“God Out”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, October 4, 2026
Reading: Ezekiel 10:1-19
Where do you locate God? If someone asks you for God’s geographical coordinates, God’s address, where do you tell them God is?
Our minds naturally go up. But of course, it’s not like God is on Neptune, or past it. Our ancestors thought of hell as down because volcanos and earthquakes throw up the fiery stuff of earth. But it’s not that if you dig down far enough you land in hell. Some religions identify god or gods with a material thing. God is here, in this holy place, or statue, or idea. The Bible is pretty harsh on that kind of teaching, calling it idolatry and warning us off it. Those of us who believe in one God are quick to say God is everywhere. That’s true. But we should be quick to add that God is nowhere. That is, we do not identify God with any one place, God is free of spatial restraint. We’d rather say that every place exists only because God creates and sustains it, whether it’s on Neptune or under the earth or even an idol mistakenly worshiped. One ancient sage says this: God is like a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
Confused yet?
Our ancestors in faith would agree that God is everywhere: omnipresent, to use the Latin term. There is no place that God is absent from. If God were absent from a place, that place would cease to exist. And yet, God lodges with the Jewish people with particular intensity. In effect, God locates God’s self, with that people, signified by the ark of the covenant, then the tabernacle, then the temple. A Jewish scholar I admire says it this way: God lives at One Temple Way in Jerusalem. That’s God’s address, God’s house, the temple. God’s presence is localizable on a distinct patch of earth.
That’s why it’s such a calamity when that temple is destroyed. Wait, does that mean, there is no more God? How could God allow his house to be violated, and dismantled and burned? Jews sitting in exile in Babylon are wondering: Okay, we were told we’d have the land forever. A king on David’s throne forever. A house for God where we would pray forever. And now we got none of it. The Babylonians have destroyed the temple, carried the people off the land, we have no king. Was everything we were taught a lie? These are the questions we asked as we sat by the River Chebar in a land of foreign tongue and strange, idolatrous practices.
When everything is lost, what do you do? Can you taste the salty tears in this psalm?
By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down, and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
2 On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
3 For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How could we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?
Today continues our series on the prophet Ezekiel, called “You Like It Darker,” with a hat tip to Leonard Cohen. The prophet has been carried away into exile in Babylon. And he has a series of visions and tells his fellow exiles all that is to come. Jerusalem’s destruction will be total. Judah’s exile will not be just us professionals, who were carried off first, but the whole people. And unlike some prophets there’s not much of an invitation here to repent, do better, straighten up and fly right and God might spare us, change his mind. No, this is just what’s coming. Ezekiel sounds like the worst climate catastrophists: the planet is doomed and there’s nothing we can do can help. Or the worst AI prognosticators: hug your loved ones tight, the machines come for us soon. Or everybody when I was a kid. The nukes will probably come. Let’s have drills where we crouch under our desks. I wonder if we human beings just live with this sense that the world might end at any moment? So, we kind of get used to it? Yeah, you might be right, but in case it’s not as bad as all that, I’m just going to the movies, okay? Who can stay terrified all the time?
Our story starts with another vision of the cherubim from chapter one. You might remember these are angelic creatures described as having the faces and feet of several animals: eagles and oxen and lions, oh my. And they have wheels, and wheels within those wheels. And the whole is covered with eyes. Artists trying to work this out show how beyond our imagining it is. That’s one effort, frightens me a little. In Christian theology, the cherubim are a rank of angels. There are other ranks, like the seraphim, who are even higher than the cherubim apparently. Angels are messengers, doing God’s will. And they praise God day and night. Here they’re kind of God’s entourage. God’s posse of bodyguards. Somewhere behind them is the living God. My kid saw Drake one time in the middle of the night on a Toronto street. He first asked himself, what are all these black SUV’s? Then who are all these beefy guys? And then, oh, it’s Drake, hey wassup? It all made sense. This vision for Ezekiel doesn’t make sense. We can’t even make out the cherubim, the bodyguards. How much less the God behind them? Us trying to imagine God is sort of like a termite trying to imagine the constellation Orion. Only more absurd. Because termites and Orion are both God’s creatures. But we’re creatures, and God is creator, another category entirely.
