Where Christ Cast the Tables

A poem of academia

Where Christ cast the tables they built it, a temple of silver and gold.
Where God flogged the merchants and patrons they cast there His image in stone.
It’s corners were pillared with marble, it’s rooftop was gabled with gold,
its walls were curtained with banners proclaiming the Glory of God.
“With knowledge we worship. With glory we teach.
The humblest of children we call forth to speak.
Come forth! Hear the secrets of prophets and kings.
The fount of all knowledge is open to thee.”
We trod the long halls to great chambers--where in stadium grandeur we thronged
around men who towered below us and beat on their hearts as they talked.
With fire and fury they shattered the statues and blasted the eons agone.
They tore at the pages of history and wept of unspeakable wrongs.
“The God we all worship is God, true indeed, but why should His Word be a blockade to me?
The world for your color has shackled your feet. The scales of justice are all weighed against thee.
The rich against poor, the black against white, the male against female is the battle you fight.
Oppressor, oppressed is the way of the world. Our crusade will amend all the failures of old.
Your life and your dreams shape now the truth. The keys to the Kingdom I now give unto you.”
In hallowed chambers of worship we cast aside hymnals of praise
And exchanged for them melodies discordant�"That lauded man’s glory and ways.
The pillars we toppled, the statues we shattered, the pages from books that were torn
All made together, a chaotic amalgam of vanity shaped in our form.
Our brothers in Christ looked upon us and chided our vainglorious ways,
And claimed that the temple once hollowed out would fall like the sky on our pates.
We mocked them and chided their warnings and laughed all their wisdom to scorn.
We drowned out their words with our festivals and called them our brothers no more.
We glutted our fill of emotions, were drunk with our righteous crusade,
And divided in new congregations of gender, of sex, and of race.
“If Everyman then is my neighbor and shares in this world that we see,
Then surely my tithe he must owe me, a man much less fortunate than he.”
We made a new doctrine of statistics to quantify the right and the wrong.
Might became right and the outlier was silenced by shouts of the throng.
Truth was slain by experience, and right was sought from within.
“Look not to Creator but creation, for only intolerance is sin.”
The banners still hung on the walls betokened a glory devolved.
The teachers God’s Word only parroted. Their founders they all but forgot.
“Why show you both sides of an issue? In only one side was I trained.
If you want more perspective go find it yourself. It’s for one perspective I’m paid.”
For hunger of knowledge we devoured their words that fed our own zeal for destruction.
When words failed to fill the void in our hearts, we set on devouring each other.
Then in our insatiable hunger we looked to the gold on the floor,
declaring the wealth of the builders would be tithes to the people evermore.
With hammers and picks we chiseled away the riches we knew we deserved.
We’d devoured the words of our teachers and now sought the old knowledge interred.
With tiles broken and scattered, up from the floor came a reek,
And laid bare was the grisly foundation for centuries set under our feet.
Upon the backs of great men do we stand to spit on the buried below.
We scoff at their failures and defects and claim all their works as our own.
Enlightened we are by lessons they taught, but their failures are all that we see.
We plunder their corpses, defile their names, and feed on the scraps of their deeds.
Where Christ cast the tables they built it their temple of silver and gold,
But beneath it they set a foundation composed of the fallen Saints’ bones.