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Pentecost 18
4/10/2020

Ezekiel 34:1-4, 9-23, 29-31
Psalm 80
Matthew 21:33-46

Sermon preached by Andrew Gador-Whyte

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Ezekiel’s image of the shepherds living at the expense of their sheep reminds us painfully of what perennially seems to characterise the exercise of authority in the world.

It’s not difficult to find instances of these kinds of shepherds in our times, intent on maintaining their own power and security. Shepherds who lie and shamelessly divide their nations with impunity. Shepherds who systematically imprison and persecute a religious minority.

We find ourselves implicated in a divided world of frustrated hope, in the pursuit of the good through the silencing of my neighbour, in the serving of the many by the exclusion of the victim.

It is under such violence, idolatry, pride and vanity that our whole humanity has been labouring. God has given his chosen people to be the light of this dark world – light in the darkness of a humanity characterised by such shepherds.

God promises that human authority will be transformed to serve the healing of the nations. And so God charges the shepherds of his chosen people with the task of allowing God to give through them.

The God who ordinarily chooses to work through human relationships has promised that the nations will find their healing through the life of this people. Through the holiness of the children of Jacob, the nations will come to be purified from the worship of our own security to worship the living God.

And so, Ezekiel reserves his sharpest words of judgement for the leaders of his own people. Those who lead the worship of the people have been given their authority as a source of reconciliation. But their exercise of authority too has become a defence of their own needs against their neighbours, the making of victims, the denial of their own dependence.

In the Gospel reading today, Jesus has entered the temple to cleanse and to judge. He comes not to destroy or to displace the worship of his people. He comes rather to cleanse that worship of the violence under which it labours. And he comes to his people to reveal himself as the true shepherd of the sheep.

In the parable of the vineyard, it is clear that Jesus is denouncing the violence in the tenants’ living to meet their own needs and security over and against others. But there is also a sacrificial image here. For the nations, sacrifice has been a manipulation of the gods to their own ends. But for Israel, sacrifice is the free lifting up of their life in praise.

In sending one lot of slaves after another, and finally his son, the landowner seeks that kind of sacrifice of the tenants – a rendering to God of the whole of life as gift; a reorienting of the various purposes of life towards reconciliation; a new vision of my relationship to my neighbour as one of pure gift and interdependence.

What are we to make of what Jesus says, ‘the kingdom will be taken away from you and given to a nation bearing its fruits’? What must be ruled out here is any sense that the Jewish people are being replaced by others. The inclusion of the Gentiles in Christ is never to be understood as a supplanting of the Jews as God’s people.

Jesus has come to reconcile all humanity by fulfilling and recapitulating the promise to the tribes of Judah. Jesus’ coming in our humanity confronts the fear and despair of the nations with a word of mutual belonging and abundant life. And his coming confronts all of us who would make the purity or success of our lives the prerequisite for solidarity.

Jesus’ words of judgement here pick up the words of the prophet Daniel. In the Book of Daniel, the temple has been defiled by a pagan invader. Daniel promises the return of the Ancient One to take up his throne, inaugurating a kingdom which all nations will participate and where God’s people will in some way rule and judge. He writes:

The kingship and dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the holy ones of the Most High; their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom and all dominions shall serve and obey them    (Dan 7:27)

When Jesus speaks of giving the kingdom to a nation bearing its fruits,       he is speaking of restoring the life of the nation of Israel to itself, over and against the desolating sacrilege set up in the holy place. And he is speaking too of all the nations who will be incorporated into the rule of the Lamb who was slain, who have become sharers in the promise.

Jesus enters the temple as its unrecognised Lord, cleanses the temple and denounces the unfaithfulness of the leaders of the people. His parable pierces our hearts as those complicit in the rejection of Christ, in our refusal to offer the whole of our life together as gift.

Against the blindness of those enmeshed in the world’s violence, the identity of Jesus is disclosed. As Ezekiel writes:

I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, so that they may not be food for them…    (Ez 34:10)

I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd.    (Ez 34:23)

Jesus is revealed as the true shepherd of the sheep, who comes not to be served but to serve. Jesus comes as a slave, as the one cast aside, whom in the blindness of our fear, rivalry and pride we did not recognise as the true object of our obedience and the true source of our reconciliation.

The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. The unifying principle of the people’s worship, the centre binding together all of creation – and its culmination in Israel’s praise – that centre is revealed in the outcast, in the slain victim, in the shameful death of the cross.

The one who was crushed even under observance of the Law is revealed as the one coming to restore all things by his broken body. The one who was cut off, sealed behind the stone, is revealed as the one coming in confrontation of all that divides the world from love. He is the one breaking open the tombs. He is the victim rising to meet his killers with the judgement of love, with true reconciliation.

And so, perhaps, opening ourselves to God’s grace, giving ourselves up to be shepherded by this shepherd, is to open ourselves to be confronted by this stone; to allow this rejected stone to be an obstacle to us; to allow ourselves to fall upon it.

We learn to deny our own will, or rather to allow our will to be judged and perfected by Jesus Christ. We learn the humility and contrition that trembles at the word of reconciliation and renewed holiness.

Through a life of obedience in prayer; through growing into the self-denial we call hospitality; through receiving the sacramental life of the church as for our neighbour’s healing; we come to see ourselves in greater clarity.

We come to know ourselves even as those crushed by this stone – or to put it another way, as those who have been under the deep waters of baptism where one has gone before us.

We learn to pay attention to Jesus Christ, who will often meet us as a stumbling block to our insularity, our fear or our complacency. We find our lives are marked by stumbling over this cornerstone. We learn to fall over this stone; to fall, not to be destroyed, but to fall as every knee in heaven and on earth and under the earth will fall; falling from blindness to sight, from rejection of the victim to acknowledgement of the crucified slave as the true form of authority and power.

Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem and to the temple begin his movement towards the cross, where his body and the temple curtain will be torn open and the darkness of our humanity disclosed; where the rejected one, hanging on the tree, will be revealed as the Holy of Holies; where the light will stream from the Holy Place to reveal to Israel and all nations their healing:

Our healing found in the one we have pierced; Our common belonging found in the broken body.

At this table, in this covenant of peace,

They shall know that I, the Lord their God, am with them;
and that they, the house of Israel, are my people, says the Lord God.
You are my sheep, the sheep of my pasture and I am your God, says the Lord God.       (Ez 34: 30-31)

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Pentecost 17
27/9/2020

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 130
Matthew 21:23-32

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In a sentence
While we associate resurrection with ‘life after death’, its purpose in biblical narrative is the possibility of new life before death

Our reading from Ezekiel today is perhaps the best-known passage from the book. It is obviously a ‘resurrection’ text – which ought immediately to raise an alarm, for when the meaning of something in the Bible is ‘obvious’ it is highly likely that we are missing something.  So let’s look to the passage to see what might be less than obvious.

Ezekiel’s vision unfolds in a couple of steps. First, he sees the valley of bones, he addresses those bones as commanded, he hears the rattle of bones upon bones, and he sees them come together and life breathed into them.

At this stage we have what we might call a ‘nature’ miracle. Something about the usual order of things has been denied: order has been dragged from disorder, life returned to what was dead. The vision then – and it is only a vision – suggests that God is able to do this, to raise the dead to life.

