Our Father in heaven, you’re fam.
Goated be your name.
Your kingdom is fire, high-key.
Hook us up with the bread today.
Forgive us for being mid, like we forgive the opps.
Don’t let us get finessed, and keep us from the ick.
That’s not the vibe.
Yours is the kingdom, the power, and the aura. Forever. Bet.

There was a time–mainly, while I was teaching eighth grade several years ago–when I realized that I wasn’t young anymore. For most of us, it probably has something to do with language and pop culture first, since that’s the thing that changes so quickly, and it’s also the thing that deliberately excludes the older generation. But there are a lot of other generational markers—taste in music, comfort level with various forms of technology, attitudes toward authority and rebellion, size of the font on your phone—that begin to go slightly deeper.

In particular, younger generations tend to be most sensitive about older generations criticizing them for things that the older generation themselves helped to create—whether that’s economic conditions and the difficulty of buying a home, or attitudes about climate change, or philosophies about careers and retirement. Each generation has faced a different set of challenges, after all, and each has been both helped and hurt by historical circumstances beyond their control. It’s why the same event can play so differently depending on what your generation has experienced and feels is “normal.”

There was a popular saying in ancient Israel, apparently—a sort of proverb repeated from one generation to the next. “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” Its most direct meaning was something like: if the parents have sinned, the next generation will pay for it.

It could also simply mean that bad parenting produces bad children. But in the context of the prophet Ezekiel’s own generation, it meant something very specific.

Ezekiel and his fellow Israelites had been exiled to Babylon. They were far from home and far from the Temple that gave their religious life meaning, structure, and order. They were longing for their homeland and their community. And many of them blamed their parents’ generation for their exile. You were the ones who ate the sour grapes—and now we are paying for it. You were the ones who walked away from God—and God punished us with exile. A generational divide, indeed.

If they were being punished for their parents’ sins, they thought, then what’s the point? There is a kind of teenage sullenness in Ezekiel’s generation: the previous generation had messed everything up, and nothing they did could change it. In Ezekiel’s view, however, this attitude is completely wrong. In one translation, God says, “What is wrong with those of you who recite this proverb? Stop saying this!” Ezekiel wants to shake his audience from their complacency.

He wants to offer them agency again, to convince them that their actions actually do matter to God and to one another. He wants to remind them that shifting blame is mere escapism. As one commentator puts it, Ezekiel is trying to tell them that “[t]he life of this present generation is God’s, and what God brings into the present is for them and aboutthem. They can stop looking back, and start looking around. This is their moment with God.” (Portier-Young)

Every generation seems to go through its cynical phase, but mine did it really well. We idolized slackers like Kurt Cobain. We sang songs like Beck’s “Loser” and Radiohead’s “Creep” at the top of our lungs. We watched Seinfeld, a show about nothing where there were no hugs and no one learned anything.

We raged against the machine even though many of us didn’t know what that really meant. Irony and sarcasm were the predominant mood of every bit of pop culture we consumed. And we did consume, ironically, a lot of it. And then, when we were in our early 20s, the tragic events of September 11th unfolded, and many people thought irony was dead, that sarcasm had ended, that there would never be a need for satire again.

And here we are, a quarter of a century later, and the satire we consumed, like Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy, is now indistinguishable from reality. I think my children’s generation is not so much ironically detached, as mine was, but numbed and wounded. It feels more difficult than ever to find authentic hope, to find true sincerity, to find something worth believing in.

We take solace in the fact that, in the broad span of history, and even biblical history, we are not alone. Ezekiel’s generation was tempted by the same bitterness and apathy. But Ezekiel is a prophet, and so he must—and he does—push his listeners to the brink of what they think is possible.

And that brink is represented by the voice of God, who says “Why will you die, O house of Israel? I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God. Turn, then, and live.” It’s a tapping of the microphone amidst the feedback of doubt. A clearing of the throat: “Listen!”

Ezekiel is present in their midst to remind them, often shockingly, that God has not forgotten them; and that God wants them to pursue life. Apathy is a dangerous drug that leads to death by attrition: a slow shriveling from inaction, boredom, and despair.

Turn then, and LIVE—Ezekiel seems to shout this command from the rooftops, reminding his listeners that each of them matters to God, and that God calls them to wake from their slumber in order to seek meaning, purpose, value, and authenticity.

As far as we can tell, every other culture surrounding the ancient Israelites had a view of the gods that denied or downplayed human agency. In varying degrees, they believed the gods had already decided what would happen, and no matter what you did, you could never outrun your fate.

