Catalyst
Commentary
Life happens. Steady, unrelenting, life happens. Whether I am aware of it or not, whether I am doing anything about it or not, life happens.
Few of us are in positions of significant influence to change life’s direction with a speech or a signature on a bill of law or a championship event sports play. Most of us wander and respond as life happens.
But each of our lectionary passages for today calls on us to be proactive rather than reactive, and to be and become catalysts for whatever good God is seeking as life happens. Because of sin and evil, the new normal for creation is decay and degradation. Complacency is capitulation, allowing the creep of contamination to break apart and break down society and relationships and goodness.
It takes faith and courage to stand against the onslaught, as Ezekiel was called to do. It requires divine strength to be the points of heaven’s light in a dark world, as Paul encouraged the early church to be. It demands daily choices in the little things of life, as Jesus’ parable pronounced.
Do we go with the flow, meandering toward mutually assured destruction? Or can we become catalysts of grace, stemming the corrosive tide in God’s grand redemptive re-creation project?
Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24
Some years ago, Jack Glenn, pastor of a Presbyterian congregation in Mendota, Illinois, decided that the church’s nativity scene needed a little repair work. The shepherd figures held staffs made of electrical conduit, bent and rebent and kinked over the years.
“Let’s get real ones,” he thought. But no farm supply store had such a thing. Intrigued, Pastor Glenn asked around until he gained the name of a man who not only owned a large herd of sheep but was also an expert on their care.
“Where can I get a genuine shepherd’s staff?” he asked.
“Nowhere,” came the reply. “You have to remember that here in the west, sheep are driven by dogs. It’s only in the east that they are led by a shepherd.”
Ours often seems to be a driven society. The ideals of the French Revolution have permeated our culture: Life! Liberty! Land! We North Americans have turned the last into a steady pleasure trip by translating it this way: the pursuit of happiness. All too often we are scrambling after more and better and bigger thrills.
One picture from the French Revolution, with its mob mania, perhaps best typifies the whole enterprise of western life. A wild-eyed man comes charging up to a citizen pausing on a Paris street corner.
“Where’s the crowd?” he cries. “Tell me, quick! Which way have they gone? I must follow them. I’m their leader.”
Driven by madness! Driven by the dogs! The dogs of desire, the dogs of fame and fortune, the dogs of war…it’s a dog-eat-dog world.
Maybe it is time to return to the east. Not the east of mysticism and transcendental meditation, helpful as they might be, but rather the One who grew up in the east, the one called “the Good Shepherd” (John 10:1-18), “the great Shepherd” (Heb. 13:20-21), and “the Chief Shepherd” (1Pet. 5:4). Maybe it is time to stop being driven and be led again in the simplicity of devotion. Maybe it is time to stop with Ezekiel, lost in Babylonian exile, and long again for the true shepherd who will not forget his people.
Sometimes, in our mad dashing about, we see only the last verses of our lectionary reading for today, the verses about comfort and the promise of good life. But which of us will hope in such things if the wild unrest and social upheaval of the early verses are not also a mark of our lives? The closest some people seem to get to the peace and serenity of life under the great shepherd’s guidance is having its poetic lines etched on the little memorial cards that are handed out at their funerals.
Note again that the key message God has for Ezekiel is that he and other prophets need to be catalysts of grace, mercy and peace, and agents of righteousness and care and protection. If the shepherds left in charge of the great shepherd’s flock fail, the people suffer greatly. And the shepherds will be judged greatly.
Ephesians 1:15-23
A schoolteacher asked her students to make a list of the things for which they were thankful. Right at the top of Chad’s list was the word “glasses.” Some children resent having to wear glasses, but evidently not Chad! She asked him about it. Why was he thankful that he wore glasses?
“Well,” he said, “my glasses keep the boys from hitting me and the girls from kissing me.”
The philosopher Eric Hoffer says, “The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings!” That is true, isn’t it?
There is an old legend about the angels of heaven coming to earth to gather prayers into large baskets. Thousands return with their baskets overflowing with every request, from a child’s prayer: “Bless Mommy and Daddy and sister and brother and my pet hamster” to the atheist’s cry: “O God! What do we do now?”
