Jamie Parsley's Blog, page 76

I Advent

November 30, 2014

Thanksgiving Eve

November 26, 2014

Deuteronomy 8.7-18

+ OK. This might not some as a big surprise to some of you. I know it will definitely not come as a surprise for Pastor Mark.
But…I am a bit of a curmudgeon. Especially when it comes to the holiday season. I know.  That’s sacrilege to some people.
“But, Father Jamie,” I hear people say. “It’s just a magical time of the year.”
I think magic, in this case, may be in the eye of the beholder. I’ve never been a big fan of the commercial aspects of either Thanksgiving or Christmas. And, I’m sure it’s no surprise to people here who know me: the food at this time of the year does not really appeal to me all that much, even before I became vegan.
But…before you judge me too harshly (and I’ll let you do that in this case), I think, idealistically, there are many positive things that can be mustered from this holiday season. 
Tonight is an example of what we can do. I have always loved the Thanksgiving Eve service. Back in the days when we were on rotation with St. Mark’s and Elim and the Shepherd of the Valley Moravian, it was great to worship together and to ponder a bit this wonderful thing we do when we give thanks to God. Now, you’ve heard no doubt many sermons and Facebook memes and other comments about how important it is to give thanks for all the great things in our lives.
A few weeks ago, on Stewardship Sunday here at St. Stephen’s, I shared that it is, of course, a good thing to give thanks to God for all those good things. But I said, on that Sunday, that we must take a step further. Paying lip service in gratitude for the things we’ve been granted is not enough.
Essentially, we are called to actually live out our Thanksgiving.  We should be a living, breathing jumble of gratitude at all times.
Tonight, though, I’m going to even take that all one step even further.  I think it’s a good thing to give thanks for all those things we’ve asked for a received.  And maybe even give thanks for those things we’ve asked for and did not receive.
(If you think about it, you know I mean. If we prayed at any time in our lives for a particular boyfriend or girlfriend and did not receive them, and later found out that they were pretty horrible people—yes, we can give thanks for those things as well. Or, maybe it was a job that we wanted—a job we felt we were perfectly made for—and we prayed it, but it went to someone else. Later, we found that job was actually quite horrible. The person whose position we pray for ended up having horrible time. Those are examples of things we didn’t get when we prayed for them.  ).
But, one thing we often don’t find ourselves giving thanks for are those moments of grace in our lives.  Now, grace is something we hear a lot about in church, but few of us really “get” grace. But I love to preach about grace. Or, at least, my definition of grace. For me, grace is something we receive from God that we neither asked for nor fully anticipated in our lives. I usually talk about grace at weddings, because, for the most part, marriage is an example of grace in our midst. People come into our lives we don’t ask for, we don’t even know how to ask for, but who are still given to us.  And the joy and contentment they bring is the greatest gift any of us can ever expect.
Children are another example of grace. No one fully realizes the blessings a child will give to one’s life until they come into our midst.  There are countless other graces we have in our lives that we are no doubt thankful for. Especially in the cases of marriage and children, these graces change our lives. We are never again who were before they came into our lives. And that, I think, is the sign of true Grace. True grace transforms us and makes us different—and hopefully better—than we were before.

In our reading from the  Hebrew scriptures tonight, we get a very beautiful image of grace.  In it, we find God bringing in the Israelites into a “good land”—a land of beauty and abundance, where all their needs are taken care of.  What’s so beautiful about this scripture is that, even if the Israelites would’ve know to pray for something like this, it still would not even come close to what God actually provides.  See. Grace.
In many ways, this scripture describes how God grants us grace as well.  Probably the greatest grace in our lives—and the one we might not fully appreciate—is Jesus himself. For the Israelites, wandering in the wilderness, hungry and anxious, God provided them a glorious land of abundance—full of food and drink.
For us, this food we receive is more substantial. Our food is the Bread which comes to us to feed us in such a way that we will never feel hungry again. It is the Bread that will not feed this body, which will die on us and be disposed of, but the Bread which will feed our souls, which will feed that part of us which will live forever. The Bread we receive is a bread we could never, on our own, even comprehended.  The Bread we receive is Jesus himself.  And it is Jesus—that truly amazing grace in our midst—whom we should be most thankful for.
Jesus’ presence in our life, the fact that in him we see God—God who came to us like food in the midst of aimless wandering, in flesh like our flesh, and who, by dying,  destroyed that which we feared the most—death—that is something we didn’t ask for.
We are probably unable to even know how to ask for such a gift. And yet, unasked for, Jesus came to us and fed us with his own Body. Unasked for, God provided us with life in a way we still don’t fully appreciate or understand.  Jesus came to us, like food in a glorious land after we had wandered about in our personal wilderness, and fed us in a way we didn’t even realized we could be fed.
This is the ultimate grace in our midst.  This is the ultimate gift for us.
So, tomorrow, as we gather with our loved ones, as we take that time to inventory the blessings and all the good things in our lives, let us not forget to be thankful for that ultimate Grace in our lives—Jesus who is everything we need and long for and strive for.
Jesus—our food in the wilderness.
Jesus—our living Bread of life.
And let us thank God for the Grace above Graces, for the Grace that that is God.