The Greek play Oedipus Rex is about this very thing: a person who receives a horrible prediction of their fate, who runs as far and as fast away from it as they can, and then in the process of doing so, runs right into it anyway.

It’s a tragic view of life as a sort of maze with no escape, and one that Ezekiel and the other prophets go to great lengths to refute. Not only do our lives matter to God, they say, our actions matter to God. God cares about what we do, and God cares about what we do not do. We are not mere puppets in the gods’ cosmic drama. We are created in the image and likeness of God, prepared, as Ephesians says, for the good works God has in store for us.

Paul spells the theological implications of this in his letter to the Philippians. Today’s passage is often called “The Christ Hymn,” something resembling one of the earliest creeds of Christianity, a statement about who Jesus is and what he has done for us. But it’s not something offered merely as a theological statement. It’s offered to the Philippians so that their joy may be made complete. How? In following Jesus, in imitating the ways in which he used his own freedom to make us whole.

Jesus emptied himself of all that we might typically associate with a “god”—power, pride and violence—and embraced instead the lowliness of our humanity, showing God’s solidarity with all who suffer. Jesus refused to exploit his divine nature, preferring to show us what Paul calls in another letter the more “excellent” way of self-sacrificial love. The way of Christ is the way of peace, the way of joy, the way of humility. And then Paul reminds the Philippians to avoid apathy. He reminds them that they are not stuck in endless cycles of generational sin.

He reminds them that, because of Christ and his example, there is real, tangible hope for the future—that our moment with God will be one in which Christ is present—really present—and that each of us has a future oriented toward Love.

He then asks the Philippians to work their salvation out in “fear and trembling”—not in the sense of holy terror, but in the sense of holy wonder. We work out our salvation through gratitude for God’s goodness and generosity. We work it out through our own generous response to all that God has given us. We work it out by extending the kindness of God that we have received to others. And we are free—truly free—to do these things or not to dothem.

There is, after all, a great paradox about freedom. If we define freedom as the ability to choose, do, or say anything we want—freedom simply as following our most basic desires—we end up in bad places. We end up, ironically, enslaved to the things that we thought helped us to express our freedom, trapped in cycles of addiction, enthralled to behaviors that we hate, but that consume us. The Bible calls this cycle “sin.”

But being set free from sin—as we already are in Jesus Christ—means that we are free not to define ourselves in these ways, either, but free to will and to choose those good things that God has prepared for us. To choose the things that bring life, not death. To choose the things that lift up our neighbors, instead of destroying them. To choose the things that look like Love, the things that look like God. To go and work in the vineyard, even if we’ve already said that we won’t, because we know that following the way of Jesus is beautiful and life-giving, that the way of Jesus is mercy and peace, that it benefits us and all whose lives we are able to touch through it.

Baseball season is wrapping up, which always makes me sad. We love having baseball on in the house. It becomes the background noise from April through October while we cook, do homework and housework, do the dishes. Baseball is highly dramatic because it offers a suspenseful, singular point of confrontation, a one-on-one battle between the pitcher and the batter. Bases loaded. Two outs. Down by three runs. Bottom of the ninth. In one swing of the bat, the game could be lost or won, solely dependent on what one player does, or does not do. So baseball is largely a game of failure, of streaks and slumps, of times when you ground into a double play and lose the game for your team, or you strike out swinging. It’s a game where getting a hit 3 out of every 10 times is considered truly excellent.

I’m always struck by the resilience of the player who fails miserably and then shows up again the next day, or even the next inning, ready to keep playing, ready to try it all over again, hopefully with a better outcome than last time. Church is like baseball in this way. We come, we express our hopes and our failings alike. We tell God, all together, that we haven’t lived up to what we wanted to be this week. We’ve struck out. We’ve failed.

But then something really transformative happens. We exchange the peace. We smile at one another. We eat a meal together, and God tells us, and shows us, that the failures are welcome. The losers are welcome. Those with suboptimal performance reviews are welcome. God decides to throw a party every week to show us that we are never alone and that we are loved beyond all knowing.

And then we get to look at one another, and decide together, let’s go back out and work in the vineyard again this week. Let’s do the thing, together. Let’s rely on one another, and especially on the God whose love never fails. Let’s bring the light of Christ into as many of the dismal places of the world as we can. Let’s have our moment with God. AMEN.

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Read this post on Substack: https://adarmond.substack.com/p/not-fated-free