But a single lonely angel returns to heaven with a half-empty basket of thanksgiving notes. That is all there are. Like the ten lepers Jesus healed, we run off with the nine and only once in a while stop to think and thank.
Paul, however, overflows with thanksgiving in his letter to the Ephesian congregation. We would never think it might be so at first. After all, Paul is writing from prison in Rome, and will soon stand before Nero to answer trumped up charges. Is this a time for light-hearted delight?
We don’t want to know the tragedies of life. We don’t want to feel the lostness and the forsakenness that Paul may have been experiencing. We don’t want his pain. We don’t want his problems. It’s either/or for us. It’s one or the other, the good or the bad, thanksgiving or curses.
But faith begins when we do keep the tragedy and thanks of Paul’s powerful letter together, doesn’t it? Before another year is over, some of us will die, perhaps painfully. Some of us will find out we have cancer. Some of us will lose our businesses. Some of us will lose our spouses. Some of us will be betrayed by our friends. And some of us will pray, but after a little while, all we’ll be able to do is cry out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
That is when we will need to remember these powerful testimonies. Thankfulness and faith go hand in hand. My faith in God is not just some polite thanks for the goodies and trinkets that I think God has given me. No, it is the other way around. My thankfulness to God is the cornerstone of my faith. I am not thankful just because I believe God has given me things. Rather, I believe because it is right to give God thanks, even when I cannot point to anything specific.
Even when the chips are down. Even when I am surrounded by trouble.
Paul’s testimony is a great catalyst to our own daily changes of circumstance. Only the grateful truly believe that God is God, and that life itself, in every dimension, is held in the sovereign hands.
Matthew 25:31-46
The latest word arrived from environmentalists in this past week’s mail: “The world’s dolphins are being decimated through a deadly combination of commercial greed and plain human carelessness.” Without public outcry, “more than 375,000 of these sensitive, intelligent animals” will be slaughtered in the next year.
It is a tragedy, and no human being, authorized by the Creator to mind the world, can ignore the scandal. “Commercial greed,” says Lesley Scheele of Greenpeace, “and plain human carelessness.” That’s what does it. When those two forces rule, life loses its importance. Commercial greed defines values in terms of profit. Carelessness takes the heart out of our relationships with things or people.
Albert Camus has a little scene reflecting that in his powerful novel The Fall. A well-known gentleman is walking the streets of Amsterdam one night, and he hears a sharp cry. A woman has fallen into the canal. She is splashing about, yelling for help. Thoughts come rushing to his mind: of course, he must help; but . . . he is a respected lawyer; should he be the one to get involved in this? After all, who knows what has been going on? Maybe she is a woman of the streets, and people would assume he had been with her! Maybe she has been attacked, and her assailant is still lurking in the shadows! Maybe . . .
But by this time, he does not have to worry anymore. The splashing has stopped. The woman has drowned. The lawyer is safe, all his marketable values still intact. Camus closes the scene with these words: “He did not answer the cry for help. That is the man he was.”
The same tragedy is reflected in Jesus’ powerful parable about the end of time. With the Father, Jesus laments for an endangered species, a vanishing breed. It is not the dolphins and it is not the dinosaurs. It is the community of faithful and godly people who once testified of their religious commitments. It is the race of humans who had a measure of integrity and carried themselves with divine dignity.
“When did we see you and not help!” cry the “good” people of planet earth. Yet, in the words of that mournful folk song: “Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?”
Commercial greed got them, Jesus says. The weak are sold for a mess of pottage. Carelessness has become their way of life.
And when the godly vanish, the conscience of the people disappears. Babies are aborted, ethnic groups are brushed aside in bigoted disdain, the earth is raped, and the skies are polluted. In another place, Jesus similarly asked, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8).
But Jesus does not allow our righteousness to take on Elijah’s martyr complex: “I, only I, am left, and they seek to take away my life as well.” Nor does he abandon us in remnant suffering: “Well, that’s just the way it is these days.”
Jesus expects us to do something about it, to enact a new law of protection or to revitalize the species with fresh energy and life. There is no magic formula, though. There is only the church. A school of dolphins swimming together can break the nets hung for them in the sea. A company of those faithful to God can shatter the grip of commercial greed and carelessness.
