Sermon - 17th Sunday After Pentecost (9/27/2020)
Ezek. 18:1-4, 25-32; Ps. 25:1-9; Phil. 2:1-13; Mt. 21:23-32
Earlier this summer we read a couple of times from the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah saw clearly that the lack of faith and the lack of justice in Judah would lead to the fall of the temple and the exile of the people from the Promised Land, and he was right – and for being right, he was vilified and ridiculed and mistreated, and as you will remember, he didn’t hold back in complaining to God about it.
Today’s first reading comes from the other great prophet of the time of the Exile, Ezekiel. Although Ezekiel and Jeremiah both lived at the time of the destruction of the Temple built by Solomon and the exile of the Jewish people to Babylon, they were very different people. Jeremiah was particularly critical of the people who put their faith in the temple – the people who said, hey, we have the presence of God right here in the Temple, so nothing bad will ever happen to us, it doesn’t matter if we worship other gods and mistreat our neighbors, we’ve got God on our side so it’s all OK. Jeremiah had no patience for this way of thinking and was always critical of the Temple and those who took undue comfort in it.
But Ezekiel was a priest in the Temple. He spent his whole day, every day, in the temple, offering sacrifices, leading people in the public worship of God. And when the Babylonians attacked Jerusalem, Ezekiel was one of the first Jewish people to be deported to Babylon and sent into exile.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Ezekiel lately. Here is someone who was living what, to him, was a basic ordinary life, until suddenly his life was completely upended by something that came out of the blue. That disrupted all of the forms of community life that he and his family and his people knew. That took away their ability to come together to worship God in the way that they were used to. That separated them from family and friends and everything that made life normal. I think it’s a lot easier for us to relate to Ezekiel today than it was a year ago.
And in this disruption, people are turning to Ezekiel for answers to their questions. Why did this happen? How could God allow this? Can we go back soon? If we can’t go back soon, what are we supposed to do now?
The most common thing that people said was that God must be punishing the people because their ancestors had been unfaithful. God called us to be a special people, a special community, with a special mission to know God and to practice the right worship of God and manifest the love of God in the way we lived together. But for generations we didn’t do this, and now our community is paying the price. Our ancestors were unfaithful, and now our generation is suffering because of it.
There was even a common proverb or saying among people at that time – Ezekiel and Jeremiah both mention it. “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” The parents did something wrong, and now the children suffer for it. And this is, after all, a common experience. How often children, through no fault of their own, grow up in families where there is alcoholism and abuse, and the consequences of that harm play out throughout their lives and their families’ lives too.
Or on the larger level, Isabel Wilkerson has recently compared the racial situation in our country to people who live in an old house they inherited with “stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.” And so, we may say, we never owned slaves or enforced segregation or wanted any of this legacy of discrimination – that was all done by people a very long time ago. And yet the legacy of generations and centuries past shapes the world we live in today, for good and for bad, and the world we live in is ours to deal with now. That may be unfair, but that’s the way it is.
Such was the wisdom of the people who surrounded Ezekiel in exile in Babyon: The parents have eaten sour grapes, yet it’s their children’s teeth that are set on edge. The ways of the Lord may be unfair, but that’s the way it is.
And then the word of the Lord came to Ezekiel in Babylon and said: I hate that saying, The parents have eaten sour grapes, yet it’s their children’s teeth that are set on edge. I wish you all would stop saying that! Do you think I am so petty that I would punish children for the sins of their parents? No, I tell you, each one of you is responsible for your own actions in this circumstance. If you fall short, you will bear the consequences, that’s true. But I want you to live – and that’s a choice that each one of you is still free to make.
In the shattering experience of the exile, Ezekiel comes to understand that God does not punish, and that especially God does not punish some for the sins of others. God does allow us to suffer the consequences of our actions – and sometimes our actions do cause harm to others, that is true. But in every case, no matter how much harm has come to us because of the actions of others, we still have agency. We are not doomed because others before us have chosen poorly. We are not helpless victims of the march of empires. In every situation in which we find ourselves – even here, with no temple, no community, without so many things we used to think we couldn’t live without – even here God wants us to live, and God is ready to help us do it.
Fast forward 600 years and change. The temple has been rebuilt, more or less. A new time of turmoil and suffering has fallen on the people of the land, through the heavy hand of the Roman Empire. A prophet from Nazareth in Galilee, Jesus the carpenter, has arrived in Jerusalem and caused an uproar in the temple. Like Jeremiah of old, this Jesus doesn’t seem impressed with pomp and circumstance and religious pretensions that cover up injustice and unfaithfulness. And as he teaches in the temple, the successors of Ezekiel, the people who run the new temple, come to him, and they have questions. By what authority do you dare to come into this holy place and do these things?
This is a moment that Jesus must have expected – if you cause a riot in the Temple, flipping over tables, denouncing the people who run it as thieves and charlatans, it’s no surprise when the police show up. And they ask Jesus: By what authority do you do these things? Just who do you think you are? And Jesus has a well thought-out reply. I’ll tell you, Jesus says to the temple police, in full view of the assembled crowds, I’ll tell you where I get the authority to do these things, but first you tell me – Where did John the Baptist get his authority?
The temple leaders recognize they cannot answer this question. They can’t and won’t say that John the Baptist was sent by God, because they didn’t accept or support him. And if they say that John the Baptist was a grasshopper-eating kook who lost his head because he didn’t have the sense to keep his mouth shut – which is of course what they actually think – then the people will agree with Jesus that they are fakes and thugs and they’ll have a real riot on their hands. So they say, We do not know – and so Jesus is now free to say, Well, then I don’t know that I can tell you where I get the right to do these things either.
And I find it quite striking that it was Ezekiel, robbed of his place in the temple, separated from his community and the worship that had been so central to him, who came to a deeper understanding of who God is in the midst of his exile, and how much freedom to choose life God was still giving God’s people. And it is the leaders of the restored temple, so careful about maintaining their place of power and prestige, so anxious to preserve the peace and not lose their status, who are unable to speak freely, and who are unable to see what God is doing right before their eyes.
Martin Luther liked to say that God is most clearly found not in the attributes people usually associate with divinity – in power and glory and majesty and prestige and opulence. No, the God revealed in Jesus is best seen in weakness, vulnerability, the servant kneeling to wash feet, the carpenter nailed to a cross forgiving those who crucified him. And so we, today, can mourn the losses that we have endured in these days, and we can fear the losses that may yet be to come. We can complain that we do not deserve these things, that God’s ways are not fair. We can be angry that the parents have eaten sour grapes and now it’s the children whose teeth are set on edge. Or we can recognize that even in the midst of suffering and loss God is still at work bringing life out of death, and that we are always free to choose the life that God is trying to give us.
In today’s second reading Paul quotes perhaps the oldest Christian hymn we have – Jesus, being in the form of God, emptied himself and took the form of a slave, accepting even death – death on a cross! It was not contrary to the divinity of Jesus to empty himself, to serve others rather than himself, even to the point of death. It is in the very nature of God to empty oneself in love and service for others. That’s what Jesus came to show us. That’s what Ezekiel did not discover until he had lost everything. In that second reading Paul urges the first-century church at Philippi to conform itself to Jesus its Lord, to empty itself in service and love for one another. May the church of Jesus Christ in the twenty-first century, in the losses and struggles that we are now enduring, do the same.