"What happens when it IS our fault?" - Sermon for 15th Sunday after Pentecost, 9-6-26
† The house of Israel, at long last, came to the conclusion that it was their fault. Up until now, they had blamed their misfortunes on God. The word of the Lord, delivered to the house of Israel by the prophet Ezekiel, was finally getting through. The house of Israel, finally, was beginning to listen.
“Our transgressions and our sins weigh upon us,” they said, “and we waste away because of them; how then can we live?”
And the Lord directs Ezekiel to say to them, “As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel?”
More often than not, in our scriptures, a person’s or a people’s misfortunes are a consequence of their actions, starting with our first parents who were escorted out of the garden of Eden after they chose to listen to the serpent and disobey God. God prefers life. We, all too often, act as if we prefer death.
One theological explanation for the necessity of our physical, biological death is that – to be blunt – death puts us out of our misery. Death takes us from our fallible, fallen state, brings us peace, and restores us, we hope, to the paradise we left behind in Eden. Biological death is the kindness which cures the curse. It comes for and claims every one of us.
But then there is death that is unexpected; death that is early or accidental or preventable or violent, which seems to us to be entirely unfair. Rather than putting one out of one’s misery, such a death robs one of one’s future.
Last week in New York City, randomly, a woman on her first day back to work after maternity leave was stabbed to death by a woman known to suffer from chronic psychoses, who minutes later was herself shot to death by the police when she refused to drop her two knives. My heart aches for everyone.
We are spending time in the Daily Office with Job, whose complaint, justifiably so, is that he did nothing to deserve his misfortune, so why did all this suffering fall upon him?
Job, of course, does not know what went on behind the scenes in the heavenly court, where God, in order to prove Job’s goodness and faithfulness, gives the Satan permission to do his worst, short of killing Job to put Job out of his misery. And in the end, when God finally answers Job, God doesn’t so much as answer Job’s question but as to remind Job that God is God and Job is Job and that is that. Sometimes for us, too – with all of life’s random unfairness – that is all we get.
Also in the Daily Office last week was John’s gospel account of the man born blind. “Who sinned,” Jesus’s disciples ask, “this man or his parents that he was afflicted this way?” That’s how they understood such misfortune. And Jesus, before restoring the man’s sight, said, “Neither sinned. He was born this way so God’s glory could be seen through him.” I wonder if you and I were born blinded by the ways we are for the same reason? For God’s glory to be seen through us?
So, then, the death that the Lord is speaking of to Ezekiel and the house of Israel isn’t physical, biological death. It isn’t the unfair death that is early or accidental or preventable or violent.
Rather, it is spiritual death – the death that comes to us before death. The death that we bring on ourselves. The death of sin and transgression that takes us out of right relationship with each other and with God. The living-death that weighs upon us when our consciences wake us up and bring us to our senses.
Today, Jesus gives the Church a method of progressive engagement for coming into right relationship when one member sins against another. Paul gives us a list of sins to avoid to keep us from offending in the first place. Good news, this.
But the better news that buttresses Jesus’s gospel and Paul’s gospel is Ezekiel’s gospel: that God takes no pleasure in our spiritual death. God doesn’t want that. What God does want is that we truly live while we are still alive. And we do this when we turn from our evil ways and turn back to God.
This starts by admitting our fault, like the house of Israel finally did. And it continues with our sorrow for what we’ve done; with our reparation whenever it is possible; and with our firm commitment to amend our lives so that we do our best not to fall in this way again.
And when we follow this ancient method of reconciliation, God’s words to us ring true. Assured of God’s forgiveness and of God’s delight in us – because we have chosen spiritual life over spiritual death – the grace of God through the comforting words of counsel and absolution send us on our way: Gentiles and tax collectors no more, but beloved children brought back, bought back by Christ’s blood on the Holy Cross, restored to our standing and status in the household of God. †
Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP
15th after Pentecost, Proper 18 – September 6, 2026
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco
“What happens when it is our fault?”
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