paralyzed man who lowered him in through the thatched roof. He saw the widow of Nain's grief. This is the actual language Luke uses. He saw, he saw, he saw. He saw the crippled woman on the Sabbath. He saw the ten lepers. He saw Zacchaeus in the tree. He saw the widow offering two coins. And this is not an exhaustive list. But we know when God sees, he is going to move and act. It's actually not even unique to Luke's gospel. We find it all throughout Scripture. Even in the Old Testament, whenever God hears the cries of hurting people and he sees them, you can trust that something is about to happen. Something big is about to happen. It's actually something that Cameo has been teaching in the Sunday school class. They've been talking about that as they're going through Exodus because we know in that the language used is that God hears and he sees the enslavement and the abuse and the subjugation of his people in Egypt. And so he sends a rescuer. It's intentional language. Seeing in Scripture is not passive. When it's from God, it is most certainly the prelude to action that is rooted in deep, deep love. So Jesus, he sees Jerusalem and he sees the people and he's weeping over them. Now we move into the temple scene where Jesus is still feeling the weight of this, of what he was feeling as he entered Jerusalem. And he doesn't just dry his eyes and move on. Like I said, like I'm so trained to do, like so many of us are so trained to do. We kind of give a little cry and then we're like, we're moving on. Next thing. He descends into the city, still carrying the weight of this grief. And the first thing that he encounters when he gets there tells him exactly why he was right to weep. Let's open up to Luke chapter 19, verses 45 through 48. Like I said, Zach read it in the welcome. Luke 19, 45 through 48. When Jesus entered the temple courts, he began to drive out those who were selling. It is written, he said to them, My house will be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers. Every day he was teaching at the temple. But the chief priests, the teachers of the law, and the leaders among the people were trying to kill him, yet they could not find any way to do it because all the people hung on his words. Now, Luke's account of the temple cleansing, that's what this is referred to as. When Jesus comes in, he's kind of clearing out the court. It's this temple cleansing. Luke's account of it is much more compressed than the other gospels. Matthew, Mark, and John. You might, and if you go to John, you see it. John's not so concerned with chronology in his book. So actually the temple cleansing happens in John chapter 2, which is strange, but it's the same thing that's happening here. And they spend a lot more time talking about the flipping of the tables, the flipping of the benches, the fashioning of the whip, the driving out of the animals. Luke's gospel is more compressed. We only get four verses on it compared to the other gospels, more extended accounts. Actually, we really only get two verses of talking about the actual like physical material cleansing of the temple. Now, some of you might be like, man, Luke, this is like one of the coolest parts in Scripture. Why the heck are you leaving this out, right? We love this picture of Jesus. A lot of us do. But something that is so beautiful in Luke's account is that he moves almost immediately from the act of actual like physical cleansing to Jesus then teaching daily in the temple. This is really important to Luke to point this out. The physical and material cleansing that we see is not the end goal for Jesus. Oftentimes we can kind of make it the end goal. But what's happening here is Jesus is quite literally clearing the way for something. He's clearing out the space for something deeper, something spiritual, something lasting. That's what Jesus is doing here. So the flipping of the tables, the clearing out of these physical things, that's not the end goal. He's clearing out the space for something deeper to happen, for encounter to now happen. As we enter into a time of fasting this week, and as we talk a little bit more about that at the end of the service and invite you into it, it is imperative that we utilize this story as kind of an underpinning of what's happening to understand what it is that the Lord is desiring to do in us, this cleansing that has to happen in order to create space for encounter. Now, I would argue that the cleansing of the temple, it doesn't just stop with the physical material cleansing, like the kicking out of the animals and the people who are selling and all of that stuff. The cleansing continues, it just moves into a more spiritual type of cleansing as Jesus now continues over the coming days to teach. Because you can be certain, as he's teaching, he's clearing up misconceptions that have been made now with what's happening in the temple. More than likely, what Jesus is teaching is he's getting things back to like, no, no, no, no, this is actually what this means and what this is supposed to be, right? He's clearing things back up. And so that really is a continual cleansing that's happening. Now, when we fast, it moves us into the spiritual cleansing. It clears out space for the word, for encounter. And when we see it happening in this story, it's clearing out the space for the Gentiles to have access to prayer. Now, hold on to that for just a minute. I'll come back to that in just a second. But when we fast, it's important to recognize that this is exactly what's supposed to be happening in our lives. We are essentially inviting the Lord in to cleanse or to