The Divine Escape--November 6, 2020
"Then the glory of the LORD went out from the threshold of the house and stopped above the cherubim. The cherubim lifted up their wings and rose up from the earth in my sight as they went out with the wheels beside them. They stopped at the entrance of the east gate of the house of the LORD; and the glory of the God of Israel was above them. These were the living creatures that I saw underneath the God of Israel by the river Chebar; and I knew that they were cherubim...." [Ezekiel 10:18-20]
What do you do when the box you made to contain God gets smashed beyond repair?
There are, as far as I can see it, really only three options: you can try in vain to trap God and put the divine once again in a new cage; you can despair that God has gotten out of your clutches and is beyond your ability to control; or you can rejoice that God is free to go wherever God's presence is needed.
The hard lesson that God's people have to keep learning is that even though we keep trying the first two options, only the third way holds the truth. God has never been stuck inside the structures we made to hold the Almighty, and it turns out to be good news that God can't be destroyed when our God-boxes get blown apart.
This insight, it turns out, is Ezekiel's gift to us. He tells us his own story of realizing that the boxes we make for God, even with the best of intentions, can never be strong enough to hold God down--and in the end, what we need is a God who can go with us into the places of uncertainty and anxiety, rather than being trapped beneath the wreckage of a rubble pile. A gilded cage is still a cage, as they say, and God will not stay put inside the structures we make to keep God safe, controlled, and contained.
Follow me for a moment. In the very opening words of the book of Ezekiel, the mystic-minded prophet tells us a dream he's had where God shows up when he is in exile. Ezekiel had been a priest in the Jerusalem Temple, but had been carried away by the Babylonians into exile in one of the waves of conquest that happened in the late days of the kingdom of Judah. And there in exile, by the river Chebar, Ezekiel saw God's "glory" appear as a sort of moving presence, with strange heavenly creatures surrounding a complicated contraption with wheels inside of wheels that could go in any direction. It's a strange vision, and it's hard to picture what Ezekiel saw and tried to put into words (words we then have to translate from Hebrew into English and then picture in our own minds' eyes), but the gist seems to be that even hundreds of miles away from home, God showed up and appeared to Ezekiel in exile.
Well, then a few chapters later, Ezekiel tells us about another vision--the one in the verses above. I've quoted just a few verses from a longer description (because honestly, it's super easy to get lost in the weeds with the outlandish and other-worldly details of wheels full of eyes and strange creatures with many faces), but the gist, if you'll trust me, is that the prophet sees God's glory rise up out of the Temple in Jerusalem--just in the nick of time before the Babylonians came along and knocked it to the ground--and travel in this strange God-mobile to go out east... in the direction of Babylon. In other words, Ezekiel saw a vision of God's presence leaving the old building where the people thought God lived, before the building was razed by the invaders they assumed were the enemy, the Babylonians. And rather than God "beaming up" into heaven to stay safe while all the dust settled back on earth, instead, Ezekiel sees God's glory heading into Babylon, to be with the people who were living in exile there.
This was a a really big deal. It was earth-shattering theology in Ezekiel's day, because the conventional wisdom of the day was that gods lived in boxes, and whoever controlled the boxes controlled the gods. The Babylonians had their pantheon of gods and goddess (with names like Marduk and Nebo), and the people of Judah and Israel had Yahweh, the God they believed had gone with them since the days of slavery in Egypt. The only thing was, the people of Judah had gotten sloppy and believed that God was contained in the structures they built. The thinking was something like this: "We built this lovely temple for God, and in return, God backs the authority of our king and the king's policy agenda, and God will protect our nation from enemies, and certainly God will protect the capital city of Jerusalem where God's Temple is, and God of course wouldn't let anything happen to the Temple itself... because, you know, God wouldn't want the divine reputation to look weak." The pop theology that the palace endorsed said that God had chosen the king, and that God would never let the temple or the palace or the capital be destroyed, because of course that would make God look weak... like a loser... or defeated... and nobody could imagine that from any respectable deity. The conventional wisdom also assumed that in a conflict, whichever side won had the stronger god--so if you had a fight between two sides, the winner must have God on their side, and the loser must not.
Ezekiel's vision blows all of that up. It's really no wonder the prophets kept getting stoned to death, run out of town, or sawn in half--because they were always taking the conventional thinking and smashing it to bits. What God showed to Ezekiel was that God wasn't stuck in the Temple when the Babylonians came along, so the God of Israel wasn't destroyed or crushed or killed or even weakened when the Babylonians came and knocked it all down. The people had made the mistake of thinking that structure they built could contain God--and when the Babylonian armies came with their wrecking balls and battering rams, God just made it clear that God wasn't under house-arrest. God up and got out of the Temple before the Babylonians ever came--in order to go to be with the people in exile in Babylon.