It is helpful to note this ‘nature miracle’ dimension of the vision because it is typically claimed that God can do miraculous things like this. More than that, it is claimed God can disrupt the natural order in this way because God is creator of that order. Control over the world in this way springs from the fact that God created the world in the first place. These are less ‘interventions’, then, than they are re-creations, re-orderings of the chaotic world.

This is to say that creation occurs as much within time as it is the beginning or possibility of time. It is not ‘easier’ to raise the dead than it is to get the whole show on the road in the first place. The beginning of time, and a truly new beginning within time, are the same kind of thing. The distinction between creation and resurrection, then – as manifestations of sheer power – is not a distinction in God. Most succinctly, resurrection is creation.

Ezekiel’s vision moves past sheer creative power, however. To this point, the vision suggests that God can raise ‘the dead’, although we don’t know who the dead are. As is usual in relation to all the wacky things Ezekiel is commanded to do in his ministry, the meaning of his vision is now explained: the bones are not merely the remnants of the dead in general but are specifically Israel’s bones: the bones of ‘the whole house of Israel.’

This unsettles two things which might seem to be ‘obvious’ in the whole vision.

The first unsettling is that this apparent violation of natural law is also a violation of moral or divine law. Almost the whole of Ezekiel’s preaching to this point has had to do with the failure of Israel, and the justice of God’s condemnation and rejection of them. The power exercised here, then, is not merely a power to undo nature’s course by bringing life to the dead. It is the power to undo the effects of divine judgement itself. Not only natural law but God’s law is violated in this resurrection, which is much more interesting than the occasional miraculous conjuring trick.

The power of creation or re‑creative resurrection, then, is not the power to ‘make stuff’ or to re-make it. It is the power to forgive, to reconcile, to gather unto God even what – on account of its own failures – God has rejected. We might say it succinctly: with this God, to create is to reconcile and to reconcile is to create.

The second unsettling of the obvious to note here is that these are the bones of ‘the whole house of Israel’. What is strange here is that the house of Israel is not dead yet. Indeed, many have died – during the Babylonian conquest and before that – but Ezekiel’s ministry is not to those dead alone but – if at all – also to the living.

This is to say, then, that Ezekiel’s vision has to do with the resurrection of the living. Those who are still breathing are as if dead when they hear Ezekiel’s preaching. Death stands now not as the end of life but as a way of life. It is not a good way of life – and it is a way which God promises in these visions to ‘create us away from’ – but those who have died and those who still breathe stand before God as equally in need of God’s own life-giving Spirit. Or, to put it differently, there is before God no real distinction between the living and the dead, and their need. We tell ourselves that being alive is better than the alternative but this is not a joke God ‘gets’.

That joke hides from us something implicit in most of our resurrection-talk, and misleading: that the dead are lying around waiting to be raised to life, that they know they are dead. In fact, they are not ‘waiting’ for anything, for they are dead and the dead don’t do anything – wait or otherwise.

We might think that this is one point at which the living and the dead differ – that the living are hoping for something, waiting for something, working on something. Yet if, in Ezekiel’s terms, the living also are in need of resurrection, perhaps we might put less store in what we hope and wait and work for. It is not that these things do not matter; they will be the form, the shape, of our salvation. But the content or the substance of salvation – what it is to be free from fear and free for each other – is, as St Paul puts it,

‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the human heart conceived…                      (1 Corinthians 2.9, from Isaiah 64.4)

This is to say that what resurrection to life might be – even here and now – is not the answer to any question we might have. It is not the political utopia we dream of, not the return to normal post-virus we long for, not a pie-in-the-sky promise to distract us from our fear of dying.

What is promised here is something which will make the lives we live – as good and worthwhile as some of them might appear to be – seem like death. Our struggles for the good and the right, the clamour of our politics, the urgency of our prayers will seem like the mere rattle of bones on bones which cannot yet imagine that they are destined to breathe and laugh and dance.

The word to Israel then is God’s word to us:

O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord…
I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.
I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin,
and put breath in you, and you shall live;
and you shall know that I am the LORD.

…And the breath came into them,
and they lived,
and stood on their feet,
a vast multitude.                                  (Ezekiel 37.5,6,10)

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Pentecost 16
20/9/2020

Ezekiel 33:10-17
Psalm 145
Matthew 20:1-16

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In a sentence
Most of our life is spent in ‘the air’, but we can be confident that God’s hand is always there to catch us

If you have read Ezekiel up to the point of our text for today you could not help but be struck by the almost relentlessly critical and threatening nature of his preaching.

After the opening vision of the ‘appearance of the likeness of the glory of God’, the text has been dark and anguished. The ‘glory of the Lord’ takes up a sword, first for Judah and then for the nations.

With Chapter 33 there comes a distinct shift in Ezekiel’s message. Jerusalem has fallen and, though it has been briefly touched upon in the midst of his earlier, darker sermons, the possibility of forgiveness and a new relationship between God and Israel comes to the fore.

And yet, there is a sense in which this last part of the book is the true beginning of Ezekiel’s preaching. Clearly this is not the case chronologically, beginning as he does by interpreting so darkly the approaching loss of Jerusalem. But this shift in his preaching is the beginning in terms of the motivation or the ‘engine’ of his preaching.

The wrath of God – a notion some of us find trouble even entertaining today – does not merely destroy, does not obliterate. The wrath of this God is expressed in the context of the covenant: from the covenant to the covenant.

The wrath of God is, then, oddly and unexpectedly creative. Creative intent is present in all that God does. It is God’s intent in the face of the chaos of the primal waters over which God moves to bring the order of the first creation; it is God’s intent in the face of the deterioration of life in Israel and the storm clouds of Babylon’s approach. God is creative as much as judge as God is creative as originator and restorer.

To offer an image which might make this easier to understand, we could say that if God casts the people away – and surely God can do this – it is always, as it were, in an upward direction, such that the people must eventually fall again, back to God.

Such a ‘flight’ of the people of God is a useful metaphor for the relationship between God and the people in Ezekiel’s preaching. Falling objects are unable to do anything to change their trajectory. Just think of those ‘funny home videos’ in which, once the hapless lad has left the mat of the trampoline in a certain direction, there is nothing he can do to stop himself sailing over the fence into the neighbours’, or ending up hanging upside down from a tree. Falling is perhaps the quintessential experience of helplessness and so also the quintessential experience of chaos and nothingness.

What Ezekiel has been describing to this point has been Israel ‘in the air’. And so there is, in fact, nothing to be done. Babylon is coming, the covenant has been broken, and Israel is in freefall.

As we have seen, Ezekiel takes this experience and uses it to speak of God’s freedom to be for or against the people. Ezekiel interprets the chaos of history – our worst fears for ourselves and the worst we can do to each other – as a sign of our distance from God. For reasons we’re heard before God is even understood to be the cause of this suffering, in a carefully qualified sense of ‘cause’.

But the message of hope to which the book of Ezekiel now comes is that, if God has tossed the people into the air, they are not tossed to the wind. God braces to catch them again – to catch us. This is the gospel at the heart of Ezekiel’s preaching, that the beginning and the end of all things are in God’s hand and that, if we find ourselves falling, it is back into the hands of God.

