Proper 28

The first vacuum cleaner was constructed of odd parts. The vacuum effect was accomplished by the attachment of an old pillowcase as its bag. A few hundred refinements later, the Hoover family popularized and sold door-to-door the motorized sucking machine dubbed the vacuum cleaner.

It doesn’t take a degree in interior design to notice how the humble vacuum cleaner has ably reflected the styles and dreams of popular culture.

In the 1930s, Hoover incorporated a round headlight into the front of their cleaning machines, causing countless children to turn off the house lights, plug in the vacuum, and play train with the noisy machines.

In the 1940s, the grillwork on vacuums was redesigned, making the machines used to clean carpets resemble the huge, chrome-plated Chryslers and Oldsmobiles sitting in driveways.

As the 1950s space-race started, designers again transformed vacuums into cosmic cleaners, round brightly colored canisters that sped across the floor like rocket-powered capsules.

Today our vacuum cleaners are as high-tech as the rest of our lives. They are lightweight, self-propelled, and cordless. Except at my in-laws.  They still use an Electrolux from the 1960s.

While some homes are now constructed with a built-in vacuum system (just hook up in each room), other homeowners have purchased robotic vacuums called Roombas. Loaded with computer intelligence chips, these flat, oval, nimble little cleaning units quietly glide over dirty carpets and floors all on their own. Come home to find a clean house.

But long before motorized, mechanized, computerized machines cleaned our homes for us, we had to sweep for ourselves. Brooms bound collections of stiff straws or rushes, fastened to some sort of handle, and served as the primary housekeeping tool for thousands of years. Egyptians swept the sand from their pyramids with brooms, nuns cleaned their cloisters with brooms, medieval merchants swept out their shops with brooms. Anywhere you found people living in permanent structures, you found brooms. Despite the grime and grunge we associate with pre-modern living conditions, we homo sapiens have always had this niggling need to clean up after ourselves.

In the earliest days of our nation, brooms were just a bundle of twigs tied to a handle. They weren’t called brooms but “besoms” (pronounced “bee-zums”), and they were a far cry from the masterpiece brooms the Shakers created in the 19th century which today you can find only in museums. Benjamin Franklin planted the first broom seeds which he obtained from Hungary (which they got from Africa) and made the first as-we-know-them-today brooms.

In colonial America, one of the home’s most prized possessions was the broom. There were brooms for every task: cobweb brooms, sweeper brooms, mantel brooms, etc. In fact, it was considered bad luck if you took your old broom to a new house.

Brooms are so commonplace in our culture that they have played a role far beyond that of a cleaning implement. Everyone knows they were used as transportation and as magical side-arms for the flocks of witches that darkened medieval skies and minds. Harry Potter fans are familiar with magical flying brooms that are used instead of flying ponies.

The broom also served as a binding symbol of love and togetherness for early American slaves, who symbolically “jumped over the broom” into marriage and family life. Increasingly popular at African American marriage ceremonies, the bride and groom together jump over one or two brooms laid out on the floor, symbolically sweeping away the old and welcoming the new, symbolically crossing a bridge and beginning a clean life together. In Jamaica, the broom is a political symbol of the People’s National Party, because it aims to sweep the opposition out of power. Party members clutch brooms in the streets.

The individual straws that create brooms have long been used to help determine our personal future every time we agree to draw straws.

In fact, the less we actually use brooms as cleaning implements (haven’t most folks moved on to Swiffers now?) the more we seem to use them metaphorically. Despite their simple structure and less-than-perfect cleaning performance, we all know what it means to make a clean sweep. Though it almost never happens, baseball pennant and world series teams dream of making a clean sweep. And who would argue that some of the most dangerous and necessarily perfect work done by soldiers and civilians alike is the tedious, nail-biting job of accomplishing a clean sweep of a minefield.

In these cases, the simple act of sweeping brings about the absolute completion of a task. Sweeping utterly eradicates all that stands in its way. It’s this same type of utter eradication that Jesus predicted for the massive, seemingly indestructible walls of the great temple, the structural center of Jewish life and faith.

Jesus is unimpressed and unfazed by the dimensions of the stones or the bulk of the building. Despite the temple’s tremendous size and its weighty significance in the history of the Jewish people, he predicts a clean sweep of it from the face of the earth, from its importance to faith.

The foundation stones of the temple, which are still visible today in the Western Wall, are probably the largest building stones in the ancient world. The smallest stones are between two and five tons, and the largest is estimated to weigh 570 tons.

The stones above the foundation really did come down. In the year 70AD, the Romans attacked the city of Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. Many people were killed or enslaved, and the treasures of the temple were stolen. The destruction of the temple was one of the greatest tragedies of Jewish history, and it caused Jewish and Christian residents of the city to scatter.

And yet, as Jesus had foretold, it was not the end-of-time. Indeed, this particular clean sweep opened the way for the birth of an entirely new kind of faith, a faith not dependent upon animal sacrifices or secret priestly communiques with God. Out of the rubble arose a kind of faith that could live and thrive without a structure, without a central building or privileged born-to-it class of leaders.

The Jewish faith was completely reshaped by the destruction of the temple, forcing Jews to shift to worship in synagogues led by rabbis. Christianity also became more congregation-focused, because followers of Jesus could no longer gather in the temple as they did in the earliest days of the church.

Christians had to focus on worship and fellowship in congregations outside of Jerusalem. And as painful as the destruction of Jerusalem was, it set the stage for Christianity to become a global faith.

And this faith was built on a new temple: the true Temple is Jesus himself. And this temple will be destroyed and re-built in three days.

With Jesus as the New and True Temple:

Faith became both personal and person-based . . . instead of institutional and legally based. Assurance came from the presence of the Holy Spirit . . . instead of from a list of laws. One sacrifice had paid for all . . . instead of requiring repeatedly paying for substitutionary animal sacrifices. Wherever two or three are gathered, Jesus is in our midst . . . instead of the faithful needing to trek to one geographical place to find the divine presence.

The devastation of the temple DID portend the beginning of the end. But it was also just the first twinge, the first birth pang, of the great events that were still to come . . . the New Temple of Jesus the Christ.

It’s our mission and our joy to spend this interim period celebrating the towering of the New Temple, the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit, and anticipating the ultimate arrival of the Kingdom of God. Jesus cautioned his disciples not to get so wrapped up in reading the signs that may be around them, but to instead recognize the miracle in their midst.

Jesus’ words reverberate today.

Has your life been swept clean of all that’s preventing the New Temple from being built in your home, your life, this church?