My last full day in Hanoi, I took the opportunity to visit the One Pillar Pagoda — a structure built in 1049 by Emperor Lý Thái Tông, preserved now for nearly a millennium as one of Vietnam’s most recognizable architectural symbols. The design is intentional and striking: a single wooden pagoda perched atop a lone stone pillar rising from a square koi pond, created to evoke the image of a lotus blossom emerging from still water.
It works. The scene is genuinely picturesque. Shade and sunlight move across worn stones. Koi drift in slow circles beneath the pillar. The gardens surrounding the pond are immaculately manicured — every hedge trimmed, every stone placed with care. There is a sense of deliberate serenity to the space, an invitation to stillness.
That is where the serenity ends.
Arriving at the pagoda requires passing through a security checkpoint and traversing a broad plaza of post-Soviet architecture — gray, angular buildings that rise from the landscape like a clenched fist, asserting dominance rather than harmonizing with it. The structures belong to the sprawling Ho Chi Minh monument complex, a civic declaration of a particular political vision. Whatever beauty the pagoda holds, it is framed by concrete and ideology before you ever reach it.
“And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, ‘It is written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer,” but you make it a den of robbers.’” — Matthew 21:12–13 (ESV)
Entering the temple courts of the One Pillar Pagoda — the outer enclosure before the pagoda itself — the first thing one encounters is a snack stand.
Looking further across the court, the eye picks up several more food vendors, clusters of souvenir tables, and the familiar rhythms of commercial tourism: haggling, photographing, transacting. Tourists clamored up the narrow stairway to peer into the pagoda itself, and the air carried the sound of commerce rather than contemplation.
I could not help it. My mind went immediately to Matthew 21 and Mark 11.
Jesus entered the temple courts in Jerusalem and found them occupied in almost exactly this way. Money changers, merchants selling livestock for sacrifice, vendors conducting the ordinary business of religious commerce. The courts designed for prayer — specifically, the Court of the Gentiles, the one space within the temple precincts explicitly open to all nations — had been converted into a marketplace. The sacred had become serviceable. The house of prayer had become a place of profit.
And He drove them out.
What struck me, standing in that courtyard in Hanoi, was the quiet sadness of recognizing how universal this pattern is. The One Pillar Pagoda is a Buddhist shrine, not a church. The vendors were not violating a Mosaic code. And yet the dynamic was identical to what Jesus confronted two thousand years ago in Jerusalem: sacred space leveraged for commercial gain, the divine drawn near enough to attract a crowd, and the crowd drawn close enough to turn a profit.
The use of the divine for personal gain is a problem that transcends religion, geography, and century.
Mark’s account of the temple cleansing adds a detail worth sitting with: “He would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple” (Mark 11:16, ESV). The temple courts had become a thoroughfare — a shortcut through sacred space for people with no interest in what the space represented. The divine had been reduced to convenient infrastructure. A path to somewhere else.
We recognize the type. We have all, at one time or another, approached God as a means rather than an end.
The moment I found myself most uncomfortable was not while watching the vendors at the One Pillar Pagoda. It was when my own thoughts turned inward — toward the modern church.
There will always be a reasonable argument made for the economics of ministry. Larger productions draw larger crowds. Larger budgets permit greater operational capacity. Greater operational capacity enables greater giving. The logic is not entirely without merit, and I want to be careful not to caricature what is often a genuine attempt to steward resources well.
But I believe the problem runs deeper than budget ratios.
At the core, this is a heart issue. And the heart issue is this: we draw near to the divine, and somewhere in the drawing near, we begin to contrive ways for the One we came to serve to serve us instead. The transaction subtly inverts. The posture of worship slowly becomes the posture of consumption. We are no longer gathered around the presence of God; we have arranged the presence of God around ourselves.
Jesus’ words to the money changers were not primarily about commerce. They were about displacement. The Court of the Gentiles — the one space explicitly reserved for all nations to seek the God of Israel — had been crowded out. The nations could not come near because the space had been claimed for other purposes. What was designed to invite proximity had become an obstacle to it.
The question worth asking of every ministry, every congregation, every individual believer, is not merely whether the books balance. It is whether the space we have been given — the sacred space of gathered worship, the public witness of the Body of Christ — still makes room for those who have come from afar to draw near to God.
Here is the detail I found most ironically illuminating.
Mounted around the courtyard of the One Pillar Pagoda were a series of illustrated signboards presenting karmic guidelines — a set of if/then statements rendered in simple cartoon relief. Do good; receive good. Harm others; receive harm. The system is tidy, transactional, and self-contained.
One sign in particular caught my attention. It depicted, in unambiguous cartoon form, the consequences for using the image of the Buddha on marketing materials for personal commercial gain. The message was plain: do not exploit the sacred for profit. Do not use the image of the divine to advance your own interests.
I stood there for a moment and looked across the court at the souvenir tables.
The irony required no commentary.
But there is something worth noting in that irony beyond the obvious. The karmic system the signboards describe is itself a form of the same heart posture — a framework that approaches the divine with the question, “What will I receive?” rather than “To whom do I belong?” Karma is not worship. It is calculation. It reduces the divine to a ledger and the worshiper to an accountant tallying columns of merit and consequence.
By contrast, what Jesus found in the temple courts — and what He drove out — was not merely bad business practice. It was a failure of the imagination. A failure to believe that the God of Israel was worth drawing near to for His own sake. That the house of prayer was sacred because of whose house it was, not because of what could be transacted within it.
The One Pillar Pagoda, built nearly a thousand years ago to resemble a lotus rising from still water, is a beautiful structure surrounded by the exact problem it was built to transcend. We do not share the same system. We share the same failure — and given what we have been given, we have far less excuse for it.
Jesus’ response to the temple courts was not merely confrontational — it was clarifying. He drove out what did not belong, and then, Mark tells us, He taught (Mark 11:17). The clearing was not an end in itself. The purpose of reclaiming the space was so that the space could be used for what it was made for.
That is the movement of genuine worship as well. We clear out what has displaced the center. We examine honestly the ways we have arranged our devotion around our own comfort, our own gain, our own expectations of what the divine owes us. And then — having cleared the court — we draw near. Not as consumers. Not as calculators of merit and consequence. But as those who know whose house this is, and who have come simply to seek the face of the One who dwells within it.
“Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’?” — Mark 11:17 (ESV)
For all the nations. That was always the point. The court was never meant to be a marketplace. It was meant to be an open door.
May we keep it that way.
From one man He made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us. Acts 17:26-27