“Whoa, Wheels Within Wheels”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, September 6, 2026
Reading: Ezekiel 1:1, 4-11, 15-18, 24-2:1
I’m so glad to be back with you. The new school year is kicking off. Next week we’re back to two services. All our studies and rehearsals and children’s and youth ministries are back soon. Folks are trickling home from vacation and sending kids back to school. I think I’m the only one in my house not enrolled in a university program. Rachel McMillan has our book group reading Great Expectations—that’s what we can have in a moment of new beginnings. Labour Day is like new year’s but without the guilt after, there’s not the pressure to diet and exercise and cut spending we associate with January 1st. It’s just a moment to lift up our heads and anticipate what new thing God is bringing.
And one new thing here this fall is a series on the book of Ezekiel called You Want It Darker, based on a song by the great Leonard Cohen. The title track’s lyrics are miserable, until they turn incandescent.
If you are the dealer
I'm out of the game
If you are the healer
It means I'm broken and lame
If thine is the glory then
Mine must be the shame
You want it darker ...
We kill the flame
The singer is breaking up with God. Because the universe is unfair and irreparable. But then we get the chorus. Hineni means “here I am” in Hebrew, it’s what God’s servants say when God calls, from Abraham to Mary:
Hineni, hineni,
I’m ready my Lord.
Not sure they can spice that song up and make it a global megahit like they did “Hallelujah.” The world is a devastated and devastating place. And yet God still calls prophets to point out the wrong and make things right. There’s Ezekiel in Michaelangelo’s imagination: looking startled, asking, “wait, what? God, are you sure?”
As Christians, we’re used to the biblical prophets anticipating Jesus’ coming. We read passages that point his way at Advent and Christmas, but we don’t really dwell in the prophets for extended periods. Hence this series. Prophets are not soothsayers. They don’t predict the future with a crystal ball or tea leaves or chicken bones or whatever. Scripture is pretty condemning of that kind of fortune telling. Biblical prophesy looks at the times and at the scriptures and sees signs of God’s goodness. So, I’m not looking for when the bond market is going to fail by reading Ezekiel backwards in Aramaic. I’m trying to say what God says to us today, based on what God said through Ezekiel in the 6th century BC. One way scholars put this is that prophets don’t so much foretell as they forthtell. Their word makes a new reality in the world. They’re not predicting. Prophets speak and things change.
And what Ezekiel forthtells is grim. His book has 48 chapters. The first 24 chapters are prophesies against Judah. Judah—that is, the two southern tribes of Israel that still exist after the 10 northern ones are wiped out, we get the word Jew from Judah. When I used to teach preaching, I never told folks that half their sermons should attack their listeners. The first half no less. Never think that being God’s people means you can do whatever you want. In the Bible, God’s people come in for more criticism than others. Because more is expected of us. Next, another dozen chapters of Ezekiel are prophesies against the nations, Judah’s neighbours. All people should know better than how we’re doing. Then the final quarter gives a vision of hope. The temple rebuilt. A people restored. A land healed. Creation made right. In the meantime, we get wild visions, and a face full of justice.
And the prophet Ezekiel is in the wrong place for any of this. He is by the river Chebar in Babylon. Ezekiel is a priest, trained up to pray and make sacrifice for us in the temple in Jerusalem. But the Babylonians have conquered Judah and carried off its professional class into exile, including Ezekiel. There is no temple to the Lord God of Israel in Babylon. There are only idols of Marduk, god of the Babylonians. Ezekiel’s skills and training and lineage are useless in this foreign place. Ezekiel is one out-of-work priest whose religion is past its expiry date and whose skills are impossible to use where he sits.
Anyone ever feel useless? Misplaced or displaced?
And yet, a vision appears. An extraordinary vision. Greater than anything that might ever have come to him in the temple back in Jerusalem. There’s a storm, with a fire in it, and out come four human forms. Each has four faces and four wings, with feet like calves’, and human hands. Each of these four faces has four more faces, one each of a human, a lion, an ox, and an eagle, and each shine like gleaming emerald, like burnished bronze.
And that is more than a little strange. One of you asked in Bible study, are we sure this is God? I mean, could be some less agreeable entity. You get wild interpretations of this vision—a UFO! Psychedelic drugs! Psychosis!
If I ask you what you envision when you think of God, I’m guessing it’s not that. Maybe a more docile image like an old man on a throne or something like your grandmother. Or you might take this as a trick question and say, ‘we don’t have to guess what God looks like, we have Jesus.’ And you’d be right. I’m guessing you don’t think of four cherubim with four faces each and wings touching. Apparently, God is stranger than we thought. Wilder, more frightening, beyond our categories or control. You’ve heard me quote St. Augustine before: if you understand it, it is not God. So, if you don’t understand the passage you heard, if you can’t see this vision, good, you’re on your way.
But the vision does show us something. A lot of somethings, a raucous cascade, an avalanche of images, too much to digest or make sense of. Some of it is traditional language in Israel’s story: God appears in thunder and lightning on Mt. Sinai as Moses meets with God and receives the law. Some of it is common imagery in many cultures: a lion represents ferocity, an ox strength, an eagle soaring and vision. The number four like the four winds, four directions of the compass, four seasons. Christian churches have neglected these sorts of weird apocalyptic passages because they’re hard to make sense of, but I think we might do well to linger in them. We’re in a generation that wants mystery, and maybe dangerous mystery. I got thinking about the cherubim because my bank teller has one tattooed on her arm. “I just think they’re cool and interesting,” she said. Sort of a low bar for permanent ink to my mind, but hey. Mainline churches have tried to trim the faith down to something that makes sense, something reasonable, and our churches have emptied out over the last two generations. Meanwhile folks flock to epic sprawling stories like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and Game of Thrones. And nobody says “that can’t happen, I don’t believe in dragons or wizards.” Y’all we got better mythology than any of em. And we bury it!
