At the beginning of Ezekiel we learn that he was a priest in Jerusalem who was hauled off into exile by the Babylonians. Five years later, as he is sitting on a bank of an irrigation ditch near his refugee camp – on his 30th birthday, no less – he has a beautiful, amazing, utterly insane, transforming vision of God that engages all five sense: He feels wind, sees flashing lightning surrounded by brilliant light, fantastic creatures, and a stunning throne of sapphire on which God, looking like a man, sits. He hears the sound of wings like the roar of rushing waters and loud rumbling. And later, in chapter 3, he is asked to eat a scroll that tastes sweet.
The irony of all of this is that Ezekiel found himself experiencing God among those who the present residents of Jerusalem had written off as rejected by God (11:15). Their fate was looked upon as incontestable proof of divine rejection. But the beautiful vision of Ezekiel shatters the held notion that patron deities were localized and restricted to certain areas. Ezekiel’s God, our God, has jurisdiction over all and God’s beauty can be seen and felt everywhere. Friends, wherever there is beauty God is there. God will not be bound to churches or books or Sundays but can be experienced in the beauty of art, secular films, cultural symbols (all of the faces of the cherubim can also be found in heavenly creatures from other religions around the time of Ezekiel), music, and food. Beauty reminds us, God will never be exiled. The Psalmist will command, “Taste and see that the Lord is good . . .” and the world becomes a sensuous menu for an unctuous God. But here’s the thing – beauty is what brought us to this text, why else would we read it. This text, in other words, is Babylon. This weird, strange, bizarre theological lightshow brought us to a passage that we would otherwise never go to in order to experience God.
In vs. 26 Ezekiel uses a funny phrase to describe the beautiful God that he sees: “a likeness like that of a man.” Why are sensates important for our worship? They remind us artfully that God isn’t a proposition or idea, life coach, or kill-joy. Ezekiel reads as a theological work of prophetic poetry. As poetry prophecy it aims to invite our Bible reading and theology into an experience of a likeness like, to peel back the façade of what we believe the world is, and to look at God from the vantage point of art and imagination - not in the language of objective logic. Prophets, like Ezekiel, were not wide-eyed crazies nor systematic logicians – they were beat poets and masters of the imagination who sought to convey the experience truth through evocative language that engaged all five senses. Ezekiel sought not so much to explain the finer points of theological correctness but to immerse us in the worshipful experience of God. We need passages like this one to remind us that God is good but always surprising, God is known but always mysterious. We need Ezekiel so that any person who stands up and says “God is . . .” stops and thinks very, very carefully. The sensate beauty of Ezekiel is that you can know a thing about God without beauty but you will never experience God without it.
We need to read it aloud with wonder, not with graphs and charts. We need to read the Bible with the same poetic spirit that Billy Collins offers to anyone who wants to read poetry. He writes:
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Ezekiel is not a book to torture a confession out of. It’s a poetic, five-senses oriented theology that meets a Disney light show with full orchestra. It’s critical thinking set to music. It’s imaginative, colorful, dramatic, a bit flamboyant, even a bit over the top. It’s a artistic rendering about what is true. And the best art, is not literal interpretation of truth but at times dramatic expositions of reality. They grab our heart and not simply our head.
By the time many of us ever get around to cracking open Ezekiel there is no danger that we are inadequately informed about basic faith. We certainly know about salvation, the Trinitarian life of God, the Christian life, and the grand narrative of God with his people. Truth be told, we could get along quite nicely without ever having to crack open this disturbing little text. But, the danger of not reading Ezekiel and other books or passages like it is not that we might not know something critical for our faith. It’s more that we might become simply too comfortable with what we know – we might actually begin to think that’s all there is to know about God. Why should we read baffling, loud, colorful passages of the Bible? We need the sensory explosion of images to remind us that God cannot be reduced to a checklist of explanations, a moral code, a life plan, a theological scheme. I think a good hermeneutic at times for reading the Bible artfully actually comes from the former enigmatic chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan who once told reporters, “I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I said.” 1988 speech, Alan Greenspan as quoted in The New York Times, October 28, 2005
Who is your Pathway Companion?
For sensates: Henri Nouwen, Barbara Brown Taylor, Frederick Buechner. These writers are all incredibly intelligent and yet found their voice when they explored God and the divine through beauty and metaphor. Take a look at Nouwen’s Return of the Prodigal Son, Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World, or check out the Frederick Buechner website: https://www.frederickbuechner.com/
Two gentle challenges:
Jesus reveled in the delightful ambiguity of art.
There’s such a temptation to mold Jesus into a white Sunday School teacher or theologian and yet foundational to remember that he reveled in art and the senses for actually talking about God and himself. His most often theological speech was the form of story telling. He relied on picturesque language and metaphor to say what God was “like.” The Gospel writer Mark even says that Jesus would often ONLY use parables to teach, which means that he was willing to risk misunderstanding in hopes that some would get a much a deeper meaning. He even read and borrowed from the book of Ezekiel himself. The “son of man” is the title that Jesus most referenced himself with and in Ezekiel it held, in complicated and challenging ways, a means of describing both the human prophet and God. He delighted in the artistic ambiguity of the term.
We need better artful Bible reading and teaching like Jesus so that we would recuse ourselves from the often empty and meaningless phrase, “The clear teaching of Scripture.” I’m not saying that that means we can make it say anything. I’m not saying that we can or should alter its teaching. I am saying that the very weight of history is that God cannot be so easily read like the nutritional information of a cereal box.
Make Jesus friends with enthusiastic dancers and children. For enthusiasts: David, Peter, and children are your companions. I suspect that this is one of our more minority pathways. We would not be what people would refer to as a church of enthusiast. And we better listen to Jesus and watch David closely.
There is often real judgment against those who are enthusiasts – who often wished to add emotional movement and wonder to the sensates unctuous sensations. I’m not asking you to be fake – what I’m asking is for you to take note that the difference between being genuine and being judgmental is often a very thin line. Don’t be like Michal and end up being barren.
What I’m asking for you to imagine is that God is worth whoo-hooing, that the universe is worth savoring, that child-like can be an appropriate way to worship and that children often worship with their bodies and not simply their minds. I’m suggesting that maybe, just maybe, if we were a little less respectable, maybe we would worship with greater joy.
