Tuesday, December 16

Scripture:  On the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing. (Ezekiel 47:12).

Observation: The Scripture passages for these devotionals come from the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL). The RCL is a three-year calendar of Scripture passages organized according to the church calendar year, starting on the First Sunday of Advent and ending on Christ the King Sunday. If you were to read along with the lectionary every day for three years, you would have read almost every verse of the Bible. The RCL readings for today include the verse above from Ezekiel, and it describes one of my favorite images in the Bible.

The prophet Ezekiel is having his fourth and final vision. Ezekiel is a priest living in exile in Babylon, now modern-day Iraq. Here, an angel gives him a glimpse of the Temple in Jerusalem, which Ezekiel saw being destroyed with his own eyes before he and his family were deported to Babylon. 

Ezekiel sees the Temple rebuilt, but with a new feature: there’s a river flowing out of the Holy of Holies, the innermost chamber of the Temple where, before the Temple fell, God’s very presence was supposed to dwell. The river bubbles up from the Holy of Holies as if from an underground spring and flows eastward, away from Jerusalem, and empties into the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea in Ezekiel’s time was just as dead as it is now. As the sea with the highest salinity on earth, the Dead Sea was and is too salty for fish to live there, so salty that a person doesn’t float in the water as much as they sit on it. 

But the river flowing out of the Temple resurrects the Dead Sea. Now it’s a Living Sea: fish can live there, and fishermen can fish there. On both riverbanks for miles, Ezekiel sees trees that are evergreen and produce food year-round. Ezekiel would know as well as anyone from the Holy Land that the terrain surrounding the Dead Sea is barren, brown, and parched. But Ezekiel sees the land transformed into a tropical jungle with lush green trees and massive amounts of fruit weighing them down. The leaves of these trees, the angel tells Ezekiel, are “for healing.” We’re allowed to imagine all sorts of healing here: healing from the trauma of exile, healing of physical wounds, healing of weary souls, healing of the mind, healing from death itself.

Ezekiel sees a Great Reversal where God’s presence in the Temple becomes the headwaters of resurrection on earth. The Dead Sea becomes alive. The desert becomes a rainforest. The hungry are fed. The suffering are healed. It’s all because God, like Elvis, has left the building and moved into the places of the world that need new life.

Application: Christmas is a taste of Easter. At Easter, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, God’s triumph over death, and anticipate our own resurrection to eternal life. Christmas is the appetizer of Easter. At Christmas, God’s very presence leaves a place, not a Temple but a heaven, and flows, not eastward but outward, into the world to be in dead places and be with hurting people. God’s presence gives us new life. It’s not the eternal quantity of life we expect in the afterlife; that’s the hope of Easter. It’s the new life of life now, an eternal quality of life now. Christmas means Emmanuel, God with us, means business. His withness with us is a Great Reversal where the dying can know living and the hurting can know healing.

Prayer: 

Your healing, Holy One, is not what I expect

   When I am well, for the healing I want in wellness is actually

   The subtraction of inconvenience and

   The addition of what I am greedy for 

   Multiplied by the boost in my approval rating.

It is when I am sick that I understand what you mean by healing.

The healing you prepared for me is

   Joy rising from the miracle of being not alone.

 By healing- 

 You mean courage to face the unknown because

   Your presence with me is fact.

You mean receiving the gift of time-abundance because

   You provide all the seconds I need to do what must be done.

You mean hope in the pepper grinder of life because

   Your light within me cannot be snuffed out.

You mean comfort when the anchors of my identity are reduced to dust because 

   You love for me is eternal.

You mean awakening to the truth of your solidarity with me because

   I cannot change where you have chosen to be-

  With me.

The healing you prepared for me is

   Joy rising from the miracle of being not alone. 

 Holy One, lead me to discover again that I am healed

   When I return to the unshakable law of your withness with me.