Christ the King

November 23, 2014

23 Pentecost

Stewardship Sunday
November 16, 2014

All Saints Sunday

November 2, 2014

John Berryman's 100th Birthday

The poet John Berryman would have been 100 years old this Saturday. Here’s a poem I wrote about visiting the site of his suicide. 


Washington Avenue Bridge
“to tilt out, with the knife in my right hand
to slash me knocked or fainting till I’d fall
unable to keep my skull down but fearless”—John Berryman
Here, we standfacing northand leaning forward—the railing halving usand preventing usfrom tilting outas Berryman did,shocked and faintingfalling throughthat January coldto the bank belowfrozen hard as stonethat early into the new year.
Now, it’s Juneand we have made our wayfrom Arthur Avenue—from the house he left that morning,from that last meal,that last drink,that last written wordon that last X’ed-out sheet of paper—to this place,following his short via crucis,keeping and pausing at each stationwhere he stumbledor waveredor looked back the way he cameto this two-tiered goal,to this placewhere whatever martyrdomhe planned for himself awaited him—a throat not cut after all,no gush of bloodto bring on the final resolve to tip outinto the airand attempt flight.
Here are the foot spaces,where he last touched groundbefore the fall,where he grasped the rail,swaying out.We kneel and touch the pavementand grasp what he graspedand gaze at what he gazed at lastthrough those frosted-over lenses.
We do it the way pilgrims doin Chimayó or Široki Brijeg,touching whatever has been made holyby the violent witness the saint made in blood.
We are pilgrimsbecause he was who he wasto us and to all that wehave carried with us all this way—to this ledge, to this railing,to this sweep of earth and riverbeneath us that makes us dizzyand faint and unwillingto attemptlike himto fly.

From Crow, copyright (c) 2012 by Jamie Parsley.

John Berryman (1914-1972) was an American poet who, on January 7, 1972, jumped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridgeon the campus of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. At the time of his death, he was living at 33 Arthur Avenue in southeast Minneapolis. Chimayó is a popular pilgrimage site in northern New Mexico. Šokori Brijeg is the site in the former Yugoslavia where forty-three Roman Catholic Franciscan priests and brothers were murdered by Communist Partisans on February 18, 1945. 

