Ezekiel 17
God’s Unfinished Business
I think I will name the message this morning “God’s unfinished business.”
If you have ever heard a sermon on Ezekiel, it was probably a sermon about the valley of dry bones. This is in chapter 37. The reading for this morning comes from chapter 17. Instead of dry bones, this reading talks about soaring eagles and tall cedars and majestic mountains. These are all friendly images, but the news is not so good.
We learn in the 16th chapter, that God is not happy with Judah. Israel had two kingdoms—a southern kingdom and a northern kingdom—and the northern kingdom had been wiped out. And now the southern kingdom, Judah, was about to be wiped out. In chapter 16, vs. 56, God says, “Jerusalem, you were so arrogant. . . but now everyone has learned how wicked you really are. . . you must pay for all the vulgar, disgusting things you have done. . . You deserve to be punished because you broke your promise to me.” This is a story about divine retribution.
The axe falls in chapter 17. The king of Babylon defeats the king of Judah in battle, conquers the people, destroys the temple, and leads the most important people off into captivity. He gives each captive a nose ring, chains them together, and leads them away. The image is one of complete and utter devastation.
I can remember a few years ago certain television preachers and evangelists were telling us tornadoes struck this city or hurricanes struck that city because God was angry and wanted to punish them. I remember as you might listening to preachers say that God doesn’t like gays and therefore sent AIDS as punishment. We are likely to more of that kind of hurtful language from the religious right—I won’t say Christian Right because there isn’t anything Christian about it. But we can expect that we will hear that kind of language in the coming days. God doesn’t like this or that, or God is angry about one thing or another and therefore people suffer the “wrath of God.”
We have to admit that this is biblical language. This kind of religious bigotry comes from the Bible. Some people who profess to be Christians and others who simply like to dress up in religious language use texts like the one we have for today to blame the victim or to shame others. It’s a very old, time-honored, practice.
I can’t help but think this morning about a certain Supreme Court Justice and his wife who are upset at the sight of a rainbow flag, so they made their own flag of shame, which they are flying over their beach house. In some odd way it seems to me that they are identifying their own house as a house of shame.
I don’t want to say any more about that except to recognize it for what it is—simple-minded, hate-filled, language that gives the Bible and the Christian community a bad name. People who think this way want to believe in a perfect God who created a perfect world and we blew it in the Garden of Eden so now we have to live with these moral codes that remind us of how bad we are and show us how to become more perfect—the way God intended.
When I was getting my doctorate, I chose to write a paper on Frederick Nietzsche as part of my oral exam. Nietzsche is the one who coined the phrase “ God is dead.” He meant by that, that It is far better to live in an imperfect world than it is to live in a static, unchanging, perfect world, with a static, unchanging God, because in such a world there would be no creativity, and therefore no reason to live. Life would have no meaning. We would simply be stick figures.
Ezekiel’s world is not a world of stick figures. It is a dynamic world. Life is not static. Let me share with you two insights came to me while reading Ezekiel. The first is simply a truism. Words matter and our actions have consequences. Judah fell to Babylon because Babylon had a bigger and better equipped army, true enough. But more importantly, Judah fell because it was not true to its own covenant. They had betrayed their own core values. Applying this insight to our time, our national creed is good: We hold these trues to be self-evident, that all people are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The creed is good. The values are solid. Will we as a people be true to our creed? That’s the question that Ezekiel poses for me. With the question he also makes a statement of faith. It’s a vision of Shalom. I’’s a vision of well-being. Here it is: “Someday, I, the Lord, will cut a tender twig from the top of a cedar tree, then plant it on the peak of Israel’s highest mountain, where it will grow strong branches, and produce large fruit, and al kinds of birds will find shelter under the tree, and they will rest in the shade of its branches.” May it be so.