The race is endangered. The species is vanishing. The conscience of society is dying. But there is the church…
Application
Ezekiel was a prophet. Paul spoke with a prophet’s voice. Jesus is the greatest prophet of all time, telling truths we all need. In our noisy world, it is hard to hear a clear prophetic voice. Yet when it happens, now and again, heads turn, and conversation is stilled. The same words used by everyone else are piled up by the prophet, yet they sound different. They sing. They dance. They punch. They swirl. They lift. They probe.
But, as we read in today’s scriptures, people may push the prophet away. “It’s only rhetoric!” “Fancy words, that’s all!” “Nice talk, but we have to live in the real world!” In fact, responding well to a prophet’s message is not usually a natural human trait.
Yet those who receive the words of the prophet with uncensored ears and wistful hearts are rewarded. For a few brief moments in time the voice of God resonates. Cataracts melt from eyes and fear dissolves in the mind. Sight is restored, vision refocused, lives are mended, and hope leads the way. The prophet’s voice cannot be stilled. That is why we preach today.
There is a great story about the dissonance and power of a prophetic voice in John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Profiles in Courage. It is found in the chapter on George W. Norris is titled “I Have Come Home to Tell You the Truth.” Kennedy narrates the story of a Nebraska Congressman who had the fortitude to take unpopular stands during the hoopla leading up to American involvement in the Second World War, and who was willing to go back to his home state to explain his very unpopular actions to town hall meetings where his own political party refused support or endorsement. Norris did not apologize for his political choices which were opposed by his constituents; he merely told the people whom he represented that if he had been trusted by them to act on their behalf, he had pledged always to do the right thing. News reports and editorials had blasted his unpopular stance against government and business warmongering and panic arousal by labeling him unpatriotic. Even the Nebraska governor got into the act and hinted that he might ask the state legislature to begin recall proceedings.
Norris declared that if it was the will of the people, he would gladly step down from office. But first, he said, he wanted to explain why his views had developed the way they did, and how these had influenced his voting record. He would return to Nebraska and meet face-to-face with his constituents. No one supported him in this politically-suicidal endeavor. His own party refused to schedule or publicize the meetings he had in mind. The first, in Lincoln, gave the appearance of throwing a maimed chicken into a pen of ravenous and angry pit bulls. Patriotic fervor had ignited a boiling caldron of venom aimed at destroying him on the spot. But Norris quietly began by saying, “I have come home to tell you the truth.” Then, as intrigued voters started to listen, the congressman poured out his heart in prophetic tones of vision, justice, morality and honesty. When he finished, the crowd and even the press loudly endorsed his actions and sent him back to Washington for many more years.
Every society wants its scapegoats, just as every people is looking for a prophet. The two are very closely related, as Plato reflected in The Republic. We still need Ezekiel, and the watchmen prophets who stand with him. We still long for Paul’s prophetic vision to come alive in us more deeply and fully. And we are still listening to Jesus tell it like it is.
Catalysts…
Alternative Application (Ephesians 1:15-23)
Paul’s prison experiences and his testimony in Ephesians 1 bring to mind a truly great story of faith that continues to resonate through the Christian church worldwide. It is particularly significant in this era of Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine.
In 1637, Eilenburg, Saxony, was surrounded by the dark night of the soul. Europe was at war. Eilenburg was tossed back and forth by the armies. Three times during that year it was attacked and severely damaged. When the armies left, refugees poured in by the thousands. Diseases ran rampant. Food was scarce.
There was only one pastor in the city, a fellow named Martin Rinkart. His journal for 1637 indicates that he conducted over 4,500 funerals that year, sometimes as many as forty or fifty a day. Life was a constant death, and each morning stank of disaster.
Still, somehow, even today, 1637 is important for nearly every thankful celebration around the world. For Christians still sing the song Pastor Rinkart wrote that year. They sing it with gusto. They sing it with faith. They sing it, not because it catalogues a list of reasons for thanksgiving, but because thankfulness is all that is left when the bottom drops out of the world.
Now thank we all our God
with heart and hands and voices,
who wondrous things has done,
in whom his world rejoices;
who from our mothers’ arms
has blessed us on our way
with countless gifts of love,
and still is ours today.