Apocalyptic passages like this are such good news. In most of our imagination, there are few options. Either climate change and the machines stop, and we live or they don’t and we die. Either the Soviets or the west win. We’ve all seen those movies. Binary, us-or-them logic. Ezekiel and his fellow Jews figure that without the land, without the temple, without a king, the Jewish people will disappear from the earth, as the ten northern tribes had. But wait, whoa, here are these creatures we can’t even make sense of promising a future we can’t really envision. You can be Jewish without a temple or a king or the holy land? Sure, Abraham and Moses were, they good enough for you? Wherever we’re stuck, there may be more options than we can conceive of. God is beyond our imagination, transfiguring what’s possible.
God commands Ezekiel, “Go within the wheelwork underneath the cherubim; fill your hands with burning coals from among the cherubim, and scatter them over the city.” Fire is an arresting image. It destroys, to be sure. But fire can also cauterize, purify, heal. No life without heat or energy. That’s why fire is such a good image for God: life-giving, light granting, also dangerous, and consuming. God appears to Moses in a burning bush that won’t burn up, and the Holy Spirit flames over disciples’ heads at Pentecost. Now, commentators are divided on this fire in Ezekiel—are these coals for destruction, or for the purification of Jerusalem? Maybe the answer is both? There are whole ecosystems that depend on regular forest fires for things to bloom. And after fire, whole landscapes roar back with life unseen in generations. I find this to be the case spiritually too—after the worst happens, look up, God is about to do something new.
And did you notice this? God is on a mobile throne. Not a mobile phone but a mobile throne. Verse one: “Then I looked, and above the dome that was over the heads of the cherubim there appeared above them something like a sapphire, in form resembling a throne.” I think of thrones as great heavy unmovable things, but this throne can scoot. “Then the glory of the Lord rose up from the cherub to the entryway of the temple; the house was filled with the cloud, and the court was full of the brightness of the glory of the Lord.” These wheels on these cherubim are there for a reason. God is about to get up and go. Readers of the Bible who use wheelchairs have noticed this: God is in a wheelchair, like I am! Hard to argue with that. So, God starts out in the holy of holies in the heart of the temple, then rises up to its entryway.
Then the glory of the Lord went out from the entryway of the temple and stopped above the cherubim. 19 The cherubim lifted up their wings and rose up from the earth in my sight as they went out with the wheels beside them. They stopped at the entrance of the east gate of the house of the Lord.
God is taking flight. Leaving the temple. Leaving Jerusalem. Leaving David’s city, the heart of the world, behind. The leaving continues in the next chapter,
Then the cherubim lifted up their wings, with the wheels beside them, and the glory of the God of Israel was above them. 23 And the glory of the Lord ascended from the middle of the city and stopped on the mountain east of the city.
What does this flight mean? Well, God is leaving the temple. That’s the only way to explain how it could be destroyed by Babylon: God had already left it behind. In one way this is more terrifying than any vision we had earlier of the slain in the streets. If God has even abandoned the temple, the city, the people, we are sunk. This is the temple first imagined by David, built by Solomon, presided in by priests for 400 years, it’s where families make pilgrimage three times a year. Our Jewish elder siblings just celebrated the high holy days. Why are they all clumped together? Because Judaism was a pilgrimage faith. You went up to Jerusalem and got in all the worship you could on one trip. Rabbis in high holy days work way harder than us ministers do in our holy week (don’t tell the M&P committee). But now all of that is gone. Imagine we wake up one morning and not only this church we love is gone, but every church everywhere. What now?
