Ezekiel 37:1-14
God’s Spirit took hold of me, and set me down in a wide open plain
covered with bones. There were bones everywhere, all dry and bleached by the
desert sun.
He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” I
replied, “God, only you know.”God said, “Prophesy to the bones: ‘Dry bones, listen to my words!’”
God said to the bones, “Watch this: I’m bringing life to you, you will come to life. I’ll put sinews and meat on your bones, cover everything with skin, and breathe life into you. You will come alive, you will know I am God!”
I prophesied as God commanded. As I spoke to the bones, there was a soft rustling and then a rattling sound! The bones came together, bone to bone; then sinews appeared, then muscles, then skin covering all; but the bodies did not breathe.
God said, “Prophesy to the breath, son of man. Say this: ‘God says, “Come, you winds, from the four directions. Breathe life on these bodies. ”
So I prophesied. The wind and breath entered them, they came alive! They stood – a huge army of living beings.
God said to me, “Son of man, these bones are Israel. Listen to what they’re saying: ‘Nothing remains of our hope, nothing remains of us.’ So now, prophesy. Say to them, ‘God says: I will bring you out alive from your burial tombs, and take you to the land of Israel. When open the tombs and restore you as my people, you’ll know I am God. I will breathe life into you again, you will live. I will do what I have said.’”
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John 11:1-48 The Message
A man was sick,
Lazarus of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. This was the same
Mary who massaged the Lord’s feet with aromatic oils and then wiped them with
her hair. It was her brother Lazarus who was sick. So the sisters sent word
to Jesus, “Master, the one you love so very much is sick.”
When Jesus got the
message, he said, “This sickness is not fatal. It will become an occasion to
show God’s glory by glorifying God’s Son.”
Jesus loved Martha
and her sister and Lazarus, but oddly, when he heard that Lazarus was sick,
he stayed on where he was for two more days. After the two days, he said to
his disciples, “Let’s go back to Judea.”
They said, “Rabbi,
you can’t do that. The Jews are out to kill you, and you’re going back?” Jesus
replied, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Anyone who walks in
daylight doesn’t stumble because there’s plenty of light from the sun.
Walking at night, he might very well stumble because he can’t see where he’s
going.”
He said these
things, and then announced, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep. I’m going
to wake him up.” The disciples said, “Master, if he’s gone to
sleep, he’ll get a good rest and wake up feeling fine.” Jesus was talking about
death, while his disciples thought he was talking about taking a nap.
Then Jesus became
explicit: “Lazarus died. And I am glad for your sakes that I wasn’t there.
You’re about to be given new grounds for believing. Now let’s go to him.” That’s
when Thomas, the one called the Twin, said to his companions, “Come along. We
might as well die with him.”
When Jesus finally
got there, he found Lazarus already four days dead. Bethany was near
Jerusalem, only a couple of miles away, and many of the Jews were visiting
Martha and Mary, sympathizing with them over their brother. Martha heard
Jesus was coming and went out to meet him. Mary remained in the house.
Martha said,
“Master, if you’d been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Even now, I know
that whatever you ask God he will give you.”
Jesus said, “Your
brother will be raised up.” Martha replied, “I know that he will be raised up
in the resurrection at the end of time.”
“You don’t have to
wait for the End. I am, right now, Resurrection and Life. The one who
believes in me, even though he or she dies, will live. And everyone who lives
believing in me does not ultimately die at all. Do you believe this?”
“Yes, Master. All
along I have believed that you are the Messiah, the Son of God who comes into
the world.”After saying this, she went to her sister Mary and whispered in
her ear, “The Teacher is here and is asking for you.” The
moment she heard that, she jumped up and ran out to him. Jesus had not yet
entered the town but was still at the place where Martha had met him. When
her sympathizing Jewish friends saw Mary run off, they followed her, thinking
she was on her way to the tomb to weep there. Mary came to where Jesus was
waiting and fell at his feet, saying, “Master, if only you had been here, my
brother would not have died.”
When Jesus saw her
sobbing and the Jews with her sobbing, a deep anger welled up within him. He
said, “Where did you put him?” “Master, come and see,” they
said. Now Jesus wept.
The Jews said,
“Look how deeply he loved him.” Others among them said,
“Well, if he loved him so much, why didn’t he do something to keep him from
dying? After all, he opened the eyes of a blind man.”
Then Jesus, the
anger again welling up within him, arrived at the tomb. It was a simple cave
in the hillside with a slab of stone laid against it. Jesus said, “Remove the
stone.” The sister of the dead man, Martha, said, “Master, by this time
there’s a stench. He’s been dead four days!”
Jesus looked her in the eye. “Didn’t I tell you that
if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” Then, to the others, “Go
ahead, take away the stone.” They removed the stone. Jesus raised his eyes to
heaven and prayed, “Father, I’m grateful that you have listened to me. I know
you always do listen, but on account of this crowd standing here I’ve spoken
so that they might believe that you sent me.” Then he shouted, “Lazarus, come
out!” And he came out, a cadaver, wrapped from head to toe, and with a
kerchief over his face. Jesus told them, “Unwrap him and let him loose.”
