November 22, 2020 “Responsibility” – Ezekiel 18

Ezekiel 18 (pp. 341-342 in Prophets)
“Responsibility”
November 22, 2020 – Christ the King Sunday

It’s nice to hear some good news about COVID-19. Of course, the best news lately has been hopeful stories about successful vaccine trials. But another story about the virus was important to Beth and me earlier this year as we waited for the birth of our first grandchild. Several studies showed that it was highly unlikely, if not impossible, for a pregnant woman to transmit the virus to her unborn child. So we were able to take that particular concern off the grandparent worry plate.

We do know, obviously, that other diseases, conditions, and substances can be passed along and affect a baby in the womb. Expectant mothers get stern warnings about alcohol, smoking, and other substances. In our lifetimes the specter of inherited genetic traits has come to loom over new parents, making them worry about passing along both visible and invisible disabilities through DNA.

Even in ancient times people realized that characteristics are passed from parent to child. They would have been as unsurprised as we are that our new grandson seems to have inherited a red tint to his hair from both sides of his family. In many ways they knew as well as you or I that what a parent is or does can have an effect on children and even on generations down the line. That awareness is behind Ezekiel’s message from the Lord in our text today.

In chapter 18 of Ezekiel we find God’s answer to Israel’s sense that they are being unjustly punished for the sins of prior generations. As the Babylonians descended upon Jerusalem to take some into exile, kill many more, and destroy the city, people, not surprisingly, wondered what they had done to deserve all that. Again not surprisingly, they concluded they had done nothing to deserve it.

So what God has to say opens, on page 341 in Prophets, with the Lord quoting back to Israel one of its own proverbs—we might call it a “meme”—that was clearly making the rounds on whatever gossip mechanism passed for Facebook back then. “The parents have eaten sour grapes, but their children’s mouths pucker at the taste.” In other words, what prior generations did was having negative consequences for the present generation.

Ancient people were not stupid. They repeated that proverb because everybody knew that what a parent eats, except for possibly a nursing mother, is not going to have any effect on what children taste. The proverb meant to say that if God was punishing those currently alive for what their predecessors had done, it wasn’t right. It was unfair, unjust. They were no more guilty of their parents’ sins than they were of their eating habits.

The problem was that Jewish people in Ezekiel’s time had good reason to believe God was operating by that “sour grapes” principle. They had scriptural, biblical reasons. In at least six different places in the Old Testament, including the prophet Jeremiah of their own time, Israelites were told that God would jealously punish the children for the sin of their parents. In fact, a warning to that effect is built into the second of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 verse 5, “I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.”

So you can understand why people in Israel might make up that meme about sour grapes and drag it out to explain the current predicament. God was just being His old, cruel, jealous self, unjustly holding people accountable for what their parents did.

We have our own contemporary version of Israel’s complaint about God’s justice in a frequent white response to charges that America is rife with systemic racism, implicit bias, and even explicit and forthright racial injustice. We watch a black man die at the hands of police and confidently assert that it was only the action of one or two bad cops. We revisit the history of slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow laws, housing and job discrimination in America and rest easy in the conviction that those things used to happen but not anymore, that other people did those things, but not you and me.

So when Black Lives Matter protestors call for structural changes to policing and the justice system, when a few even dare to speak of reparations for African American people, we tend to bristle, maybe even get a little loud, and protest ourselves. “Why should we be held accountable for the actions of previous generations?” and “I never owned slaves or lynched anybody. I don’t say the ‘N-word.’ I don’t have a racist bone in my body. Why, some of my best friends are black! Why are you asking me to feel guilty about, suffer, and pay for the actions of others?”

We’ll come back to those objections to calls for racial justice later. For right now, let’s note that God basically agrees with Israel’s gut feelings about moral responsibility. As He tells them in verse 3 not to quote that proverb about sour grapes anymore, God goes on to explain that He is not doing what they’re complaining about. If He did hold a generation of people accountable for the sins of a prior generation, that would be a divine act of cruel injustice. But that’s not God’s rule.

Instead, God says, “this is my rule: The person who sins is the one who will die.” The one God is going to hold accountable for any given act of sin is just the one who did it. Whatever all those “to the third and fourth generation”s mean, God flatly denied He was operating by an unjust, immoral rule that blamed people for wrongs they did not commit.

In fact, God operates with the same legal principle William Blackstone formulated in the 18^th century in England. “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” That became a foundational rule for both English and American law. It’s still taught to law students today. It’s why our court system sometimes seems weighted in favor of offenders. Justice demands that innocent people not suffer for crimes they did not commit. God is here telling us that His justice is no different.

The next part of our text, most of page 341, verses 5 to 20, is a long example touching on that warning about “to the third generation.” God walks Ezekiel through three generations of a particular family, showing how responsibility, guilt and God’s punishment play out depending on individual actions in each generation.

