Today's(9/15) passage is Ezra 9:1-8.
The Jewish leaders tell Ezra that many of the Jews including priests and Levites had intermarried with the foreign peoples around them. Shocked at their infidelity to God, Ezra tears his hair, his beard and his clothes and sits in mourning all day.
At the evening sacrifice he prays, ashamed of the sins of his people, seeing their history as one big sin and that as the reason for their subjugation by others. He says the Lord has allowed just a remnant of them to survive and granted them a moment of grace in Jerusalem.
Ezra himself is not guilty but, as a priest and teacher of the law, he so identifies with his people that he feels their shame before God.
For Ezra the sins are not theirs but "ours" and the guilt "ours". It is not their history but "our" history. He is both judge and participant.
The most intense moment of shame in my life came a month before my first wife died. My wife was in the hospital and I was bewildered as to why.
No one would tell me. She had aged so much in such a short time that a nurse, in an effort to comfort me, said my "mother" was resting comfortably.
When I told her she was my wife not my mother, the nurse blushed.
A few moments later I blushed much more deeply. I saw the hospital psychiatrist come out of my wife's room.
I watched him go to the nurse's station and pick up the phone.
I overheard him speaking.
He was angry. He wanted to know why he had been called to visit her because, as soon as he entered the room, he could see she was a chronic alcoholic in the final stages of her life.
That was the moment when the truth broke through my self-serving denial of my wife's alcoholism.
I blushed to the very core of my soul.
In an instant I saw what I had done to my children and myself with that fifteen years of denial.
Like Ezra I was appalled. Because I was married to my wife and we were of "one flesh", I participated in her sins.
I blushed for my sin of denial and for its consequences suddenly realized.
I blushed for my wife's sins of lying, stealing, mocking me before our children as a blind fool.
I blushed that I had begun committing adultery against this woman.
There was no end to my blushing because there was no end to my sins.
I was alone in a busy hospital, consumed by the burning guilt of my life.
The shock of my sin was so great that I couldn't stand.
A chair appeared as if by magic and I sat down.
It seemed like I sat forever but it could not have been more than a few minutes.
When I stood up, I felt like a remnant of myself.
In the next few years that remnant grew even smaller as I committed adultery and conceived a child outside of marriage.
There wasn't a lot left of me by the time I reached Wooridle Church where I have experienced my "brief moment of grace."
Lord, let me see that I am the keeper of my brother in law and I do participate in his sins. Help me repent as I need to.
