Ezekiel 24:15-27 "Tragedy and Faith" Scott Hoezee

Back in the 1960s, to the distress of the older generation, many young people decided to use their own bodies to protest all they believed was wrong with society. The most common signs of being counter-cultural were long hair, shaggy beards, and funky-looking wire-rimmed glasses--what we now regard as the classic "hippie" look. Tye-dyed T-shirts, sandals, leather vests, and wildly embroidered bell-bottomed jeans were also signs of not wanting to fit in with "the establishment."

Teenagers and college students also used their bodies for sit-ins and love-ins, turning their very physical presence and sexuality into yet another symbol of rebellion. Some tabooed their bodies with the peace symbol or painted daisies on their faces. Probably the most extreme example of someone using his own body in a protest was the Buddhist monk who sat down in the middle of a Saigon street, doused himself with gasoline, and ignited himself to death in protest of the Vietnamese government.

If it is true that "the medium is the message," the young people of the 60s used the medium of their own bodies to get the message across. Ezekiel did too. In the first half of this prophetic book we have already seen Ezekiel depict God's messages by digging holes in the walls of his house, lying mute and prostrate on his couch, giving himself a sidewalk haircut, building a toy model of Jerusalem and then laying siege to it, putting on a big pot of stew and boiling it all away. Ezekiel's own body and life were the modes of God's communication with Israel in exile.

But nowhere is this tactic more startlingly on display than in the verses we read this evening. In order to convey a shocking truth to the exiles, God takes the life of Ezekiel's wife and then forbids Ezekiel to respond to this tragedy in a normal fashion. God comes and tells Ezekiel, "I'm taking the love of your life away from you! The apple of your eye, your dear and precious wife will die. But when she does, don't you dare shed a tear. Don't weep, don't wail, don't let anyone see your hurt. Don't put on a black suit but where your regular clothes and your fanciest, most festive hat."

As we just saw from reading this part of Ezekiel 24, his wife does die and Ezekiel does obey God's queer commands. In a few minutes I want us to think about the obvious scandal involved in all this, but first let's trace out the rest of this chapter and the way by which God and Ezekiel used this personal tragedy in the wider Israelite community.

By the time you get to chapter 24 Ezekiel has been a recognized prophet for quite some time. By now the people know that if Ezekiel did something bizarre, it almost surely meant some new message from Yahweh. So when Ezekiel's wife suddenly dies and Ezekiel responds as though nothing were wrong, the neighbors crowd around Ezekiel's front porch to inquire what in the world this might mean. And the prophet tells them.

Yahweh has removed something precious to Ezekiel, but he is now getting ready to remove something precious from all the people: the very Temple of God in Jerusalem. For too long now the Israelites had arrogantly assumed that God would continue to dwell in the Holy of Holies no matter how lousy they conducted their lives. The people had placed all their confidence in the naive belief that Jerusalem could never be touched by an enemy. After all, God was right there on Mount Zion as the unquenchable fire of holiness that no one would ever be able to douse.

But now God comes to declare that simplistic belief to be heresy. Solomon's Temple means nothing to God compared to having a people who really tried to live Godly, holy lives as God has asked them to do. Yes, God delighted in the Temple, too, but it could only be secondary compared to the delight he wanted to be able to take in the people themselves.

But as we've seen from earlier in Ezekiel, the people had turned away from God. Their worship had become as hollow as an empty rain barrel. Their society had become corrupt and unjust. The poor were exploited or ignored, widows and orphans were shunted aside as being of no value to the economy. Maybe they still honored Yahweh, but they had no trouble grandfathering in some pagan beliefs, too.

So God has had enough. He has turned away from Jerusalem, high-tailing it up into the mountains to the east of the city, as Ezekiel predicted already back in chapter 11. God hated the people's pop theology of anything-goes immorality and loose religious traditions. And so he was through. The Temple was desacralized. Without God living in the Temple, the Holy of Holies was no longer holy. Solomon's Temple had become just another profane edifice, having no more significance than any other building.