Only the grateful believe!
Few of us are in positions of significant influence to change life’s direction with a speech or a signature on a bill of law or a championship event sports play. Most of us wander and respond as life happens.
But each of our lectionary passages for today calls on us to be proactive rather than reactive, and to be and become catalysts for whatever good God is seeking as life happens. Because of sin and evil, the new normal for creation is decay and degradation. Complacency is capitulation, allowing the creep of contamination to break apart and break down society and relationships and goodness.
It takes faith and courage to stand against the onslaught, as Ezekiel was called to do. It requires divine strength to be the points of heaven’s light in a dark world, as Paul encouraged the early church to be. It demands daily choices in the little things of life, as Jesus’ parable pronounced.
Do we go with the flow, meandering toward mutually assured destruction? Or can we become catalysts of grace, stemming the corrosive tide in God’s grand redemptive re-creation project?
Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24
Some years ago, Jack Glenn, pastor of a Presbyterian congregation in Mendota, Illinois, decided that the church’s nativity scene needed a little repair work. The shepherd figures held staffs made of electrical conduit, bent and rebent and kinked over the years.
“Let’s get real ones,” he thought. But no farm supply store had such a thing. Intrigued, Pastor Glenn asked around until he gained the name of a man who not only owned a large herd of sheep but was also an expert on their care.
“Where can I get a genuine shepherd’s staff?” he asked.
“Nowhere,” came the reply. “You have to remember that here in the west, sheep are driven by dogs. It’s only in the east that they are led by a shepherd.”
Ours often seems to be a driven society. The ideals of the French Revolution have permeated our culture: Life! Liberty! Land! We North Americans have turned the last into a steady pleasure trip by translating it this way: the pursuit of happiness. All too often we are scrambling after more and better and bigger thrills.
One picture from the French Revolution, with its mob mania, perhaps best typifies the whole enterprise of western life. A wild-eyed man comes charging up to a citizen pausing on a Paris street corner.
“Where’s the crowd?” he cries. “Tell me, quick! Which way have they gone? I must follow them. I’m their leader.”
Driven by madness! Driven by the dogs! The dogs of desire, the dogs of fame and fortune, the dogs of war…it’s a dog-eat-dog world.
Maybe it is time to return to the east. Not the east of mysticism and transcendental meditation, helpful as they might be, but rather the One who grew up in the east, the one called “the Good Shepherd” (John 10:1-18), “the great Shepherd” (Heb. 13:20-21), and “the Chief Shepherd” (1Pet. 5:4). Maybe it is time to stop being driven and be led again in the simplicity of devotion. Maybe it is time to stop with Ezekiel, lost in Babylonian exile, and long again for the true shepherd who will not forget his people.
Sometimes, in our mad dashing about, we see only the last verses of our lectionary reading for today, the verses about comfort and the promise of good life. But which of us will hope in such things if the wild unrest and social upheaval of the early verses are not also a mark of our lives? The closest some people seem to get to the peace and serenity of life under the great shepherd’s guidance is having its poetic lines etched on the little memorial cards that are handed out at their funerals.
Note again that the key message God has for Ezekiel is that he and other prophets need to be catalysts of grace, mercy and peace, and agents of righteousness and care and protection. If the shepherds left in charge of the great shepherd’s flock fail, the people suffer greatly. And the shepherds will be judged greatly.
Ephesians 1:15-23
A schoolteacher asked her students to make a list of the things for which they were thankful. Right at the top of Chad’s list was the word “glasses.” Some children resent having to wear glasses, but evidently not Chad! She asked him about it. Why was he thankful that he wore glasses?
“Well,” he said, “my glasses keep the boys from hitting me and the girls from kissing me.”
The philosopher Eric Hoffer says, “The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings!” That is true, isn’t it?
There is an old legend about the angels of heaven coming to earth to gather prayers into large baskets. Thousands return with their baskets overflowing with every request, from a child’s prayer: “Bless Mommy and Daddy and sister and brother and my pet hamster” to the atheist’s cry: “O God! What do we do now?”
But a single lonely angel returns to heaven with a half-empty basket of thanksgiving notes. That is all there are. Like the ten lepers Jesus healed, we run off with the nine and only once in a while stop to think and thank.