To find ourselves falling is a totally disorienting experience. It is indeed an experience of utter helplessness, and we spend much of our time and energy trying not to be helpless. And so falling is what it is like to hear that we carry a terminal illness, or to lose a job, or for a marriage to fail, or for a child to die. In such moments there nothing to hold on to, nothing with which to brace ourselves, which is not also falling with us.

There is something of this in what we are experiencing at the moment. We are unable to fast-forward the clock so that the virus is behind us, unable to re-establish the patterns that make us feel safe, and exposed also to deep problems in the world and in ways of doing things we thought – not that long ago – weren’t too bad. We simply have to endure the fall.

But were we to dig deeper, we might come to suspect that life as a whole – even at its best – is a kind of freefall, even if we spend most of it trying to find something to grab onto.

If that were the case – if it were that, in sickness and in health, whether poor or rich, whether young or old, we were always ‘falling’ – then in the end there would be not much difference between being held in God’s hand and still being in the air yet destined again to land there again, and we would not worry too much about where we are.

Rather, we might simply allow that most of life is spent up in the air, and get on with the business of learning to fly.

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Pentecost 15
13/9/2020

Romans 14:1-12
Psalm 114
Matthew 18:21-35

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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God, may my words be loving and true; and may those who listen discern what is not. Amen.

‘The Sycamore Tree’ is a social enterprise cafe run by the Uniting Church in Heidelberg. While I was helping manage it, I placed on the street front a chalkboard sign reading, “Currently Serving Feminist Coffee.” The coffee in question was a blend called Todas las Damas , Spanish for ‘all the ladies.’ It was a blend of coffee from two different locations, which highlight the role of women in coffee cultivation:

One of these locations was the Cauca region of Colombia. Coffee cultivated as part of the Columbian Women’s Coffee Project. Columbia is a country which for decades has been subject to instability: the site of internal political struggles and violence, as well as a lucrative illicit drug trade. The intertwining of violence, politics, and economy has shaped much of the country’s recent history. In the midst of this instability women have taken on a disproportionate role in agricultural work and coffee cultivation; working to support their families after their husbands, fathers, and brothers have fallen victim to the country’s internal violence. The Columbian Women’s Coffee project began in order to establish a network of female coffee growers. The project helps to upskill growers, facilitates the sharing of expertise, and offers micro-financing; and the project works to establish a fair and reliable route to export markets like Australia.

Quite apart from my personal obsession with coffee, the story of the Colombian Women’s Coffee Project is quite instructive. Because it serves to highlight that for many parts of the world — and for large swathes of human history — questions of economics: of debt and forgiveness, cannot be treated simply as abstract metaphors which might serve to teach us simple moral lessons. Rather, issues of economics are connected to concrete concerns for security, and the livelihood of families. The concrete realities of debt and forgiveness are often set within broader contexts of violence and insecurity.

This is helpful to bear in mind when we read in our Gospel reading a parable about a king forgiving the debts of a servant. We are not dealing here with a simple moral lesson, parables never offer us that.

The story of the parable itself is fairly straightforward. A servant owes his king 10,000 talents (a large unit of currency), but the king forgives this debt. We then learn that the servant himself is owed 100 denarii (a much smaller unit of currency), which he refuses to in turn forgive. When this is reported to the king the servant is thrown into prison and tortured.

Commentators are somewhat divided over whether the unrealistic sum of 10,000 talents should be rendered with the sense of a gazillion dollars, or a bajillion. Estimates suggest that 10,000 denarii was equivalent to the entire tax revenue of a country, or administrative region within the Roman Empire. It seems unrealistic that a single servant would have accrued this much debt personally. While it’s possible that the unrealistic nature of the debt is part of the point: look how ridiculous and extravagant God’s forgiveness is! (Which is undoubtedly true.) Other commentators suggest the possibility that the servant had a responsibility for overseeing the tax collection for the king’s territory. The large sum of the debt therefore represents the large responsibility of the servant.

Seen in this light the forgiveness of the servant’s debt is not simply about mending a relationship between the king and the servant, or about the servant being given a fresh chance to live up to his duty. Rather, if we explore the text on the basis that the servant was responsible for collecting taxes, then the forgiveness of the king has much deeper implications.

The original threat from the king to sell the servant, and his wife, and his children, and all his possessions, does not serve to merely emphasise the impossibility of the debt — highlighting how vast the sum of debt is, and how ridiculous it is to suggest that the sale of a few slaves, and a few belongings could repay it. Instead the king’s threat reflects the cycle of humiliation and violent consequences inherent in ancient (and often not so ancient) systems of political order. To be close to power often means being close to the significant violence used to maintain that power.

In contrast to this reality, the forgiveness of the tax collector’s debt does not simply represent a kind gesture, which in any case makes little appreciable difference: whether the king liked it or not such a large outstanding amount was not going to be forthcoming from anyone. The forgiveness of the king disrupts the use of violence as a tool of retribution, revenge, and control. Forgiveness in this parable, in other words, is not simply about letting things go and moving on, returning to business as usual; forgiveness in this parable serves as a starting point for change. Forgiveness has a negative dimension, in the sense that the punishment of the servant is withheld; and at the same time forgiveness comes with a positive and proactive dimension: the kingdom shifts from being governed by violence to being governed by mercy.

When three biblical scholars, Robert Heimburger, Christopher Hays, and Guillermo Mejia-Castillo, conducted a series of bible studies using this text with survivors of armed conflict in Colombia, it was precisely these themes which came to the fore. The connections between debt and violence in the original historical context seem more readily apparent to people who have had to flee their homes due to threats from illegal loan sharks. In more local experiences, the connection between debt and insecurity are much more immediate when you have found yourself at the end of a pay week with no money left to pay bills, buy groceries, or cover rent.

The insights of the Colombian readers of this text point to the need for forgiveness as a key part of restoring communities. Forgiving the perpetrators of violence after conflict is a necessary part of rebuilding the society that violence ripped apart. Forgiveness needs to move beyond the past, and think creatively about projects which rebuild and offer opportunities for a common future. While the NRSV translation from which we heard earlier renders Peter’s initial question about forgiveness — which prompts this parable — in terms of “another member of the church,” more literally the text says, “a brother” (and we might suggest “sister” as well). If forgiveness is part of moving towards mercy, then we should side with Colombian readers who suggest that references to brothers and sisters must also mean those who are not yet part of our community, those who we are beginning to learn to live with.

If we take this parable seriously we might be led to the realisation that forgiveness is not simply about being nice to another person. But forgiveness reflects a deeper concern for transforming the world to be more merciful and more just.

The lesson the tax collecting servant fails to learn is not just that he should be nice to others, because the king has been nice to him. The servant failed to learn that the forgiveness he had been shown began to break apart the cycle of violence which he himself participated in. Forgiveness began to tear apart the connections between politics and violence, and between financial hardship and insecurity. Forgiveness is the ripple which builds to the overflowing river of God’s justice.

Forgiveness does not simply say that, “it’s okay, everything will be alright.” Forgiveness begins the very process of making things right. Forgiveness is both our individual duty, and our collective call. “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice,” said the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” This is what forgiveness leads us to.

When Peter asks, “Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive?”

Perhaps we are wise to avoid the disagreement over whether Jesus’ response means 7 times 7, or 77 times.

