“Turn, then and Live”

Pentecost 15A
September 25, 2011
Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32

On September 11th, I was scrolling my Facebook feed on my iphone while waiting for the flight that took Chris and I to Orlando, Florida on our honeymoon. While doing this I came across a comment posted by someone I’ve known since high school. The post was about how proud she is in regard to how this country has been unified since the attacks on America 10 years prior. My first thought was yeah, we did pull together for a little bit, but then we fractured big time. It wasn’t two days after the attacks when Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell were blaming the attacks on the Gays, Feminists, the ACLU, Pagans, etc. In the years that have followed we have blamed this person and that for the attacks…some saying blaming all muslims, others saying that the CIA must have known something was up…others still blamed the Bush administration, claiming a relationship between the Bush family and Bin Ladin. The list goes on and on…and still, 10 years later, as we enter another election cycle and the third possible occurrence of a major budget crisis in a year had appeared, it is clear from news reports, facebook and twitter, that as a nation, we are still pointing fingers, blaming this person and that person for the state our nation is in, rather that putting in the effort to come together and seek ways in which we can do better for our nation and the future of our nation.
There was a lot of finger pointing going on among the Israelite exiles in Babylon, too. Instead of pointing the finger at others among them, though, the fingers were pointed towards the ancestors and towards God. Our reading from Ezekiel this morning was written around the time that the first group of exiles had been taken from their home in Israel to Babylon. King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had ordered the capture of 3,000 people from Judah, the southern kingdom of Israel…as well as the removal of the King of Judah from the throne. The rest of the people were left to be workers for the Babylonians in Judah. The exiles were not too thrilled with their situation in Babylon, mostly because they didn’t think that they had anything to do with becoming exiles and therefore there wasn’t anything they could do about getting out of exile. Their thinking comes from a couple of sources.
First, there is a writing in Exodus that appears again in Deuteronomy in which God says that God will visit the sin of the fathers on the children and the third and fourth generations of those who hate him…in addition to this, the writers of the books of Kings and Chronicles had made it abundantly clear that by re-instituting pagan worship during his reign, which took place about a hundred years earlier, King Manasseh had sealed the fate of Israel for generations to come. A final element that needs to be noted for the context of Ezekiel and his audience, is that they lived in a poly-deistic society…for them, the God of Abraham or the other gods like Baal, let you know how pleased they were with you by how things went. To them, drought which yielded bad yields of crops, floods, damaging winds, and other natural events of the sort, were all acts of the gods to get your attention.
And so, when you add all this up, the visiting sins up future generations, the well known sins of Manasseh and their beliefs about natural phenomena, the 3,000 Judean exiles in Babylon decided that it was unfair that they had been taken from their homes, their livelihoods, their families and been taken to this place. And we can all agree with them on that…it isn’t fair when people are forcibly taken from their homes, families and livelihoods. But in their eyes, what made it even more unfair was that they felt that they were completely innocent and had done nothing to deserve the situation that they were in. God had exiled them, taken them away from everything they had as punishment for what their ancestors had done. So why bother doing anything, we can’t fix the situation we’re in…so the exiles spent their days repeating an old proverb “the parents have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” It was a proverb that expressed their feeling that their situation in exile was completely the fault of the parents and grandparents and, for them, absolved them of any guilt involved with the exile.

And this is where Ezekiel steps in.

Ezekiel had been taken into exile with the rest of the group…but Ezekiel was also a prophet who had a message to bring to the exiles. It was a message from God that called them out on the finger pointing and showed them a different way of looking at things. First, God forbids the use of the proverb used by the exiles and in the verses that are missing from this passage, God uses Ezekiel to explain to the people that they have wrongly interpreted the passages form Exodus and Deuteronomy. Ezekiel tells them that when God looks at an individual, he doesn’t see the sins or the righteousness of the parent or the grandparent, but God looks at the person him or herself and judges everyone accordingly. But if there are generations after generations of folks who hate God, then yeah, there might be consequences.
In general, however, who we are in the eyes of God is not defined by the past acts of our ancestors, but by who we are…and going further, who we are is not defined by who we were before, but who we choose to be and what we choose to do now. This is how God works! We can think that we are storing up righteousness for a rainy day…or think that all the bad things we’ve done in the past will be held against us…but that’s not how God works. God gives us a chance every day to choose who we are going to be and how we are going to act. The past does not define us, nor the future, only the present.
And yet, along with the Judeans in exile, we are often tempted to look out at the world and see how things are, throw our hands up in the air and say “why are you being so unfair, God?” When we do that, though, we are ignoring that there is a difference between the worldly order of things and God’s order of things. In the worldly order of things, everything that we do affects the people around us…if I don’t go grocery shopping regularly, my husband and dog will have nothing to eat…if we as a congregation don’t join together to serve with LINK, Family Promise and the food pantry, people who really need our help won’t get that meal or that place to sleep. If we as a nation don’t peaceably work out a solution to our economic problems, our children and children’s children will be affected by this. This is the worldly order of things, the cause and affect of physics is very much how the world works. As Homer Simpson once said “how come my actions always have consequences?”
Fortunately for us, God knows all to well how the world works. God has been looking over us from the beginning but because he is an all loving God, God knows that he can’t force us into anything…not into loving him and not into choosing to do the right things every day. But that’s why God does give us a choice every day…God allows us to choose every day who we are going to be and what we are going to do. We can choose to follow God and listen for what God has for us to do, or we can choose to ignore it and go the other way. But with that choice comes and admonition, to get a new heart and a new spirit, to turn and choose life! To try every day to be better people for God and for the world…it’s not easy, but we know that it’s possible. We know this because we have the example of the one who was in the form of God but chose humbled himself to the point of death on a cross. Jesus wasn’t afraid to call out the Pharisees when they pointed fingers and he’s not afraid to call us out, either. Sure it’s uncomfortable…but in the end, it what helps us to grow and thrive.
And so we have a decision to make today and every day…in this world of fractured people, finger pointing and unfairs, who are we going to be? Are we going to be the people who throw our hands up in the air and give up? Or are we going to be a witness to the world of how God does things?