After feeding the five thousand, Jesus dismissed the crowd. He went one way, His disciples another. He went off to the mountain to pray; they went off in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. This was the Lord’s doing, His idea. He forced them to leave late in the day knowing how the winds kick up strong at night. He compelled them to get in that little boat. He wanted them out on the water in the wind in the darkness.

So you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, build on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. (Ephesians 2:19)

Today is part two of what it means to be “in Christ.” Last week we heard the lengthy litany in glorious run-on fashion: In Christ we are blessed, in Christ we are chosen, in Christ destined for adoption, in Christ we are chosen, in Christ we are loved, in Christ we are redeemed, in Christ we have an inheritance for which our Baptism is a dow payment guaranteeing our possession. All in Christ.

Our text from Ephesians is a run on sentence long enough to curl the hair of your English teacher and earn you a D- in your 6th grade composition class. But this wasn’t originally written in English but in Greek. And it wasn’t written by some sixth grader, but by the apostle Paul to the churches of Asia minor including Ephesus. The translators have spared us and broken it up into bite sized pieces. One huge run on sentence beginning with our blessing in Christ in the heavenly realms and ending in the water of our Baptism as a down payment of the inheritance to come. While run on sentences make for difficult reading, they do drive home the point: You can’t stop anywhere in the middle because God’s grace in Christ that begins in the mind and will of God doesn’t stop until it reaches you.

The Word of God is a rejectable Word. People can take offense at it. People can mock it and laugh at it. People can close their ears and minds to it, literally walk out of the church, shut their Bibles. The Word is as rejectable as Jesus.

All three readings this morning testify to the rejectability of the Word, its vulnerability, the fact that God forces Himself on no one. The prophet Ezekiel is sent to a stubborn people, a nation of rebels, a people with a track record of disobedience. Yet God sends His prophet anyway, Ezekiel, the “Son of Man.” God insists on being heard, He insists that His Word go out and that people hear it. But He forces no one. “Whether they hear or refuse to hear, they will know that a prophet has been among them.”