A Just Hope--November 16, 2020

 

A Just Hope--November 16, 2020

"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. 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. And I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them; I, the Lord, have spoken." [Ezekiel 34:16, 20-24]

Getting back to normal isn't enough.

Just hitting "reset" to get things the way we think they "used to be" in our memories (even if there were such a reset button) won't make things right.

And merely making things predictable after a season of chaos isn't the same as making things good or right or whole.  The farmer can predict what will happen if a fox gets loose in the henhouse, after all, but isn't good.

No, the hope has to be bigger, deeper, more complete than just, "Can't we go back to the way it used to be?" because "the way it used to be" is what got us where we are.  Our hope has to be more more than just what's familiar or expected--we are called to something truly better, something good for all, something we have never fully known but always longed for.  The people of God are called to yearn for a just hope.

Ezekiel is teaching me that again.  These words--words that we'll hear this coming Sunday as part of what the church observes as Christ the King Sunday--speak to people who have been living in the turmoil and uncertainty of exile.  They have seen their government pulled down when the Babylonians installed a puppet king, only to have the same Babylonians decide that wasn't enough, and then destroy the capital, burn the city to its foundations, and raze the Temple to the ground.  They have seen their life as a nation utterly broken.  And they are longing for hope--the possibility of a new beginning on the other side of exile.

But it's important to note what the prophet offers as hope--and what he doesn't say.  Because as much as everybody seems to just want things to go back to "the way they used to be," Ezekiel doesn't quite promise that.  He offers hope, but more than that, he insists that the future God brings will mean justice for all people, even if that makes some of them uncomfortable.  

See, as Ezekiel tells it, the problem with "the way things used to be" before the exile was that the people of God were being terrible to one another.  The strong preyed upon the weak.  The rich preyed upon the poor.  The well-fed took advantage of the hungry.  And making it worse, the powerful and prosperous used the lie that their advantage must have been God's will and a sign of God's blessing because they were doing so well.  That was the system in Israel and Judah before the exile: the strong and the rich exploiting the weak and the poor.  But because they had all just gotten used to it and assumed it was "the way things are meant to be," everybody assumed that was all there ever could be.  This must be God's plan, after all, because this is how things have always been.

I am reminded of a line from Christopher Nolan's Batman movie, "The Dark Knight." In a climactic monologue, Heath Ledger's Joker says, "No one panics when things go 'according to plan'--even if the plan is horrifying!"  And isn't that just the truth?  If we have been taught that it's normal for people to go hungry or be homeless, we won't bat an eye when a neighbor family goes without food.  If we have been taught that racism, or hatred for our neighbors, or angry threats of violence when someone doesn't get their way, are all "just facts of life," we won't try to change them or call them out when we see them.  If I accept terrible things as just "part of the plan," we won't be troubled when those terrible things happen... as long as they happen to people I don't have to think about.

And this is where Ezekiel begs to differ.  More to the point, God begs to differ.

God doesn't have it mind just to bring the people back from Babylon so they can start stepping on each other all over again.  God isn't going to force Babylon to let the exiles come home just for them to oppress their neighbors like they always have.  God's vision of a future on the other side of exile doesn't merely hit the reset button on Israel's crookedness so they can take advantage of each other or ignore the needs of their neighbors all over again.  God's vision means justice.  And that means a hope, not just for the well-fed and well-heeled who want to get back to living the jet-setting glamorous lifestyles they were used to, but a hope for the people on the margins who had been treated like they didn't matter for too long.  God's vision isn't just of a market hitting record highs, but of a community where nobody has to go hungry anymore, and nobody gets elbowed out of the way because they are seen as expendable.

That's part of the sharp (but necessary) edge to Ezekiel's message here.  God will again gather the scattered people of Israel, like a shepherd gathering a lost flock.  But God will not let the powerful be bullies any longer.  God will not let the well-fed and aggressive one push the weak or the sick or the slow sleep aside, and God will not just return the exiled people back to the old order of the day, because it was never truly good for everyone.  God's vision is of justice, not merely familiarity.

If it makes us squirm to hear God say, "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," maybe we need to ask what makes us uncomfortable... and whether we are afraid of God actually rearranging our comfortable and familiar routines.  If we don't like God telling the "fat sheep" they they can't get away with pushing others out of their way because they were weak, maybe we need to ask why that is.  And maybe we will have to decide, at long last, whether we would rather have the familiarity of "the old normal" or the promise of a hope with justice.

In these late days of a turbulent year, of course we are all longing for what is familiar, what is comfortable, and what feels like "normal."  Of course.  We want our work lives and family situations to go back to what we remember.  We want the upheaval and ugliness from a nasty election season and its aftermath to settle down.  We want our lives back.  Of course.  But it's worth remembering that there have been some folks who were living with upheaval and ugliness thrown at the for a lot longer than we have.  And there are folks whose lives have been in turmoil and chaos for a lot longer than just what the pandemic has brought.  And it's just possible that a lot of us have just accepted all that brokenness of society because we were told it was just part of "the plan" and couldn't be avoided.  And when we clamor for the old "normal" we end up saying we're OK with all that old rottenness that came with it.

The prophets keep daring us to dream with them of something different--something better--and something that rings not only of peace but of true justice, too.  Yes, God will shepherd the people and gather the out of exile, but also this same God will keep the strong sheep from butting the weak out of the flock.  God will make a new order of things, where the weak, the lowly, the injured, the lost, and the left-out are included.  And instead of being upset that God won't just reinstitute the old normal, maybe we can rejoice that God has committed to a new kind of community, where nobody goes hungry, where justice is truly done, and where all are honored.

I can only barely even imagine it... but it seems worth hoping for.

Lord God, bring your Reign of justice--even where it unsettles our expectations and shakes up what we had accepted as normal.