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The best
definition of prevenient grace I ever heard suggests that
ours is a God who goes searching for people who don't possess
the good sense to know they are lost. More than once in my
early career in youth ministry, I frantically searched an
amusement park, a campground and, in one case, the entire
south side of Chicago, for a group of kids who, upon being
found, couldn't understand "what the big deal was."
In today's text, the people of Israel knew full well "what
the big deal was." Not only were they lost, they knew
both the why and the wherefore of their lostness. They were
exiles, living in Babylon, having been carried off by their
captors. Their deportation took place under the watchful eye
(and with the full compliance) of their God. What did God
do when the enemy came? The prophet Ezekiel tells us that
God looked the other way and lifted nary a finger to help.
There is even a hint that God played a more active role in
their dispersal, given that in 36:17 Ezekiel says:
This
is what I heard the Lord say. "When the people of Israel
dwelt in their own land, their conduct was like the uncleanness
of a women in her monthly time of impurity. So I poured
out my wrath upon them, scattering them among the nations,
dispersing them through the countries according to their
conduct."
Which
is not a pleasant message to bear, let alone hear. After all,
who wants to be told that when you are on the outside looking
in, it's pretty much where you deserve to be.
Then,
at last, comes a hopeful word ... a promising word ... a counterbalancing
word ... just when you think the prophet will never get around
to saying it.
I will
deliver you, says the Lord God of Israel. I will lead you
out. I will bring you back. I will take you home. Clean
water I will sprinkle upon you. A clean heart I will place
within you. Abundant grain will stand tall in your fields.
Abundant fruit shall hang low from your trees. And you shall
once again be established in the land that I gave to your
ancestors.
The implied
message would seem to be: "Therefore, start packing,
lest you spend one more day in this godforsaken hellhole than
is absolutely necessary." Whether the Lord said exactly
that is academic. That's what the people heard.
And that's
more like it. That's what you and I want to hear. "Tell
us, Bill, that no place is so forsaken so as to be deemed
godforsaken. Tell us, Bill, that even the world's hellholes
will have their darkness splintered by the sunlight of heaven.
And tell us, Bill, that we can never be cast so far from shore
as to preclude the possibility of being reeled back in."
"Good Lord, deliver us," we cry despairingly. "And
He will," cries the prophet, responsively. "He will."
All of
which has a familiar ring to it. Isaiah said it. Jeremiah
said it. It's just taken Ezekiel a little longer to get around
to it. One has to put up with more gloom in Ezekiel on the
way to the hope. Yet, sooner or later, even Ezekiel's God
comes through.
Except
it's not all that simple. For in the midst of this long-awaited
promise, we find this strange word: "It is not for your
sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the
sake of my holy name which you have profaned among the nations."
"It
is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to
act." What does that mean? It means just what it says.
It means that while God is about to save his people, God is
going to do so, quite apart from anything having to do with
them. Which is not what we would normally expect to hear.
We would expect to hear that God loves them ... that God cares
for them ... and God's heart goes out to them in spite of
everything that may have previously come between them. But
that's not what the text says. It says that God has such a
low opinion of this people (as a result of their cheating
hearts and idolatrous ways) that, if there is to be a deliverance,
Israel will have nothing whatsoever to contribute to that
deliverance. "It is not for your sake that I am about
to act, but for the sake of my holy name."
Among
Old Testament scholars, Walter Brueggemann currently occupies
that pedestal reserved for the "fairest of the fair."
When Brueggemann comments on a passage of scripture, preachers
listen. So it is interesting to read Walter's word concerning
these lines from Ezekiel. "I regard this as one of the
most dangerous and stunning texts in the Bible, in that it
dares to set God's free and unfettered sovereignty at something
of a distance from Israel." Let me translate that for
you. What Walter is saying is that God sometimes acts for
reasons having more to do with who God is, than with who we
are.
Think
of it this way. Picture yourself as parents in a restaurant
(a very nice restaurant), trying to eat a meal with your children
(your very small children). It has been a long day, which
means that your children are tired and not behaving very well.
As their parents, you are just as tired as they are, to the
point that you are not coping very well. With each passing
minute, they (as children) are becoming more obnoxious. And
with each passing minute, you (as parents) are becoming more
embarrassed. Not really all that much is at stake for the
children. They are behaving ... well...pretty much like children.