19 Pentecost

18 Pentecost

October 12, 2014


Isaiah 25.1-9; Matthew 22.1-14
+ I did a wedding last night. Now, weddings, for the most part, for me anyway, can be wonderful and great, or truly a cross to bear. Last night’s was one of the good ones.  The bride was a long-time friend of mine. The banquet afterward was probably the closest I’ll ever get to doing a big, Catholic, Stearns County German wedding. It was truly a party. With polka, even!
But I gotta say, I thought a lot about this Gospel reading for today, last night. It’s just such a pointless story isn’t it? I know, I shouldn’t be saying that about a parable. But, to be honest, I just don’t like it. The structure is so off.  If this was a short story in one of my writing workshops, it would’ve been torn apart and reassembled. There’s almost nothing, at face value, worth redeeming.
But, let’s not throw it out yet.  Let’s not completely abandon this story just because we find it unpleasant.
(If you find this unpleasant, wait until my book of short stories is published…)
First of all, it definitely seems that Matthew definitely has an agenda in this story. Obviously Matthew is directing this at the Jews. And when we see it from that perspective, it kind of starts making a bit of sense.
The first guests, as we discover, are the nation of Israel. The first slaves represent the prophets, who were also beaten up and killed for trying to tell them what God wanted. The second slaves are the apostles. And, if you notice, the second group of people are very different than the first group. They’re the Church.
At this point, “everyone” has been invited. “Everyone” is an important clue to this story. “Everyone” means everyone.
So, what Matthew is trying to have Jesus tell us is that Israel ignored God’s message, and as a result, the Kingdom was given to others. That’s certainly what we’ve been hearing in our Gospel readings lately. The Kingdom can—and has been—given to others
So, we have these slaves going out and inviting everyone. The apostles were called by Jesus to do just that. They were called to invite everyone—not just the elite. Not just the best guests. Everyone.
That’s great. That’s wonderful.
What happens next is the real pivot here.  The second coming essentially happens. The King arrives. Now, that sounds great. We’re all looking forward to the Second Coming. We’re all looking forward to the King arriving.
But wait…. It’s not all pleasant and beautiful. Why? Because someone gets thrown out. This poor guy who isn’t wearing a wedding robe gets thrown out.
What? That’s not what we want for this story. If everyone gets invited, who cares if someone is wearing a robe or not? Now it sounds terrible to us.
But, but, but… Let’s keep it in the context of its time.  At that time, not wearing the wedding robe that was provided to the guests was an insult. It was essentially a way of saying that, Yes, I’m here at the wedding, yes I’m going to eat and drink, but I’m not really going to participate. I’m going to get what I need out of this, but when I do, I’m gone. I’m not really going to make a commitment to this feast. I’m going to be a bad guest.
And this is the real gist of this story.
Now, the good thing about this is that, it’s all about choice. We have a choice. We choose to go. We choose to be a good guest or a bad guest. God did not make us into mindless robots, after all.
But there are ramifications to what we choose.  My motto for life, as you know is: the chickens always come home to roost.
The fact is, by not wearing the robe, we’re not really present. We’re saying no to the King.  For us, it’s kind of the same here. We can be here. We can sit here in our pews. Or up there in the presider’s place. But we don’t have to be a part of it all. We can be obstinate. We can cross our arms and critique everything about the sermon or the liturgy or the music or the way the altar is set up, etc.  We can close our minds and hearts and be bitter and complain. We can nitpick or backbite or stomp our heels because we don’t like it.  We’ve all known those kind of people in the church.  I’ve done it myself.
Or we can be a part of it all. And not just here, in church on Sunday. As we know, it’s a lot more than just church on Sunday that makes us Christians—that makes us good or bad Christians. Ultimately, it is about what we do out there. If we are jerks to people, if we are close-minded, if we judgmental, if we’re sexists and homophobic and mean-spirited, then we’re not really doing a good job as Christians. If we refuse to love, we’re refusing the wedding robe.
The fact is, everyone is invited to the banquet. I say it again and again. We’re all invited. And it really isn’t that hard to get in. But sometimes it is really hard to be a good guest at the banquet. Sometimes, we really just don’t want to participate. Sometimes it’s just easier to cross our arms and pout in the corner.  Sometimes it’s easier to not love and respect others.  Because, we’ve so often not been loved and not respected by others.  And that’s our choice to react like that.
But it’s not what is expected of us. We’ve been invited to the banquet! We should be glad! We should be excited. We should don that wedding robe and do whatever else needs to be done to be a good guest. Because, it’s not fun being all by one’s self on the outside of the party, looking in at everyone who’s there.
And that’s where we put ourselves.  That’s where we often go to pout and feel bad about ourselves.
Luckily our God, who truly does love us, who truly does want us at the banquet, never lets us stay out there—outside the party—for long. The invitation from our God keeps coming. And we have many opportunities to put on that wedding robe and rejoin the banquet.  That’s all the bad guests had to do to rejoin the party.
So, let us put on the wedding robe. Let us not cast ourselves off into the exterior.  Let us not alienate ourselves with our bitterness and anger.  But let us join the banquet in love. Let us heed the invitation. Let us celebrate, and be joyful and be glad. That’s what our Host wants from us.  
And when we do, we can truly echo those words we hear today from Isaiah:“This is our God, the one for we have waited…Let us be glad and rejoice in our salvation.”