clear away the physical or material or even spiritual things that are kind of cluttering up the space in our lives that is meant to be sacred space in order to be cleansing our hearts and minds and our spirits with this truth. Now, a little kind of nugget that I dropped there about cleansing, the temple cleansing, clearing way for the Gentiles to be able to come and pray, that might kind of sound weird, but in this passage, something that you we don't really see right on the surface, it only really comes if you spend some time and really kind of study this deeply and do some cross-referencing. Jesus is actually quoting two Old Testament texts in combination here. When he says, It is written, My house will be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers. When he does that, he's taking two Old Testament texts. The first one, My house will be a house of prayer, is Isaiah 56, 6 and 7. The second one that he says, You've made it a den of robbers, he's referring to Jeremiah 7, 11. Now, this is really important to note here, particularly the Isaiah text. This is so cool. This is one of those like theology nerd moments that just like blew my mind as I was I was studying this and realizing this. When you look at the text, the actual original context of Isaiah 56, 6 and 7, what Jesus is quoting here, he's explicitly referring to foreigners and particularly eunuchs being welcomed into the house of God. Isaiah 56, 6 and 7 says, And foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants, all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it, and who hold fast to my covenant, these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar, for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations. It's easy to think that the temple and especially in the in the Old Testament, that Jesus was just concerned about the Jews. That's not true. He is desiring that all nations come to him. And we see it here, and this is what Jesus is quoting, this text here. So a lot of times this isn't real common knowledge, but what Jesus, the part of the temple, because it's a temple complex, and as you go into the temple complex, it would have started out with an outer court called the court of the Gentiles. Okay? Now, this is the space where non-Jews were able to come and to pray, have access to encounter with God. It was a really special part of the temple complex, the only part of the temple that was open to non-Jews. And this is this area that Jesus is cleaning out, that he's cleansing. So this means that the money changers and the sellers had set up in this part of the temple, the court of the Gentiles. Practically speaking, it's the one space that was designated for outsiders, and it had been filled with insider religious commerce. The religious leaders of the very people whom God chose to be a light to the nations, to be a priestly nation, the religious leaders of that nation had now become a stumbling block to the nations. They were essentially blocking out the light. And Jesus came to cleanse it and to bring that back. In Jeremiah 7, the citation that Jesus says about the den of robbers, it's equally layered. In its original context, what's happening in this moment when Jeremiah says this is referred to by scholars as the temple sermon. This is what Jeremiah is doing in the Old Testament when he's saying this part that Jesus then quotes as he's cleansing the temple. The temple sermon is this devastating critique against certain Jewish people who believed that their salvation came just with being in the presence of the temple, being in the actual physical presence. And that they could live however they wanted to, could do whatever they wanted to do as long as they came to the temple and that and God would protect them. So this temple sermon that Jeremiah is giving is this devastating critique against that line of thinking that you can just kind of do whatever you want to do and then just kind of like hide behind God. Saying you can't do that. That's what Jesus is actually quoting here. The den of robbers language does not necessarily mean that the merchants who were selling and doing money changing were even really being dishonest per se, though it's like They were. We don't definitely know that. It's more that the temple had become a place that people were retreating to after they would commit injustice against others. It's like a child hitting her sibling, causing pain, and then running and trying to hide behind dad. It doesn't work that way. It can't work that way. That's what we see happening here. And what the Jewish leaders were actually doing is they were robbing the Gentiles of the opportunity to encounter God in the temple. Now, the thing that should unsettle us about this passage is not necessarily that there were bad people doing bad things in the temple. It's more so that there were ordinary people doing ordinary things in the wrong place. Now that might sound strange because normally the focus in this passage is on the supposed evil and deceit of the people doing business. That's not the focus here. Again, that might very well be the case, that there was deceit, that there were things like that. That's not the focus. The animals that were being sold, this was a legitimate business practice that needed to happen so that people could get animals for sacrificial use. This was the legitimate operation. The money changing was a necessary part of Jewish culture. When you would come to the temple, there would be, it should have been outside, but there were money changers because you could not use Roman coin that bared the image of Caesar on it