Instead we can hear in Jesus’ answer: you forgive until the world is changed.
You forgive until it flows out to your sister and brother from deep within your heart.
You forgive until there is peace on the earth, and violence ceases.
You forgive until it melts all anger, and heals all wounds.
You forgive until all are saved from trial, and rescued from evil.
You forgive until justice and mercy come.

Hear these words of Christ,
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”

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Pentecost 14
6/9/2020

Ezekiel 16:53-63
Psalm 119:33-40
Matthew 18:15-20

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In a sentence
God’s salvation comes in response to our particular type
of brokenness, and takes the shape of that brokenness

After five months of varying degrees of lockdown we are very much looking forward to putting Covid-19 behind us, however far away that might yet be.

What will it feel like to move out from under the shadow of the virus? For some of course, this will not be possible – the impact has been felt in the death of a loved one or some other devastating effect which will continue. Yet even for these, with most others, relief will surely be at the centre of emotion as things normalise, even if to an as yet unclear ‘new normal’.

Thinking about what a relaxing of the strictures will be like and what the new normal might be is, at this stage, not much more than speculation. But speculating does indicate at least the character of what we hope for: we hope for relief, in the form of freedom to move again, to be together, to work and to earn.

Ezekiel speaks into a context like ours, in that it is a time of loss, of deprivation, of suffering. Although most of the book has to do with condemnation of Israel (or other nations), hope for Israel – a renewed relationship with God in the form of a return to land and temple and kingship – this is also central to his preaching.

Yet this promise has a negative association which jars with our usual talk about forgiveness and grace. We heard this for the first time in the reading for today’s service, which comes at the end of a long diatribe against Israel, characterising the people as a wilfully and wantonly unfaithful wife to God:

^16.59 …thus says the Lord God: I will deal with you as you have done, you who have despised the oath, breaking the covenant; ⁶⁰yet I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish with you an everlasting covenant. ⁶¹Then you will remember your ways… ⁶²I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall know that I am the Lord, ⁶³in order that you may remember and be confounded, and never open your mouth again because of your shame, when I forgive you all that you have done, says the Lord God.

‘…I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall know that I am the Lord, in order that you may remember and be confounded, and never open your mouth again because of your shame…’

This is first of several times Ezekiel links God’s forgiveness to Israel remembering its shame (see also 36.26-32; 43.10f; 44.9-14. 39.26 has ‘forget their shame’ in NRSV, although an alternative reading is ‘bear their shame’, and is favoured by many commentators on account of the other ‘shame’ texts). If we were to ask Ezekiel what the Israel had to look forward to as it moved out of its own particular ‘lockdown’, he could well answer, ‘Shame’.

How is this good news?

Shame is a powerful emotion, and is often confused with its lesser cousin, embarrassment, which also features implicitly in our reading.

Both shame and embarrassment have to do with a disruption of relationships though a violation of the agreed rules of social engagement, but at different levels. Were you to wake up to discover that your nightmare about being naked in a room full of dressed people was not a dream but actuality, you would be embarrassed. Were you found naked in bed with someone you shouldn’t be with, you would – if you were paying attention – be ashamed.

Embarrassment arises from the uncovering of something which we know or suspect might be there but agree should remain covered. Shame is about the uncovering of something which should have not been there in the first place. And so, while embarrassment wants only to be covered up, shame wants to hide. Embarrassment might elicit sympathy but shame demands explanation. We are victims in embarrassment but held responsible in shame.

It is this last observation which locates the embarrassment implicit in our present reading. If it is Israel who will be ashamed, it is God who has been embarrassed. Something has been uncovered – in fact, in the unfaithful spouse metaphor, Israel has uncovered herself – and in this way exposed God who is so closely joined to Israel. (See Leviticus 18.6-8 for an account of the link between the ‘nakedness’ of a husband and wife in Hebrew thinking.) This ‘exposure’ of God is linked to our thinking last week about God’s action ‘for the sake of my name’.

These are some of the dimensions of the shame which features in Ezekiel’s account not merely of the punishment of Israel but, more strikingly, in his account of Israel’s salvation. Shame, by itself, reflects a deep sense of guilt. And yet, while there is much guilt being identified by God in these texts, it is not guilt unto damnation. This ‘shaming’ is not like our current sharpening of political correctness into ‘cancel culture’. There is grievous fault here but it is not named in order to crush.

The guilt and the shame to which it gives rise are part of the relief God holds out to Israel. This is to say that the relief offered here – the restoration of the people in their standing before God – is no mere relaxation of the strictures of exile, no simple putting behind us of what has been wrong, no easy ‘forgive-and-forget’. We might wish that it were otherwise – that the experience of guilt or weakness could be left behind – but this is to deny something about ourselves that God will not.

God loves us as we are – whether that be guilty or oppressed, arrogant or timid, proud or just afraid. Our stories – our histories – make us what we are and it with these stories that we are loved. And so God’s healing, and the knowledge which comes with it – ‘and you shall know that I am the Lord’ – comes with the memory of why healing was required, of what it is God calls us out of.

None of this is to say that the way to God is only through shame or the admission of weakness. The church has sometimes given this impression, whenever it begins with the need of humankind, however great or small, to which God is supposed to be an answer.

Ezekiel’s point is surely the opposite, that God moves first and that it is only in then looking back that we begin to re-evaluate who we are and what we are called to be.

This means that when God ‘gets’ us it will be both exactly the relief we desire, and yet also not. Israel hears that it will be restored, but also that this restoration springs entirely from God’s relentless grace and not from anything Israel has done to earn it. In the same way, the church – that peculiar way of being human which springs from the experience of the death and resurrection of Jesus – marks divine forgiveness with bread and wine as signs of the rejection of God‑in‑Jesus. Blood and flesh are signs in our midst in the same way as Israel’s shame is in Ezekiel: reminders of what has been overcome in order that we might again be this God’s people, and this God our God. Israel’s shame is to the renewal of the covenant as the gospel’s cross is to the resurrection.

To be true to who God is, we must remember the transition from what we were to what God has now made of us and calls us yet to become. In forgiveness, we might say, God forgets but we must not, for it is in our shift from less to more, from enslaved to liberated, from death to life, that we know who God is, and know God’s fundamental character as being for us.

In the strangest of twists, then, the people of God are those who could be said to be – in Ezekiel’s terms – ‘hoping for shame’.

This is not because shame or arrogance or pride or weakness or death defines who we are but precisely because, with the God who can overcome all such things, they do not.

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Pentecost 13
30/8/2020

Ezekiel 36:16-32a
Psalm 8
Matthew 16:21-26

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‘Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me’.

In this way we exhort our children not to take too seriously the mean things which might be uttered in the playground. What then are we to do with a God who seems to take too seriously the unkind things said about God?

^36.20…when [Israel] came to the nations…they profaned my holy name, in that it was said of them, ‘These are the people of the Lord, and yet they had to go out of his land.’ ²¹But I had concern for my holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the nations to which they came.

²²Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name…

The point is driven home a couple of times in our present text, and we’ve also heard it before (Ezekiel 20).

To act for the ‘sake’ of something is generally to act for its benefit, to bring it direct or implied honour. Acting for ‘sake’, then, is also cast as a kind of sacrifice – something we didn’t have to do but did ‘for the sake’ of (whatever).