17 Pentecost

Matthew 21.33-46
October 5, 2014
+ This is not a question you are asked very often. Or probably EVER. But…what are you zealous for? No, not jealous. Zealous. For what do you have zeal?
I know. Yes, some of us have real zeal for sports. Or for political causes.
I, as some of you know, have real zeal for music—for alternative from the 1990s, especially. Oh, and for poetry. Oh, and God, of course.
But zeal is a word we don’t use too often anymore. And, at least in this part of the country, we are, for the most part, uncomfortable with zeal. 
Now to be fair, being zealous, of course, is not a bad thing by any means.  
This morning we definitely have one of those parables that challenges us, that keeps us on our toes.  It may even make us a bit angry and that definitely forces us to look more closely at ourselves.  Let’s face it, it’s a violent story we hear Jesus tells us today.  These bad tenants are so devious they are willing to kill to get what they want.  And in the end, their violence is turned back upon them.  It’s not a warm, fuzzy story that we can take with us and hold close to our hearts. The Church over the years has certainly struggled with this parable because it can be so challenging.
At face value, the story can probably be pretty easily interpreted in this way: The Vineyard owner of course symbolic of God.  The Vineyard owner’s son of Jesus.  The Vineyard is symbolic of the Kingdom.  And the workers in the vineyard who kill the son are symbolic of the religious leaders who will kill Jesus.  From this view, we can see the story as a prediction of Jesus’ murder.
But there is another interpretation of this story that isn’t so neat and clean and finely put-together.  It is in fact an uncomfortable interpretation of this parable.  As we hear it, we do find ourselves shaken a bit.  It isn’t a story that we want to emulate.  I HOPE none of us want to emulate it. But again, Jesus DOES twist this story around for us.
The ones we no doubt find ourselves relating to are not the Vineyard owner or the Vineyard owner’s son, but, in fact, the vineyard workers.  We relate to them not because we have murderous intentions in our heart. Not because we inherently bad.  But because we sometimes can be just as resolute.  We can sometimes be just that zealous. We sometimes will stop at nothing to get what we want.
We are sometimes so full of zeal for something that we might occasionally ride roughshod over others.  And when we do so, we find that we are not bringing the Kingdom of God about in our midst.
Zeal can be a good thing.  We should be full of zeal for God and God’s Kingdom.  We too should stop at nothing to gain the Kingdom of God.  But zeal taken too far undoes the good we hoped to bring about.
The most frightening aspect of our Gospel story is the fact that Jesus tells us that the kingdom can be taken away from us.  It can be given to others.  Our zeal for the kingdom has a lot to do with what we gain and what we lose.  Our zeal to make this kingdom a reality in our world is what makes the changes in this world.
At the same time, zeal can be a very slippery slope.  It can also make us zealots.  It can make us fanatics.  And this world is too full of fanatics.  ISIS is a good example of fanatics in this world.
This world is too full of people who have taken their religion so seriously that they have actually lost touch with it.
This story we hear Jesus today tell us teaches us a lesson about taking our zeal too far.  If we become violent in our zeal, we need to expect violence in return.  And certainly this is probably the most difficult part of this parable for most of us.
For those of us who consider ourselves peace-loving, nonviolent Christians, we cringe when we hear stories of violence in the scriptures.  But violence like the kind we hear in today’s parable, or anywhere else in scriptures should not just be thrown out because we find it uncomfortable.  It should not be discarded as useless just because we are made uncomfortable by it.
As I have said, again and again, it is not just about any ONE of us, as individuals.  It is about us as a whole. If we look at the kind of violence we find in the Scriptures and use it metaphorically, it could actually be quite useful for us.
If we take some of those stories metaphorically, they actually speak to us on a deeper level.  If we take the parable of the vineyard workers and apply it honestly to ourselves, we find it does speak to us in a very hard way.
Our zeal for the kingdom of God should drive us.  It should move and motivate us.  We should be empowered to bring the Kingdom into our midst.  But it should not make us into the bad vineyard workers.  It should not make into the chief priests and Pharisees who knew, full well, that they were the bad vineyard workers.
A story like this helps us to keep our zeal centered perfectly on God, and not on all the little nitpicky, peripheral stuff.  A story like this prevents us, hopefully, from becoming mindless zealots.  What does it allow and commend is passion.  What it does tell us is that we should be excited for the Kingdom. True zeal makes us uncomfortable, yes.
It makes us restless.  It frustrates us.  True zeal also energizes us and makes us want to work until we catch a glimpse of that Kingdom in our midst.  
This is what Jesus is telling us again and again.  He is telling us in these parables that make us uncomfortable that the Kingdom of God isn’t just some sweet, cloud-filled place in the next world.  He is telling is, very clearly, that is it not just about any ONE of us.  It is not about our own personal agendas.
The Kingdom of God is right here, in our midst.  And the foundation of that kingdom, the gateway of that Kingdom, the conduit of that Kingdom is always love.  Love of God, love of neighbor, healthy love of self.
This is what Jesus preached. That is the path Jesus is leading us on.  This is the path we walk as we follow after him.  And it is a path on which we should be overjoyed to be walking.
So, let us follow this path of Jesus with true and holy zeal.  Let us set out to do the work we have to do as workers in the vineyard with love in our heart and love in our actions.  And as we do, we will echo the words we heard in today’s Gospel:
“This is what the Lord’s doing; it is amazing in our eyes.”

