This was delivered July 8, 2018, at First Presbyterian Church in St. Cloud, MN, a city blessed with a significant number of refugees from Somalia and South Sudan. I had to rewrite a significant portion of this text (including the title) the night before, as earlier that day I enjoyed a delightful encounter in a local park near the church. As usual, I employed Paul Scott Wilson’s “Four Pages” method of homiletical preparation.
Sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time), Year B
Ezekiel 2:1-5; Mark 6:1-13
I
OUR BAD NEWS
We are not where we should be.
Let me repeat that: We are not where we should be.
While I cannot speak for each person in this congregation, I would be surprised to learn if there is someone here who does not resonate with this statement in some respect. We are not where we should be. That may be a literal statement; perhaps you do not feel that you are in the right place geographically. Just this week the St. Cloud Times ran a piece about the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who estimates that—at this moment—68.5 million people in the world have been forced to leave their homes. 68.5 million—that is staggering. For many people, then, this is a literal statement: we are not where we should be. But even if you feel that your literal place in this world is fine, perhaps this is how you feel spiritually—that your spiritual life is not where it should be. Or morally or ethically, perhaps you feel burdened by poor choices and actions, and that you are not where you should be morally. Perhaps you’ve treated someone unfairly, or harbored resentment, or—you can fill in the blank. Perhaps life has dealt you some cards leaving you feel that, through no fault of your own, you are not where you should be. Health. Finances. Unemployment or underemployment. In relationships with others. We are not where we should be.
And to take this statement further, we may apply it to our collective lives. Not just as individuals are we not where we should be, but as a church—both local and global. We here at First Presbyterian are not where we should be. Perhaps we should be further along with the development of the building. Perhaps we should be better about outreach to the community. We could be better about providing this or that ministry. We are not where we should be. And it can apply to the larger church, Presbyterian or otherwise. Many congregations are shrinking. Churches are closing. Denominations are splitting. If you’re politically conservative, the church is too liberal. If you’re politically liberal, the church is too conservative. We are not where we should be.
This is the premise of the idea of utopia, the perfect paradise. That term utopia in Greek literally means no-place, communicating the idea that that place where we should be is not here.
It’s an interesting metaphor for life, isn’t it? This geographical or topographical metaphor in which place has an ought: We ought to be there; we ought not to be here. We can feel out-of-place literally, but we can also have that same sense of geographical inappropriateness in so many other ways of life.
II
BIBLICAL BAD NEWS
Now, the Bible has a curious way of dealing with this sense of not being in the right place.
Let’s take our first reading from Ezekiel, for instance. Ezekiel was not where he was supposed to be. Ezekiel was a Zadokite priest, which meant that he was a descendent of Zadok, who had been a significant priest in the history of Israel. Zadok was the priest who coronated King Solomon, and thereafter Zadok’s descendants had a particular authority as the priestly class in Israel. And this priestly class, for generations after Zadok, maintained a close relationship to the monarchy. So when the Babylonian empire took over the region and exiled the royal family so that the Babylonians could install a vassal king who would be loyal to the empire, they also put the Zadokite priests and their families into exile as well.
Now with historical hindsight, we know that just a few years later, after even the vassal king rebelled, the Babylonians took the entire nation into exile—hence the term Babylonian exile. But there was a period of about ten years where only the royal family and the priestly family was kept out of Jerusalem to live closer to the imperial capital city of Babylon.
And it is here that we find Ezekiel in the opening chapters of the book that bears his name. Later chapters of that book reflect Ezekiel’s life and ministry once the entire nation was in exile, but here we find him, his family, and the royal family far away from where they should be.
Ezekiel should have been in Jerusalem—in fact, in the temple in Jerusalem, the house of God. Ezekiel should have been in God’s very house. And although we tend to think of God as everywhere today, this was not immediately self-evident in the ancient near east. To be away from your homeland was not only to be away from your people; it was away from your god.
But it is there in exile that Ezekiel is called by God to be not just a priest, but a prophet. And virtually all of the prophets in the Bible have what scholars call a call narrative—a story of the moment in time that they received a special call from God to be a prophet. We see this at the beginning of Samuel’s career, and toward the beginning of the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah. (The burning bush episode is Moses’s call narrative.) So here in today’s passage we hear Ezekiel being similarly called to be a prophet.
And in that call narrative, Ezekiel learns that he is to deliver a message to the people of Israel, whom the text calls a nation of rebels. We hear the Lord say to Ezekiel that they are impudent, stubborn, and a rebellious house.