Ok, so what? Here we are, like twenty-five centuries and change after Ezekiel's bizarre fever-dreams, and we all think we know better now. We all say we "know" that God doesn't live inside a Temple somewhere, or even in all of our many church buildings. So we think that we have learned all that this passage has to tell us, because we modern Respectable Religious folks know so much better now. Except the trouble is that we keep building all sorts of other structures that we think will at last contain God, and we don't realize we're doing the same thing all over again. We build these structures out of words and ideas as much as bricks and stones these days, but don't doubt that we still fall for the same old thinking that God is obligated to stay put within the boundaries and spaces we have created. We do it in our denominational thinking when we imagine that only "My Kind of Church" has the real truth about God, and that our neighbors down the street have it all wrong. Or we do it with national boundaries when we imagine that God is partial to American or American ideals or interests (and, boy, we do a bang-up job when we yank that verse from 2 Chronicles 7 about "if my people who are called by my name will turn to me..." and pretend it has anything to do with the United States in the 21st century--because, that is decidedly NOT what what is about, and we are abusing scripture when we share flag-draped memes with that verse as a way of ginning up support for our particular political agendas). And to be honest, we keep doing the same nonsense with political parties, too, when we imagine that God has to fit into one of our political party categories, and that therefore God must defend the interests, the platforms, or the candidates of the party we have pegged is "God's party." None of those these are true.
Let me say that again clearly and loudly, for the folks in the back: God does not back your or my candidate, and God does not back any of our countries or political parties. Neither does God need to defend any party, candidate, church denomination, nation, or institution, in order to protect the divine reputation or preserve the structures we have made for God to live in. And in fact, it seems over and over again, at the moment when we think God has to fit inside the nicely decorated box we have made for the divine, that is precisely the time when God gets up out of the temple, church, structure, institution, or container we have made for God (you know, to keep God safe, we always tell ourselves), and God gets loose before something comes to smash the box we built.
Because something always does. The boxes we make for God never last. The Temple in Jerusalem got smashed to the ground by the Babylonians in Ezekiel's time, and then after the people rebuilt it, the Romans came and smashed the second one a generation after Jesus' time. And every time Respectable Religious people come along and say that God "has to" defend some other structure we have made--from churches and denominations to political parties and candidates--God seems to especially chafe at our arrogance, gets the old cherub-powered God-mobile, and shakes free of the constraints we want to put on God. God refuses to stay put inside the God-boxes we build. Ezekiel wants to make that clear, and so he uses as vivid and attention-getting a set of images as he can dream up to convey that to us.
But there is deeply good news to hear in that word, too. While it can be uncomfortable to have to face the truth that God isn't required to do the things we want or expect or assume God should do, it really turns out to be good news that the Almighty doesn't have to stay inside the God-boxes we build. That's because it means God is free to actually show up where we need God. For Ezekiel, it was scandalous at first to say that God didn't owe it to anybody to keep the Temple from being destroyed, or to support the king when the Babylonians took him prisoner, or to keep the capital from being destroyed. Everybody lived in a system that was built on the assumption that God had chosen the king, and therefore that God could not let anything bad happen to the king... and that God would not let the king's palace or city or administration be pulled down. But Ezekiel's vision showed the people that God had never been tethered to a place... or to any particular royal administration... or even to a temple, a city, or a piece of ground. God was always free to slip the leash and go wherever God blessedly-well-pleased to go... included to join the people in exile.
And that's where this surprising claim about God is revealed to be Gospel good news--because God can't be chained up like a dog to the post in the back yard, God is free to meet the people who are taken into captivity and dwell among them. God doesn't get destroyed when the God-box gets smashed open, and beyond that, God is free to be present where we are, and wherever we go. God always was free--we just kept imagining that God had to stay where we dictated.
This is a hard word for us, perhaps, more than two and a half millennia after Ezekiel's time, but it is good news for us if we dare to recognize it as such. It means that God is free to be with us and for us and among us, even when the structures we had built our lives on get shaken to their core, and even when it's our own rottenness and sin that have landed us in trouble. A god who has to stay in the box we humans build is going to get smooshed when the box collapses. But the living God never had to stay inside the structures we build, and so when the God-box breaks apart, there has already been a divine escape. God is already free to show up where we need God to be, even if that's not back where we expected God to be.
It may be worth the time and humbling it will cost us to look at where each of us has been trying to tether God into a box, so that we can open our hands. And when we do that, we discover that God was never stuck inside our grip in the first place, but rather has always been free to stay among us, and also free to go on ahead of us, wherever the next leg of life's journey will take us.
What are some of the ways each of us has been trying to stick God in a box... and what might it mean to admit that God is something of a Houdini when it comes to slipping the handcuffs and strait-jackets we keep trying to hold God in? Maybe today's the day to let go of the box, because God's not in it.
Lord God, as you showed to your prophets ages ago, speak to us again and help us to let go of the constraints we try to put you in, so that we will see you always have been free, and you choose to use your freedom to go with us.
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