God Picks Losers

God Picks Losers--November 27. 2017

"For thus says the Lord GOD: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out.... I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord GOD.  I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.  As for you, my flock, thus says the Lord GOD: I shall judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and goats: Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet? And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have fouled with your feet?  Therefore, thus says the Lord GOD to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep. I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd." [Ezekiel 34:11, 15-23]

I grew up kind of assuming that God doesn't really take sides in much in life.  Or at least, I figured, if God had a "side," you would know it by who looked like a "winner" at the moment.

After all, the pro football players all "thanked Jesus" for their wins, of course after having prayed to this same Jesus before the game to "get" the win, so pre-teen Me figured that was basically how the universe worked.  That is, I assumed you could tell where God's chips were by looking at who was stronger, faster, richer--and who won the game. 

How did God want the game to go?  Ah, well, God must have been backing the winning team. 

Which companies did God want to succeed on the stock market?  Clearly, the ones that closed higher today, dummy!

Whom did God want to win as prime minister in such and such a country on the evening news?  Obviously, whoever won the election was God's choice--that's how it works... right?

Well, I'll give this much to my childhood self: that sure made for a simple kind of theology.  It was basically backdated religious meteorology, after all.  What did God want the weather to be yesterday?  I guess, whatever the weather was yesterday.  Must be the same with the sports page and the headlines, too: whatever happened, must have been the way God wished for it to happen.  And whoever won in yesterday's contests must have been God's choice.

Except... that decidedly not how the Scriptures talk about things.  Honestly.

It's not just here in this passage in Ezekiel, but throughout the record of the Old and New Testaments, God... well, there's no polite way to say this: God picks losers.  God gets a reputation--and sort of wears it proudly--for being the defender of "the orphan, the widow, and the foreigner [sometimes translated "alien" or "stranger"]" in the Bible, and those are all people who are decidedly without a lot in the "win" column.  God chooses a band of slaves to set free.  God sometimes grants them victory... and sometimes allows them to be defeated.  God allows them to be carried off into exile--even when that looked in the ancient world like the defeated, exiled country's god or gods must have been destroyed by the victor nation's pantheon of deities.  That is to say, throughout the Bible, the God we meet in its pages is well aware that picking losers gets God labeled a "loser," too, sometimes--and yet God picks 'em, anyway.  God wades into the mess, instead of staying up at a distance to only take credit for the wins.

That blows apart my childish theology that said, "You know who God wanted to win because they won."  It says that the God of the Scriptures is willing, and in fact makes a sort of reputation on, specially attending to the ones who didn't win, who were overlooked, who were stepped on, forgotten, or shoved out of the way.  God decidedly isn't just underwriting the ones who win the day.

Now, at one level, I suppose you have to wrestle with the question of why or how things happen that are not God's will.  And certainly over the centuries, there have been traditions, writers, pastors, and theologians who are a lot less comfortable with saying that things happen that run counter to GOD'S WILL.  After all, they say, one of the defining qualities of God--perhaps, they say, the ultimate defining character of God--is that God is sovereign, and God makes happen what God wants to happen.  And I get that point... but then it also means painting yourself into the corner of saying that God picked Hitler for the German chancellorship in 1933, or that God wished for the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, or that God wanted hundred of people in prayer to be killed in a mosque in Egypt last week, by other people who wave the flag of ISIS.  If you really want to push the idea that God's sovereignty means saying whoever won the football game was God's favorite (which is easy to do when it's the home team that's headed to championship), you have to take with it the baggage of saying every win was backed by God. 

And here's the rub--even if you are willing to go out on that limb for the sake of internal consistency with your line of argument, even if you are willing to ride that train of thought all the way off a logical cliff, it ain't the way the Bible actually talks about God.  And this is the thing that keeps poking at me, not only from here in Ezekiel, but from throughout the Scriptures throughout.  Looking to yesterday's scores to declare whom God must have wanted to win isn't the faith of the Old and New Testaments--it's really more of a laissez-faire free-market deism, where God is the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith.  It gives the neat and tidy answer of saying, "Whoever won the horse race was the one God wanted to win," but it also means saying that God can't be the God of the orphan, the widow, and the foreigner, because they weren't "winners" on any page of the paper.

Instead, the Scriptures--like this passage from Ezekiel in particular--show a God who does in fact take sides, at least in some matters, but not as the de facto endorsement of whoever won.   If anything, the God to whom Ezekiel bears witness specifically is looking out for those who got shoved out of line, pushed back, and left behind.  And God threatens "justice" for those who have been butting others out and trampling on their grass.  The prophet puts it with characteristic bluntness:  "I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy."  Yeah, the God of the Bible takes sides, in a manner of speaking, but it ain't for the self-appointed "winners."  God enters into the mess and picks losers.

Like I say, for much of my life, my default assumption was that the God who picked winning football teams must also pick winners everywhere else, and that if you were wealthy, it must be a sign that God was rewarding you, and that lack of wealth must have been God's punishment. It all made neat and tidy sense--you could read the listing of top gains on the Dow Jones and figure out which companies God "wanted" to succeed yesterday....

But that's just not how Ezekiel, or any of the other prophets, really, see things.  They say instead that the living God reserves the right to bind up and strengthen the ones written off as losers by the world, and that God reserves the right to serve up a hot dish of "justice" for the arrogant and overfilled.  It's not just here in Ezekiel--it's Hannah's song in the book of Samuel about how God raises up the poor and sends the well-fed off to work for a change, and it's Mary's song before Jesus is born about how God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty.  It's the God of the Exodus saying "NO" to Pharaoh's claim that he is the greatest and biggest winner, and instead taking the side of a band of Hebrew slaves.  It's the God of the Exile being willing to look like a loser versus the gods of Babylon for the sake getting through to the covenant people.  It's the God of the cross who is willing to get nailed between thieves while Rome smiled proudly, thinking it had proven its "winner" status by crucifying another threat to its rule. The God of the Bible not only picks losers, but chooses to be a loser, for the sake of being with us... a world full of, well, losers. 

Sure God loves the whole flock, even the stinkers, but notice: instead of God just saying, "I like ALL the sheep," sometimes, God deliberately says, "I'm siding with the ones who got stepped on, pushed back, and squashed by the other bullying sheep," because those are the ones who need it said.  God picks losers.

I will confess that it was something of a rude awakening in my own walk of faith to read--to actually read--passages like Ezekiel here, or the Magnificat, or the Beatitudes, or any of a thousand other places in the Scriptures--and to see that my day-late weather-report theology and my laissez-faire free-market deism were simply not the way the Bible actually depicts the living God.  It is hard breaking out of the neat and tidy system that simply slaps a halo on whoever has the winner's crown.  

But it is deeply good news for all of us losers... for all the times we have been last, or felt lost, or seemed left behind.  And moreover, it is good news still for all those who are still losers, who are told they do not matter, who are elbowed out of the way, whose pasture grass gets trampled, and who have been tripped up by the strong and powerful, or made to be the scapegoats for some bully with a loud voice.  

The God for whom Ezekiel doesn't just endorse the list of winners from yesterday's news.  The God of the Scriptures takes the much messier step of picking losers... thank God.

Lord God, break open our neat and tidy systems of thinking, to allow that you have come to the aid of the weak and lowly, whether that is us, or someone else today.