16 Pentecost

September 28, 2014

Ezekiel 18.1-4;25-32; Matthew 21.23-32
+ This past week, of course, the plaque for the memorial garden we dedicated in May was finally finished. It will hang on the wall near the circular window on the stairs leading down to the Undercroft. I am proud of our memorial garden and what it will, hopefully, one day be. A resting place.

But I am especially proud of our memorial garden because of something that we, at St. Stephen’s, make sure will happen with it. In our policies for the memorial garden, we make no disctinction about who can be buried there. Some churches state that only members and their families can be buried in their resting places. Nowhere does it say that only St. Stephen’s members can be buried in our memorial garden. And, a clear policy is this one:
  Under no circumstance will anyone be denied burial in the memorial garden due to financial reasons.
This, of course, ties in perfectly to the ministry we have been doing here at St. Stephen’s for years. Something as simple as this policy really does hit home for us.  There are not many places in the Fargo-Moorhead area that allow such an open policy regarding burial.  
Now what few of us know is that, just a few blocks north of this church, there are two cemeteries.  Unless you actually get out of your car and walk into the actual cemeteries you wouldn’t even know they’re there.  And I do invite you to go and visit theses cemeteries.  If you do, you’ll see, in each, a large boulder.
In one cemetery the boulder is inscribed COUNTY CEMETERY #1.  This one is located at the end of Elm Street.  Where the road forks, one to the Country Club and the other to the former Trollwood, right there, on the left fork toward Trollwood, is the cemetery.  You’ve probably driven by it countless times and never had a clue.
County Cemetery #2 is located on the other side of the old Trollwood, just within sight of where the old main stage stood.  Back along the bend in the Red River, there is a stretch of grass and another boulder. This one says COUNTY CEMETERY #2.
A third County Cemetery was located on north Broadway.  In 1984, those graves were moved to Springvale Cemetery, over by Holy Cross Cemetery, near the airport, because they were falling into the Red River through erosion. One of my great-uncles, who died in 1948, is actually buried in that cemetery.
For the most part, many of the graves in Springvale are marked.  But in the first two cemeteries, there are no markers at all.  No individual gravestones mark the graves of the people buried in the first two cemeteries. In fact, if you walked into them, you would have to force your mind to even accept the fact that it is a cemetery.  But there are hundreds of people buried in those graveyards. Hundreds.
These are the forgotten.  These were Fargo’s hidden shame.  Beginning 1899 and going through the 1940s, this where the prostitutes, the gamblers, the robbers were buried.  This is also where all the unwanted babies were buried.  There are lots of stories of unwanted babies being fished out of the Red River in those days.  This is where the bodies of those unnamed babies were buried.
And when one walks in those pauper cemeteries, one must remind themselves of those words we hear from Jesus this morning in our Gospel reading.
“Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the Kingdom of God ahead of you.”
There, in those cemeteries, lie the true inheritors of the Kingdom of God.  Last week in my sermon I quoted the great Reginald Fuller, who said:
“[This] is what God is doing in Jesus’ ministry—giving the tax collectors and prostitutes an equal share with the righteous in the kingdom.”
That—and those words of Jesus we heard in this morning’s Gospel reading—are shocking statements for most of us.  And they should be.  It should shock us and shake us to our core.  It’s a huge statement for him to make. Partly it does because, things haven’t changed all that much: we can grasp the understanding about prostitutes—after all, prostitutes are still looked down upon by our society in our day.
After all, we do still view prostitutes with contempt.  They are another segment of our society that we tend to forget about.  But we really should give them concern.  And I don’t meant from a judgmental point of view.  I mean, we should give them our compassion.  We should be praying for them often.  Because we often hear the horrible stories of what people have to deal with on the streets, not to mention what drove them to the streets.. But the stories of what keeps them on the streets are just as bad.  And the dangers they face—day and night—are more mind-boggling than anything we can even imagine in our safe, comfortable lives.