Jerusalem was going to go down the tubes. And when it did, the people were not to mourn. It is their own fault. They are getting what they deserve. They had better not lament these losses to God because he doesn't want to hear about it. God's own holiness left him no choice but to flee Jerusalem. This morning we talked about taking God's name in vain. We said that the essence of blasphemy is to swipe God's good name and reputation and pollute them in such a way that God looks so bad he can't get through to people anymore with his true message or with the true nature of his character.

Precisely that took place in Israel. If God stayed in Jerusalem, he would end up being associated with an unjust society. But God cannot afford to let his holy Name get smeared like that. The people of Israel chased God out. Since they never managed to generate any sincere repentance over the sins that caused God to flee, they had better not generate any mourning and sorrow once Jerusalem gets burned to the foundations.

That is the story of Ezekiel 24. It is a turning point in this book. We are now at the precise middle of this book's 48 chapters. At the end of this chapter God tells Ezekiel that following Jerusalem's destruction, Ezekiel's mouth will be opened to speak. From here on out Ezekiel will more and more proclaim messages of hope. Eventually we will get to the valley of the dry bones coming back to life. In an earlier sermon in this series we peeked ahead to chapter 40 and its message that one day God will return to Jerusalem and to his people. Hints of restoration and future hope will begin to permeate the formerly dark message of this book. Tragic though the events of chapter 24 are for both Ezekiel personally and for the people in general, out of this tragedy comes hope.

Yet none of that erases the scandal of this chapter. Can it be that God would actually arrange the death of someone like Ezekiel's wife just to make a point? As sermon illustrations go, isn't this a tad extreme?! It's one thing if Ezekiel wants to give himself a haircut and then do all kinds of zany things with his shorn locks, but the actual taking of someone's life seems radical.

But this is not the only time in the Bible when a servant of God is asked to become a kind of suffering servant. Abraham was tested by being asked to sacrifice his son, his only son, Isaac, whom he loved. Many of the other prophets in the Bible were asked to risk abuse, imprisonment, and death. Jeremiah suffered horribly. Ultimately we see Jesus as the true suffering servant of God. The apostles followed in Jesus' footsteps, nearly each one of them being stoned, jailed, beat up, falsely accused, exiled, and finally put to death.

Of course, very few people in the history of either Israel or the church were asked to suffer in exactly the way Ezekiel was. But although the specifics here may be more extreme, few discerning readers of the Bible could miss the fact that sacrifice and suffering seem to be part of the divine picture from the beginning. Yet this is a truth we want to resist.

Someone once observed that suffering is so universal and inescapable in our world that all religions must take account of it somehow. Some deny suffering exists at all, saying it is merely a state of mind which can be eradicated through re-directed thinking. Others say that suffering comes from having desires. If through mantra-driven meditation you can purge yourself of all expectations, you won't suffer. No passions, no passion; no desire for gain, no pain. What very few people want to believe, however, is that some form of salvation can come through suffering or that the way to salvation includes suffering.

But what do we say as Christians? We do not make God the author or source of all suffering, although the deepest scandal of Ezekiel 24 are those active verbs which say that God himself was the agent to snatch away Ezekiel's wife. But mostly the Bible tells us to be wary of any simplistic, black-and-white equating of God's will with this or that piece of suffering. Still, the notion that God can be involved in suffering can never be very far from our minds.

For ancient Israel, it was the experience of exile which transformed their thinking. The loss of their homeland taught Israel to take account of all suffering within the scope of the divine plan of salvation. The covenant did not necessarily rule out the specter of suffering. So in the midst of their exile experience the prophets and the people of Israel faced a choice. They could, as is common to all people who experience great dislocation, become self-preoccupied. They could indulge their sufferings, let them take over their lives, let them nix the possibility of there really being a God named Yahweh after all.

Or they could respond in a different way: they could try to take account of their hurts and grief before the face of Yahweh. Many of the great psalms of lament were written during the exile in which the people boldly and brazenly complained to God. Also, many of the great psalms of confession were written during this time as many realized they did bear some responsibility for the calamities that had come. And of course many of the psalms that plead for deliverance were written in exile, too. Complaint, confession, pleas for rescue: all were responses to suffering which brought God into the picture of their sorrows instead of letting their sorrows eclipse Yahweh.

