Ezekiel 2:1-2 “He said to me, ‘Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you.’ As he spoke the Spirit came into me and raised me to my feet, and I heard him speaking to me.”

When the judge enters the courtroom, what does the bailiff say? “All rise.” When the bride appears at the back of the church and begins her march down the aisle, what do the guests do? They stand. When a superior officer enters a room where soldiers are gathered, what do they do in the officer’s presence? They stand up and salute. “Stand up in the presence of the aged, show respect for the elderly,” Moses commanded in the book of Leviticus (19:32). Standing is not the only way, but it is one way that we show respect.

So the Lord was about to speak to Ezekiel, and he commands the prophet to stand up. Back up a little in this vision, and you find Ezekiel showing deep respect in another way with body language: He bowed down with his face to the ground. Now the Lord not only commanded the prophet to stand. He sent his Spirit into the man and made it happen.

We have a similar moment in our worship each week. In churches that use the historic Christian liturgy, a lesson from one of the four gospels is read each Sunday. This is the part of God’s word that speaks specifically about Jesus, the very heart and soul of Christian faith. To hear those words, we don’t sit back and relax in our seats. It is not a casual moment. We do something that may feel a little stiff and formal. But it wants to deliver a subtle message about respect for God and his word. We stand up to hear the gospel. It’s a way that we recognize something significant is happening in these words. We stand in respect for the story they tell.

The point isn’t the outward ceremony. The point is, this is God’s word, and we take it with the utmost seriousness. This must be especially true for the man God sends to preach it. The prophet, the preacher, the pastor, must be convinced that he has been given the very words of God. These are not his plaything, so much Play-Doh or Silly Putty he has been given to bend and shape and twist until they look and sound the way he wants. They are not a collection of sanctified opinions, more or less human speculations about what God might demand, or how he might operate, that he can safely set aside because the times have changed, and we know better now, and that way doesn’t work anymore.

People have called me a “fundamentalist” because I try to understand the words of the Bible the way they read on the page, the way they read in their context, and approach them as the very revelation of God speaking to us. They called Ezekiel and the prophets, Jesus and his disciples, far worse for respecting the words on the page and taking them this way. Understand that the prophet’s task is to respect what God says and deliver it to you clear and unvarnished, not try to make it more palatable or sensible for modern ears.

What might this mean for us? There is a scene in the Disney movie Aladdin in which the hero has just let the genie out of the bottle. After a little song and dance about all the possibilities this offers Aladdin, the genie tells him, “There are a few provisos, a couple of quid pro quos. Rule number one, I can’t kill anybody. So don’t ask. Rule number two, I can’t make anyone fall in love with anybody else…Rule number three, I can’t bring people back from the dead. It’s not a pretty picture. I don’t like doing it.”

In a similar way, the faithful preacher of God’s word wants to serve you and give you even greater gifts than the genie in Aladdin. God does like bringing people back from the dead. It is the whole point of giving us his Son, forgiving our sins, and bringing us faith. So the preacher has to respect what God says. Don’t ask him to modify the rules or play fast and loose with the words because we want something God forbids. To paraphrase the genie, “It’s not a pretty picture. I don’t like doing it.” Give the message, the one who gives it, and the one who delivers it, respect.