In Ezekiel, however, God’s action is explicitly – and with emphasis – for God’s own sake or, more specifically, for the sake of God’s ‘name’. In view of what we normally do in acting for the sake of something, this makes God’s motivation here seem self-involved, self-serving and so almost petty.

At the same time, the effect of this apparent self-interest is the restoration (or at least promised restoration) of Israel. This, surely, is not petty or self-interested.

From this, at least two possibilities emerge to account for what God says and does here. One is that the restoration of God’s people springs from God’s ‘vanity’. On this reading, God thinks, ‘They are saying nasty things about me’, and acts to improve God’s own reputation. If perhaps it seems not a little impious, this nevertheless works reasonably well as an explanation of why God moves from punishment and rejection to forgiveness and reconciliation.

The other possible motivation for God here, and one equally impious in a different kind of way, is that the being of God’s people is intimately and ineluctably, inextricably, linked to the very being of God. God’s concern with reputation is indeed petty for a god, unless God is who God says God is.

Important here is that God’s name is not like our names. ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me’ doesn’t apply to God. The ‘name’ of God is like the ‘appearance of the likeness of the glory of God’ we considered back in Ezekiel’s extraordinary opening vision (1.28). The name of God is as close as we can get to God. It is a placeholder we use to mark where God would be if God is anywhere, a sign to wave if there were anything which could catch God’s attention.

Our schoolyard chant distinguishes between us and our name – it is our bones which are really us, while a name is a mere label. But, for God, God’s name is God’s bones. The broken bones of God – the broken bones of God’s body, Israel – amount to a kind of misnaming of God, a ‘calling God names’.

Here we might also note that it is nothing Israel does in exile which causes the dishonouring of God. It is rather God’s own action in bringing them into exile (36.20).

We arrive, then, at a deep mystery: The reduction of Israel is a reduction of God, by God’s own hand. It is by both God and Israel that God is brought into disrepute among the nations. A restoration of God’s reputation, then, requires a restoration of Israel, because this God survives the death of God’s people and feels their loss.

This is not the impiety of suggesting God is vain but the impiety of tying God so closely to a particular historical people.

Ezekiel is not the first in the Scriptures to hold this impiety, and not the last. The last is the gospel of Jesus, in which a particular human being is condemned, and with him is also condemned before all the God whose kingdom he proclaimed and embodied. To utter another impiety – Jesus becomes, on Ezekiel’s terms – something of a profaning of the name of the God he proclaimed: ‘…let him come down from the cross now’, cry those who witness the crucifixion,

‘and we will believe in him. He trusts in [‘]God[‘]; let [‘]God[‘] deliver him now, if he wants to…’ (Matthew 27.42f)

But to pick up where Ezekiel goes with this: if God is who Jesus said God is, and if Jesus had the relationship to God his words and actions suggested, the resurrection is not an impossible ‘miracle’ but a matter of divine ‘necessity’, if God’s name is not to continue to be mocked. The mockery of Jesus on the cross is the mockery of the God he proclaimed. The resurrection of Jesus is, then, ‘for the sake of God’s name’.

The upshot of all this is that whether condemned as Israel was for getting God wrong, or condemned as Jesus was for getting God right, hope lies not in us but in the God who’s very being is tied to ours.

To have been chosen by God is to have had our lives tied to God’s, such that we are now and forever more, ‘for God’s sake’. Wherever we find ourselves, the question of who we are and what we can look forward to as our hope is always answered with the name of God.

This is surely good news for anyone who suspects that their own name will not be enough to carry them over, and a challenge to any who imagine their name will suffice.

Let us then rejoice, or repent, as God’s name and promise gives cause.

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Pentecost 12
23/8/2020

Ezekiel 18:1-4, 30-32
2 Corinthians 3:1-6
Matthew 16:13-20

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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God, may my words be loving and true; and may those who listen discern what is not. Amen.

A friend of mine recently commented that, in the present circumstances, he was feeling a palpable sense of living through history. Of course we are always living through history in varying ways: our personal histories, family and local histories, and even taking our part in world history. In part accelerated by increased connectivity between all parts of the world, we are constantly aware that there is always something of significance going on somewhere at any given moment. We seem far removed from the BBC news broadcast in 1930 which was forced to end 10 minutes early because there was nothing newsworthy left to report.

This palpable sense of living through history, however, points to the present context of a once in a century pandemic. It feels like we are not simply passing idly through time, but are experiencing the sort of thing that will be recorded in history books, and studied by future generations. The kind of event which in the past has prompted the question, “where were you when …?” The key difference being we will all know the almost universal answer: at home.

This sense that the road of history has come up to meet us, and here we are compelled to journey through it, seems akin to the feeling the prophet Ezekiel is seeking to evoke in our reading today from chapter 18.

Throughout the prophetic utterances of Ezekiel we hear, often with stark imagery and detail, about the judgement due to the people of Israel, and the nations around. Spoken into the context of exile, when God’s people were taken from their land and subjugated, Ezekiel’s prophecies interpret this experience of suffering and dispossession as the result of divine judgement. This judgement is due because of the idolatry and sinfulness of the Israelites: their unfaithfulness to God’s holiness and God’s commands.

As we read through Ezekiel, any notion that the Israelites can be a people apart from God is definitively rejected. They cannot make of themselves what they like. The Israelites cannot fashion their devotion, their common life, or their identity in whatever manner they see fit. The call of God comes relentlessly through Ezekiel: the Israelites are God’s people because they belong to God . They are God’s people because they were called out of Egypt, because they were formed into a people by the law, because they were known by God. There can be no self-reliance, no sense of a people persisting through history apart from the God who has formed them, and sustains them. Ezekiel makes clear the condemnation for Israel’s departure from God, and the judgement which follows from their infidelity.

In one sense, Ezekiel 18 might be construed as a sort of relief from the unceasing judgement of previous chapters. In this text the focus shifts from the broad sweep of geo-political change: the Babylonians rising as an agent of divine retribution against Israel; the history of God’s people narrated against the drama of God’s long-standing faithfulness to unfaithful Israel. In chapter 18 the story becomes, in an odd way, intimate. The striking images of winged beasts, and executioners, and desolate temples, give way to stories of parent and child.

“Know that all lives are mine,” says the Lord, “the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine …”

Against all that has been said about the grand sweep of history here Ezekiel lays out that while the whole world is held in God’s hand, so too is every life. The life of the parent, as well as the life of the child. The God who is Lord over the rise and fall of nations is portrayed here as also incredibly close.

It is tempting to hear in these words a comfort against the backdrop of crisis and exile. God holds each of us, owns each of us, keeps us: every one. Perhaps, after all, everything will be okay.

Yet, in the midst of crisis the closeness of God can rather feel, not like a comfort, but like a cold and bitter challenge. The God who is close cannot plead ignorance, or that we are collateral damage. God holds every life, and yet … the city is destroyed. The people are dragged away from their homes – or locked within them. Many of these lives perish. Far from easing the burden of God’s judgement, this reflection on the closeness of God can make this judgement feel even more acute.