In Christian theology the cherubim are a rank of angels. There’s another rank of angels called the seraphim, which means the fiery ones. And there are regular angels too. Each exists only to praise God and carry out orders. You might have heard of a cherub as a sweet angelic imp. We have a cherub choir with our youngest cutest littles here at the church. But Ezekiel depicts them rather differently. More terror-inducing than cute. Scholars call these “composite creatures,” with parts from different species. They guard passageways between one level of reality and another. So, when Adam and Eve are kicked out of Eden, a cherub with a flaming sword guards the way back. The top of the ark of the covenant has two cherubim with wings touching. Not just to keep us from opening it or else God will melt our faces like the Nazis in Indiana Jones, but to keep God in the ark. The presence in the ark is powerful and dangerous, like nuclear energy, handle with care. These cherubim in Ezekiel’s vision also guard the way from heaven to earth and impede traffic either way: no further, if you want to live.
Annie Dillard says this about worship and the strange goodness of God:
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
One place these four images appear in church is as symbols of the four gospels. This is the Book of Kells, from the 9th century. Each one of the creatures is linked to a gospel: the eagle to John, which soars in its vision. The ox to Luke since the ox and other animals adore the baby Jesus in the manger. Here’s another version, often these were covers for rare bibles. And here’s a wheel within a wheel: the outer wheel with twelve Old Testament prophets, the inner wheel with seven apostles, so the gospel is contained within Israel’s good news. Look what these images are saying: however spectacular the vision of Ezekiel is, if you want to know God, read these books. Then read them again. And live by them.
You noticed the chariot by these cherubim. Something like a wheel, and then something like a wheel is inside that wheel. A baseball fan friend of mine points to a wheel play in baseball: all the runners going counterclockwise as they do, the hitter bunts, and all the defenders rotate the opposite direction, defensively. A wheel within a wheel, with a bit of whimsy. This chariot seems to have eyes. Not too many wheels have eyes in my experience, but the whole point is what we’re seeing is beyond our experience. What do you need a chariot for? Well, somebody’s going somewhere. Theatre nerds talk about the Chekov rule: if there’s a gun in the scene it’d better do something by the end. Hold that thought.
Because now we get a vision of God proper. These cherubim creatures are cool, but they’re only guardians, the body guards. What’s behind them?
And above the dome over their heads there was something like a throne, in appearance like sapphire; and seated above the likeness of a throne was something that seemed like a human form. 27 Upward from what appeared like the loins I saw something like gleaming amber, something that looked like fire enclosed all around; and downward from what looked like the loins I saw something that looked like fire, and there was splendor all around. 28 Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the appearance of the splendor all around. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.
Gleaming amber from the waist up. Something like fire from the waist down. And did you notice how often Ezekiel hedges? Pulls back? “Something like,” and “it appeared like,” and at the end: “This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.” This prophet, who sees more clearly than any of us, sees only what’s sort of, sort of, sort of like this and that. What human eye can take in the God whose chariot has eyes?!
Ah that chariot, the gun that had better go off at some point. This unbearable vision of God is a prelude to saying, God is leaving. Ezekiel is written after the temple is destroyed, but set when it still stands, like the gospels. The writer and readers know that the temple’s destruction is coming, God’s house will soon be gone. How else could the Babylonians destroy it? If God were still resident there, it couldn’t have happened. So, God is about to depart the temple. And go where? Well, to the River Chebar in Babylon. To wherever people sit in devastation and pray.
Think about what made us Judah, God’s people, in the first place. The temple where we worship with sacrifice and regular festival. The land God gave us. The monarchy stemming from King David. The promise to Abraham and Sarah and their descendants. Three of those four gifts are gone. No temple. No land. No king. Would you still be yourself without your name, your history, your places? Judah reinvents itself in exile. Gets born again. Gatherings will be for prayer with teaching, not sacrifice in a temple. We still love the land, but from afar as we hope to go back one day. No temple? No problem, God can appear here in Babylon, and in technicolor. All we have left is the promise to Sarah and Abraham to heal the world through as unlikely a people as us.
And I wonder how this might come as good news. Most people I know, myself included, feel stuck in some way. Ill at ease and maybe not sure why. And sometimes nothing seems more stuck than religion. We built this building a hundred years ago to look like it was built 900 years ago. But actually, faith has this remarkable ability to reinvent itself. Because we serve a living God. The temple and the land and the king can go away, but God cannot go away. For us Christians, the temple is Jesus’ body, available in the Lord’s Supper this morning. The land is holy, but faith radiates out from there to all parts of the world in mission. Our king in David’s line is Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. And our way into Abraham’s and Sarah’s family is by faith and baptism, by following Jesus. By reading those four gospels and living them out. If we don’t recognize Ezekiel’s vision as anything other than strange, imagine how Ezekiel would see us. Wait, you’re not even Jews? In some place called Canada? Where’s that? In a building designed in a place called England in a different millennium? Wow, God is even more creative than I thought.
Ezekiel shows that God is weirder than we thought. Not domesticated by our expectations, but wildly different than we imagine. Ezekiel also shows God is better than we thought. A friend of mine gave me this quote from an early church father, St. Gregory of Nyssa, 4th century: the danger with the gospel is that it is so wonderful we won’t believe it. Both things are true: God is both stranger and better than we can conceive.
And that matches what we need. Because whatever we face, whatever it is, I can promise you two things: it will be harder than you can bear. It will. I’m sorry for the bad news. Ready for the good news? Whatever you face, it’ll eventually be better than you can possibly imagine. Make it so Lord, don’t make me a liar. Amen.