“Eat the Book”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, September 13, 2026
Reading: Ezekiel 2:1-3:15
So what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten?
In the Philippines there’s a favourite food called balut—an egg in which the bird has started to form. Sometimes it even has feathers. No thanks. In Indonesia once I tried durian fruit, you may have seen its spiky exterior. It’s illegal in some subways and buildings because it smells so hideous, and many Indonesians have stories of some uncle who ate it and immediately had a heart attack. I’d try it again. Minus the heart attack. Tell me on your way out your strangest delicacy. Was the critter still moving I wonder?
Anybody ever eaten an inanimate object? Something that’s not even supposed to be food?
In our story for today, the prophet Ezekiel eats ... a book. For real, listen:
He said to me, “Mortal, eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.” Then I ate it, and in my mouth, it was as sweet as honey.
To be more historically precise, this would have been a scroll, with words either scratched on vellum, animal skin, so sort of like a tough leather, or it could have been a papyrus scroll of reeds woven together. Just a metaphor you say? An evocative image? Scripture sounds that way sometimes:
the ordinances of the Lord are
sweeter than honey
and drippings of the honeycomb.
Clearly a poetic illustration here. But I think Ezekiel is trying to be aggressively, offensively literal. Artists have taken it that way, as you see on your bulletin cover. Here’s another medieval rendering, looks anatomically challenging. And a more modern one. Eat the book. Other prophets like Jeremiah and John in Revelation are also told to eat the book. We also speak of reading in metaphors from the table: I devoured this book, or this is a book to savor. Like food, what we read becomes part of us, and changes who we are. I hope this fall we all digest the book of Ezekiel together, that it becomes part of our bodies, and makes us different, more like Jesus. The Christian hip hop group Indie Tribe warns “eat the word of God before you go with your gut.” Pastor Dayle gave me that line. I’m not that cool.
Last Sunday was our first sermon in this series on Ezekiel. If you missed it, I encourage you to go read Ezekiel 1. Be very afraid. It describes cherubim in their biblical glory. Not cutesy imps but monsters who if I told you they were in the Bible, you might not believe me. Four heads, from different creatures, wings, with eyes, but that’s only the beginning. Behind them the living God. But of course, no one can see God. So, the prophet says it was sort of like this, a little like that, somewhat like amber and bronze and fire and sapphire. Imagine a fire ant trying to explain a supernova. Ezekiel falls on his face. Appropriate response. Then our passage for today: the Spirit of God rushes Ezekiel, yanks him onto his feet, and feeds him a book.
Oh, I’m sorry, you thought faith was supposed to be easy?
Ezekiel is trained to be a priest in the temple in Jerusalem. But Nebuchadnezzer’s Babylonians have conquered the Jews and carried off their professional class to exile in Babylon, Ezekiel included. His skills are about as useful by the River Chebar as a baseball mitt at a soccer game. All the same, God is commissioning him as a prophet. Giving him a message to eat and then throw back up on the people. We don’t know it’s content yet, but basically it’s that God sent us into exile by our enemies’ hand, and it’s our own fault. We failed to live up to the covenant. That’s why we lost our land, our temple, our sovereignty. Before God tells the content of the message, God promises today: this will fail. They will not listen. “For they are a rebellious house.” seven times we’re told “they are a rebellious house.” They have hard foreheads. They’re walled in by nettles and thorns and scorpions. This is a doomed errand, a suicide mission.
And you thought your job was hard?
Why would God do this? Raise up a prophet and send him or her to a people knowing they will not listen? This is not just a question about Ezekiel. When Jesus teaches his first parable, Mark explains why:
When he was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables. 11 And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything comes in parables, 12 in order that
‘they may indeed look but not perceive,
and may indeed hear but not understand;
so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.’”
Jesus quotes Isaiah to say I teach in parables to block communication. So folks won’t understand. Jesus learns this from the prophets and their doomed missions. Eat this book. Throw it back up. People won’t like it.
Anybody ever struggle with modern art? I love medieval all the way up to cubism. Some of you have suggested we do a museum tour together, I’m game. But as we get to the later 20th century and more abstract art, I start to lose interest. They’re just messing with us, I think. I understand it sort of. Once we have photography a visual artist doesn’t need to be realistic. They can show things that no one can see. Like a banana duct-taped to a wall, so I get it, but I don’t feel it or love it, let’s head to the café for a croissant. But smarter people than me insist Jesus is at work in the modern wing. His message often defers meaning, puts the cookies on the high shelf. Whoever wants to save their life must lose it. You wanna be first? Be last. Blessed are the poor. Right. Anybody want an espresso?
We live in a tough age for our kind of faith. Mainline churches have been shedding members and influence for generations. Some forms of faith are growing: Really traditionalist Catholicism, Pentecostalism in the global south and its diasporas. Latin-speaking Catholics and tongues-speaking charismatics. But Protestant churches like ours that use plain ole’ English? I wonder if it’s because we thought faith should make easy sense. Here, it’s like school. Y’all sit in rows, we’ll have a lecture, we’ll all leave with the right ideas in our heads. But the bible itself often seems to want to obscure understanding. Our sister synagogues up Bathurst Street are also growing, despite Canadian antisemitism at the moment. The highlights of their worship are in Hebrew. Folks up there understand Hebrew? Only the rabbis really. But you can understand some without fully comprehending. I just wonder, do we need a language we don’t understand? To defer or delay meaning more often? We got a head start in here. Our forebears gave us a gothic playground full of shadows and secrets. Maybe they intuited something we’re only now learning. That God is beyond our knowledge or understanding. That the gospel isn’t there to fit inside our tiny imaginations. Its there to explode them.