Paul, however, overflows with thanksgiving in his letter to the Ephesian congregation. We would never think it might be so at first. After all, Paul is writing from prison in Rome, and will soon stand before Nero to answer trumped up charges. Is this a time for light-hearted delight?
We don’t want to know the tragedies of life. We don’t want to feel the lostness and the forsakenness that Paul may have been experiencing. We don’t want his pain. We don’t want his problems. It’s either/or for us. It’s one or the other, the good or the bad, thanksgiving or curses.
But faith begins when we do keep the tragedy and thanks of Paul’s powerful letter together, doesn’t it? Before another year is over, some of us will die, perhaps painfully. Some of us will find out we have cancer. Some of us will lose our businesses. Some of us will lose our spouses. Some of us will be betrayed by our friends. And some of us will pray, but after a little while, all we’ll be able to do is cry out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
That is when we will need to remember these powerful testimonies. Thankfulness and faith go hand in hand. My faith in God is not just some polite thanks for the goodies and trinkets that I think God has given me. No, it is the other way around. My thankfulness to God is the cornerstone of my faith. I am not thankful just because I believe God has given me things. Rather, I believe because it is right to give God thanks, even when I cannot point to anything specific.
Even when the chips are down. Even when I am surrounded by trouble.
Paul’s testimony is a great catalyst to our own daily changes of circumstance. Only the grateful truly believe that God is God, and that life itself, in every dimension, is held in the sovereign hands.
Matthew 25:31-46
The latest word arrived from environmentalists in this past week’s mail: “The world’s dolphins are being decimated through a deadly combination of commercial greed and plain human carelessness.” Without public outcry, “more than 375,000 of these sensitive, intelligent animals” will be slaughtered in the next year.
It is a tragedy, and no human being, authorized by the Creator to mind the world, can ignore the scandal. “Commercial greed,” says Lesley Scheele of Greenpeace, “and plain human carelessness.” That’s what does it. When those two forces rule, life loses its importance. Commercial greed defines values in terms of profit. Carelessness takes the heart out of our relationships with things or people.
Albert Camus has a little scene reflecting that in his powerful novel The Fall. A well-known gentleman is walking the streets of Amsterdam one night, and he hears a sharp cry. A woman has fallen into the canal. She is splashing about, yelling for help. Thoughts come rushing to his mind: of course, he must help; but . . . he is a respected lawyer; should he be the one to get involved in this? After all, who knows what has been going on? Maybe she is a woman of the streets, and people would assume he had been with her! Maybe she has been attacked, and her assailant is still lurking in the shadows! Maybe . . .
But by this time, he does not have to worry anymore. The splashing has stopped. The woman has drowned. The lawyer is safe, all his marketable values still intact. Camus closes the scene with these words: “He did not answer the cry for help. That is the man he was.”
The same tragedy is reflected in Jesus’ powerful parable about the end of time. With the Father, Jesus laments for an endangered species, a vanishing breed. It is not the dolphins and it is not the dinosaurs. It is the community of faithful and godly people who once testified of their religious commitments. It is the race of humans who had a measure of integrity and carried themselves with divine dignity.
“When did we see you and not help!” cry the “good” people of planet earth. Yet, in the words of that mournful folk song: “Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?”
Commercial greed got them, Jesus says. The weak are sold for a mess of pottage. Carelessness has become their way of life.
And when the godly vanish, the conscience of the people disappears. Babies are aborted, ethnic groups are brushed aside in bigoted disdain, the earth is raped, and the skies are polluted. In another place, Jesus similarly asked, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8).
But Jesus does not allow our righteousness to take on Elijah’s martyr complex: “I, only I, am left, and they seek to take away my life as well.” Nor does he abandon us in remnant suffering: “Well, that’s just the way it is these days.”
Jesus expects us to do something about it, to enact a new law of protection or to revitalize the species with fresh energy and life. There is no magic formula, though. There is only the church. A school of dolphins swimming together can break the nets hung for them in the sea. A company of those faithful to God can shatter the grip of commercial greed and carelessness.
