First Hebrew Scripture Reading—Ezekiel 1: 1-6
Second Hebrew Scripture Reading—Ezekiel 1: 15-22, 28
This morning I want to share with you a story about a man who is a member of a church very much like this one. The story begins on a Saturday morning. It was that morning that Harold had received a most unusual call. “Would you be willing to preach this Sunday?” asked Kathy, the office administrator at his church. “Pastor Bob has come down with laryngitis, and he thought you would be the best person to replace him tomorrow at church. He said your job has prepared you well to fill in on a moment’s notice.” Harold was shocked. He started to disagree as he thought about how he had no theological training whatsoever. Moreover, he secretly thought parts of the Bible must have been written in a pharmalogically induced state. “What was Ezekiel smoking when he saw that burning wheel?” he often asked. But then Harold thought about some of the lessons his job had taught him and his mind was thrown into turmoil. “Kathy, can you give me five minutes to think this over and then I will call you back.” Kathy said yes, but she really would need an answer soon.
After he got off the phone, Harold at first felt overwhelmed by the idea of having to come up with his first sermon ever on such short notice. He smiled as he thought how shocked his mother would be if he preached a sermon. Not only had he been a bit of a mischief maker in his earlier years, but his mother would never had guessed that his current profession would have ever led to him preaching. You see Harold was a comedy improv instructor. For the first five years that Harold taught classes at the Hooligan Comedy Improv Club, his mother could not understand what it was that he did for a living. Harold tried to explain that comedy improv was a kind of theatre designed to make people laugh, but instead of acting from a script, one acted spontaneously by feeding off the other actors or suggestions from the audience. Even after the TV show “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” made improv comedy familiar with households everywhere, his mother still didn’t get it. “How can Wayne Brady possibly make up all of that stuff without a script?”
Eventually, his mother finally became a believer, but she then had to be convinced that improv required instruction. “If they just make stuff up on the spot, why would they ever need a teacher? What’s there to teach?” Harold tried to explain, but it never seemed to get through to his mother. The whole idea seemed ridiculous to her. This was a perpetual source of agitation for Harold. Even though comedy improv was designed to make people laugh, Harold liked to take his profession seriously. He had gotten too much out of it and he had seen others get a lot out of it as well. There was the shy kid who became the life of the party once he learned that people actually laughed and liked him when he said whatever was on his mind. Then, there were the mischievous kids like himself when he was younger who found a healthy way to channel their energy and their craving for attention. But improv was actually much more than simply helping people develop social skills or have social outlets. As one of his early instructors had told him, the essence of comedy improv ultimately boils down to three t’s: theatre, therapy, and theology. Theology. Yikes, there was that word that Harold liked to believe he only knew second hand through his pastor.
Harold then remembered that he needed to come to a decision quickly before Kathy called him back asking for an answer. The whole reason Harold couldn’t just say no earlier was that he had thought about the lessons he taught his students and how following those lessons might actually lead him to say yes. The question he faced now was whether he would affirm those lessons or whether he would toss them out the window as silly nonsense and admit that the last 8 years of his life had been an utter fraud.
The lesson that had really created a stumbling block for Harold was the first lesson he taught students: always look for the yes. In creating a scene with another actor, it is easy to be in conflict, to argue back and forth, but the problem with conflict is that it makes it hard for the action to move forward. Conflict gets you stuck in one place. The far more creative and enlivening route is to always search for the yes. In other words, to always find a way to agree with your partner.
Harold often applied this lesson to life. He realized that life is full of conflict, difficult situations, and roadblocks to one’s dreams. The art of living with all this is to improvise by looking for the yes, by trying to find that river or trickle of possibility that allows you to get around the blockage. Sometimes that might even mean saying yes to disagreement—agreeing to disagree.
To demonstrate that agreeing to disagree can sometimes be quite fun, Harold liked to tell his students the Monty Python “Argument Sketch.” In the sketch, a man is looking for the argument room. He enters into one room and sees another man at a desk:
“Is this the right room for an argument?” he asks.
“I’ve told you once,” replied the other.
“No you haven’t.”
“Yes I have.”
“When?”
“Just now.
“No you didn’t.”
“Yes I did.”
“Didn’t.”
“Did.”
“Didn’t.”
“I’m telling you I did.”
“You did not!”
“I’m sorry, is this a five-minute argument, or the full half-hour?”
