And as for you, human one, don’t be afraid of them or their words. Don’t be afraid! You possess thistles and thorns that subdue scorpions. Don’t be afraid of their words or shrink from their presence, because they are a household of rebels. 7 You’ll speak my words to them whether they listen or whether they refuse. They are just a household of rebels!
8 As for you, human one, listen to what I say to you. Don’t become rebellious like that household of rebels. Open your mouth and eat what I give you. 9 Then I looked, and there in a hand stretched out to me was a scroll. 10 He spread it open in front of me, and it was filled with writing on both sides, songs of mourning, lamentation, and doom. Then he said to me: Human one, eat this thing that you’ve found. Eat this scroll and go, speak to the house of Israel. 2 So I opened my mouth, and he fed me the scroll. 3 He said to me: Human one, feed your belly and fill your stomach with this scroll that I give you. So I ate it, and in my mouth it became as sweet as honey. 4 Then he said to me: Human one, go! Go to the house of Israel and speak my words to them. (Common English Bible)
“Escape Routes: How the
Christmas Story Points Us Forward,” Week Two
Mandalay
Bay stands over the south end of the Las Vegas Strip like massive colossus, a forbidding
sentinel that demarcates the boundary between what is simply Sin City, and what
is the massive, sensory-overload, adult Disneyland that is the Strip.
Along
the way up to the Mandalay Bay, a series of billboards appears on the side of
the road, bearing messages of thanks and inspiration all the way up until the
very last billboard, which simply says “#VegasStrong,” a reference to the
deadliest mass shooting in the history of the United States that a) had only
taken place weeks prior to when Carrie and I had visited a month ago, and b)
broke the previous record that had only been set less than a year and a half
prior, at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
But
during our weekend there, it was simply hordes of tourists taking in exactly
what Vegas advertises: the fountains at the Bellagio, acres upon acres of
gaming tables, and about as much skin as one could see short of being in a
nudist colony.
It
was as though nothing had ever happened right there, just several short weeks
ago.
Las
Vegas was still the same escape it had been for decades. And that was, I am
absolutely certain, by no means an accident. It is, rather, exactly what we
want, and have successfully demanded, from the world.
This
is a new sermon series for a new church year—while the calendar year doesn’t
turn over for another four weeks, the church year begins with the season of
Advent, a preparatory time set aside for us to live out the exhortation of John
the Baptist, who, quoting Isaiah, encourages us to prepare the way of the Lord
and to make straight His path.
We
look at our own path to Jesus and typically want it to be as straight and as
easy as possible as well—a simple beaming up to the mother ship when the time
comes would do for us, never mind the fact that the journey is what defines the
destination.
So
how can we prepare a way when we are trying to escape the world upon which that
path rests? Can we instead escape the hell we create in this world and this
life, confident that our doing so veers us away from hell in the next?
That
is the premise of a book by Johann Christoph Arnold, a pastor in the Christian
communitarian church, the Bruderhof, who sadly passed away this past spring.
Just before he passed, I had settled upon his book, Escape Routes, as the template for this year’s Advent sermon
series, and I hope to do that justice. We began this series last week with a
passage from his chapter entitled, “Success,” and move on today with another passage,
this one from his chapter entitled, “Suffering:”
Many of us flee from an
unblinking view of human reality into entertainment or consumption. Paying to
be distracted, we let our hearts become callous and are unable to see the world
from another’s perspective.
But materialism is not
the only false escape from suffering; selfish and sentimental religion is a
culprit that’s just as guilty. When religion becomes a fantasy buffering us
from life’s harshness by telling us to ignore the present and worry only about
the afterlife, it has become an opiate. It’s nothing more than a dangerously
addictive sedative that calms our feelings of anxiety or guilt. Knowingly or
not, pastors or priests whose motto is “once saved, always saved” are perpetrating
fraud. They hawk an easy gospel promising cheap grace—and seem to forget that
once we really escape the prison of self-absorption, we will immediately find
ourselves among others in a wider human community for which we have
responsibility.
Seen from a global
viewpoint, such efforts to evade pain appear delusional. A few million of the
world’s people live in comfort, but billions do not, and one billion of them
are so poor that they barely have enough to eat.
Arnold
almost picks up right where we left off last week about the limits of
materialism and the fleeting pleasures that it can offer us, but there is
something even deeper to his words here: that it is our use of religion to ignore
this world that enables such short-term misuse of both people and resources.