to pay the temple tax. So you had to have money changers. It was a legitimate operation. The problem isn't with what they were doing, it was where they were doing it. They had brought it into the temple court of the Gentiles, thus pushing all of the outsiders and foreigners out, saying, you have no place here anymore, because we got to take care of what we got to take care of in here. It would essentially be the same concept as us. You know, we have a 12-step meeting that meets every Sunday morning, ID recovery, and they use the chapel. And it really, if you ever, it is sacred space. It would be like us as leadership being like, you know what, we really need a new place for our printer, our printing paper. We don't have a lot of office supplies. That's really all we have. Like our computers, like store some things. Uh if you could, ID, if you guys could just go find somewhere else, like a coffee shop or something, we need this to like store things. It'd be similar to that. Essentially moving things in for utility for us, but pushing other people out in the process. It's putting process before people. That's what's happening here. Now, this is the pattern that Jesus is disrupting here. Not evil for evil's sake, but utility that is displacing the sacred. It is function that is crowding out presence. Now, for us this morning, I want us to just take a moment and think really honestly about what our own sacred spaces are and what they have maybe become. First, in order to do that, we need to identify just a few things in our lives, a few places in our lives that we might consider sacred space, even maybe inherently sacred space. Because really, any space can be sacred if within that place we honor Jesus as king and invite the Holy Spirit into that space. It doesn't matter if you're in a bathroom or whatever, like any space can be sacred space. But let's look at a few things that are like, these are legitimate, I think, inherently sacred space in our lives. For us, number one, our bodies. Our bodies were created as sacred space. Relationships, marriages, our homes, our times of rest, our times of prayer, our times of fellowship, our times of just eating a meal. These things are intended to be sacred spaces. What in our lives that was designed for encounter with God? What place, what space in our lives that was designed for encounter with God for rest, for presence? What have we taken and then just now repurposed as simply existing for utility or for transaction? Like what did we start doing as worship or honoring a sacred space, maybe, and now moving it into where now it's just kind of like a checklisty kind of thing. This is the pattern that Jesus is disrupting here. And it's not always an intentional pattern that we fall into. Nobody really wakes up one day and just decides, you know what, I'm going to start crowding out the presence of God in my life. I'm going to start doing that. That's not really a thing, I don't think. What happens is it's a slow burn. It starts to happen over time. Over things we kind of prioritize. Life starts kind of weighing us down, and it starts to happen before we realize that we have crowded out the presence of God in our lives. We have no more space. I don't think it's a malicious thing. I think it just fills up so often, oftentimes with useful things, like good things a lot of the time, necessary things, reasonable things, until there's just no room left for what it was actually for. I was thinking about this. I think for me in my car rides, as I drive into work, as I drive or whatever, I love using that time as like sacred space. But so often, if I'm not intentional with it, I can instead like use it to listen to the news. I can use it to worry. Just like it's just like a box filled with anxiety on wheels. I can use it to have made-up hypothetical conversations with somebody. This is never even gonna happen. Alright, I can do that thing. Honestly, only at stoplights and stop signs, I can go through texts and emails. Right? I can so quickly turn that space into just a play, a space of utility and transaction. And sometimes if I'm driving to a meeting or something, I need to be like thinking through something. That's okay. But man, if I'm not intentional, it can just so easily turn into like just a little office on wheels. Instead of being that sacred space where I can't even tell you the time amount of times I've had in my truck where I'm the Lord meets me there and I'm crying and or laughing, and people are looking at me from the outside like that guy needs help. And I don't, it's just sacred space. But man, it's so easy to forget that. Now, where I really want to get to this morning is to ask the question are we honoring our bodies as sacred space created in the image of God? Or are we simply utilizing them for transaction or utility? Later on in Scripture, Paul calls the body a temple of the Holy Spirit, 1 Corinthians 6, 19. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit? This is one of those things that gets so like thrown around and it just we're really desensitized to this. Do you understand how unbelievably epic and powerful that is? Our bodies are temples for the Holy Spirit of God to dwell in. Guys, that is so massive. