St. Anthony Park Lutheran Church, St. Paul, MN

4 September 2005 (Pentecost 16)

Text: Ezekiel 33:7-11 (Series A)

Preacher: Frederick J. Gaiser

So you, mortal, I have made a sentinel for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, "O wicked ones, you shall surely die," and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from their ways, and they do not turn from their ways, the wicked shall die in their iniquity, but you will have saved your life. Now you, mortal, say to the house of Israel, Thus you have said: "Our transgressions and our sins weigh upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live?" Say to them, As I live, says the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel? (Ezekiel 33:7-11)

IS GOD FAIR?

So, what do you think? Is God fair or not? Consider the headlines: groups of people trapped in a major city with no escape by a disaster that was not their fault, crying for help that does not seem to come. Where is God?

It could be New Orleans, 2005—but it was also Babylon, 550 B.C.—Iraq, one of the earlier Gulf Wars—and we hear those voices in our text, which is why I raise it again today. God is not fair, says Israel, because here we sit in captivity in a foreign land for something we did not do. Our parents may have sinned, causing a war that destroyed Jerusalem and made them exiles, but they are long since dead, and here we rot. Not fair. QED.

Different prophets interpret Israel’s Babylonian captivity in different ways, but Ezekiel valiantly tries to make God’s case, working through a list of what-if possibilities to show how God would finally be just in each one. If you do this, then this; if you do that, then that. Not always an easy task.

Suppose we took New Orleans as a case study. Is God fair? Come on, a hurricane that produces the untold suffering we continue to see on our TV screens. How is that fair? Well, we could say—heartless as it sounds, this close to the event—that one shouldn’t blame God for the human folly of building a city in a flood plain on ground that is below sea level. But then somebody will push the accusation back a step and argue that a just God wouldn’t have made a world with random storms and floods in the first place, but that would, of course, be to ask for a world without a natural order that includes, of necessity, elements of unpredictability—certainly not this world—and we probably wouldn’t want to live there. No floods, no sunsets, I suppose.

Or we could point to the victims further victimized by the horror of looters and rapists and ask what’s fair in that. But we probably wouldn’t want a world of human puppets without moral choice, either, the moral choice that allows immoral decisions, even monstrous ones. Evil acts have evil consequences; if they did not, good acts wouldn’t have good consequences, either, and who would want that?

So, like Ezekiel, we could try to work this out, to make the best case for God, and it would be quite possible and even true—but when we were done, we’d still have disaster, we’d still have chaos, we’d still have to look into the face of suffering human beings to whom there would be no way to maintain that they’re getting what they deserved. So, is God fair?

Fact is, holding fast to either option (God is fair; God is not fair) seems destined to produce bad religion. And, of the two, I would say that by far the more dangerous is the insistence that God is fair—at least “fair” as we might define it. Being convinced of that has produced pretty much all of the legalistic and self-righteous possibilities that human religion has invented. God is fair—so, obviously, you get what is coming to you. You’re in trouble? You’ve been doing something naughty! You’re thriving? God obviously loves you more than others. So, just act right, believe right, do worship right, go to my church, vote right, hold your mouth right, do everything right, do something right—and you will find favor with God.

You can read Old Testament law that way—or, as we heard last week, you can read Paul’s exhortations that way. Here’s some good religious advice to follow; just do it, and everything will be okay.

“Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes, and I will observe it to the end,” we heard in today’s psalm. So, “Confirm to your servant your promise, which is for those who fear you” (Ps 119:33, 38). I fear you, God; I worship you; I love you; I observe your laws—so, God, deliver on your promise. I’m your guy.

“You shall not commit adultery,” says Paul in today’s epistle. “You shall not murder;You shall not steal.” No debauchery and drunkenness; no quarreling and jealousy. Love your neighbor as yourself. Well, hey, God, I give it my best shot. And, mostly, I’ve steered clear of the big ones. So, yeah, compared to the next guy at least, I’m doing pretty well. I wouldn’t loot in a disaster, for heaven’s sake. So, God, I ought at least get a pass.

Here’s where we get all the feel-good religions, all the self-help religions, all the pray-your-weight-away and religion-is-good-for-you movements. Do religion right and you will prosper. God wants you to succeed, and so do we.

The attraction of this, of course, is that sometimes it works. No drunkenness and debauchery, and you’ll be healthier. No murder, no stealing, no adultery, and all of us are clearly better off. Do what God commands, and you’ll be happier. Care for the neighbor, and we’d be better prepared for floods. Often true. Just not necessarily Christian. Don’t screw up and things will go better for you and for the world. A pretty good rule to follow—but nothing that Jesus needed to die for.

Worse luck, you can’t count on it. Be good and things will go your way. Well.... Tell it to the people in New Orleans; tell it to the mothers of the Iraqi dead or the American dead in Baghdad. You can’t count on it. Wrong place, wrong time, and you’re a target, no matter how good or how bad you are.

So, then, God is not fair. The value of this one, if you’ve got to pick one of the options, is that at least it’s honest. God is fair? Come on, look around you. Explain New Orleans; explain the Twin Towers; explain Iraq; explain AIDS; explain child abuse; explain anything. God is fair? It’s to laugh. Or to cry. Fine, our parents did really stupid things, said the exiles to Ezekiel, and got what they deserved, but we weren’t even born then. Fair? Not on your life.