But much is at stake for you. For everybody is watching. You'd
really like to swat them one, or find some similar means of
letting them have it. But you don't want the people at the
nearby tables to think poorly of you, to the point of concluding
that you who birthed these children, can't control them. So
you become the very models of "parental patience"
(given your concern for the opinions of those who may be looking
on).
This is
pretty much what Ezekiel says happened to God. Israel had
tried and exhausted God's patience, having thrown one sufficiently
long tantrum, until even God could take it no longer. What
concerns the prophet is that even God may have a breaking
point, and that the one who is said to be "slow to anger,"
may (nonetheless) have a flash point to that anger. "What
happens," Ezekiel seems to wonder, "when even God's
compassion runs dry ... when, having gone so many extra miles,
He find himself reluctant to go one mile more? What then?"
Then (Ezekiel
says) Israel's last hope ... our last hope ... the only hope
left ... .is that God will be sufficiently concerned with
his reputation that He will act to preserve his good name,
even if God has long-since passed the point of worrying about
ours. "I am going to deliver you," says God, "not
because of you, but because of me ... so that the nations
will see that I am God, and will know that it takes a very
great God to love a people like you."
Now that
notion probably bothers many of you. I know it bothers me.
What's more, I know why. First, it bothers us because we have
assumed that, at the core of his nature, ours is a rather
mushy God. To whatever degree we have slipped into the habit
of seeing God in grandfatherly imagery, such imagery has less
to do with our belief in a God who is old, than in a God who
is soft. Grandfathers, in the main, are more inclined to be
soft than stern. And the notion of "sternness" (which
is laced throughout Ezekiel's writing, not to mention the
entirety of prophetic literature) is hard to square with the
notion of "softness." Meaning that when push comes
to shove, we will always choose soft over stern. We'll opt
(every time) for the Charmin God ... squeezably soft. And
there's much to be said for a pliable God ... easier to relate
to ... easier to be in touch with ... and easier to be loved
by.
But the
word "soft" means absolutely nothing until it is
measured against (and balanced by) something "hard"
... something that neither yields nor bends. Some years ago,
when my wife was working for a community agency known as Farmington
Youth Assistance, she sponsored a lecture by a nationally-acclaimed
parenting guru named Pat Hurley (a most insightful and funny
man). As I remember it, the title of his talk was: "How
to Raise Your Parents."
Marvelous
lecture. Lots of kids in the audience. Lots of parents, too.
Pat Hurley had the kids in the palm of his hand. At one point,
he was talking about two different voices that parents employ
to say the same simple word ... the word being "no."
One voice says "no" in a way that says: "It's
not negotiable. It's not discussible. Don't moan, groan, whine,
beg, make a face, throw a tantrum, or badger me 30 minutes
from now with 17 additional arguments. It's going to be `no'
then, just as it's `no' now." But the other parental
voice says "no" as if to say: "But if you want
to take a shot at changing my mind, be my guest." Then,
Pat Hurley turned to the kids and said: "Raise your hands
if you can tell the difference between yours parents' `no's.'"
And virtually every hand of every kid in the room shot up.
Every
home has a place for both kinds of "no's." Love
renegotiates some things, while drawing the line at others.
So, one suspects, does God. Soft and stern. We surrender either
at our peril.
While
I was thinking about softness and hardness ... and the degree
to which they could co-exist in the same God ... I spent an
evening with a dear friend of mine who was in the process
of babysitting his grandchildren. My friend's grandchildren
are great kids. And he loves being their granddad. The role
fits him like a glove. I hope, someday, to be half as good.
But you need to know that his grandkids are both boys, ages
two and a half and three and a half. And, as the saying goes,
they are "all boy." This means there are times when
he wears out before they do. Which is partially his fault,
given that he is the one who heats them up, only to wonder
why he has trouble cooling them down.
But the
bigger difficulty consists in the fact that they can't conceive
of their grandfather as having a stern side. To them, every
"no" is negotiable. Meaning that they push the limits
until they exhaust themselves in the effort ... or until he
gives them back to their mother ... his daughter. We are talking
about the same daughter who knows he has a stern and inflexible
side, and was smart enough (in her growing up years) so as
not to provoke him to demonstrate it. Remembering those early
days with his daughter, he said: "All I had to do was
look at her and she knew I'd had enough."
