Dr. William A. Ritter
First United Methodist Church
Birmingham, Michigan
Scripture: Ezekiel 36:16-30
The best definition of prevenient grace I ever heard suggests that ours is a God who goes searching for people who don’t possess the good sense to know they are lost. More than once in my early career in youth ministry, I frantically searched an amusement park, a campground and, in one case, the entire south side of Chicago, for a group of kids who, upon being found, couldn’t understand “what the big deal was.” In today’s text, the people of Israel knew full well “what the big deal was.” Not only were they lost, they knew both the why and the wherefore of their lostness. They were exiles, living in Babylon, having been carried off by their captors. Their deportation took place under the watchful eye (and with the full compliance) of their God. What did God do when the enemy came? The prophet Ezekiel tells us that God looked the other way and lifted nary a finger to help. There is even a hint that God played a more active role in their dispersal, given that in 36:17 Ezekiel says:
This is what I heard the Lord say. “When the people of Israel dwelt in their own land, their conduct was like the uncleanness of a women in her monthly time of impurity. So I poured out my wrath upon them, scattering them among the nations, dispersing them through the countries according to their conduct.”
Which is not a pleasant message to bear, let alone hear. After all, who wants to be told that when you are on the outside looking in, it’s pretty much where you deserve to be.
Then, at last, comes a hopeful word….a promising word….a counterbalancing word….just when you think the prophet will never get around to saying it.
I will deliver you, says the Lord God of Israel. I will lead you out. I will bring you back. I will take you home. Clean water I will sprinkle upon you. A clean heart I will place within you. Abundant grain will stand tall in your fields. Abundant fruit shall hang low from your trees. And you shall once again be established in the land that I gave to your ancestors.
The implied message would seem to be: “Therefore, start packing, lest you spend one more day in this godforsaken hellhole than is absolutely necessary.” Whether the Lord said exactly that is academic. That’s what the people heard.
And that’s more like it. That’s what you and I want to hear. “Tell us, Bill, that no place is so forsaken so as to be deemed godforsaken. Tell us, Bill, that even the world’s hellholes will have their darkness splintered by the sunlight of heaven. And tell us, Bill, that we can never be cast so far from shore as to preclude the possibility of being reeled back in. “Good Lord, deliver us,” we cry despairingly. “And He will,” cries the prophet, responsively. “He will.”
All of which has a familiar ring to it. Isaiah said it. Jeremiah said it. It’s just taken Ezekiel a little longer to get around to it. One has to put up with more gloom in Ezekiel on the way to the hope. Yet, sooner or later, even Ezekiel’s God comes through.
Except it’s not all that simple. For in the midst of this long-awaited promise, we find this strange word: “It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name which you have profaned among the nations.”
“It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act.” What does that mean? It means just what it says. It means that while God is about to save his people, God is going to do so, quite apart from anything having to do with them. Which is not what we would normally expect to hear. We would expect to hear that God loves them….that God cares for them….and God’s heart goes out to them in spite of everything that may have previously come between them. But that’s not what the text says. It says that God has such a low opinion of this people (as a result of their cheating hearts and idolatrous ways) that, if there is to be a deliverance, Israel will have nothing whatsoever to contribute to that deliverance. “It is not for your sake that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name.”
Among Old Testament scholars, Walter Brueggemann currently occupies that pedestal reserved for the “fairest of the fair.” When Brueggemann comments on a passage of scripture, preachers listen. So it is interesting to read Walter’s word concerning these lines from Ezekiel. “I regard this as one of the most dangerous and stunning texts in the Bible, in that it dares to set God’s free and unfettered sovereignty at something of a distance from Israel.” Let me translate that for you. What Walter is saying is that God sometimes acts for reasons having more to do with who God is, than with who we are.
Think of it this way. Picture yourself as parents in a restaurant (a very nice restaurant), trying to eat a meal with your children (your very small children). It has been a long day, which means that your children are tired and not behaving very well. As their parents, you are just as tired as they are, to the point that you are not coping very well. With each passing minute, they (as children) are becoming more obnoxious. And with each passing minute, you (as parents) are becoming more embarrassed. Not really all that much is at stake for the children. They are behaving….well…pretty much like children. But much is at stake for you. For everybody is watching. You’d really like to swat them one, or find some similar means of letting them have it. But you don’t want the people at the nearby tables to think poorly of you, to the point of concluding that you who birthed these children, can’t control them. So you become the very models of “parental patience” (given your concern for the opinions of those who may be looking on).