Their complaint is fully alive today—on lips around us and often on our own. How could a good God allow....(fill in the blank). If this is God, I want none of it. Which, of course, makes us God’s judge, so the God-is-not-fair-according-to-the-way-I-understand-fair option is a dangerous place to be as well. Even if we all do it.

So, what’s a God to do? Interestingly, what the God of the Bible seems to do is to embrace all of the above, the whole muddled mess. On the one hand, since God is just—must be just—finally, if only finally, God is fair. Ezekiel insists upon it. Not that you can bargain with God, play your cards right and get the goodies in this life. But, finally, when the chips are down, he says, you are responsible for your own life and no one else’s. You will not die for the sins of your parents, but only for your own. To be sure, it is a dangerous world, where acts have consequences, and where the sins of the parents will indeed impact the lives of their children, as we all know. Not because God is unfair, but because the world is real; and, if we think about it, we would not want it otherwise. But still, finally, when all is said and done, before God you are responsible only for your own actions or inactions. Jesus said the same thing: Finally, when it’s time to separate the sheep from the goats, the only issue will be what we have done to the least of Christ's brothers and sisters. Bad enough, but at least fair.

Ezekiel knows something more: God wants us to be well. God loads the dice in our favor, telling us everything we need to know to live and to thrive. You’ve maybe seen the poster announcing that “this life is only a test”; “if it were a real life you would have received more complete instructions.” But interestingly, the Bible insists that we have all the instructions we need. There are no secrets available only to the initiate, no Da Vinci code to decipher, no mysteries to solve, no hidden pathways in some computer-game life. God wants us to live, and God tells us all we need to know to make that happen:

“Say to them, As I live, says the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel?”

Don't die here, says God. It's the summation of all Old Testament law: Don't play in traffic. No small-minded God denying this and forbidding that because of a deep-seated worry that someone somewhere might be having a good time. Just a loving parent, putting all the cards on the table face up so we have no question about how the game is played. Don't steal, don't murder, don't commit adultery—those things will kill you. And, since I gave you life, I desperately want you to live. God is fair, and more than fair.

At the same time, God recognizes the massive unfairness of it all. The innocent suffer, the good die, children are caught in the crossfire, floods wipe out whole populations—again, because the world is real, because acts have consequences, because God insists upon allowing moral choice, because there are people and powers opposed to the will of God, because chance is a necessary aspect of the universe as God has made it.

So, what's a God to do? First, over and over again in the Bible, God weeps, cries out in pain over injustice, roars in anger about the suffering of the innocent, reaches out to carry and save his people, bearing himself the burdens they have forged. Until, finally—and this is pretty much the whole thing of Christian faith—God doesn't solve the riddle of an unfair and complex world with a convincing logical answer, God enters just that world. “The Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave....humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death” (Phil 2:7-8).

The religions all have in common the attempt to figure it out, to find the magic that will enable us to win, to align ourselves with the power of the gods, to channel the spirit world for our benefit, to crack the code. The God of the Bible will have none of it. Pain and joy, suffering and exaltation, life and death are real for us all—and there's no escaping any of it for any of us. Amazingly, there's no escaping it for God, either—at least not for a God who so loved the world that he gave his only son (John 3:16). Not for a God who was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself (2 Cor 5:19). Not for a God who came that we may have life and have it abundantly (John 10:10).

So, what are we to do? Paul has a suggestion: put on the Lord Jesus Christ—which certainly sounds formidable, but how in the world would we do that? Let’s see, I could wear my khaki slacks today, or I could put on Jesus; which will it be? Absurd, of course, because putting on Jesus is not one choice among many. The only way we can put on Christ is because Christ has put on us, taken our shape, taken our flesh, taken our sin, taken our unfairness, taken our death—and thus given us himself as our brother, our friend, our sure defense. Put me on, says Christ, and I will be the first to meet whatever troubles come your way. Put me on, says Christ, and I will usher you home to my Father, where all is finally fair. But that’s a scary thought, because when at last all is most completely fair, we will stand naked before the throne of judgment—and, I don’t know about you, but I fear that my, you know, pretty good life is going to seem pretty inadequate. But then, when things are at last fair, everything becomes most completely unfair, for God will look at us and see Christ whom we have put on, who has put us on, and God will say, “I have called you by name, you are mine.”

So, what are we to do in the meantime? We really don't have to kill and steal and commit adultery. We really can plan better for our cities and ourselves. We really can love our neighbors—the more so now that we have been given faith to see Christ in them. But, of course, we really don't, we really can’t—certainly not as we ought, not even as we are able. So we love, we fail, we give, we take, we share, we hoard, we help, we hold back, we do our best, we do our worst. And then Ezekiel comes or another prophet—today and everyday—and we hear God’s poignant call to choose life, and we turn and repent, and we are made new. And we come to the altar and we put on Christ, we put in Christ—into our bodies and into our lives—and we say, Here I am, Lord. Use me as you can. In Jesus’ name. AMEN