It
is a fundamental flaw to our approach to Christianity—to see it only as an
escape route from the hell of the afterlife rather than also of the hell that
can exist in this lifetime, something that the prophet Ezekiel was vehement in
pointing out in his own…vivid way.
A
confession at this point in my message: I haven’t preached much at all on
Ezekiel before because, truthfully, getting him right can be exceptionally
difficult. His prophecies are action-packed and apocalyptic, and it is not
always easy to discern where literality stops and imagery, symbolism, and
metaphor begin. And this passage, from early in his book, is really no different,
as the prophet is depicting himself eating a scroll given to him by God, and
saying afterward that it tasted sweet, like honey.
But
once we get past the shock value of imagining someone actually consuming a
scroll and claiming that it tastes like honey, it is much clearer what Ezekiel
is claiming that he has done: internalized the Word of God. This fortifies an
already strong spiritual constitution for Ezekiel—as God says to him, “You possess
thistles and thorns that subdue scorpions!” Thistles and thorns are not always
thought of as such good things—unless you’re a Portland soccer fan—and that is
because we are more often the scorpion who tries to dodge the thistles and
thorns.
When
we suffer at the sting of scorpions ourselves, though, whether in the form of
interpersonal nastiness, insults, and trolling, or in the form of far bigger,
systemic hurts around us like assault and harassment that continue to reveal
themselves—and the pain that they have caused for decades upon decades—in waves.
And
while Arnold’s book—and, by extension, this sermon series—is called Escape
Routes, he makes it abundantly clear to us that we are not supposed to simply
try to sit tight and wait until we’re raptured up, or to escape into our own
bubbles of entertainment and distraction. It is not that entertainment is
inherently bad, but when we use it as a numbing agent, to make us forget what
we have done or left undone, it becomes capable of doing more harm than good.
It
becomes one more thing for us to have to overcome in order to be whole and
well. It becomes the scorpion that can manage to wriggle through our thistles
and thorns.
It
is entirely natural to want to escape whatever suffering we experience. But
sticking our heads in the sand to our suffering is not an escape—it’s a form of
denial, and one that is as old as we are.
Suffering
demands that we face it, and the pain we feel is our acknowledgement of it. Listening
to our own minds and bodies, then, when we are feeling pain and understanding
the cause of it goes an awful long way in our own abilities to transcend and
overcome our own suffering.
Helping
others do the same, though, is one way in which Ezekiel’s ancient Judah falls
short, and is partly why Judah and its capital Jerusalem fall to Nebuchadnezzar
II of Babylon. Ezekiel makes it clear that Judah’s rebellion against God is the
cause of the lamentation and woe the scroll he consumes contains, and we
learned last week from Jeremiah that the woe comes from Jehoiakim’s selfishness
and self-centeredness in his pursuit of material wealth at the expense of his
country and countrypeople.
The
propagation, rather than prevention, of suffering of the children of God at the
hands of the kings and men of power rotted the kingdom from the inside out. And
just as rotted wood crumbles quickly, so too will a rotted kingdom or a rotted
church.
The
funny thing about Las Vegas that Carrie and I learned while we were there was
that it really was a manufactured façade rather than much of anything authentic.
Many of the big spectacular structures are hollow, like a movie set. They look
impressive, but I imagine are capable of quickly crumbling and falling apart.
And
their entire purpose was to act as a temporary escape, a numbing agent, for
people.
The
#VegasStrong hashtag, then, is not so much about those buildings, but about the
people. Just as the heart of God’s kingdom here on earth is not any one
building or location, but the people.
The
people who are resilient, loving, strong, fierce, capable of withstanding so
much and imagining so much more.
People
who are warm with the light of God, yet also possessing of thorns and thistles
such that even the most intrepid scorpion would hesitate before.
People
who are preparing to meet their Messiah face-to-face in a manger just two weeks
from now.
We
are those people. You are the thistles and the thorns as well as the roses. You
are the light as well as the heat of the fire. And you are the disciples whom
God has fashioned out of sinners.
That
same God beckons you forth still to Bethlehem—to watch and wait, yes, but also
to rejoice.
We’re
fifteen days away now, brothers and sisters. Keep the faith.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
December
10, 2017
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