Now I don’t want this to sound like some sort of 90s postmodern English class, where meaning is impossible and the only thing we’re against is absolutes. Let’s be clear: this text is saying some things clearly. Events are in the hands of a good God who makes judgments. Without that, there is nothing called history at all. Just a bunch of nonsense as people try to take advantage of one another. This God is bodily involved with the world. It’s God’s own arm that reaches down with a scroll for the prophet. And God sends prophets even to us who don’t listen. But let’s not be allergic to mystery. Most of the good stuff in our lives is mystery: like the mere fact that we’re born in the first place, or how to become good, or whether and who we should marry, or how to respond to tragedy. None of that is simple. And that’s why the Bible and Christianity are as difficult as they are.
I had a chemistry class I hated in high school. Chased me right out of the sciences. I ranted about the textbook till my teacher took me aside and said, “Look, this book isn’t written to be clear. It’s written to be hard to access. Chemistry is something you can’t learn from a book alone. You have to work with your hands in a lab, with burners and test tubes and, let me spell this out for you: chemicals. If you could read the book on your own and understand it, it wouldn’t be chemistry.” A book written to be not-understood without using your hands, without a lab or instructor. Are we surprised the Bible is any easier?
I asked someone I didn’t know how their ministry was going. Well, if you read the prophets, they’re sent to a people who don’t want to hear. It’s going like that. Wow, a little melodramatic and self-pitying. Glad you’re not my preacher. But his words stuck with me. Genuine prophets get that kind of reaction.
But why this doomed mission, to a rebellious house who will not listen or respond? Here’s why: “Whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house), they shall know that there has been a prophet among them.” They shall know there has been a prophet among them. Any prophets among us now?
There’s a story told in some protest circles about a guy with a candle in the rain, standing outside a nuclear submarine facility, in a protest for peace. He was alone. Except for the guard of the facility, warm in the guardhouse. The guard finally asked what are you doing man? You’re not going to change anything. The protestor responds, I’m not doing this to change anybody else. I’m doing this to change me. Peace is worth looking ridiculous. Seems to me we still have prophets like Ezekiel.
There was a farmer in Austria named Franz Jägerstätter. The Catholic Church calls him a saint now, but his friends just remembered him as a mean old cuss who didn’t like authority. When the Nazis came to power, Jägerstätter wouldn’t do what they said. Wouldn’t say heil to anybody. Wouldn’t serve in their death machine of an army. Terrence Malick’s film A Hidden Life about him is gorgeous. And all because my man had a bad attitude about authority. God can use our strangest gifts. And aren’t we glad now that some people believe stuff precisely when no one else will. Seems to me we still have prophets like Ezekiel.
Dolly Parton died recently. We’ll honour her soon at our parking lot concert. St. Dolly, pray for us. It’s been commented she might have been the last person on earth who was universally loved. Far right, far left, middle: everybody loved Dolly. A course at my alma mater is called “Dolly Parton for president.” She came from Locust Ridge, Tennessee, and started a region-wide library named for her father, who was illiterate, never read a book. Now when I was a kid, Dolly was mostly a punchline, especially among boys and men, for her ample figure. Or her red-neck-i-ness. Or her just her her-ness. She herself said she took fashion insight from the town tramp. I just wonder how often she felt alone — leaving her family’s narrow morality in the holler to become a worldwide icon. There’s some goodness in not caring how you’re perceived. Having a harder forehead than your critics. Seems to me we still have prophets like Ezekiel.
There was a fantastic New York Times profile of Yo-Yo Ma recently. The musical genius who performed for JFK as a seven-year-old. He might have studied only music, stayed cocooned in it. Instead, he studied anthropology. As an immigrant kid, first to France and then North America, he was curious about people. Still is. The problem with interviewing Yo-Yo Ma apparently, is he wants to ask you all the questions. My wife Jaylynn got to ask him a question once, but he interrupted her—first, ma’am, how are you? Think of the stereotype of the musical diva: all spotlight on me please, the solo genius. Everyone else is a character in my movie, thanks. But a prodigy, world renowned since childhood, thinks everyone else is the most interesting person in the room. Seems to me we still have prophets like Ezekiel.
Now these last two may seem counter intuitive as prophets. Dolly Parton and Yo-Yo Ma are widely beloved. But I’m going to stand by them precisely because they lived differently than they could have. They gave away radiance. They were interested in others and didn’t just soak up all the attention. They were the opposite of a certain world leaders at the moment. And they also show us God hasn’t forgotten us. Seems to me we still have prophets like Ezekiel.
Final example. The poet, novelist, and farmer Wendell Berry just died too. Wendell was a writer on the make in New York City in the 1950s, and then he up and left. Went back to his family farm in Kentucky. He believed we have to love a place and should take part in raising up life from its soil, over against the anonymous and deeply ignorant ways of our economy and culture. Listen to these bracing questions:
How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.
For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.
What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the mountains, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.
State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security;
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.
Seems to me God still raises up prophets like Ezekiel. But we tend to learn about these folks when they’re old or dead. Who’s going to be like that for our day? Who wants to eat the book now?
Most of us are not called to be prophets personally. And that’s good. True prophets tend to die horribly and friendless. But we are all called to do something. I used to think we got called to a profession when we’re young, that vocation—calling—was only up in the air for students or young people. Nuh uh. We have to keep discerning God’s voice and stepping into it with courage. We’ve seen Ezekiel’s calling today: eat this book, tastes good, don’t it? Now go and tell the brick wall. Wonder what our calling will be next? The great Howard Thurman, mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., used to say this about vocation: “Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Let us pray. Lord Jesus. Raise up prophets among us. Throw us all into our life and work with a portion of Ezekiel’s Spirit. With the scroll like honey in our mouths. Amen.