03-13-25

ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
March 13, 2025
Have you ever come across a passage in the Bible and thought, “Well, that seems strange?” I suppose it happens quite frequently; at least, that’s my experience. Sometimes, the strangeness arises from a translation issue or the need to understand a not-so-obvious backstory. Whatever the case, my hope is for people to be curious and ask questions, even if the answer is not easy to come by or the answer is the cause of some discomfort. What I find more often are people who think to themselves, “I am embarrassed that I do not know this” and they move forward as if not having an answer is better than, say, “I don’t know.” Yet in many cases, other people were equally troubled or confused by the passage of scripture and were thankful when someone spoke what everyone else was thinking but afraid to ask. One of the crazier examples is a passage from Ezekiel 23, where the prophet compares Israel's actions to lusting over a donkey's genitals. In fact, it gets a bit more graphic than that. The whole chapter is rather blunt, but each time I come to these words, I am unprepared for what I read—a little shocked and uncomfortable. The Prophet was speaking about two sisters and their lack of faithfulness, which is all well and good, but then it gets a little earthy. To be honest, I have never preached on that section of Ezekiel because I would find it difficult to explain much in under 20 minutes. Yet I will confess a great deal of curiosity the first time I came across the passage (I probably giggled as I was 18 or 19 years old and rather immature), and I felt the need to explore those words. It required me to dig, reading larger sections of Ezekiel, along with commentaries that provided context. I really wish someone could provide a three-page handout that explained the entire Bible, the deep questions about the nature of God, and what it means to follow Jesus in the year 2025, but so far, such a handout does not exist. For that very reason, we should allow our curiosity to propel us further into the scriptures, and hopefully, into a deeper relationship with God.

Merciful and Holy Guide, let the unknown that we stumble across be a catalyst for even deeper exploration of this marvelous thing we call faith. Amen.