This is pretty much what Ezekiel says happened to God. Israel had tried and exhausted God’s patience, having thrown one sufficiently long tantrum, until even God could take it no longer. What concerns the prophet is that even God may have a breaking point, and that the one who is said to be “slow to anger,” may (nonetheless) have a flash point to that anger. “What happens,” Ezekiel seems to wonder, “when even God’s compassion runs dry….when, having gone so many extra miles, He find himself reluctant to go one mile more? What then?”
Then (Ezekiel says) Israel’s last hope….our last hope….the only hope left…..is that God will be sufficiently concerned with his reputation that He will act to preserve his good name, even if God has long-since passed the point of worrying about ours. “I am going to deliver you,” says God, “not because of you, but because of me….so that the nations will see that I am God, and will know that it takes a very great God to love a people like you.”
Now that notion probably bothers many of you. I know it bothers me. What’s more, I know why. First, it bothers us because we have assumed that, at the core of his nature, ours is a rather mushy God. To whatever degree we have slipped into the habit of seeing God in grandfatherly imagery, such imagery has less to do with our belief in a God who is old, than in a God who is soft. Grandfathers, in the main, are more inclined to be soft than stern. And the notion of “sternness” (which is laced throughout Ezekiel’s writing, not to mention the entirety of prophetic literature) is hard to square with the notion of “softness.” Meaning that when push comes to shove, we will always choose soft over stern. We’ll opt (every time) for the Charmin God….squeezably soft. And there’s much to be said for a pliable God….easier to relate to….easier to be in touch with….and easier to be loved by.
But the word “soft” means absolutely nothing until it is measured against (and balanced by) something “hard”….something that neither yields nor bends. Some years ago, when my wife was working for a community agency known as Farmington Youth Assistance, she sponsored a lecture by a nationally-acclaimed parenting guru named Pat Hurley (a most insightful and funny man). As I remember it, the title of his talk was: “How to Raise Your Parents.”
Marvelous lecture. Lots of kids in the audience. Lots of parents, too. Pat Hurley had the kids in the palm of his hand. At one point, he was talking about two different voices that parents employ to say the same simple word….the word being “no.” One voice says “no” in a way that says: “It’s not negotiable. It’s not discussible. Don’t moan, groan, whine, beg, make a face, throw a tantrum, or badger me 30 minutes from now with 17 additional arguments. It’s going to be ‘no’ then, just as it’s ‘no’ now.” But the other parental voice says “no” as if to say: “But if you want to take a shot at changing my mind, be my guest.” Then, Pat Hurley turned to the kids and said: “Raise your hands if you can tell the difference between yours parents’ ‘no’s.’” And virtually every hand of every kid in the room shot up.
Every home has a place for both kinds of “no’s.” Love renegotiates some things, while drawing the line at others. So, one suspects, does God. Soft and stern. We surrender either at our peril.
While I was thinking about softness and hardness….and the degree to which they could co-exist in the same God….I spent an evening with a dear friend of mine who was in the process of babysitting his grandchildren. My friend’s grandchildren are great kids. And he loves being their granddad. The role fits him like a glove. I hope, someday, to be half as good. But you need to know that his grandkids are both boys, ages two and a half and three and a half. And, as the saying goes, they are “all boy.” This means there are times when he wears out before they do. Which is partially his fault, given that he is the one who heats them up, only to wonder why he has trouble cooling them down.
But the bigger difficulty consists in the fact that they can’t conceive of their grandfather as having a stern side. To them, every “no” is negotiable. Meaning that they push the limits until they exhaust themselves in the effort….or until he gives them back to their mother….his daughter. We are talking about the same daughter who knows he has a stern and inflexible side, and was smart enough (in her growing up years) so as not to provoke him to demonstrate it. Remembering those early days with his daughter, he said: “All I had to do was look at her and she knew I’d had enough.”