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. If that's true, and I believe it is. And what we do with our bodies, how we nourish them, what we feed them, how we rest them, how we discipline them, how we attend to them, how we train them, it is quite literally a form of temple stewardship. That's what we're doing. Like if the body is a temple, then what we do with it, what we fill it with, what we withhold from it, what we give it is an act of either worship or transaction. There's no in between. Fasting, then, is the deliberate choice to interrupt the transaction. To fast isn't just a spiritual discipline, though. It is that. It is not just a spiritual discipline or spiritual practice. It is choosing to participate in the reclaiming of the temple of the Holy Spirit, your body. That's what fasting is. It's a reclamation of the temple that God desires to dwell in. That's heavy. That's what Jesus is doing in that temple court. He's not just moving furniture around. He's saying this space was made for encounter with the spirit of the living God, and I'm taking it back. And here's something that I really want to name very explicitly here. When sacred space is reclaimed, when what is rightfully God's is reclaimed, returned, submitted to Him, the powers of this dark world will push back. Many of us in this room are very, very aware of this reality. We've all experienced it. But maybe you just aren't quite aware of it just yet. But when we say yes to the Lord, something that he's calling us to, to reclaiming space that he desires to dwell within, and to allow his spirit to come in and start reordering our lives and reordering our priorities. When we say yes to that, the enemy's antennas go up. And many of us have experienced that he starts to really fight back against that. And it just makes sense. It just makes sense. If we're just going to go with the flow of the world and not really have any concern for any of this stuff, and we're just kind of going, you know, whatever, like the however the wind blows us, we're going, getting kind of tossed to and fro by, you know, just different things that the world is teaching us, then the enemy has no real need to launch an offensive. We're like, we're not a threat. But when he sees that we are actually making the decision to reclaim space, to take up our cross and start walking with and following Jesus, then he's going to up his game. We experience this a lot in recovery. It seems like big moments in recovery from addiction to whatever. Like when you're in recovery and you're experiencing these big kind of mountaintop moments, maybe a certain amount of clean time. Or you've gotten, you know, uh your car back, or you've gotten a good job, you've gotten your kids back. Man, you can rest assured that it's going to be followed up by an attack from the enemy. It's just how he operates. We're not strangers to it. We are going to get pushback from the world when we say yes to the Lord. And it can be incredibly discouraging if we let it. It really can. But if we view it rightly, it can actually be a really encouraging thing. It's not easy to view it as such, but it is possible. Because what's happening here, when the enemy starts to put back, when we put our yes on the table, we start to reclaim space, what's really happening is the devil is scared. He's scared. And so that's kind of an encouraging thing. For me, a lot of times, if I can view it rightly, which is so, so hard, and I would say 99% of the time I don't. But 1% of the time, when I'm experiencing something beautiful, I've said yes to something, I'm walking in obedience, whatever it is, and experience an attack from the enemy. Handful of times I've been able to use it as an encouragement. Like he's scared. That's why this is happening. This is confirmation for me that I'm walking in what the Lord has for me. It's not easy, but it's possible. That's what's happening. So after Jesus physically cleanses the temple, he begins preaching and teaching in the temple. Again, I think continuing that cleansing. When you move into chapter 20, which I encourage you guys to do this coming week, spend some time reading through and studying, looking at chapter 20. You get a really clear picture of the attempted pushback from the enemy that comes through the mouths of religious leaders. This pushback that comes against Jesus for reclaiming the temple space. Chapter 20 is this really beautiful passage in Luke that is structured as a series of what we know as, they're called controversy dialogues. Controversy dialogues. Now, controversy dialogues are a really well-known, kind of recognized form of Jewish rabbinic tradition where opponents would try to trap one another with unanswerable questions. Luke presents four of them in succession. Luke chapter 20. We see four controversy dialogues happening here after the cleansing of the temple. The first one, we see them questioning the authority of Jesus. They ask him this question about John the Baptist's baptism, whether it was from heaven or from men, and Jesus asks them that, and it puts them in this impossible position where either way they answer it, they're going to lose. We see the question of authority. The next one, we see the question of ownership. Jesus tells this story, this parable about tenants who have managed this vineyard so long that they've forgotten who actually owns the vineyard. And when the owner of the vineyard sends his son to take account of what's happening, they kill the son. And these leaders, as Jesus is saying this to them, the religious leaders that are hearing this parable, they know exactly who he's talking about. The third one, we see the question of image. We see the coin, Caesar's image on this Roman coin. It's when we hear the famous line from Jesus where he says, Render unto Caesar what is his, give back to God what is his. And the fourth thing, the fourth controversy dialogue that we see is the question of life. The last challenge we see from the Sadducees, it tries to