November 29, 2020 “Sticks” – Ezekiel 37:15-28

Ezekiel 37:15-28 (pp. 378-379 in Prophets)
“Sticks”
November 29, 2020 – First Sunday in Advent

In the Boy Scouts I learned to lash together pieces of wood to build something. The knots were fairly simple, just wraps over and under on either side of a joint. Finding appropriate pieces of wood at a campsite was not simple. One summer at our camp in the Sierras, I put together a table that was supposed to be something like the picture in my Scout manual. Instead, it was a rickety hodgepodge of crooked sticks that would barely stand up, much less hold anything like cooking gear.

Ezekiel may have felt like I did when God told him to find two pieces of wood and then put them together as if they were one piece. Our translation tries to smooth them out, maybe literally, but it seems fairly clear these were not two pieces of finished lumber. As it says in most translations, they were “sticks,” bits of unsawn, rough timber picked up off the ground, not planed, sanded boards ready to be joined. It doesn’t say, but maybe Ezekiel was supposed to lash them together like I tried as a Boy Scout.

In any case, as you heard from the middle of Prophets page 378, verse 15 and on, God told Ezekiel to write the name of Judah on one and Ephraim on the other. He made those two sticks represent the southern and the northern kingdoms of Israel. Our translation obscures it, but the word “Israel” appeared on both sticks, something like “Judah and those from Israel associated with him,” and “Ephraim, descended from Joseph, and all the house of Israel associated with him.” In other words, just in the labels God marked the unity between those kingdoms. They were both “Israel,” both His chosen people.

Then in what is verse 17, God told Ezekiel to put the two sticks together in one hand, to hold them out as if they were one stick. When people asked what the sticks meant, the prophet was to explain that Ephraim, the northern kingdom, was to be rejoined to Judah, the southern kingdom. God said, “I will make them one piece of wood in my hand.” That reunification would come from God. It would happen in His hand, by His power.

Let’s review some of the history we’ve been through with the prophets. Back when we started in August with Amos, we heard how God used Assyria to destroy and completely obliterate the ten tribes of the northern kingdom Ezekiel here calls “Ephraim,” the name of the most important tribe in that confederacy. Over the next hundred and fifty years or so, those tribes were scattered and assimilated into Assyria and all the surrounding countries. That’s why they’re often called the “lost” tribes of Israel.

Moreover, in Ezekiel’s time, the two tribes left in the south, Benjamin and the dominant tribe of Judah, suffered their own invasion and destruction at the hands of the Babylonians. Ezekiel himself was one of the exiles in Babylon, speaking to other exiles. When he delivered his pictorial message written on sticks of wood, it was like he was predicting the impossible. God promised to gather all the tribes back to their own land, as it says further on in verse 21. He wasn’t just going to bring the exiles home. He was going to gather back and reunite them with fellow Israelites from whom they had been separated for centuries. It was a wild and crazy dream then, and, literally, it still has not happened. Those lost tribes of the north are still nowhere to be found.

One approach to this text would be to argue that its literal fulfillment is still in the future. Somehow, someday, maybe when Jesus comes back, God is going to sort out all the mixed-up DNA of those northern tribes and reconstitute them as an actual ethnicity again. Then He will bring them back together with other present-day Jewish people to completely fulfill a literal prophecy of a reunited kingdom of Israel. But I doubt it.

As you will discover as you read the remainder of Ezekiel this week, more than one prophecy God gave him has not had, and likely never will have, any literal fulfillment. Starting in chapter 40, page 381 in Prophets you will find a building plan for a huge, fantastic new Temple with a river flowing out of it that begins beneath the altar. It’s followed by specifications for new, greatly enlarged borders for Israel. Again, none of it has happened, nor, do I think, will ever happen literally.

Instead, we need to read these visions and picture prophecies of Ezekiel as most Jews and Christians have down through the ages. These are brilliant, beautiful images of what God has done and will do spiritually in this world, ultimately through His Son Jesus Christ. In relation to today’s text, those sticks in the prophet’s hand show that God has, can, and will reconcile seemingly irreconcilable differences among human beings. God has, can and will resurrect the lost and the dead. God has, can and will bring all people together in one Kingdom which He is building in this world.