The race is endangered. The species is vanishing. The conscience of society is dying. But there is the church…
Application
Ezekiel was a prophet. Paul spoke with a prophet’s voice. Jesus is the greatest prophet of all time, telling truths we all need. In our noisy world, it is hard to hear a clear prophetic voice. Yet when it happens, now and again, heads turn, and conversation is stilled. The same words used by everyone else are piled up by the prophet, yet they sound different. They sing. They dance. They punch. They swirl. They lift. They probe.
But, as we read in today’s scriptures, people may push the prophet away. “It’s only rhetoric!” “Fancy words, that’s all!” “Nice talk, but we have to live in the real world!” In fact, responding well to a prophet’s message is not usually a natural human trait.
Yet those who receive the words of the prophet with uncensored ears and wistful hearts are rewarded. For a few brief moments in time the voice of God resonates. Cataracts melt from eyes and fear dissolves in the mind. Sight is restored, vision refocused, lives are mended, and hope leads the way. The prophet’s voice cannot be stilled. That is why we preach today.
There is a great story about the dissonance and power of a prophetic voice in John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Profiles in Courage. It is found in the chapter on George W. Norris is titled “I Have Come Home to Tell You the Truth.” Kennedy narrates the story of a Nebraska Congressman who had the fortitude to take unpopular stands during the hoopla leading up to American involvement in the Second World War, and who was willing to go back to his home state to explain his very unpopular actions to town hall meetings where his own political party refused support or endorsement. Norris did not apologize for his political choices which were opposed by his constituents; he merely told the people whom he represented that if he had been trusted by them to act on their behalf, he had pledged always to do the right thing. News reports and editorials had blasted his unpopular stance against government and business warmongering and panic arousal by labeling him unpatriotic. Even the Nebraska governor got into the act and hinted that he might ask the state legislature to begin recall proceedings.
Norris declared that if it was the will of the people, he would gladly step down from office. But first, he said, he wanted to explain why his views had developed the way they did, and how these had influenced his voting record. He would return to Nebraska and meet face-to-face with his constituents. No one supported him in this politically-suicidal endeavor. His own party refused to schedule or publicize the meetings he had in mind. The first, in Lincoln, gave the appearance of throwing a maimed chicken into a pen of ravenous and angry pit bulls. Patriotic fervor had ignited a boiling caldron of venom aimed at destroying him on the spot. But Norris quietly began by saying, “I have come home to tell you the truth.” Then, as intrigued voters started to listen, the congressman poured out his heart in prophetic tones of vision, justice, morality and honesty. When he finished, the crowd and even the press loudly endorsed his actions and sent him back to Washington for many more years.
Every society wants its scapegoats, just as every people is looking for a prophet. The two are very closely related, as Plato reflected in The Republic. We still need Ezekiel, and the watchmen prophets who stand with him. We still long for Paul’s prophetic vision to come alive in us more deeply and fully. And we are still listening to Jesus tell it like it is.
Catalysts…
Alternative Application (Ephesians 1:15-23)
Paul’s prison experiences and his testimony in Ephesians 1 bring to mind a truly great story of faith that continues to resonate through the Christian church worldwide. It is particularly significant in this era of Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine.
In 1637, Eilenburg, Saxony, was surrounded by the dark night of the soul. Europe was at war. Eilenburg was tossed back and forth by the armies. Three times during that year it was attacked and severely damaged. When the armies left, refugees poured in by the thousands. Diseases ran rampant. Food was scarce.
There was only one pastor in the city, a fellow named Martin Rinkart. His journal for 1637 indicates that he conducted over 4,500 funerals that year, sometimes as many as forty or fifty a day. Life was a constant death, and each morning stank of disaster.
Still, somehow, even today, 1637 is important for nearly every thankful celebration around the world. For Christians still sing the song Pastor Rinkart wrote that year. They sing it with gusto. They sing it with faith. They sing it, not because it catalogues a list of reasons for thanksgiving, but because thankfulness is all that is left when the bottom drops out of the world.
Now thank we all our God
with heart and hands and voices,
who wondrous things has done,
in whom his world rejoices;
who from our mothers’ arms
has blessed us on our way
with countless gifts of love,
and still is ours today.
Only the grateful believe!
