If you were in worship last week today may feel like theological whiplash. Last week we read from Ezekiel 33 where he gave the message that each person was accountable to God for his or her actions. God was clearly standing above and acting as judge. God would give life to the righteous and death to the wicked. To round out the Bible readings in the worship bulletin I found a passage from St. Paul and a saying from Jesus that were along the same lines.
But today we’re hearing almost the
opposite message. Let me read those
verses from Ezekiel 34 again so that we can fully realize the contrast:
11For thus says the Lord God: I myself will search for my sheep,
and will seek them out. 12As shepherds seek out their flocks
when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will
rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of
clouds and thick darkness. 13I will bring them out from the
peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own
land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the watercourses, and
in all the inhabited parts of the land. 14I will feed them with
good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture; there
they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall feed on rich pasture
on the mountains of Israel. 15I myself will be the shepherd of
my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. 16I will seek the
lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I
will strengthen the weak,
This is a message of deep love and
grace. These are words we like to
hear! God is doing all the acting. The people – the sheep – are not even seeking
God. God is seeking them. God is bringing them back to their
homeland. God will provide them with all
their needs.
And
so within the prophet Ezekiel at different times we have completely opposite
messages. That goes for more than just
Ezekiel. It is a tension we find
throughout our scripture. What is the life
of faith? Are we judged by our
works? Do they make us likeable to God
and as reward God looks favorably upon us?
-Or- Is the life of faith something that is completely God’s? Are we saved by what God has done for
us? And is even our faith a product of
God?
The
answer is, “Yes!” to both ideas, even though they are contradictory. In seminary I was always taught that sermons
need to have a tension between law and gospel.
Law being the reality that we fall short of the glory of God, that we
are not in right relationship with God.
And gospel being the word of grace that we are unconditionally and
forever loved and held secure by God.
Many
people – many theologians, especially protestants, attempt to come up with a
middle of the road approach. They say
that God has given us everything as a free gift but that we must accept
it. If we don’t accept it then we don’t
get to have it.
That’s
a likeable idea to us. It preserves our
free will – it preserves our agency in life and salvation. It is, however, wrong. It’s not even remotely biblical. It’s actually heresy.
Most
Roman Catholic theologians along with many protestant theologians, especially
Lutherans, will talk about the complete depravity of the soul. It is the truth that without God we are nothing. God created the dust that we are made
of. God created the life that animates
the dust that we are made of. God
sustains that life in us and in everything.
And that even the faith that is within us is also God’s work.
What
can we take credit for? Nothing. Not our good works. Not our righteousness. Not our faith. Not our “decision” to believe and accept
God’s goodness.
Truly
it makes a tatters of the idea of free will, but then again, the idea of free
will is a human invention anyway. And
the resulting contradiction is a product of the limits of our human thinking.
The
idea of our complete dependence upon God and God alone formed the center of
Martin Luther’s theology. But those
thoughts were hardly new to him. They
were not even new to Christianity and Jesus 1500 years before. Go back even 600 years further and to the
prophet Ezekiel and you find them. And
in fact it goes to well before Ezekiel’s time.
We depend upon God for everything – even our faith is a work of
God. This is a truth that humans always
struggle to accept. But God is simply
beyond our limits. I suppose it will
always be a struggle.
Today
is Reformation Day. It commemorates the
beginning of the Protestant Reformation which led to many reforms in the church,
especially the church in northern Europe, which in the 16th century
appears to have gone quite astray from the core of Christianity.
Things
had gone astray in Ezekiel’s time too.
You’ll remember that Ezekiel was a prophet who worked among those Jews who
were taken into exile by the Babylonians after they had conquered Israel. Later these people would learn that Jerusalem
had been destroyed and that its 500-year-old temple had also been destroyed.
The
front of the bulletin lays out the four things Ezekiel needed to reform in the
thinking of his countrymen. All of them
were expectations they had of God. They
were promises they thought God would make good on. But now it appeared as if God had not. Had God lied?
Had God failed? Was God even for
real? Had they been foolishly duped into
believing in old traditions and teachings?
The
four things are:
One, that they alone were God’s chosen
people. Of all the nations of the earth
God had chosen them and made an eternal covenant with them through Moses when
they were coming out of Egypt and moving to the Promised Land. They had confidence that God would ensure
their wellbeing and protect them. To be
sure, that covenant included obligations on their part as well as promises from
God. But it appears they focused more on
benefiting from the promises than taking seriously their obligations.
Two,
that God had granted the land of Israel to their ancestors. God owned the land – at least according to
Leviticus there was no real personal ownership of land – and they were
caretakers of it who would reap its blessings.
They believed that God would fight to protect them and to ensure that
the land would forever be available as theirs.
Third,
God had entered into a covenant with King David that his family would forever
be the rulers of the nation. They saw it
as an unconditional promise from God.
Meaning that no matter how bad they were, or how bad the king was, God
was honor bound to keep the covenant forever.
And
fourth along with that, that the city of Jerusalem, and especially the temple
within it, was God’s chosen dwelling place and would stand forever. What are the final words of the famous 23rd
Psalm? The Psalm starts off with, “The
Lord is my shepherd,” the same theme we read from Ezekiel today. And it ends with, “I shall dwell in the house
of the Lord forever.” That translation
actually misses it somewhat, but you get the idea. The temple is God’s chosen dwelling place. God will dwell there forever.
We
aren’t spending enough time with the prophet Ezekiel to do his writings justice. There just aren’t enough weeks to truly cover
the prophets. One of Ezekiel’s major
visions that we are not covering is Ezekiel 10.
It’s a vivid vision where God’s glory departs from the temple. Leading up to that vision are descriptions of
all sorts of corruption and wrongdoing in and around the temple. God becomes so disgusted with the filth that
God can’t take it anymore and ultimately decides to leave. That is one of Ezekiel’s messages intended to
explain their current situation and to bring about a reformation in their
thinking.
Ezekiel’s
original audience were the Jews taken to exile in Babylon were their country’s
leading citizens. These four things were
the core of their faith. They had lost
all of them. What was left of
faith? What was left of their national
identity? Ezekiel’s role was to reform
their thoughts and understanding of God into something else.
After
harshly condemning the people for their constant corruption and faithlessness
Ezekiel tells them there are deeper promises from God. God has not failed. God has not lied. They are still God’s people and still within
God’s power. And we see in our reading
from today, God will bring about a restoration.
They should live and trust in that.
Ultimately they did. Judaism
continues to flourish to this day. It is
the only religion from that time to do so.
The reforms Martin Luther called for
were actually far less significant than the major changes Ezekiel called
for. But the underlying truth is the
same. We are God’s. We are created by God, loved by God, and
saved by God. As for our part, yes the
news of our value being held by God should inspire us to work, work hard, be
creative, and to know that suffering often goes along with it.
God had not actually forsaken the
people of Ezekiel’s day at all. But they
needed to rethink many parts of their faith to see it. May we also be able to question and reform
our own thinking regularly so that we never miss what God is up to.
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