Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32
Last week, we considered Jonah on the hillside, having a tantrum because Nineveh had not been destroyed. In the folktale, the people of Nineveh repent of their sins, fasting, praying, wearing sackcloth and ashes. And by people, I mean everyone from the king to the cattle. It certainly makes you wonder about the personhood of livestock!
Now, the leader of the city would actually not have been a king, but that doesn’t matter when it comes to the lesson. And the lesson is one of collective guilt and collective punishment, or more accurately in this case, collective repentance.
This is often the way things work in the Jewish Scripture. Children suffer for the sins of their parents, generation after generation, a mirror image of the covenant blessings promised to the descendants of David, unearned rule generation after generation, in both cases undeserving.
Yahweh decides that the Neo-Assyrian Empire should conquer the Northern Kingdom of Israel as punishment for something or the other, worshiping other gods, worshiping on the wrong mountain. Definitely economic injustice as reported by the Prophet Amos. Yahweh decides that Babylon should conquer the Southern Kingdom of Judah as punishment, again for worshiping other gods, again for economic injustice. Yahweh decides that Cyrus the Great, King of Persia, will be the Messiah who conquers Babylon to set the Jewish captives free, because God is forgiving.
Never mind that some of those Israelites might be innocent and faithful, some Judahites righteous, some Babylonians not part of the oppressive regime, some good people who happened to have lousy mothers or fathers or great-greats or lived under a lousy king. Not that we would know anything about living under a lousy despot.
Fortunately, there is a counter-narrative in scripture. There is almost always a counter-narrative in scripture, whether because there are competing voices, or because the theology evolved.
Today’s reading is an example of the counter-narrative around collective guilt and collective punishment. God, through Ezekiel, proclaims a new system of divine justice. Going forward, you are only responsible for your own sins. For those who live in sin, iniquity will be their ruin. And maybe that doesn’t even need a puppet master god. Maybe ruin is the ultimate consequence of iniquity.
But, and this is huge, those who repent are saved.
If we believe Ezekiel, written five centuries before Jesus, we don’t need the crucifixion to be saved, which is to say the formula where God demands the murder of God. There is no collective guilt, no guilt that passes from generation to generation. Salvation in Christ must come in some other form. But that is a sermon for another day.
This is good news. I mean, we’re still incredibly dangerous apes that engage in collective destruction all the time, but at least you’re not cursed just because your grandfather had an affair. Except, in some ways, you still are, it just isn’t divine damnation, but the rule of cause an effect, the reality of genetic inheritance, the accumulation of ill-gotten wealth, the construction of imaginary and fixed categories of race, religion, and nationality, the real intergenerational effects of trauma.
After all, it is hard to pull yourself up by the bootstraps when those boots are nailed to the floor.
Then there is the reality that our value system is destroying the planet’s ability to sustain life, the sins of our parents and our own sins inflicted on humanity’s non-future. And that without the claim that Artificial Intelligence is going to kill us all within a handful of years. Coming generations, are going to suffer for our sins, if they exist at all. We already see how Generation Z is getting crushed by the Boomer ballot box.
In many Eastern cultures, the individual is lost to the collective, resulting in a devaluing of human life. Stalin could throw bodies into the meat-grinder of the Eastern Front with zero consideration for the lives lost because they didn’t matter, as can Putin and Kim today in the meat-grinder of Ukraine.
In the West, the common good is often lost in the worship of the individual. Ayn Rand is God’s prophet, Neo-Liberal Capitalism the religion articulated in the new Ten Commandments of the Washington Consensus and carried around the world by the missionaries of the International Monetary Fund.
Meanwhile, we all fall at the knees of Mara Wendigo.
Who, you may ask, is Mara Wendigo?
I made her up. But she is absolutely real.
In the Buddhist tradition, M?ra is the demon who tries to prevent the enlightenment of Siddhartha, the soon-to-be Buddha. When M?ra fails, his three daughters give it a go. They represent Thirst, Discontentment, and Desire. We know how the story ends. They fail too.
Wendigo, on the other hand, comes from North America’s Algonquian tradition. It is an evil spirit that possesses people and causes an insatiable hunger that consumes other humans.
Today’s Mara Wendigo, the devouring spirit of our age, works on Madison Avenue. She has one goal, to possess you so that you consume, consume the planet, consume the poor, insatiably hungry for more. If she gets you to desire more, she feeds the insatiable appetite of corporations and the billionaires who own 90% of the stock market, not to mention the piracy and rapine of private equity and hedge funds.
Mara Wendigo came up with Sprite’s “Obey Your Thirst” campaign. Her Instagram posts are filtered and glamorous and exotic. She tells you that all of your discomfort can be resolved with a pill. She gets cool people to promote DraftKings so you can gamble away what little money you may have left, while the company itself uses Artificial intelligence to insure problem gamblers lose even more. Because if you are paying attention to whether your millionaires working for billionaires beat their millionaires working for billionaires, maybe you won’t focus on other things. She sits in a conference room discussing how to tweak the algorithm so you doom scroll unto death, then her political allies complain that people are not giving birth to children they cannot afford, cutting off the supply of mindless consumers to plug into the Matrix.
And in an ironic twist, Mara Wendigo is promoting GLP-1s that kill your desire to consume, and since your own doctor will not prescribe them, if you can find and afford a doctor at all, the companies she promotes can provide you with an online doctor.
The good-bad news is that the transfer of wealth to the Wendigo class of billionaires has accelerated to the point that a growing number of Americans can barely afford essentials, which still doesn’t kill the hunger pains of demonic desire. Unless, of course, they have enough money for the GLP-1s, and haven’t lost it all on DraftKings or Kalshi.
Vulture capitalism is killing consumer capitalism and picking at the bones. The question is what comes next. Our vision of a just world for all, a just economy for all, is not something we stick in the secular box, the politics box. It can and must be driven by our faith.
The Torah is filled with economic guidelines, about wages and lending and charity. The prophets cry out for economic justice. The gospel calls for an economic revolution. But every form of just economy humankind has ever known has come back to one central trait. Just economies are relational, not transactional. Not that transactions are inherently bad, but because the holy mystery of each and every living thing must come first.
Contentment is a virtue, joy its fruit, which is not to say we must accept an economy that leaves so many without the essentials they need for thriving, but is to say that we should examine what we consider need and what we consider thriving in the light of our faith. It is to say that the accelerating destruction and despair in our individual lives and our collective lives, both priceless, will only stop when we, individually and collectively, decide we will no longer succumb to the demons of desire and discontentment, will touch earth, flip tables, and live what we say we believe, that the world is charged with the God’s Grandeur, and that already includes you. Amen.
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE concluding with the Lord’s Prayer
Let us pray.
Most Amazing God,
in the legends of Siddhartha,
he had everything,
a pampered prince in a palace,
everything he thought he desired,
everything except freedom.
So many remain trapped in a world of illusion,
consumer capitalism,
algorithm hell,
even as their misery grows,
even as they pass that misery on
to children born and unborn.
We follow a man who called
for resistance and reform.
Help us, individually and collectively,
carry his spirit of resistance and reform into the world,
as we pray with the words he taught us, saying:
Our Father…