First there is a righteous man. We might want to notice the list of what makes him righteous. He is properly religious, yes. He doesn’t worship idols. But he also stays away from sexual immorality. He is honest in his business dealings with the poor, but even more, like Jesus talked about in our Gospel lesson today, the righteous man gives food and clothing to those in need. And he is just and good in his public life. He is “honest and fair when judging others.” He takes his turn at jury duty and does it justice.

In any case, the next generation of the man’s family is not so good. He has a son who is the opposite of his father. He worships idols, commits adultery, and oppresses the poor, foreclosing on debts without mercy. He exploits the poor with excessive interest. God asks, “Should such a sinful person live?” In other words, should the virtue of that evil man’s father offset all the wrong he does? “No!” says God, “He must die and take full blame.”

Then to play it out to that third generation mentioned in the Ten Commandments and elsewhere, God pictures that sinful man having, in turn, a righteous son. He “sees his father’s wickedness and decides against that kind of life.” Then we get the whole list again of what the righteous person does. Then, just as the first man’s goodness did not count for his evil son, neither does the evil man’s wickedness count against his own good son. Only the middle man, the evil father “will die for his many sins—for being cruel, robbing people, and doing what was clearly wrong among his people.”

We will come back to that punishment God decrees, that the evil person “will die for his many sins.” For right now, let’s consider that chain of generations and whether good or evil is passed on from parent to child. You have probably heard that abused children are more prone to become abusers themselves. It’s one of the sad consequences of that evil.

Psychologists talk about breaking a generational cycle of abuse. They work at helping children and adults turn the corner in a family history. And God’s story of three generations makes it clear that despite all that negative upbringing, one can be different from one’s parent. One of the glories of being made in the image of God is that we can make choices that are not predetermined by our ancestry or upbringing.

I will testify to that gift of choice in my own life. My father was an alcoholic and a narcissist. His life, conversation, and activity were almost entirely focused on himself. And he escaped facing the consequences of his self-absorption by drinking. He deserted my mother when I was 2 and my sister was 1-year-old. He had three more wives or partners after that. The last time I saw him I took my daughters to meet their grandfather. All he did was talk about himself. Long ago, I decided I didn’t want to be like that.

I don’t feel like a moral giant at all, but I do believe God gave me grace to be able to choose to be different from my father. When I get a little too caught up in myself, when I realize I am engaging in addictive behavior, I turn to God and ask for help to do something different. God told Ezekiel that it can be like that for everyone, for anyone. It’s only your own sins you need to worry about, not your parents’ and not your children’s. Down at the bottom of page 341, verse 20, God says, “The child will not be punished for the parent’s sins, and the parent will not be punished for the child’s sins.” That is good news, my friends. We are free. That is challenging news, my friends. We are responsible.

At the top of page 342, verse 21 on through verse 28, God also addresses the possibility of change even within a generation, within an individual person’s life. Even one’s own prior sins do not determine a person’s fate. We are truly and always free to turn and be something different. As Christians we know that God gives each of us that opportunity by faith in Christ. That is very good news. Yet we are still free and responsible.

Now back to racism for a moment. Does all this individual responsibility here in Ezekiel undercut Black Lives Matter and other concern about the racist history of America? Does it short circuit the call to uncover and undo systemic racism and injustice? If I’m only responsible for my own sins, what has what two or three cops did in Minneapolis a few months ago got to do with me? If I only have to answer to God for what I do, why should I be bothered by stories of slavery or lynching a hundred or two hundred years ago? If I’m kind and gracious and friendly to the people of color I meet, haven’t I done all I need to do? The answer is no.

There is individual responsibility but there is also corporate responsibility. As the prophets declare over and over, God’s people are responsible and culpable when they participate in and benefit from the evil of the social structure around them. God is telling them here that He was not punishing them for their parents’ sins. He was letting the Babylonians destroy their city and society because of their own sins, their own idolatry and oppression of the poor. The same responsibility is there for you and me if we knowingly let ourselves continue to enjoy and benefit from racist practices and structures, even if we have not uttered racist slurs or shunned a person of color.

If I simply accept it as O.K. that a police officer lets me off for a traffic offense with a warning while giving a ticket to or even arresting a black man who commits the same offense, I am responsible for that racism. If I enjoy living in a prosperous neighborhood or even a city like Eugene that at some point systematically excluded black people or funneled them into less desirable areas, then I am responsible. No, I may not have stamped “Denied” on an African American couple’s loan application, but if I am aware of it or refuse to pay attention to it and blithely let my own application be accepted, then I am responsible.