make the resurrection look ridiculous. And Jesus doesn't argue the hypothetical, he just reframes it. The way they view resurrection. Like I said, again, please spend time this coming week working through these four controversy dialogues in Luke chapter 20 and seeing how Jesus handles these. Because in every one of these challenges, what the question is ultimately is about the authority. Who has authority over sacred space and sacred life? There's four questions, four factions of leaders that you will see in that chapter. And the thing that they all want to know is who does this space belong to? Who does this space belong to? The pattern that we find in the text is the pattern in our lives. When we begin to reclaim the sacred, when we start fasting, when we start praying or setting aside Sabbath and honoring it as such, or attending to our interior life, we will encounter resistance, like we see in chapter 20 toward Jesus. And some of the resistance that we experience is external. Some of the resistance is external. It's schedules, it's just demands, it's other people's expectations. But the most persistent resistance that I've found when I start to say yes to the Lord, when I start to walk in obedience to him, is internal. It's this internal pushback that I feel. Because there's a part of all of us that has just made peace with moving the marketplace into the temple and turning sacred space just into space for transaction and utility. Because it's efficient there. It's quick, it's easy, it's manageable, it's familiar. The idea that space might be reclaimed for something wilder, something untamable, something less controllable, like actual encounter with the living spirit of God, that's a bit more unsettling for us. And so it's all, of course, natural that we would start to kind of crowd that space out, leaving no room for that type of encounter. I believe in this succession of challenges that you guys will read about in the coming week, this challenges to Jesus, the parable of the tenants is really the sharpest for us as we move into this coming week. The tenants who kill the son of the owner who sends to take account this vineyard, they're not really villains in this like cartoonish or silly sense. They're just people who have been managing this vineyard for so long, this thing that doesn't belong to them, but they've been managing it for so long that they've forgotten the distinction. They've forgotten who it actually belongs to. The vineyard that they've been taking care of for so long, it feels like it's theirs, like they are the ones who own it. The idea that the actual owner might come and want an account feels like some kind of intrusion. It's something that we can really relate to when we look at our own bodies, our homes, our relationships. We have taken care of these things for so long that we start to forget that we don't actually own these things. They are God's. We are stewards of them. And Lent is the season of remembering this truth. This is not ours. This body, this life, time, the sacred spaces that we inhabit, they belong to the one who made them. Fasting is, among other things, a small act of remembering that even our own hunger is not fully ours to manage. Listen, what you do with sacred space, again, your body, your time, your inner life, your relationships, what you do with those things. What I do with those things. It tells me, it tells you, it tells everyone around us what it actually is that we worship. Not what we say we worship, but what we are actually worshiping. Lent is the season of just taking honest account. It's not self. Flagellation. It's not some performative sorrow. It's just honestly seeing what parts of our lives that were meant for holy encounters with the living God. Which of those spaces have just become spaces for utility and transaction? It's the kind of seeing that Jesus does as he crests the hill and enters into the city. This loving, grieving, truthful seeing. This morning, as I said earlier, I want to invite you guys into something this coming week. I would love to invite you guys into a 24-hour fast with us. I want to invite you into this as a small but incredibly powerful act of temple reclamation. Here's what it is. One day this week, you choose it, what works best, set aside food for 24 hours. A lot of times what I'll do is I'll start, so as leadership, we're fasting Tuesday. We'd love for everybody to fast on Tuesday. If you can, if you can't, it's totally fine. But it'd be dope if as many people as could, we're all fasting on Tuesday and praying about this. But a lot of times what I'll do is I'll start like Monday at 8 in the evening, and then I'll go through the night, and then till Tuesday at 8 o'clock the next evening. So that would be a Tuesday fast. And that's what we are inviting you guys into. Not to punish your body, not to prove something to God or to yourself, but to just create space. Again, like I said, our leadership, our elders, our staff, our deacons, we are all doing Tuesday. We'd have loved to invite you guys into doing that. It's okay if you can't. Regardless of the day, every time that you are hungry and that you would normally eat, and that will happen many times in 24 hours, let the hunger be a question rather than just a sensation. What are you actually hungry for? What would it feel like to be this empty and to allow God to fill that space? What parts of my body and my life have just become transactional or utility? Fasting does something that almost nothing else does. It makes the body a participant in spiritual attention. We don't fast to escape the body. We fast to