As Walter Brueggemann has written, experiences of loss are universal. Sometimes they come to us as a direct result of our faith, as is the case for our persecuted brothers and sisters around the world. Sometimes loss comes to us the same way it comes to all people; namely, by virtue of living in a fallen world where diseases and accidents abound. But no matter how loss comes to us, our belief in the abiding presence of a good and loving God makes the experience more acute.

We cannot join those in this world who chalk up disaster to blind fate. We believe far too much in an all-seeing God to think that way. We cannot chalk it up to the randomness of cosmic chance. We believe too much in a God of providence to embrace such a cold calculating of the odds. And we cannot join even those fellow Christians who try to paste a yellow happy face over top of every tragedy by saying that this came directly from God to make you a better person. We believe too much in a God of compassion and grace to believe that he engineers all such events.

What we do believe, however, is that the cross of Jesus gives us a chance to express our grief, parse our losses, and understand the abiding presence of God's Spirit. What we can remember, or try to anyway, is that the cross bears witness to the fact that we can expect our share of sorrows in life but that we can also expect God to be with us through them.

But how we wish we would not have to countenance suffering at all. We'd rather have guarantees, would rather have our faith be like a hermetically sealed bubble to shield us from what the rest of the world endures. Deep down we're not comfortable with a God who tells Abraham to sacrifice his son and Ezekiel not to mourn his wife.

Indeed, in recent years many commentators even from within the Christian church have sought ways to re-construe the stories of Abraham and the death of Jesus. The crucifixion has been called barbaric, bloody, and the world's most famous case of child abuse. Abraham's hearing God tell him to sacrifice Isaac and Ezekiel's hearing this explanation about his wife have been chalked up to delusions--these were just mistaken impressions that got enshrined in Scripture but which we do not need to adopt for ourselves.

It is all an attempt to skirt suffering, to keep God from being too very much involved in it. But should that be our goal? The Israelites concluded that this was not the right way to proceed in the faith. That's why they developed the traditions of talking to God about suffering in ways that did not deny for a moment the real pain, grief, disorientation, and even anger that suffering brings. But they talked to God about it all and defied him to make it better, to bring a better day, to himself be the restorer of shalom.

Faith does not exist in a suffering vacuum but it nestles in alongside of suffering. It has to--in this world there is no place where faith could go to avoid it. This past summer the daughter of a friend of ours married a Jewish man. We got a copy of the wedding program, which included a kind of primer on the symbolism and terminology of a Jewish wedding ceremony. One of the things many of us have seen, probably in movies, is that portion of a Jewish wedding in which a champagne glass is wrapped in a napkin and then smashed by the feet of the bridge and groom. According to the program, the symbolism of that act is to remind Jews, even on as happy a day as a wedding, of all the suffering which the Jews have endured in history and in particular to remind them of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem way back in Ezekiel's day. Suffering permeates the Jewish faith.

But it does the same for us Christians. In this sanctuary we frequently experience great joy--we chuckle and smile over what our children sometimes do and say during the children's sermon, we beam with happiness when a baby is baptized, we are moved when we sing certain hymns, we celebrate weddings and professions of faith. But everything we do in this room is done under the towering symbol of that cross on the wall behind me. It is a reminder of Jesus' death, of God's suffering in and with Jesus, of the jagged edges of life which no one, not even God's Son, can escape.

But it's also a reminder that somehow, in ways we cannot fathom, God will abide with us and bring us to a better day. We don't seek suffering. We don't regard Christians who suffer more to be better or worse than those who suffer less. And we don't celebrate suffering per se; we don't say that it was a lovely thing that happened to Jesus on the cross or that it was a good thing that happened to Ezekiel's wife.

What we cling to, however, is that we serve a God of resurrection. At least some of the hurts we suffer in this life seem so final, seem to have the last word on everything. But Jesus says that he has the last word--that he just is the first and the last Word. And that promise, coming as it does from someone who has been to hell and back, is our hope. The last word from God in Ezekiel 24 is that the people of Israel "will know that I am Yahweh." This morning we said that "Yahweh" means nothing less than the God who is and who always will be faithful. In and through our own sufferings, it is our dearest desire to cling to just this God. Amen.