Yes, of course what I’ve said is full of complications and difficulties, not least of which is knowing what to do about it all. But we can perhaps start by admitting that our denial of responsibility for racism is very much like Israel’s denial in Ezekiel’s time of responsibility for their sins. God tells them on page 342, verse 25, “you say, ‘The Lord isn’t doing what is right!’” We hear someone accuse us of racism and complain, “That’s not right!” But God is always in the right, whether He’s holding us responsible for our idols, for our neglect of the poor, as in Matthew 25 again, or for ways we’ve profited from being white in a racist society.

Matthew 25 shows us that ignorance is no excuse. Pleading to the Lord, “When did we see you being beat up by police? When did we see you passed over for a promotion? When did we listen to jokes about the color of your skin and say nothing?” won’t cut it. Jesus made it clear that to love Him means to love His people, even the last and the least of His people. To do otherwise is to hate Him.

Which is why that very first instance in Exodus 20 of those “to the third and fourth generation” warnings adds the phrase “of those who hate me.” God’s punishment carries down all those generations when the sin carries down, when the hate for God and for His Son Jesus is carried down by neglect and contempt for all the people He loves. That’s why each generation needs to start over and choose the Lord’s way once again.

I said earlier that the gift of freedom to choose something different is good news. That gift is based in the very best news. What God wants most of all is for us to choose Him, to turn to Him and live, as the end of our text says. Near the top of 342, verse 23 we read God telling us, “‘Do you think that I like to see wicked people die?’ says the Sovereign Lord. ‘Of course not! I want them to turn from their wicked ways and live.’” Then He goes on to explain that even though it’s not what He wants, He will honor the choice of those who turn in a different direction and let them have the death they choose.

Jesus told us that story about the king dividing the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25 to show us our responsibility, the choice that God gives us. We can be on one side or the other. God is always offering the possibility to break the cycles of sin we find ourselves in, whether it’s a cycle of addiction or abuse or whether it’s a cycle of apathy about the injustices we see playing out around us. We can choose to look toward God or to look away from Him. We can choose to see Jesus Christ in our sisters and brothers begging on street corners or being imprisoned because of their color or being shuttled off to wretched refugee camps in other parts of the world, or we can keep looking away, refusing to see Jesus suffering in the lowly people of the world when He’s right there in front of us.

The choice between life and death for people to whom Ezekiel spoke was in many ways literal. God stepped into that national disaster to spare some of the faithful, letting them continue to live in exile. The choice for us right now is more spiritual. We have the choice of turning away from God and from others while our hearts and souls die inside us. Or we can toward God in Jesus Christ as we see Him in the faces of those crying out for justice and help, while our hearts and souls come alive with joy as we hear Him say to us, “just as you did it for one of the least of these, my family, you did it for me.”

I’ll keep saying it over and over. The good news is that God wants the better choice for us. We are each responsible, but God gives us each a pathway back to Him. There at the end of what we read, verse 31, God tells Israel, “find yourselves a new heart and a new spirit. For why should you die, O people of Israel? I don’t want you to die, says the Sovereign Lord. Turn back, and live!”

God does not enjoy punishing anyone. God does not want to punish anyone. He keeps saying it over and over in Scripture. He said it with His arms outstretched on the Cross to receive everyone who will turn to Him there. Our Lord won’t let us escape responsibility, but He died and rose again so that we may escape spiritual death. That’s what He keeps on telling us and showing us over and over. We must accept responsibility, but we may also turn and accept His grace and forgiveness, and receive a new heart and a new spirit.

When I told you that story about deciding not to be like my father, I may have made it sound like it happened all at once. But it wasn’t like that. It was a choice God kept having to offer me. It some ways He still has to. I do remember one point in junior high when I had taken a wrong turn somewhere. I had started to use bad language, hang out with a rougher little group of students, become disruptive in class. And God sent me a prophet in the form of a little Japanese woman science teacher.

All of five feet tall to my already six feet, Mrs. Yamamoto sat me down after class one day. I thought she was going to dish out some punishment, send me to the principle or something like that. But all she did was point out what I’d been doing and saying. Then she said, “Steve, I don’t think that’s who you want to be. I don’t think it’s who your mother wants you to be.” If it hadn’t been a public school, I think she may have said, “I don’t think it’s who God wants you to be.” She was right. That was one of the key moments, even though I hadn’t put it all together yet, when I realized I wanted to be different from my father, to turn toward real life rather than spiritual death. It was an opportunity God gave me to turn and live.

God sent prophets over and over to Israel. He sent them before the exile, like Amos and Jeremiah. He sent them during the exile like Ezekiel and Daniel. And as we will see, He kept on sending them after the exile. Finally, He sent Jesus. All of them came to give us moments like I had that afternoon with that teacher, moments when we say, “No, I don’t want to be like that. I want to live. I want a new heart and a new spirit.” And our gracious Lord and Savior is there, is here, ready to make us new and give us life. Let’s turn back now, and live.

Amen.