I was talking about all of this with my own daughter (who I never felt much of a need to discipline). Whereupon she said: “That’s because I knew ‘the look.’ And when, at some point in the discussion I got ‘the look,’ I knew not to push things any further.” Today, I’m not sure I could reproduce “the look.” But it must have been pretty effective. I trust that my daughter loves me as much for “the look” as for my mushy malleability (which was, more often than not, my true fatherly nature).
Our hope, says Ezekiel, is not rooted in the fact that God will always bend to us, but that God will be true to himself. Which bothers us, because it strikes at the notion that God is a rather mushy deity. But it also bothers us because (down deep) we like to think of ourselves as being rather nice people. Why wouldn’t God want to deliver us? How could He become fed up with us? After all, aren’t we doing the best we can?
One of the nice things about reading as much Bible in any given week as I do, is that it forces me to read a lot of stuff I would skip over, were I merely reading the Bible in search of sermon material. One of scripture’s recurring themes that I would just as soon skip is the theme of divine depression over our sorry performance. In no small number of places, God is depicted as being sorry that He made us, even to the point of flirting with the notion of scrapping the whole enterprise and writing us off as a noble experiment, gone sour.
I don’t know what to do with all those passages. But I am forced to conclude that God may sometimes feel that way. It’s not (I suppose) that we’re so bad, but that we promise so much while delivering so little. Were we born losers, God could probably take it better. But I doubt that’s how He sees us. I think He sees us as Mike Ilitch does the Tigers, possessing so many good pieces, yet unable to put them together to the point of delivery.
Not that we lack for excuses. All of us have them. And when we run out of them, we lay the rest of our problems off against our nature. “Don’t look at us,” we say, “that’s just who we are.” I hear that phrase being used over and over again to explain, excuse and rationalize some of the stupidest behaviors. But it works. For if I am willing to understand that “you are just who you are,” then maybe you’ll understand that “I am who I am,” and neither of us will ask the other to be “other” or “better.” So it’s quite easy for me to say how nice I find you to be, trusting that you will say the same about me. Yet, is ours the ultimate judgment that matters?
Robert Coles of Harvard (who writes so beautifully of what life is like on the boundary where Christianity meets psychiatry) tells of a particularly troubling patient in his early years of clinical practice. His client was a woman of 25, a graduate student in literature, who seemed to be suffering from a hard-to-pin-down mixture of guilt and remorse. Upon concluding that her feelings of dis-ease were somehow connected to a sexual liaison with her professor, Coles began leading her toward some internal act of catharsis and cleansing. In doing so, he focused the therapy on the specific person of the professor, only to have the young woman keep insisting that the professor was only one piece of the problem, and that (in her own words), “there is someone else who needs to be mentioned.”
After exhausting all the possibilities as to who that suddenly-significant-someone-else might be, Coles changed the subject, only to notice that a strange new word surfaced in her conversation. That word was “transgression.” Suddenly Coles knew the identity of the “someone else who needed to be mentioned.” So he planted the suggestion very softly, leading her to acknowledge: “Yes, I will probably never be able to come to terms with myself until I come to terms with God, whose judgment matters more to me than my own. It’s not how I look at my affair that matters, but how God looks at it.”
I find myself wondering if any of us even care how God looks at our affairs….or at us. And were we to really ponder that question, might we be led to conclude (with Ezekiel) that if God acts to deliver us, it will have to be because of some graceful quirk in his nature, rather than some clear and obvious merit in ours.
There’s an old chestnut of a story, remaking the rounds of late. It concerns a minister who died, met Peter at the gate, and learned that he needed 100 points to get in.
“After all, I was a minister for 47 years,” the man said.
“That’s nice,” said Peter. “We’ll count that as one point.”
“I visited shut-ins every chance I got.”
“Shut-ins. One point.”
“I worked with junior high youth in every one of my churches.”
“Junior highs. One point.
“And many were the times I set up chairs and tables, and even mopped the church floors when nobody showed up to help.”
“Chairs and mops. One point. Making four points. Leaving 96 points.”
“Ninety six points? Save for the grace of God, I don’t stand a chance.”
“Grace of God. Ninety six points. Come on in.”
My friends, let the word go out to the nations that it takes a very great God to love a people like us.