The key is there in the middle of that last full paragraph on 378, verse 22, “One king will rule them all…” The beginning of the next paragraph, verse 24, fleshes that out, “My servant David will be their king, and they will have only one shepherd.” Again, neither Jews nor Christians have ever thought that would be literally fulfilled, that there would be some sort of actual second coming of king David the man. Instead, we Christians are about to celebrate the birth of the King who was born of David’s lineage. We praise and worship Jesus the King, who is, as the hymn says, “great David’s greater Son.”

I decided not to preach on the more familiar first part of chapter 37 in Ezekiel. It starts on the bottom of page 377 in Prophets, the story of a vision of a valley full of dry bones. They come together and rise from the dead, as the Holy Spirit blows life back into them. It’s a promise of resurrection, which Jesus affirmed for us by rising from the dead. I skipped over it because, instead of the corporate promise of new life that it is, we often turn it into a personal and individual hope of new life for ourselves or for some loved one.

There’s nothing wrong with hope and trust in our own individual resurrection and new life, but God’s Spirit in those dry bones was His answer to people then saying, “Our nation is finished!” God told them through Ezekiel that He was going to give them new life together, as a body, as a people, not just as this person or that person. The message of the sticks carries that forward. God’s plan for the world is not merely to save individuals, like pulling a man or a woman or child off a sinking ship. God’s plan is to save the whole ship, to gather the individuals who’ve fallen overboard back into it.

That’s why the “land” is so important here. If God’s salvation was just about individual souls, that could happen as well in Babylon as it could back in Jerusalem. If all that matters is getting people to heaven, what difference does it make where in the world they start from? But if God’s plan is to save the world, to redeem the whole human family, then the land is important too. All God’s creation is included in the plan of salvation.

When we heard Jesus talk about His second coming in our Gospel lesson today from Mark 13, He said that when He comes back “he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.” It’s the same promise God gave Ezekiel in those sticks, “I will bring them home to their own land from the places where they have been scattered.” God’s plan is to put people together, back together, even if they have been broken apart from time beyond remembering.

Coming together like that happens in Jesus. It’s happening right now in Jesus. Look at how Paul talked to early Christians in our reading from I Corinthians. He told them he was praying for them to enriched and filled with spiritual gifts as they “wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In the last verse we heard he said that by God “you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ.” That word fellowship is the Greek word koinonia. Some of you know it. It means a community, a body, a unity of people who know and love Jesus. We weren’t called to escape one by one into some individual afterlife. We were called together into a fellowship, a union of those whom God has gathered together.

The heart of that unity is God Himself, uniting us in Jesus, holding us together. God said to Ezekiel, “And I will make a covenant of peace with them, an everlasting covenant.” Every time we celebrate Holy Communion we remember that is exactly what Jesus did. We repeat His words, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.”

More than fifty years ago now, I did a little better job of joining pieces of wood together in seventh grade woodshop. Each of us received two boards of different colored wood, one light colored, one reddish. Following our instructor’s directions, we sawed them into strips. Then we carefully planed the edges of those strips square so they would fit smoothly together, alternating dark and light. Then we spread glue between them and clamped it all tight together.

Jesus’ own blood, that new covenant in His blood, is the glue which holds together the people He gathers. Ezekiel just held together those sticks in his hand. It is Jesus who has the power, the grace, the force of His own life poured out on the Cross to actually keep them together like those boards in our woodshop project. Nothing and no one but Jesus has that sort of power to bind us into fellowship with each other.

There was more to that shop project. Once the glue was dry the whole thing had to be planed again, top and bottom, level and true. The shop had a large machine only our instructor could run to do that final finishing for us. Then the slight differences in length between the wood strips had to be trimmed. Finally, the whole thing needed to sanded smooth and an oil finish rubbed in to preserve the wood. There was a lot more to it than simply slapping together a few sticks of wood.

Two sticks in a man’s hand were a picture of what God meant to do, how He plans to gather His people back together from the far corners of world. But everyone knew then that it would not be simple, that it would not be easy. Ten tribes were lost. Everyone was scattered. If it was going to happen, only God could do it. But that image of two sticks together was prophetic in another way. It showed how it would all begin, with two larger pieces of wood nailed or lashed together to form a Cross. And there the King, the Shepherd who would gather the lost sheep, died to bind them together in a lasting union.

