O God be in my mouth as I speak for you and fill this
place with your great grace that we may leave this place less of what we use to
be and more of what we ought to be, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
Thus says the Lord God: I am
going to open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my People; and I
will bring you back to the Land of Israel….I will put my spirit within you, and
you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that
I, the Lord, have spoken and will act,” says the Lord.
This morning’s reading from
Ezekiel has always been a personal favorite of mine. There are two different
reasons that I find the reading so appealing.
First, the dry bones coming to
life has an eerie quality that always seems to fit in well for youth retreats.
I am little embarrassed to admit that I have used the story countless times to
put a good scare into my youth group.
The second reason has more to do
with the competitive nature of seminary life. Most of you are probably not
aware that Episcopal seminaries have their own form of hazing.
Although we don’t swallow gold
fish, we do have certain traditions that most students have to suffer through.
In the first week of my first
Old Testament class, Dr. Bennett gave us a map quiz where we had to identify
about eighty different Biblical sites on two different maps.
Other types of hazing or maybe I
should now call it “training” had to do with the way you acolyted, sang or read
during daily chapel services.
Guess what Old Testament reading
was used to train seminary students for public reading. Yes, you guessed it, Ezekiel and his dry
bones.
Now you might be asking what
makes this reading so special. Good question. On the surface the reading does
not seem particularly challenging.
It does not seem to have any
difficult words to pronounce like Obadiah or Ecclesisaticus.
Yet if you asked my former
seminary professors, they would tell you they chose the lesson because it
requires the reader to carry on a conversation between God and Ezekiel as they
read publicly.
Both our Old Testament and
gospel lesson have a lot of action taking place in the story, and we need to
remember that God’s action in our lives is supposed to be exciting.
Many of us have heard these
stories read in such way that makes us wonder if the person even realizes the
wonderful and miraculous nature of what is taking place.
In our first account, Ezekiel is
magically transported to a valley full of dry bones and God tells him to preach
and prophesy to those same dry dead bones.
In a story that could easily be
taken from a Harry Potter book, Ezekiel speaks, the text tells us, “suddenly
there was a noise, a rattling and the bones came together, bone to bone. I
looked and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin
had covered them….
The passage goes on to describe
how God brings breath to these creatures and makes them live. Now the story
doesn’t tell us exactly what kind of creatures were brought to life.
I have always imagined they were
elephants. I think because I had a book as a young child that pictured Ezekiel
bringing to life a herd of creatures that looked like elephants.
But as in all good stories I
want to encourage you to use your imagination to come up with your own favorite
animal.
Our Gospel lesson is no less
dramatic as Jesus travels to Bethany to see Mary and Martha and to bring
Lazarus back to life.
Scripture tells us that Jesus
even delays his trip two days according to John’s gospel to give the body more
time in the tomb and to heighten the dramatic effect of the miracle. Jesus
clearly seems to be setting the stage for something spectacular.
Arriving in Bethany, he asks the
men to remove the stone from the tomb. At first they refuse. “Lord, already
there will be a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus responds,
“Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?”
They take away the stone and
Jesus says in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out! On cue Lazarus appears at the
mouth of the cave alive with his hands and feet bound up with strips of cloth.
Truly it is difficult to think
of two other Scriptural passages that could be read on a Sunday morning that
evoke feelings of terror, awe, and surprise within us.
Did these events truly happen?
Was Ezekiel dreaming? Was Lazarus in
some kind of coma? How do we explain these stories in some kind of rational
way?
Of course today it is
increasingly popular in some Christian circles to see these stories as merely
symbolic of God’s power in our lives and not as literal accounts.
Elephants aren’t put back
together from a pile of bones, and dead men don’t walk out of tombs.
I suppose this kind of viewpoint
helps some people reconcile their modern scientific beliefs with their
religious faith.
But I have difficulty believing
that Jesus’ followers and his disciples were really willing to die because they
felt the resurrection was just a nice story that somehow symbolized God’s
action in the world.
C.S. Lewis picked up this point
in a short essay entitled Miracles. He wrote, “We must not say they
believed in miracles because they did not know the laws of nature. This is
nonsense. When St. Joseph discovered that his bride was pregnant, he was “minded
to put her away”. He knew enough biology for that…When he accepted the
Christian explanation, he regarded it as a miracle precisely because he knew
enough of the Laws of Nature to know there was a suspension of them…If a man
has no conception of a regular order in Nature, then of course he could not
notice departures from that order….Nothing is wonderful except the abnormal and
nothing is abnormal until we have grasped the norm. repeat
Lewis reminds us that it is far
too easy to ascribe a level of ignorance to our forefathers and mothers as a
way of explaining away certain miraculous passages in the Bible.
Yet just because they had never
seen a space shuttle, this does not mean they did not know that something
amazing had occurred in their lives. That God did have the power to change
their lives in what appeared to be a miraculous way.
Think of Ezekiel living in
exile, hundreds of miles from Jerusalem. It would have been easy to throw in
the towel. Admit that God was not God. After all the Babylonians had destroyed
his hometown.
Yet to read his story in the
Bible is to gain a level of appreciation for someone who had lost it all and
yet continued to see that God had a plan and a role for the nation of Israel.
As God’s prophet and priest, Ezekiel
preaches to his people that God one day will return his people to the Promised
Land. God will once again bring the dry bones of their shattered dreams to
life.
In much the same way, Jesus
comes to his friends, Mary and Martha, at their lowest spiritual point. They
have lost someone they loved and I am sure we can all relate to where Mary and
Martha have found themselves.
For Jesus and the Gospel writer
this is a pivotal moment in his public ministry. Is Jesus capable of bringing
hope to a situation that is as hopeless as the dry bones of Ezekiel’s vision?
True he turned water to wine,
and healed a man born blind last week but is our Savior capable of a true
resurrection for his closest friend.
Our gospel writer gives an
emphatic yes to this question as Lazarus walks out of his tomb.
And I would argue that for this
story to have meaning for us, we must ask ourselves the question, “Do we really
believe in resurrection?”.
Have you ever experienced the
kind of death that is described in these two stories? Have you been in exile or
felt that your dreams had been shattered?
I believe that God is able to
call those bones to life and to bring us from the dark tomb of sin back into
the light of day.
This is the journey that God
asks us all to make in this upcoming Holy Week? We are asked to bring our lives to this altar and to have God
remake and reshape them in his own image.
This is what resurrection really
means for us as a church. This is the good news we are called to share as we
lead others to know and love the resurrected Lord.
Believe me, no mere symbol will suffice.
We must be ready this Holy Week to experience once again the living breathing
reality of God’s new life in each of our lives.
God is ready to breathe into our
bodies and call us forth…are we ready….