I was
talking about all of this with my own daughter (who I never
felt much of a need to discipline). Whereupon she said: "That's
because I knew 'the look.' And when, at some point in the
discussion I got 'the look,' I knew not to push things any
further." Today, I'm not sure I could reproduce "the
look." But it must have been pretty effective. I trust
that my daughter loves me as much for "the look"
as for my mushy malleability (which was, more often than not,
my true fatherly nature).
Our hope,
says Ezekiel, is not rooted in the fact that God will always
bend to us, but that God will be true to himself. Which bothers
us, because it strikes at the notion that God is a rather
mushy deity. But it also bothers us because (down deep) we
like to think of ourselves as being rather nice people. Why
wouldn't God want to deliver us? How could He become fed up
with us? After all, aren't we doing the best we can?
One of
the nice things about reading as much Bible in any given week
as I do, is that it forces me to read a lot of stuff I would
skip over, were I merely reading the Bible in search of sermon
material. One of scripture's recurring themes that I would
just as soon skip is the theme of divine depression over our
sorry performance. In no small number of places, God is depicted
as being sorry that He made us, even to the point of flirting
with the notion of scrapping the whole enterprise and writing
us off as a noble experiment, gone sour.
I don't
know what to do with all those passages. But I am forced to
conclude that God may sometimes feel that way. It's not (I
suppose) that we're so bad, but that we promise so much while
delivering so little. Were we born losers, God could probably
take it better. But I doubt that's how He sees us. I think
He sees us as Mike Ilitch does the Tigers, possessing so many
good pieces, yet unable to put them together to the point
of delivery.
Not that
we lack for excuses. All of us have them. And when we run
out of them, we lay the rest of our problems off against our
nature. "Don't look at us," we say, "that's
just who we are." I hear that phrase being used over
and over again to explain, excuse and rationalize some of
the stupidest behaviors. But it works. For if I am willing
to understand that "you are just who you are," then
maybe you'll understand that "I am who I am," and
neither of us will ask the other to be "other" or
"better." So it's quite easy for me to say how nice
I find you to be, trusting that you will say the same about
me. Yet, is ours the ultimate judgment that matters?
Robert
Coles of Harvard (who writes so beautifully of what life is
like on the boundary where Christianity meets psychiatry)
tells of a particularly troubling patient in his early years
of clinical practice. His client was a woman of 25, a graduate
student in literature, who seemed to be suffering from a hard-to-pin-down
mixture of guilt and remorse. Upon concluding that her feelings
of dis-ease were somehow connected to a sexual liaison with
her professor, Coles began leading her toward some internal
act of catharsis and cleansing. In doing so, he focused the
therapy on the specific person of the professor, only to have
the young woman keep insisting that the professor was only
one piece of the problem, and that (in her own words), "there
is someone else who needs to be mentioned."
After
exhausting all the possibilities as to who that suddenly-significant-someone-else
might be, Coles changed the subject, only to notice that a
strange new word surfaced in her conversation. That word was
"transgression." Suddenly Coles knew the identity
of the "someone else who needed to be mentioned."
So he planted the suggestion very softly, leading her to acknowledge:
"Yes, I will probably never be able to come to terms
with myself until I come to terms with God, whose judgment
matters more to me than my own. It's not how I look at my
affair that matters, but how God looks at it."
I find
myself wondering if any of us even care how God looks at our
affairs ... or at us. And were we to really ponder that question,
might we be led to conclude (with Ezekiel) that if God acts
to deliver us, it will have to be because of some graceful
quirk in his nature, rather than some clear and obvious merit
in ours.
There's
an old chestnut of a story, remaking the rounds of late. It
concerns a minister who died, met Peter at the gate, and learned
that he needed 100 points to get in.
"After
all, I was a minister for 47 years," the man said.
"That's
nice," said Peter. "We'll count that as one point."
"I
visited shut-ins every chance I got."
"Shut-ins.
One point."
"I
worked with junior high youth in every one of my churches."
"Junior
highs. One point."
"And
many were the times I set up chairs and tables, and even
mopped the church floors when nobody showed up to help."
"Chairs
and mops. One point. Making four points. Leaving 96 points."
"Ninety
six points? Save for the grace of God, I don't stand a chance."
"Grace
of God. Ninety six points. Come on in."
My friends,
let the word go out to the nations that it takes a very great
God to love a people like us.
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