bring the body into the conversation. To say, even here, even at this most basic carnal level of need, I am not just managing transactions. I am waiting for something more, something meaningful, something lasting. For those of you who can't fast from food due to health or medication, pregnancy, history with disordered eating, anything that would keep you from being able to do it, this is not a lesser path, but we would love to invite you in to taking something else and setting that thing aside for 24 hours. Might be your phone, social media, something, something that is taking up that space. The point is the space, not the specific thing that you're choosing to set aside. And last thing, when the fast is over, notice and write down or talk about with somebody, your community group, about what you learned. Not about what you proved, but what you learned. About your hunger, about what came to the surface that you maybe didn't realize was in there, good and bad, about what's been filling the spaces in your life, about whether God showed up in that space. That's the liminal space that we've been talking about in this series. It's not the cross yet, it's not resurrection yet, it's just the honest aching, that open space between what is and what was always meant to be. It's exactly where Jesus meets us. And it happens in such a beautiful way when we fast. Talking about where Jesus meets us, about sacred space, about what happens when the space meant for encounter gets filled with just transactions or checkboxes, about the gap between what things are made for and what they become. Out of this conversation, we now come to the table of communion. This table can so easily just turn into a place of transaction and utility. But it's not that. He takes the cup, he says, This is my blood poured out for you. So as we come to the table this morning, let's come to the table the way Jesus came over the hill toward Jerusalem. Not with some kind of weird, strange, puffed up triumphalism, or at arm's length, or just as utility or transaction, but with honest, open, vulnerable, messy, lament-capable presence. We come as people who have filled sacred spaces with transactions and forgotten what they were for. We come as people who bear the image of God but do not always live like it. We come as tenants who have tried to manage and claim things that belong to someone else. Still, the most important truth of all of this is that we come soaked in his grace and mercy and forgiveness as his beloved children for whom he set this table. We are welcomed at this table. That's the beautiful scandal of this table. Not that the worthy come and receive, but that the hungry come and they're fed. If you are in Christ this morning, if you had made him king of your life, this table is for you. Because he is not the God of the dead, he is the God of the living. And this table is the proof of that. If you're here this morning and you have not yet come home to Jesus, do not leave this morning without having honestly sought after him and considered him. He is waiting to breathe his spirit into your lungs to give you real, true, genuine, eternal life. We also have a prayer team in the back led by Richard, who would love to talk with you, would love to pray with you if you feel so led. So this time, I'm just going to invite our band, our communion team to come up. I'm going to read Luke chapter 22, verses 14 through 20. We'll be talking about this passage in more detail in the coming weeks. But this is the account of the institution of the Lord's Supper that we see. Luke 22, 14 through 20. When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table, and he said to them, I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God. After taking the cup, he gave thanks and said, Take this, divide it among you, for I tell you I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. And he took bread, gave thanks, and broke it to them, broke it and gave it to them, saying, This is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. In the same way, after the supper, he took the cup, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you. God, this morning, as we enter into this time of communion, to come forward and receive the meal of our adoption at this table that you've set for us, where you're the host. God, I pray that you would just help us to come honestly with searching minds and hearts, attentive to the spaces in our lives that you are trying to reveal to us that we have just filled up with other things. So much so where we've just crowded you out. Lord, I pray that you would help us as we realize these spaces, these areas of our lives, that we wouldn't feel shame about that or guilt about that, but Lord, that we would just rest in the beautiful grace and mercy and forgiveness that you offer every single one of us. And God, that we would just allow your spirit to come and reclaim those spaces. I pray that the steps that we take toward this table would be the first steps that we take toward that temple reclamation of our bodies and our lives. Lord, we declare this morning the beautiful, beautiful, scandalous mystery of communion. We know and trust and believe that you are here with us by the power of your Holy Spirit. We thank you for this cup. Our prayer is that you would use these things to nourish our bodies and nourish our spirit, Lord. Do something that only you can do inside of us through this. God, we declare that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ is coming again. We love you and we thank you for that truth. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.