Of course the course of history has taught us to be careful in how we Christians read passages like this. We cannot read this in such a way that we think less of Jews as a people. There is a much larger context in which the Bible’s criticism of Jewish people is set, and we absolutely cannot make racial or ethnic generalizations. That is not where the text should lead us.
What we can glean from the Lord’s criticism of Israel here in Ezekiel’s call narrative, however, is this: that Israel, metaphorically speaking, was not where it should have been. And the later chapters of Ezekiel show how this geographical metaphor becomes literal—in exile, the people of Israel joined Ezekiel in not being where they were supposed to be. But even before the exile, here, in this morning’s reading, we learn that—as a rebellious house—the people needed a prophet to tell them: We are just not where we should be.
III
BIBLICAL GOOD NEWS
So what is the good news here? As Ezekiel is called by God to be a prophet, it quickly becomes evident that, although Ezekiel is not where he should be, God is. And God is not just far away, but God is there—with Ezekiel, in exile.
If we look to our gospel reading, we see this geographical theme developed further. Of course it’s kind of odd to say that Jesus was not where he was supposed to be, but we do see him in a kind of exile. There he is, in his own hometown, finding himself unwelcome. “Who does this guy think he is?” they said. “What, he learns a few magic tricks and thinks he has religious authority? We knew him when he was just in diapers.” Even in his own hometown, Jesus is not where he was supposed to be.
Then in the next paragraph, we see Jesus then commission the twelve disciples. He delivers a kind of call narrative, in fact, as he instructs the twelve disciples to go out into other villages likewise to heal and to teach. But, he warns, there will be places that will not accept them. The disciples will also find that they are not where they are supposed to be.
But, of course, it’s okay. That’s the sense the text gives us. Even though Jesus and the disciples are not where they are supposed to be, they should just wipe the dust from their feet and move on. Why does it not matter? Because the power of God is there with them. The word of God is there with them. And, indeed, great things happen. The text says that, like Jesus, they cast out demons and cured the sick. They were not where they should be, but God was—and God was there with them.
IV
OUR GOOD NEWS
That same deconstruction of the geographical metaphor applies to us today. Or, put more simply, we are not where we should be, but God is—and God is here with us. We are not where we should be, but it’s okay. The power of God is with us. The word of God is with us.
Yesterday we had some dear friends from out-of-town visiting with us, and it was such a beautiful day we decided to go to Lake George and fly kites. My parents had given us some very nice cloth kites, and with such a clear and breezy day, we thought it was the perfect opportunity. Within minutes of getting there, however, it was a somewhat entertaining scene. One kid was running across the field, the kite bumping on the ground, and pieces of it coming apart, so then we’re searching the grass for these thin plastic rods. One of our friends spent far too much time trying to untangle a knotted kite string that we probably should have just cut and retied. And we could not get these kites up in the air. Well, I finally managed to get one a few feet up in the air when another boy, a complete stranger, came over to watch and be a part of the action. And he said, “We used to fly these a lot back in Africa. But these are nice. We just made them out of plastic bags and sticks.”
So I asked him where he had been in Africa, as I was curious which country he had come from. Without hesitation, he answered, “Oh, a refugee camp. Yeah, we flew kites all the time there.”
“Well, you must be pretty good at this, then,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “Could I try?”
So I handed him the kite and then another of our children needed help, so I quickly went over to do something else, but within minutes I looked up and that kid, the one I’d handed the kite to, he had that thing up—it looked like it was a quarter-mile up in the sky. If you were anywhere in Stearns or Benton County yesterday you probably could have looked up and seen that kite. It was impressive.
And while this young boy was standing there, nonchalantly controlling this kite with expert skill, he walked over and began to teach our kids, and our friend’s kids, about how to pump the string to give it even more height. It was a beautiful sight to behold. At one point I walked over to him, and said, “Wow, you control that line so well. It’s kind of like fishing in the sky, isn’t it.” And he got the biggest grin and said, “Yeah, I guess it is.”
This kid from a refugee camp in Africa, in a very real sense, is not where he should be. And I don’t mean that in a xenophobic he shouldn’t be here sense. But he should not have been in that refugee camp. And he should not have had to escape to live here in central Minnesota. But I witnessed something yesterday—that it’s okay. And that’s not to minimize the suffering of those 68.5 million displaced people. But when we are not where we should be—it’s okay, but God is—and God is with us.
There at Lake George I saw the power of God as I watched this young boy teach our boys, our family, and our friends how to fly a kite.
Friends, we are not where should be. Literally, figuratively, spiritually, morally, and in circumstances beyond our control. Individually, collectively, as a community, as a nation, as a congregation, as a denomination, as the church universal, we are not where we should be.
But God is—and God is there, here, with us.
Thanks be to God.