The received wisdom, which might have helped us through the crisis, must be set aside. As the proverb says, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” Perhaps it isn’t us: our forebears were unfaithful, and so we are only bearing the consequence of their actions. While it is true that we are suffering, perhaps after all, we are not the direct targets of God’s judgement. This was not merely the conventional wisdom, but the law. The law sets out that the iniquity of parents will be born by their children, “to the third and fourth generation of those who reject God.” (Deut. 5.9)

Ezekiel challenges this wisdom, and even this law. Through this chapter Ezekiel sets out the story of a parent, and a child, and their child: three generations. The Grandparent is righteous, and so shall live; their unrighteous child shall die for their own sins; and the righteous grandchild shall live, despite the sins of their father. The point Ezekiel is making is not about locating the reader as an individual in the midst of the crowd. As if what mattered was who exactly is at fault for an entire nation being cast aside and dispossessed of its land. Rather, Ezekiel is locating the reader as the focal point of history: it is this generation which is experiencing the judgement of God, it is this generation who is responsible for turning back in faithfulness, it is you : now, dislocated in exile: you are the ones who must walk towards righteousness and life, and away from guilt and death. The road of history has come up to meet you. The responsibility we find here is not the responsibility of blame for what has happened, but the responsibility for acting now in order to shape the life which might arise out of the present circumstances.

Ezekiel’s prophetic address is perhaps not so far away for those of us in the present circumstances, with a palpable sense of living through history. What matters is not who is to blame, but that we (all of us): now, dislocated in our homes: we are the ones who must walk towards righteousness and life, and away from guilt and death. The road of history has come up to meet us. God has come close.

The comfort of God’s closeness cannot be heard without first hearing the seriousness of this responsibility. We are called to respond, called to be concerned with the oppression of the poor and the needy, called to give food to the hungry, to exact true justice, and adhere to the ways of the Lord. Let us cast away a narrow focus on ourselves, and step into the moment which has come to us.

The echo of Ezekiel can be heard saying: God comes to us in this moment, and calls us to respond. This is a serious responsibility.

But let us be clear: God does come to us in this moment; and does call us, that we would respond. The responsibility is great, and also a sure sign of God’s closeness in the midst of crisis. We must not think that God is only a figment of history, or that God is always to come. God is close to us even now. And though it is as much a challenge as a comfort, it is a comfort. Because God seeks for us a renewal in this moment: a new heart and a new spirit. God desires for us to meet this moment and turn in faithfulness and live. God desires us, yearns for us. As a mother yearns for their daughter, and desires that they would grow into goodness. God takes no pleasure in death and suffering, but calls and beckons us – evermore, even now – to come close to God as God has come close to us.

What it means for God to hold the whole world in God’s hand, all of history, and each of us, is not a simple accounting of rights and wrongs. But is a yearning to be bound to us, and us bound to God; a desire that we should turn and be transformed, renewed not by wisdom and law, but by a new Spirit of the living God. In the midst of chaos, uncertainty, and what feels like the crisis of divine judgement, Ezekiel reminds us that God does not cast us down from afar, but turns the divine eyes of life towards us.

May we embrace the God who comes embraces us, yearning with God for the life of the world.

Come Holy Spirit. Come.

Amen.

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Pentecost 11
16/8/2020

Ezekiel 20:1-9
Psalm 67
Matthew 15:10-20

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In a sentence
What holds us together and makes us ‘us’ is God’s address to us, God’s holding of us

Our present circumstances present a considerable challenge to our assumptions about who we are, what we can expect, what control we have over our destiny.

If we are honest about what we’re experiencing, and are to take seriously chatter about the development of ‘new normals’, we might ask what it is we think makes us who and what we are – what it is we seek to preserve in our struggle against the new normal, and what new realities we might look to see develop there.

These are questions which concern our identity. This identity is not merely the kind of thing displayed in a passport or a driver’s license. Those details are only a ‘presenting’ identity which locates us for a particular moment and purpose. But identity is not merely momentary – a here-and-now thing. Identity is also about what makes us continuous with what we were, and what we might yet be. Put differently, our identity is about what makes us identical with ourselves – me, now, with the child I once was, and with the person I might yet be, and whatever – if anything – continues when I die.

Reflecting on what it is upon which are threaded all the pieces we are, we might propose that our body is what holds us together, continuing as it does more or less intact through time for as long as we are alive. A problem here, of course, is that bodies don’t last all that long. If we were to invoke the notion of ‘soul’ to overcome this problem, we then have the difficulty of telling one soul from another – which is what having an would identity allow us to do. Souls require some link to their bodies in order to be the particular souls that they are. Whatever a soul is, it is nothing without reference to a body. And yet bodies eventually stop.

And so one way faith has dealt with the problem of continued identity is the notion of resurrection – specifically the resurrection of the body. It needs to be ‘of the body’ because otherwise we could not know that the thing raised was continuous with the thing which died; recall how the risen Jesus proves his identity by showing the disciples the wounds of the crucifixion. Yet the resurrection of the body raises a whole lot of other problems which we’ll not go into now other than to say that ‘body’ here doesn’t mean quite what we usually think it means, but it does mean at least more than a spooky soul(!).

I raise all of this because the events described in Chapter 20 of Ezekiel concern the interaction of Israel with God over the course of some 700 years, from Israel in Egypt all the way to the exile out which Ezekiel speaks. At each of the crisis points along the way – all rather death-like – the continuing identity of Israel is under threat. Israel is regularly at a point of turning away from God, of ceasing to be the one who ‘wrestles with God’ – the meaning of the name ‘Israel’.

What keeps Israel ‘continuous’, however, is nothing in its own choices. The thread which strings together these various episodes – and many more besides – is the constant presence of Israel’s God, something altogether external to Israel. We have previously noted a ‘refrain’ throughout Ezekiel to do with the revelation of God’s own character: ‘and you shall know that I am the Lord’. Had we heard the whole of Chapter 20 today we would have heard several times another refrain. In response to this or that unfaithfulness of Israel in the story, God remarks:

I thought I would pour out my wrath upon them…, to make an end of them. But I acted for the sake of my name, so that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations… (8f; cf. 13f and 21f)

The possibility of ‘wrath’ is the threat to Israel’s continuity, the point at which it could be dissipated and forgotten, its identity dissolved – ‘I thought I would pour out my wrath…’ At each point along the way, then, it is not anything within Israel itself but God’s own action ‘for the sake of my name’ which maintains Israel’s identity.

This opens for us another way of thinking about what makes us, about what provides us with continuity of identity, about what ‘brackets’ our lives. It is not merely that Israel ‘survives’ because God does not act to destroy it. It is that Israel does not stop being God’s people because God continues to address it, despite its unfaithfulness. When God acts ‘for the sake of my name’ – this is not a petty preservation of God’s own reputation but the grounds of Israel continuing to be identified in relation to God.

This is to say that Israel’s identity is found in God’s very address to it. God names Israel as God’s own: ‘and then you will be my people, and I will be your God’ is another refrain we find in Ezekiel (11.20; 14.11; 36.28; 37.27).

Over the course of those 700 years, and since then, Israel’s continuity is not guaranteed by there being a few still standing at any particular time. Israel’s continuity as Israel, as itself, continues because God keeps ‘saying’ ‘Israel’. Chapter 20 recalls much to be lamented in the tale of Israel. But the very fact that the story is retold with Israel and God as the central actors returns Israel to its true identity. Israel’s character may be sadly wanting but its identity is undeniable – Israel is the one which belongs to God.

