Year A: Proper 21 | Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
September 27, 2026
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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A few years ago—it may have been back during COVID—I read an article in which the author was opining on the glories of their youth in the 1980’s, when everything was great and people were treated with equality and respect and the world was at peace. My personal reaction was, where was this person, and were they even paying attention? The 80’s spanned most of my childhood—ages four through thirteen, to be exact—and the world I remember was far different. I remember acid rain and excessive radiation from the hole in the ozone layer. I remember my friend Trevor being demeaned and mistreated by our Christian elementary school classmates because of the color of his skin. I remember not being allowed to eat Halloween candy or apples because someone may have hidden tainted needles or slipped razor blades inside them. I remember friends who rarely saw their parents and essentially had to raise themselves. I remember layer after layer of congressional hearings about governmental misconduct and abuse of power. I remember the terror of the AIDS epidemic and the rapid spread of a poorly understood yet deadly disease. I remember the nightly expectation—yes, nightly—that Russia would bomb us and I would never wake up to see my family again. The author recalled a nostalgic daydream. I remember a drawn-out nightmare.
Looking at our Ezekiel reading, something similar is going on. The people of Judah have been expelled from their homeland, driven out by the cruel and abusive Babylonian Empire and forcibly resettled in distant, unfamiliar lands. The leaders who long touted Israel’s racial and religious superiority have been executed or enslaved. People long for the good old days, when they could do and eat whatever they wanted wherever they wanted and everybody treated everybody else fairly and everyone had a strong and consistent moral upbringing. Their present circumstances were NOT their fault. It was the generations before them that had sinned: “the parents [had] eaten sour grapes.”[1] So why did they have to suffer—why were “the children’s teeth set on edge?”[2]
The prophet Ezekiel was a weird dude. We know he was a priest who appears to have been forcibly deported from Jerusalem among the first batches of Judah’s young, educated people. We know that his prophetic work began on or around the summer solstice of 593 BCE.[3] And both his visions and method of sharing God’s messages among the Exiles were notably strange, including, among many others, alien beings zipping back and forth beside wheels inside of wheels covered in eyes; lying on his side for over a year shouting doom at a little scene he built from a brick and iron pan; and—probably the most famous for us as Episcopalians—a valley full of scattered, desiccated bones magically pulling back together and regrowing all the soft tissue before the wind streams in to revive the inert bodies.
Like me, Ezekiel appears to remember his youth differently than the dominant narrative. He remembers observing the indulgence and excess of the upper classes as skyrocketing grocery prices in Jerusalem caused poor people to literally starve to death. He remembers all the things Jeremiah was prophesying against—the hubris and complacency of daily life rooted in self-satisfaction under the empty worship of a god with a stolen name. The good old days weren’t nearly as dreamy as everyone liked to pretend, and present realities, although built up over the course of generations, were simply the practical consequences everyone had been warned about and should have expected from their culturally embedded sin of quietly despising and mistreating one another while coddling their own sanctimony.
In the verses the Lectionary chose to skip, Ezekiel tells a story about several generations of a particular family. The grandfather was conscientious, someone “righteous who does what is lawful and right.”[4] He respects God, treats women honorably, stands against oppression, and provides for those in need. The result? “Acting faithfully—such a one is righteous; he shall surely live, says the Lord God.”[5]
His son, however, chooses not to follow his father’s example. Instead, he chases other gods, abuses women, robs and oppresses the poor, and makes money at others’ suffering and expense.[6] “Shall he then live?” Ezekiel asks, immediately answering his own question with, “He shall not. He has done all these abominable things; he shall surely be put to death; his blood shall be upon himself.”
Along come the grandson, who, having seen and lived under his father’s example, is appalled. He spends his life working to restore the family’s name, following similar paths of love and kindness to those his grandfather had taken. And the consequence for him? Ezekiel tells us, “he shall not die for his father’s iniquity; he shall surely live.”
But the crowd in the story rejects this conclusion, demanding, “No! He needs to pay as well!” Here the Lectionary jumps back in with the Exiles grumbling, “‘The way of the Lord is unfair,’” to which God responds, “Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way unfair? Is it not your ways that are unfair?”[7] God goes on to describe what I’ll call present-tense righteousness: if a wicked person turns from their pathway and dies while seeking God by caring for those around them, that person will live. Likewise, if a historically responsible character turns to a path of cruelty and abuse, they’ll die, their good deeds forgotten. Each generation will be held to the same standard, and each generation is responsible for itself.
What seems to be happening here is people, living under the consequences of previous generations’ failures and suffering under systemic injustices their ancestors built or chose not to reform, interpret their present circumstances as God actively punishing them for what others have done. Disillusioned with the present, they blame God and their ancestors for their ills. But God’s response essentially says, “Consequences are not the same as punishment.” It’s true: your circumstances aren’t great. You’re far from your homeland. You’re being forced to learn a new language and work under the expectations of a different culture. The options you used to have are no longer available to you. But that doesn’t make this punishment. It simply makes this your reality. Yes, your parents did indeed eat sour grapes, but that isn’t why your teeth ache. You aren’t being—and won’t be—judged for what happened before you. Your responsibility is to follow God’s paths in the present. That might look different now than it would have before your father devastated your grandfather’s reputation and legacy. But your legacy is your own. Make your choices based on where—and when—you happen to be. What matters now is how you choose to live.
Like the people Ezekiel was addressing, we hear a lot of blame and fault-finding with others today—including how people before us have chosen to live. It’s clearly their fault that our world is falling apart; there’s nothing we can do about it. And, to some extent, they are at fault. People have been making some very bad decisions for a very long time, things that have led to prejudice and social discord and severe damage to the natural world. Some of those choices were intentional; some were based in ignorance. But no matter the “why” behind what happened, the present is what it is. We aren’t being punished. This isn’t the wrath of God, nor is it the End of the World. This is simply the reality with which we have to work.
The past has already occurred; at this point, no one can change it. However, like the grandson in Ezekiel’s story, we can learn from it. Yes, the consequences of others’—and our own—actions and inactions are real, and they’ll weigh us down in ways we’d rather not experience. Our options limited, the only truly relevant question right now is, what will we do? How will we choose to live? Yes, different groups have despised and refused to listen to one another for generations, but how will we choose to respond to those around us? Will we look to examples who demonstrated kindness and empathy, who attempted to build relationships with and respect for those with whom they disagreed, or will we continue on the childish path of clapped ears and name-calling? Will we keep lying around virtue signaling as we complain about ongoing injustices, or will we stand up and work to change the systems and presumptions that perpetuate the harm? Will we gaze longingly at past glories as their ruins crumble against the sunset, or will we turn to build a future in which others might experience greater hope?
The past was great in a lot of ways. And the past was miserable in a lot of others. The primary question of our moment is, what will we do now? How can we respond today? The present is what it is; we can only change the future. So, yes, rebuilding trust is a challenging prospect, but it’s our prospect. Reconciling broken relationships may be daunting, but those remain our relationships. Restoring our reputation and standing will take ongoing labor, but that isn’t the work of the past or the work of those to come: that’s our work. Building a future rooted in the genuinely Christian values of love, equality, generosity, and kindness may look like a dream right now, but it can be our dream. Our legacy before God is our own. We who live in the present must make our choices based on the present. So, then, what will we choose to change? How will we choose to live?
[1] Ezekiel 18:2 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.
[2] Ibid.
[3] The date the book offers equates to June 19, 593BCE.
[4] Ezekiel 18:5
[5] Ezekiel 18:9
[6] Financial abuse and injustice, as exemplified through charging interest, is a grievous sin throughout the Hebrew Bible.
[7] Ezekiel 18:25