Sermon 9/27/2020 “Turn, and live”
Preacher: Jo J. Belser
Location: Church of the Resurrection at VTS in Alexandria, VA
Text: Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32
Day: 17Pentecost, Proper 21, Year A, during a pandemic
A colleague once told of hearing his two-year-old son crying in his bedroom, so he went in to see what the matter was. His four-year-old daughter was also there, so he asked her, “What’s the matter with Alex?” His daughter replied, “He hit his head.” So my colleague asked, “On what?” To which Lynn pointed to a plastic bat on the floor. Suspecting the answer, my colleague asked, “How did that happen?” to which his daughter replied, “I was holding it and Alex ran into it.”
I’ll bet God hears stories like this all the time. For instance, God asked Adam, “Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” and Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent (Gen. 3:11-13). And later, God said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” And Cain replied, “I don’t know: am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain didn’t mention having murdered his brother and keeping his brother’s corpse in the ground at his feet (Gen. 4:8-10). Even Moses, who spoke to God face-to-face, shifted blame onto others for his failure to
trust God. The people had been thirsty, so God told Moses to speak to a rock. But Moses hadn’t trusted that speaking would be enough, so struck the rock with his staff instead, for which God had told him he wouldn’t be able to enter the Promised Land (Num. 20:2-12). Much later, at the edge of the Promised Land, Moses explained to the people he couldn’t get to go with them. Moses told them, “It’s because of you, that God is angry with me” (Deut. 3:26).
I could go on, but you get the point: We blame others for our failures. Today’s readings all focus our attention on the need to take responsibility for our actions so we can turn, and live.
In our first lesson, for example, the leaders of Judah were in exile in Babylon, after the second wave of deportations but before the Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed. Among the exiles was a priest from Jerusalem named Ezekiel who God had called as a prophet while in exile. And God brought to Ezekiel’s attention that a whole lot of his fellow exiles in Babylon were avoiding their responsibility for the defeat of their nation. The younger generations were saying a popular proverb, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” In other words, we are exiled due to our parents’ sins. And then they blamed God for the unfairness of their being punished for the sins of their parents. As if they weren’t complicit in failing to amend their ways. As if God hadn’t warned them—all of them—over and over.
But the younger generations weren’t the only ones quoting the sour grapes proverb. The older generations were saying it, also, blaming their parents and complaining that God was unfair to blame them for the downfall of their nation.
Now, we know the misdeeds of parents can negatively affect their children and even their children’s children, both directly through genes and epigenomes and indirectly through copying the behaviors of their elders. But here God said, “I, God, will hold you each responsible for your own sins, not the sins of others.”
God was angry and sad. He had warned the people many times and they had not paid attention. Even now, in exile, they still were not acknowledging their own failure to turn and live, their failure to repent and amend their ways.
The prophet Jeremiah, who lived at the same time as Ezekiel but was in Jerusalem instead of Babylon, made the same observation about the “sour grapes” proverb. Apparently, the people still in Jerusalem fearing the city’s downfall and destruction of the Temple blamed others for the coming loss of their nation. Like Ezekiel, Jeremiah told the people that God forbid them from using this excuse any longer. Jeremiah (31:30) prophesied, “… all shall die for their own sins…”
Ezekiel said the same thing, that God promised to hold only the sinner accountable for his or her own sin. It was the people who claimed otherwise. The “blame game” would not work with God.
Like the people in exile in Babylon, today we have the same tendency to deny responsibility. We smoke for decades and get lung cancer but blame the tobacco companies. We blame politics for major weather disasters while continuing to create a huge carbon footprint. We burn our mouths on the hot coffee we order and blame those who sold us the coffee for not warning us that hot coffee is hot.
The Good News is that God has already provided a way out of the blame game. God told the exiles to turn away from their sins and do what was lawful and right. He said if they turned from their sins that would live. The solution is just that simple—not necessarily easy, but simple. Consider our actions. Repent. Turn away from sin and stop blaming others.
The Israelites in Babylon did exactly that. They repented and God convinced their conqueror to let the people go home after only 70 years away. In the book of Nehemiah, we learn that when the people returned home, they also repented as a people of the sins of their ancestors, just as they had repented of their own sins. The current generation knew they must rid themselves of their corporate sin, their collective sin, if they were to begin anew as God’s people.
By then, most of those who returned home had been born during the exile, so they really did repent of the sins of their ancestors. The people who returned had gotten themselves a new heart and a new spirit, as God had instructed.
I wonder how we will apply this gospel today. For example, will we continue to enjoy the benefits of race-based privilege while denying we are complicit in continuing a system of advantage at the expense of others? Or will we get ourselves a new heart and a new spirit by getting honest with ourselves about the part we play in perpetuating this sin and repent of it? And will we repent on behalf of our ancestors, too, so we can begin anew?
Or maybe we will sink to a whole new level of denial by denying that sin even exists or that we ourselves sin. “Repent, turn, and live. Thus says the Lord.”