This is the case even when Israel seems totally lost – dead, for all intents and purposes. What restores Israel – what resurrects it – is the address of God: ‘you are mine’. To be claimed by God is to be restored to life, from whatever state we are in.

So it is for all resurrection moments, whether the restorations of ancient Israel, the raising of Jesus or coming to faith today.

Whatever it is we think most fundamentally makes us who we are – whether it be our body, our race or culture, our family, our gender, our achievements, our failures, our enemies or anxieties, our being shut down for fear of the coronavirus – these are not the threads of our identity but are rather threaded upon God’s own identity, which causes God to claim us as God’s own.

There may be much of our story on that divine thread which is tarnished, and corrupted, and rank with the stench of death. But this God is a thread upon which all things become jewels. This is the miracle of resurrection by this God: not a mere call to continue but a claiming of all that we have been and done as God’s very own, now made whole and presented back to us as also our own, as a blessed aspect of our identity.

This resurrecting call is the constant in our lives, the key to our identity and so also to our future.

Who we are is not our circumstances. No circumstance – not even those deathly things we weave around ourselves – cannot be re-woven into a robe of righteousness, a garment of joy.

For our name, our identity, is ever on the lips of God: You-Are-Mine.

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Pentecost 10
9/8/2020

Ezekiel 6:1-10
Matthew 14:22-33

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In a sentence
God takes what happens to us – the good and the bad – to tell us who we are and who God is.

Perhaps some of you have seen the recent stage musical Hamilton, an account of the life of the American revolutionary Alexander Hamilton.

The principal comic relief in the show is the appearance several times of King George III, commenting on the action. His first appearance is before the war is lost and so he imagines he still has a chance. His song ends like this:

‘You’ll be back like before
I will fight the fight and win the war
For your love, for your praise
And I’ll love you till my dying days
When you’re gone, I’ll go mad
So don’t throw away this thing we had
Cuz when push comes to shove
I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love’

Of course, in an American telling of the American Revolution, the king’s appearances and comments are deeply ironic. The horror, then, that one might show ‘love’ by killing is both very real and yet, perhaps, softened a bit by the fact that the king loses the war and his ‘love’ is unrequited.

By contrast, the figure of God which features in the first half of Ezekiel appears, at least at first blush, not a little unlike Hamilton’s King George but without the relieving irony. The language of wrath and fire and sword abounds, and none of it is good news for those Ezekiel reminds, if not quite of God’s love, at least of God’s righteousness. ‘And you will know that I am the Lord’ – the slogan of God’s freedom we noted last week – finds itself too often at the conclusion of George-like threats, such as we have heard today:

^6.7 The slain shall fall in your midst; then you shall know that I am the Lord.

The horror of it all is sufficient to make atheists of many and to cause even believers to squirm with discomfort. These instincts are pretty good.

Yet it ought not to surprise us that things are not quite as straightforward as simply editing out what seems to be such violence by God’s hand. Not least, it is too cheap to dismiss out of hand God the wrathful punisher of Israel, for would we not need then to deny God’s involvement as happy benefactor in the blessings we think we receive from God and so eagerly embrace? Most of us find it easy to identify God’s blessing action in things which go our way. We thank God that we dodged this or that bullet – that we arrived a moment too late to be caught up in the accident, implying that God caused some earlier irritating delay in order to save our lives; or we think it God’s blessing that we recovered from a serious illness though most do not. ‘Thank God’ is one of the more pernicious throw-away lines on the lips of believers, along with ‘God has been good to me’. Even the expected final receding of COVID-19 will be the cause of thanking God, as if it were something God ‘did’ – did in the same way we might hope God did not destroy Jerusalem in 586BC, or did not cause the pandemic in the first place.

The problem with too quick a dismissal of the divine violence in the prophets is that the texts about God’s wrath are as clear as those about God’s benedictions – to which Ezekiel will also come – so that we can’t have the one without the other. To imagine God active in giving to me but not in taking only really works if we split the world into two – and split God also – one part beneficent and one maleficent, the two battling it out through the course of history, with us fleeing from the one to the other.

Yet this is one thing Christian (and Jewish) confession will not allow; God has no rivals. This is to say that the God who blesses is the God who curses.

What then is happening in these terrifying texts? Is God managing history in this way, happily for blessing and horrifically for punishing?

It is clear that Ezekiel reads the suffering and exile as the sign of God’s wrath. The question Israel asks is, How could this happen? The biblical prophets answer, God is punishing you.

Yet the word ‘sign’ is important here, for it connects us to our thinking last week, when we noted the ‘like’ language in Ezekiel’s description of his vision of God. There he saw things ‘like’ human figures, ‘like’ precious jewels, ‘like’ fire and a throne. God is only indirectly seen, sitting somewhere behind our language but still ‘needing’ it in order to be presented – présent‑ed or ‘made present’.

But if the freedom of God means that God cannot be pinned down with precision, the same must also be said of God’s actions. The ‘error bars’, if you like, which indicate our uncertainty about God apply also to knowing God’s action. This is to say that a stark cause-and-effect reading of the connections Ezekiel makes between history and the action of God – even his own apparent reading of them – is an over-reading of those connections.

It is not that the words are unclear, it is rather that we might mistake the kind of words they are. These are borrowed words of blood and fire laid over borrowed events of conquest and exile. They are borrowed to speak of the relationship between an uncertain and disoriented people and a God we can’t quite grasp. This is a process by which God commandeers history – even ‘hijacks’ it – for use as a sign of God’s own character, or of the consequences of faithfulness or unfaithfulness. God takes historical fortune and make of it a so-called ‘teachable moment’.

To put it more starkly, Ezekiel’s preaching here is a process of adding ‘insult’ to injury. The injury is what befalls Israel as a matter of the flow of historical events. What we’re calling the insult is the charge of unfaithfulness by which that disaster is interpreted, and it’s the insult which matters and which endures. That the very people of God can fail – indeed have failed – is what we remember from these texts. And so we might refine this further and say that Ezekiel displaces injury with insult. The insult endures, long after the injury is past, to the extent that the injury is now only remembered because of the insult, because of the interpretation – because of the revelation of God’s character and what God looks for in the community of believers. Ours is not the experience of the destruction of Jerusalem and loss of all that we love; we do hear the lesson, however: that the people of God can get it wrong just as imagine they are getting it right.

‘Adding insult to injury’ is, perhaps, not the most profound description of Ezekiel’s preaching but it has at least the advantage of being memorable! Yet it does matter that the insult is the interpretation of a history which is then left behind. For these texts then call us to humility, repentance and thanksgiving in whatever historical circumstances we find ourselves. What is excluded, on the one hand is quivering fear before a God who might crush us to remind us of his love and, on the other hand, the arrogance of the faithful that because things are going well for us God must be on our side.

The pressure of Ezekiel’s preaching is not towards the guarantee that all will be well with those who keep the covenant; faithful people suffer and die prematurely all the time. Neither is it toward all being bad for the unrighteous; the unrighteous often do pretty well for themselves.

