Truth be told, Jesus,

There are lots of tables that need overturning

   in our lives;

Beneath the veneer of respectability

   the tidy rows and neat regulations

      hide dark addictions and angry judgments

         hungry greeds and heartless rejections

We know the pain—and so do those around us—

   of keeping up the facade;

What a relief it would be to have it all

   upset, smashed, scattered, destroyed

So, perhaps, Jesus, today you could pay us a visit

   and help us to radically rearrange

      the furniture of our lives

Amen.

John van de Laar, South African Methodist worship minster

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And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. And he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. And he was teaching them and saying to them,

“Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’?

But you have made it a den of robbers.”