Thus Says the Lord
Ezekiel 2:1-5; 36:25-28[1]
I wonder whether we really
believe in the possibility of new life any more. I wonder whether we ever
believed in it. When you listen in on conversations about people, or about
communities, or about society as a whole, there’s not much hope to be found
there. It’s my impression that the way we talk about others can be rather
negative. I’m not sure where this cynical approach to our fellow human beings
comes from. I would say there’s probably not one source, but many. And chief
among them would be the experiences of our own interactions with people who are
less than kind to us, to put it mildly. Our experience makes it hard to believe
in new life.
I find this to be troubling,
because at the heart of our faith is the promise and the hope of new life
through our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ. That new life isn’t something we
wait to receive when we pass from this world. It’s something that’s meant to
change the way we live here and now. And the message of the Scriptures is that
there is no one who is ever “too far gone” to find new life in Jesus Christ.
But our negative outlook on people, as evidenced by the way we talk about them,
flies in the face of our faith. I wonder if we really believed in the promise
of new life whether the way we talk would take on a different tone.
The prophet Ezekiel had
plenty of reasons to have a rather negative outlook on his situation. He, along
with a fair amount of the people of Judah, had been conquered by the
Babylonians. And as a result they had been deported to Babylon, a place far
away from everything they knew. That included, in their minds, the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Like most other people in that day, the Israelites
believed that their God ruled over their land. But they were a long way from their
land. They were living in forced captivity in a foreign land ruled by foreign
gods. Given that assumption, you can understand why they might have given up
hope.
Right into the midst of that
seemingly desperate situation, Ezekiel had a vision that must have knocked his
socks off. It was a vision of God: not tied to the land of Israel far away, but
right there with him in Babylon. And the gist of the vision was that God is not
restricted to one land, but rather he can go wherever he wants. In addition, the
vision assured Ezekiel that his people were not “out of sight, out of mind” to
a God dwelling way back in their homeland, but rather he is a God who sees what
is happening everywhere. Ezekiel, along with many of his people, may have given
up hoping in God, but God had not given up on them!
Like many of the prophets,
the book of Ezekiel recounts his “call” by God to speak on his behalf. God was
well aware of the spiritual condition of his people, and he was sending Ezekiel
to confront them about it. In our lesson for today, God instructs Ezekiel to
tell them “Thus says the Lord GOD” (Ezek. 2:4). And in fact, that phrase
becomes a refrain throughout the book of the prophet Ezekiel, along with “The
word of the LORD came to me.” God was not finished with his people, and he sent
Ezekiel to be the one through whom God would declare his message of hope and
new life to them.
One of the central passages
where Ezekiel expresses that hope is in chapter 36. There, Ezekiel reminds the
people that because of their failure to live for God with all their hearts,
they had “profaned the name” of God in their exile. And yet, despite the
people’s failure, through the prophet God announces that he is going to renew
his people. He says, “I will sprinkle clean water upon you,” and “A new heart I
will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you” (Ezek. 36:25-26). The
idea is that, by his Spirit, God would radically and thoroughly change his
people so that they would live for him. And they would live for him not because
of external demands or the threat of punishment, but because God would change
their hearts and give them his Spirit. The idea is that they would then want to live for God.
Many of us even in the church
live our lives with a kind of “functional atheism.” We speak the words of faith
when we come to church, but we live our lives as if there were no God. Or at
least as if whatever God there may be doesn’t really make any difference in our
lives. Bad things still happen to good people. Those who are truly wicked in this
world seem to get along just fine, thank you very much. And those who are truly
good struggle and suffer at the hands of the power-mongers. If we believe only
the evidence we see that powerful people tend to take advantage of others, it’s
no wonder we wind up with a negative outlook on the prospect of new life.
But just as in the days of
Ezekiel, so today the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ
will not leave us with hardened hearts. God continues to work in each of our
lives by his Spirit to give us new hearts—hearts that love God and love our
neighbors because we have experienced God’s love for us. Hearts that know the
joy that comes from seeds of new life that God’s Spirit continues to plant within
us. Hearts that continue to hope that the suffering we see in this world is not
God’s last word on humanity. Perhaps when we let that really sink in, we will
have a different outlook on life in general. Perhaps when we learn to trust the
promises made in the name of the Lord, we will be open to new life in ourselves
and in others.
[1] ©
2018 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 7/8/2018 at
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
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