Harold liked to further tell his students that looking for the yes often means being open to following the unexpected twist, being open to the unusual choice. Harold thought about how saying yes to preaching tomorrow would certainly be an unexpected twist, an unusual choice. When Kathy first asked if he would preach, it scared the hibbeegeegees out of him. His heart went into spasms of anxiety over the prospect of being in the pulpit without having other actors with whom to interact. He would be alone starring at all those people who would give him about 30 seconds to say something interesting before deciding whether to hit the snooze button for another 15 minutes.
Harold wondered what he would tell his students in a situation like this. Ah, yes, he would tell them to stop and think about what the current scene—life at that moment—was suggesting to them. It occurred to Harold that this idea was not far from a theological idea. Maybe being faithful isn’t so much about following rules as it is about waiting and watching for God to arise out of the life situation tossed before us.
“Well, what is life suggesting to me?” thought Harold. “What is God saying to me in this mess caused by my pastor’s wretched voice-box malfunction? Oddly, enough my job seems to have taught me some theological lessons. Maybe God is even suggesting that I share the nuggets of what I have learned over the years as a teacher with the rest of my church.”
But before Harold said yes, he wanted to think some more about what he would say. He had to do more than just talk about his class and his students. He had to relate all of that to the congregation and, even worse, he needed to relate it to something in the Bible. It occurred to him that probably preachers normally start their sermon preparation with the text and then figure out what they were going to say based on that. By having decided first that he wanted to share the lessons he had learned over the years teaching, Harold would be doing it backwards. “Well, nobody needs to know how I got the end result,” he thought to himself.
Besides, in improv, one was supposed to make things up as one went along. Maybe he would just invent his own process for coming up with a sermon. Who says one needs to get a degree in preaching in order to have something to say? Harold decided he did not need to worry about whether he would make any mistakes if he preached. As he often told his students, “There are no mistakes, only altered opportunities.”
Harold now felt better about the idea of preaching, but he still hadn’t figured out what to do with the Bible. He liked to tell his students that part of being able to find the yes in life is a willingness to explore and experiment. That was precisely what he would have to do with the Bible. But where to begin? “It is such a big book,” he thought. “What was that text I thought of earlier? Ezekiel and the burning wheel! What a hoot it would be to preach on that text!” Harold quickly flipped the Bible to Ezekiel and saw the text he wanted. He read it, but he gradually became depressed as he did so. He said to himself, “What can I possibly say about this?”
Not wanting to give up easily, he read the footnotes in his Study Bible along with the editor’s introduction to the book of Ezekiel. He learned that Ezekiel and his pals had been going through some tough times. They had been booted out of Jerusalem and forced to live in Babylon. The life of those in exile had been thrown into disarray. They had believed that God literally lived in the Temple of Jerusalem and that one couldn’t even have a vision of God outside of Jerusalem. This was a problem for Ezekiel. He had been a priest. He had labored in the Temple to keep the people connected with God. What was he to do now? Were he and his people to live completely separated from God?
It occurred to Harold that old Zek would have needed some strong medicine to deal with that situation. No wonder he needed a powerful vision to prove to him that God was indeed capable of living and breathing outside of the Temple walls. In his vision, he saw the cherubim of the ark, and he saw them on wheels. Harold thought, “Maybe I should title my sermon ‘God on Wheels.’ I will tell my congregation that we don’t even need to worship in our great big sanctuary in order to have God present with us. In fact, we could worship in the church’s boiler room down in the basement and still have God with us.”
Harold realized that in thinking about the scripture in this way he was doing something that he told his students to do. He told his students to make connections. “When you are on the stage improvising,” he said, “try to connect what is going on now in the scene with what has gone on previously. In other words, do two seemingly contradictory things at the same time: be aware of your present moment and remember what happened in the past.”
Recalling this lesson, Harold then got on a roll. He started connecting all of the things he had thought about that morning with his text. He thought about how Ezekiel probably had initially felt as if he and his people had lost control of their situation, but then he decided to search for a yes amid all of the mess. He stopped and he waited for God to arise and, man, oh, man, did God arise with wheels aflame. God then called Ezekiel to follow an unexpected twist, to make an unusual choice. Ezekiel was to be a prophet. He was to continue providing spiritual care and direction to his people despite being far away from their homeland. As a prophet, Ezekiel would learn to make do with what he had and that would be enough.
Well, Harold had come to a decision. He picked up the phone, but instead of first calling Kathy, he called his mother. “Mom,” he said, “I am going to preach this Sunday in church. I know you won’t believe it. That’s why I am saving a seat for you in the front row, and, Mom, I will have a script this time.” And, that, my friends, is the story of how Harold came to preach about a God who never stays stuck in one place but always rides on wheels. Amen.