Rather, Ezekiel presses towards the guarantee that the world is a place which bears God to us, whether it be ill or good which is at play. God is never nowhere to be found. God borrows the world as it is – be it the good of sunshine or the of newborn babe, or the evil of a pandemic or the cross – so that we might be ‘reminded of his love’ in all things.

For, despite what we think we see going on around us, God’s love is what we are moving towards in all things.

It is for us, then, in all things, to adjust our sight so that it is this horizon towards which we are looking as we pass through green pastures and through shadowed valleys.

In all the days of our lives – for better and for worse – ours is the house of the Lord in which all things finally become goodness and mercy.

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Pentecost 9
2/8/2020

Ezekiel 1:1-28
Matthew 14:13-21

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In a sentence
We can’t really say quite what God is like, and this means that God is free to set us free

For 2500 years, Ezekiel’s extraordinary vision on the river Chebar has captured the imagination of mystics and wackos alike. Winged creatures with strange faces, eye-balled wheels within wheels, a throned figure and fire against a thunderous soundtrack – what is not marvellous in this striking account?

Artists, naturally, have also been caught up by the vision, with all manner of attempts to capture Ezekiel’s vivid description as an image. And yet, for all the enthusiasm about what it was Ezekiel saw, there is one word in his account which goes largely overlooked in all these musings – the little word ‘like’.

In fact, ‘like’ (or ‘likeness’) appears 25 times in this account of Ezekiel’s vision, and ‘appeared’ (or ‘appearance’, both in the sense of ‘looking like’) is found another 8 times. The last three verses illustrate the point most intensively (NRSV):

²⁶ And above the dome over their heads there was something like a throne, in appearance like sapphire; and seated above the likeness of a throne was something that seemed like a human form. ²⁷Upwards from what appeared like the loins I saw something like gleaming amber, something that looked like fire enclosed all round; and downwards from what looked like the loins I saw something that looked like fire, and there was a splendour all round. ²⁸Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the appearance of the splendour all round. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.

The problem with any attempt to portray what Ezekiel sees here is that while we can draw, say, a picture of a person and saw that our drawing is like the person, how do we draw something which is itself like a human person? ‘Like’ a human being is not a human being. ‘Like’ a throne is not a throne, ‘like’ amber is not amber, and ‘like’ fire is not fire. This is to say that representations of Ezekiel’s vision with human figures and shining jewels and fire and a throne are representations of what Ezekiel did not see, for what he was ‘like’ these things.

This might seem rather a subtle distinction but consider the last line of what we heard today, which punches the point home. Ezekiel sees ‘only’ the ‘appearance’ of the ‘likeness’ of the ‘glory’ of the Lord. ‘Like’ language removes God as many as three times from what he actually sees. He sees not the Lord but the glory of the Lord, and not the glory but the likeness (or semblance) of that glory, and not the likeness of the glory of the Lord but something which appeared like the likeness of the glory.

Ezekiel’s account is of a kind of ‘space-holder’ for where God would be or what God would look like, if God were anywhere or looked like anything. To put it differently, here we have an account of the transcendence of God, of God’s being utterly beyond all in the world, and yet – the ‘and yet’ is crucial – still present to the world, pressing upon it. This is a transcendence not primarily ‘over’ or ‘beyond’ the world, but for it.

To capture this, God is indicated not by describing God rather but what God is ‘like’; ‘not-God’ stands in God’s place. God is thus always at least one step removed from anything said about God, properly in the background to what we think we see and name as ‘God’. This is not about the poverty of language to express God, and it is not an evasion by God. In this God is not to be elusive but free.

Throughout the book of Ezekiel we will hear the refrain ‘[and] you/they shall know that I am the Lord’ (in fact, over 50 times). Here the name ‘Lord’ is crucial, as is the fact that this refrain is never ‘you shall know I am God’; it is ‘Lord’ and not ‘God’ which matters here.

‘Lord’ is here the divine name given to Moses in the burning bush episode. We usually say that name in English as ‘Yahweh’ (‘Jehovah’, in the old money). The meaning of ‘Yahweh’ is itself somewhat elusive but we know that it implies self-determination. ‘Who are you?’ Moses asked. ‘I am who I will be’, God answers, or, ‘I will be who I will be’. This is a name which communicates the fundament character of the one whose name it is: I will be as I will to be. God here names Godself as the one free to be God’s own.

(While we’ve remarked on the prevalence of ‘like’ language in Ezekiel’s vision, it’s worth noting here that there are several things which are not described as ‘like’. The ‘wheels’ are apparently not like wheels but are, in fact, wheels. So also for the eyes in the wheels, and the spirit which animates them to move ‘chariot-throne’ – if we might call it that. At this great cultural distance any particular symbolism in the wheels or the eyes is difficult to identify with confidence, but we can comprehend at least the ‘every‑direction’ freedom of movement the wheels have, and the every‑direction vision of the eyes. The one seated on the chariot-throne is free to move, and sees all. There is nothing ‘like’ freedom here but freedom itself.)

God’s transcendence is not about God’s location – over, above, beyond – but about God’s freedom. Ezekiel’s encounter is with a God who relates to the world – as creator, lover, judge, redeemer – and yet is not part of the world, is at best only ‘like’ this or that thing we already know.

The question which might tempt us here is ‘What use is a God like this?’

It is a tempting question because useful things seem to us to be what we most need. We assess our situation and determine what it demands. We are building things and protecting things. Or future seems to us to be in our hands and what is ‘useful’ aids us in our work towards these projected futures. What is free – radically free – is precisely what our projects seek to overcome, because free things break with order and challenge the status quo, be it the wild child, the raging storm or the advanced tumour. Free things disrupt our own stories about ourselves.

A God we cannot get a handle on – who is only ‘like’ this or that familiar thing and so is really unlike anything – is a threat to our stories about ourselves. This the case whether those stories are positive or negative. When our stories about ourselves are arrogant and proud, such a God would reveal to us death, would reveal that our kingdoms are not God’s kingdom. When our stories about ourselves are bleak and desperate, such a God would reveal to us hope, for God sees further than we do.

What might we say such a free God is ‘like’ today?

There is among us at the moment something ‘like’ God in its freedom, at least – a radical disrupter revealing to us that our best laid plans are susceptible to the threat of death, for what else is the virus but such an unfettered interruption? We will, doubtless, yet discover useful tools beyond what we already have, and bring this terrifyingly free agent of death under some likeness of control. Our prayers are with those charged to fashion these tools, be they regulations to keep us safe or the magic of advanced medicine.

But, to add to the tentative reflections of last week on the relationship between the virus and God’s judgement, perhaps we could see in the virus not quite God but a likeness of God’s own freedom to approach us in times and places least expected, whether on the banks of the river Chebar in 593BC with condemnation and promise, or here-and-now with whatever will shake us down into a richer humanity. For as then so also now, it is only such a free God who might be able to dislodge us from our arrogance and self-delusion, our indifference and self-satisfaction, and our grief and fears.

Do we not need such a jolt?

All of this is to say, with Ezekiel, that when the God who is like nothing we know comes to us, it is to reveal that tomorrow belongs not to us with all our plans and projects but belongs to God.

And, unlike a virus which simply wipes tomorrow away, God comes to call us to meet him in that tomorrow, where condemnation resolves into grace, darkness yields to light, weeping gives way to joy.

What, in the end, is not to ‘like’ about such a God as this?