Scripture: Ezekiel 11:14–20 (NRSVUE)
Key Verse: “Therefore say: Thus says the Lord God: Though I removed them far away among the nations and though I scattered them among the countries, yet I have been a sanctuary to them for a little while in the countries where they have gone.” (Ezekiel 11:16)
Reflection:
Ezekiel hears a report from Jerusalem. The people who survived the first deportation are still in the city, still walking past the Temple on the way to market, and they have reached a theological conclusion about their deported relatives: “They have gone far from the Lord; to us this land is given for a possession.” It is a short sentence that does a great deal of work. It turns survival into evidence of favor and displacement into evidence of judgment. It lets the people who kept the property claim the God who was supposed to live on it. God’s reply refuses the whole arrangement. The exiles in Babylon have not wandered out of God’s reach. God has been a sanctuary to them there, beside a foreign canal, far from the Temple and the worship that once ordered their lives.
The claim from Jerusalem is the oldest temptation of people who stay. Holding the building begins to feel like holding God. Faithfulness gets measured by attendance, by years of membership, by who carries a key and who has served on the trustees. Ezekiel unsettles that measurement at the root. God’s presence was never the possession of the people who kept the land, and it is not the possession of the congregation that kept the building. A few verses later the glory of the Lord rises from the city and stops on the mountain to the east.
Churches that have survived decline are tempted to read their survival the way Jerusalem did. We stayed when others left. We kept the lights on. We assume, without quite saying it, that the people who drifted away, the families whose church closed, the neighbors who stopped coming after a divorce or a diagnosis, have gone far from the Lord. Ezekiel gives that assumption its right name: a land claim dressed up as faithfulness. All Saints Sunday asks us to remember the dead and grieve what we have lost. Ezekiel asks a harder question in the same breath. If God is with the displaced, are we?
Writing Prompt: Write about one person or group you have quietly assumed is “far from the Lord” because they left, never came, or lost their place. What did that assumption protect for you?
Application: Before next Sunday, call or visit one person who used to worship with this congregation and stopped coming. Do not invite them back. Ask how they are, and listen to the whole answer.
Prayer: God of the exiles, I confess how easily I mistake my place for your presence. Where I have treated staying as proof of faithfulness, unsettle me. You are already with the people I have written off. Give me the courage to be found there with you. Amen.