Here’s the thing about faith. It has this odd habit of resurrection. Right when you think it’s going to go away, it comes storming back. There are reports of church growth and baptisms in places where they’re not supposed to happen: like France, and Quebec, the Netherlands, China. Among people not supposed to be interested, like Generations Z and Alpha. Judaism lost its heart and soul to Babylon: temple, king, and land. And in exile, Judaism reinvented itself. Got born again. We can apparently worship without those things. The temple was God’s house, not God’s prison. All we need are the stories, and the Torah, and gatherings for prayer. The Judaism we recognize meeting in synagogues today is more like what came about in Babylon than ever was in the temple. And in a way we Christians are much closer to that. For us, imagery of Israel’s temple and king and land coalesce around Jesus. He is our king, our living temple, and he has no land to call his own, yet sends us to every land. He’s the temple that was destroyed and raised in three days. Judaism could have vanished in Babylon. Instead, it was reborn. And I just wonder about you: what are you facing that is indeed death, but may also be surprising new life? Awfully hard to get resurrected without dying first, I regret to inform.
Last week Dayle was preaching away up here. I was sitting over there where I don’t normally sit. And I noticed, looking at the pulpit he and I and Joanne share: there are wheels. And wheels within wheels. Whoever designed this pulpit wanted to show: Preachers prophesy. Forget what I said weeks before about prophets being annoying . . . maybe this word from Ezekiel is more familiar than we thought? Saw someone recently, not from this church, who asked me, who was that prophet who had to lie on his side for like a year? Uh, Ezekiel, I preached on that last Sunday. Yeah, I know a guy with a detached retina who has to do that. This was supposed to be obscure and difficult, not like a present-day prescription for health. One of you told me about a novel you’re into about a guy from North Carolina who’s an ex-pat in Toronto. Ok, weird, that’s not me, but sounds familiar. And then you said the book’s epigraph is from Ezekiel. Whoa.
Ezekiel tells his story this way: its first half, 24 chapters, are prophesies against people, Israel first, for 12 chapters, the nations next, us gentiles, 12 more chapters of judgment. But then the next half, 24 more chapters, are prophesies of new life, God remaking creation, restoring the temple in a way we couldn’t have imagined, making right everything we’ve ruined. The destructive chapters are prelude. What’s coming is resurrection, the renewal of the cosmos, all things made new. There’s a reason the last book of our Bible, Revelation, returns to these cherubim, these wild apocalyptic visions, these impossible possibilities. Oppressed people need hope above all. A reason to live. You can live a little while without food or water, but not a moment without hope. And Ezekiel says: more hope is coming than you can imagine or bear.
What does it mean that God leaves the temple? Well, it means that God can be present and accessible by the River Chebar, where the exiles are. This might be a foreign land, Babylon, with strange speech and gods and ways, it might be hard to be Jewish here. But God is not absent. In fact, God left Jerusalem to come here, with us, as we reinvent faith altogether. A friend of mine taught at a seminary in New York City. He didn’t like it. It was Babylon on the Hudson, he called it. Babylon is sort of biblical shorthand for a wretched place with ways that insult God and demean people. And the prophet says you know what? This will do fine. God has come with us into exile. We’ll gather for prayer and meals and to love our neighbours. In fact, we might just thrive here in Babylon. If we have God, what more do we need?
So, for Jews, God’s location is complex. God is everywhere, sure, but God’s home is One Temple Way in Jerusalem, but God’s also not stuck there. He can leave, in fact, God has left. For us Christians, God is everywhere, no doubt. God is also present in the man Jesus with the same intensity that God is present in the temple. Only Jesus is a walking temple, a house for God in our flesh. When Jesus ascends, he is gone, back to the right hand of the Father, not here. It’s like God’s wheelchair of sapphire leaving Jerusalem altogether. But Jesus also says he’s present in bread and wine. In the enemy and the poor. In the neighbour we can’t stand. Even, Lord help us, in the mirror. He’s here, then he’s leaving, but he’s present in specific things to save us, and he’s coming back. If we’re asked where God is, rather than pointing up, we can point to this bread, and this cup. To the stranger who’s hungry. To the enemy. To one another, temple of God that we are. And we are confident God can speak to us in love, even here in Babylon, until he returns, renews his creation, and makes all things new. Amen.