Truly prostitutes throughout history have been the real exploited ones.  They are the ones who have lived on the fringes of society.  They are the ones who have lived in the shadows of our respectable societies.  They have lived dangerous, secret lives.  And much of what they’ve had to go through in their lives is known only to God.  They need our prayers.  They need our compassion. They definitely don’t need our exploitation.  They certainly don’t need our judgment.
As uncomfortable as it is for us to confront them and think about them, that is exactly what Jesus is telling us we must do.  Because by going there in our thoughts, in our prayers, in our ministries, we are going where Jesus went.  We are coming alongside people who need our thoughts, our prayers, our ministries.  And rather than using them, rather than continuing the exploitation they have lived with their lives, we need to see them as God sees them.  We see them as children of God, as fellow humans on this haphazard, uncertain journey we are all on together.
And, more importantly, we see in them ourselves. There, but for the grace of God go us.  Had we been born in different circumstances, had life gone wrong for us in certain areas, who are we to say we wouldn’t have been there?  Or who we are to say we wouldn’t be the exploiters?
So we can understand why prostitutes (and tax collectors, who were just as ritually unclean as prostitutes in Jesus’ day) were viewed with such contempt in Jesus’ day.
The point of this morning’s Gospel is this: the Kingdom of God is not what we think it is.  It is not made up of just people like us.  It is, in fact, going to be made up people who maybe never go to church, who may never have gone to church.  It will be made up of those people we might not even notice. It will be made up of those people who are invisible to us. It will be made up of the people we don’t give a second thought to. In our society today we have our own tax collectors.  They are the welfare cases.  They are the homeless.  They are alcoholics and the drug addicts and the drug dealers. They are the lost among us, they are the ones who are trapped in their own sadness and their own loneliness.  They are the gang leaders, they are the rebels.  They are the transgendered.  They are the cross dressers.  They are the ones we call pagan, or non-believer or heretic.  They are the ones we, good Christians that we are, have worked all our lives not to be.
This is what the Kingdom of heaven is going to be like.  It will filled with the people who look up at us from their marginalized place in this society.  It is the ones who today are peeking out at us from the curtains of their isolation and their loneliness.  They are the ones who, in their quiet agony, watch as we drive out of sight from them. They are they inheritors of the kingdom of God and if we think they are not, then we are not listening to what Jesus is saying to us.
When we think about those county cemeteries just a few blocks north of here, we need to realize that had Jesus lived in Fargo, had he lived 1900 years later and had died the disgraceful death he died, that is where he would’ve ended up.  He would have ended up in an unmarked grave in a back field, on the very physical fringes of our city. In fact, he is there.  And in our policy for the memorial garden, we are guaranteeing he will be here among us as well in our memorial garden.  He is wherever the inheritors of his kingdom are.
Those cemeteries and that policy in our memorial garden for me are potent reminders of who inherits.  They are potent reminders to me of who receives true glory in the end. It is these—the forgotten ones, the ones whom only God knows—who are in glory at this moment.   They are the ones that, had life turned out just a bit different for us, would be us.
Of course, we too are the inheritors of the Kingdom, especially when we love fully and completely.  We too are the inheritors when we follow those words of Jesus and strive to live out and do what he commands.  We too are the inheritors when we open our eyes and our minds and our hearts to those around us, whom no one else sees or loves.
So, let us also be inheritors of the Kingdom of God.  Let us love fully and completely as Jesus commands. Let us love our God.  Let us love all those people who come into our lives. Let us look around at those people who share this world with us.  And let us never cast a blind eye on anyone. Let us do as God speaks to us this morning through the prophet Ezekiel: Let us “turn, then, and live.”