If you haven’t guessed, my junior high project was a cutting board. Five decades later, it’s still holding together and still solid. It goes on every camping trip with me and I use it to slice potatoes and onions and clean fish for the frying pan. I’m a little proud of how it’s held up, but I know it’s not really because of me. It’s because of that crusty old shop teacher who walked around supervising two dozen squirrely young boys (sorry women, it was different world back then) and helping us get it all put together right. It was his direction and guidance that made those pieces stay in place and last this long.

You and I are in the same position as the boys in my shop class. In the church of Jesus Christ, He gave us and taught us everything we need to be His people. He keeps gathering His people from every tribe and race and nation on earth. He died on those two sticks of wood so we could all be forgiven and reconciled in Him. He poured out His blood as the Communion which holds us together even when we do our best to break apart. Yet there is still work to do, lots of planing and trimming off our ragged edges, lots of sanding smooth all the rough places in us that rub each other wrong. For that work, we need our Lord’s constant help and direction.

At the end of that prophecy of the sticks, God explained He would be there to keep on guiding and directing us. After promising that new covenant, there on the top of page 379, verse 27, God said His Temple would be there “among them forever.” God knows our unity in Him needs His constant attention, His constant presence, if it is going to be truly a covenant of peace. When Jesus commanded His disciples to go out and start gathering people into His kingdom, He said, “And, lo, I am with you always.”

You and I are like those servants Jesus pictured at the end of Mark 13 in our reading. Here we are, left waiting for Him, but each with plenty of work to do if we are to bring the sticks together, to craft and bond that covenant of peace as reality in our own time and lives. It is frequently not easy. There is so much roughness and brokenness and splintering among us. Yet He is here, with all the direction we need. As God said to Ezekiel, “I will make my home among them. I will be their God, and they will be my people.”

Lots of voices in our world call us to something that sounds like the vision God gave Ezekiel, to fellowship, to unity with other people. Some of those voices are good. People of God can join with them to build peace and community for days to come. Those sticks had different names on them. They were different but God brought them together. Jesus is going to gather His people from everywhere on earth. Unity that recognizes and values differences of race and nationality and language and color is godly unity. Christians can support it and participate in it.

Yet other voices call for unity in our world don’t mean what Ezekiel and God mean by it. They want the differences between the sticks to disappear. They want all the strips in the cutting board to be the same color or at least the darker pieces to be smaller and less significant. They want everyone to be dominated by one culture and one language and one way of life. Christians cannot support and participate in that kind of unity. It’s a false unity. It’s a false gospel. It’s a false hope.

The true hope is that little signs of how Jesus puts sticks together keep happening in our world. Francis Schaeffer told the story of how divided German Christians came together after World War II, overcoming the separation between church people who cooperated with Hitler and confessing believers who resisted the Nazis. Then there was the Christian work of Desmond Tutu on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa after the end of Apartheid. And Katie and Julio, our missionaries in Columbia, are right now teaching young people to “Be Peace, Make Peace,” as the people of that country seek unity and reconciliation after so much violence there.

We as people of Jesus Christ have the same calling as Ezekiel. We are to pick up broken, splintered sticks from all over the world, from separated and divided people here in our own country, and do what we can to hold them up together. Let us speak God’s prophecy over those sticks, that in Jesus Christ, the King who is the Good Shepherd, they can be one, they can be together. Then let’s get down to the hard work of reconciliation, smoothing out but not eliminating differences, respecting the dignity and the voice of each person and each tribe and each nation that God has brought to Himself.

That prophecy God gave Ezekiel focused mostly on Israel, on one tiny nation and its unity. But the bigger picture is there. At the very end, God says that when His Temple is here, when He makes His home in this world in the person of Jesus, then “the nations will know that I am the Lord, who makes Israel holy.” That’s what Jesus meant when He said the angels would gather them in from the four winds. It’s not just going to be a couple little sticks. It’s all the nations. God is going to put the whole world back together in Jesus.

Amen.