Ah Ezekiel! My favorite Old Testament
heretic!
Heretic, you say? A chosen speaker of
God’s word? A part of the canon of the Hebrew Bible? How can this be? Am I the
heretic here?
Maybe, maybe not. Let’s explore this a
bit.
What do we know of Adonai, of YHWH, the
God of the Hebrew Bible?
Well, if we agree on nothing else, we
know that this is a God of following the rules. The Deuteronomist spills much
ink on rules, rules, and more rules.
And rules are, indeed, a needful thing:
how else to keep a fractious and frightened people together in the midst of
continual cultural and political assaults, across the desert, in captivity, in
battle? There must be rules to keep the community distinct from those who are
not the Chosen People, and to keep them from behaving as badly as they seem
inclined to do.
And in this passage from the book of
Ezekiel, set in the midst of the Babylonian captivity, we see how when God’s
people do not follow the rules, there are consequences. There is conquest,
diaspora, separation from the spiritual heart of Israel, the Temple in
Jerusalem.
Okay, so far we are following the
normative role of covenantal relationship with the Lord – you mess up, you end
up in a bad place.
But then something happens in the midst
of the misery of people who cannot even sing their own songs anymore because
they are so depressed. Ezekiel dreams and prophesies: redemption is coming. Actually, redemption has come, perhaps not in
a way that was always recognizable to them, but it has been there: God has been
with them. If the people could not go to the Temple, the Temple came to them.
God was abiding with them. It may have seemed just a pale shadow of the glory
of the Temple, but no matter. God was with them. Even if the people failed in
abiding by the covenant, God – and God’s covenant - abided with them.
But wait! There’s more! These sad souls
will be back in Jerusalem soon…but the rules may have shifted a bit.
God proclaims that the people who have
been scattered abroad will be gathered together.
A sidebar here: Ezekiel reminds us that
the folks who DIDN’t get dispersed, who remained in Jerusalem, have something
of the attitude of those modern people who say “I’ve got the good stuff because
I’ve been faithful and God loves me for it, and if you don’t have the good
stuff, it’s clear you offended God.” Those who got to stay in Jerusalem thought
the Temple belonged to them – possession is 9/10s of the law, right? – and the
others, well, tough luck for them. They deserved their fate.
And here’s where the strange and
wonderful and slightly heretical glance of Ezekiel comes into play: God says “never
mind.”
God says, “yes, we will clean up the
messes you folks left, but it isn’t about the Temple. I’m going to set up shop
near it, but no longer in it – take that, you pompous self-righteous prigs in
Jerusalem – and we’re going to repair not the Temple, but our hearts.”
For what seems like the first time in a
long time, this Creator God starts with the heart rather than the rules.
“I will gather you from the peoples, and assemble you out of the
countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you the land of
Israel. When they come there, they will remove from it all its detestable
things and all its abominations. I will give them one heart, and put a new
spirit within them; I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give
them a heart of flesh, so that they may follow my statutes and keep my
ordinances and obey them. Then they shall be my people, and I will be their
God.”
The work of the Heart precedes the work
of the rules. Both are needed, but the sequence matters.
If the sole focus of our common lives
together is following rules, we become diminished, parsing out every jot and
tittle. If the sole focus of our common lives together is warm and fuzzy
feelings, we become undisciplined and unclear. We need both, but the sequence
matters.
When relationships are broken, the
various sides in the story are judging each other and themselves. It’s the
human condition, isn’t it, trying to prove we are in the right and others are
not? Trying to prove we have God’s favor while others are lower in the pecking
order?
When we work at the hard and beautiful
work of reimagining relationships, one of the first things we have to do is to
put aside the rules that divide us and fall in love with our brothers and
sisters again. How we live into that
love requires that we figure out some operating principles, some rules of the
road, but unless we enter into a rule of life starting with a rule of love,
because God loves us first and fiercely, the rules will continue to divide us.
This is why a slightly heretical
apocalyptic prophet is the perfect voice for what we are trying to do here,
years after the signing of “Called to Common Mission” document. It has to do with
the very nature of apocalyptic literature: odd and strange words from a fever
dream, challenging and prodding and awakening people to some new understanding
of what God is doing. What is god doing here?
Ezekiel, speaking for God, strips down
the legalities to what is most important…
Three things: God is with you. God will
return you to a place of conjoined spiritual nourishment. There will be a new
relationship between God and God’s people.
And how does this happen? God removes
hearts of stone and replaces them with hearts of flesh, drawing them into a
sweet embrace. Beating sometimes in unison, sometimes in complementary rhythms.
A relationship. The disparate parts of
God’s people drawn back together. Later, then, some guidance as to how the
relationship will work – rules to be together as righteous children of God –
but that guidance doesn’t come until the relationship is rebuilt.
Love. Relationship before rules.
If we do nothing else in our time
together, we must – MUST – fall in love with each other through the shared love
of our sovereign and loving Creator. The other stuff? Rules and such? I won’t call them “adiafora” – that’s above my
pay grade – but it seems to this occasionally heretical preacher that unless
the rules serve the love and the relationship rather than the other way around,
we’ll be stuck in Babylon, and that’s nowhere for God’s people to be. No more
hearts of stone. No more rules that divide. Love. God’s love. Our love. Nothing
more. Nothing less.
Amen.
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