A couple of weeks
ago, when we were talking about kinds of darkness, Ed noted that darkness in
a cave is pretty well absolute. In English we have a phrase “dark as a tomb”.
There are caves, and then there are caves. Norio and I walked through river
caves in Puerto Rico, which were entered through a huge cave mouth where
there was lots of light. But as we walked further in, and around corners, the
light is gone. For safety reasons there are some lights along the path – a
few – but the path sometimes is quite obscure, and if those lights went out,
everyone would be in total absolute darkness – and there are places where it
would be easy to walk off the edge and fall. It would be literally the
darkness of a tomb.
Barbara Brown
Taylor talks about that cave experience – sitting underground in a cave with
literally no light at all. No sense of direction, no sense of what ‘here’ is.
She asks “what makes darkness
frightening to some people and not to others? What makes it frightening
sometimes, and not other times? Does having a light make a real difference,
or is it a security blanket? One thing I am sure of is that being in a cave
with people who know what they are doing is the only way to go. Being in this
cave alone is not something I want to think about.”
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Ezekiel finds himself
in the valley of the dry bones, and God says that the bones represent the
people of Israel - dead to everything until the breath of God enters them. Without
the breath of God they are dead. - as a people, the Israelites are dead until
the breath of God inspires them - until they breathe in the breath of God.
I looked at
several translations, which all used the word “graves”. Except in the time of
Ezekiel, a grave was really a cave, with a stone rolled across the opening, to
prevent wild animals from getting in. It wasn’t a six-foot deep hole in the
ground, it was a hole in solid rock. So I decided to try paraphrasing a little
– to see what happened. Here’s the very last paragraph of that whole text – and
I think the change is significant.
Is this a literal story of the raising of thousands out in the middle of a plain? Or is it a story about the darkness and tombs of people’s own making? God says here is a people in such deep darkness it has become a tomb. They are a dead people, in a tomb of their own making, they have given up hope. God says “I will bring you out from your tombs, I will breathe life into you.
In the Gospel reading, Jesus first
speaks of Lazarus sleeping, and then dead, and he uses two completely different
words, first he says Lazarus is sleeping, and then he says Lazarus is really dead.
But what does it actually mean? Is Jesus is saying that Lazarus appears dead,
but is really just sleeping; or is Jesus is saying Lazarus is dead to
everything, until the Spirit comes and brings new life. Perhaps Lazarus is dead
and bound, in a tomb of his own making???? Had Lazarus just given up hope and refused
to engage in life again?
Then there’s the parallel between the story of the breath of God
raising Lazarus to new life through Jesus, and Jesus being raised by the breath
of God into new life.
Reading again from Barbara Brown Taylor, “Jesus was born in a cave
and rose from the dead in a cave. Like most Westerners, I always thought of the
stable in Bethlehem as a wooden lean-to filled with straw, at least until I
went to the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank. There, I learned that caves made the best
stables in Jesus’ day – no wind whistling through the boards, no predators
sneaking up on you from behind. The traditional place of Jesus’ birth is not in the Church of the Nativity, but under it, in a small cave under the
altar.
The cave in which he rose from the dead is long gone, covered over by
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Today visitors stand in line to
enter a mausoleum that looks nothing like a hole in the ground. This may be
just as well, since no one knows what happened there. By all accounts a stone
blocked the entrance to the cave so that there were no witnesses to the
resurrection. Everyone who saw the risen Jesus saw him after. Whatever happened in that cave happened in the dark.”
Both of the Scriptures
today talk about being dead until the Spirit gives life; in Christian
eschatology - that is, a theology of the end times - it is usually meant to
mean the end of the of the physical world, and a complete change of everything.
Jesus, in traditional theology, was seen as an event rather than a person - he
stood at a kind of crux in the continuum
- pointing back towards God in creation, and forwards to the future
realm of God when the hope and promises are fulfilled and the realm truly comes
into being.
One of my
favourite theologians, is a German named Jurgen Moltmann, who has written
extensively about the church, and the power of the spirit. In 1993, he said
this:
“The renewal of the church finally depends
on what happens at the grass-roots level. And renewal at this level awaits, it
seems to me, on the conscious reclaiming of the gifts of the Spirit on the part
of the laity. These gifts, which in the New Testament are always identified as
signs of the coming Kingdom of God, are given to the whole people of God for
ministry, for diakonia.”
David Jacobson,
in the magazine Lectionary Homiletics, says “The Rushing Wind of the Holy
One”.is not so much about quiet centring and endlessly wandering labyrinths, or
about internal renewal of faith, as it as a propelling out of our closed spaces
- or is it like a flame that sets our tongues and our hearts and lives on fire
with the good news of the Gospel for the world. The Spirit is not for our
spiritual renewal, but for the sake of our neighbours who will not know the
good news unless we get out of our safe church buildings, unless we stop trying
to keep them ‘safe’ for ourselves.”
God asks
Ezekiel - ‘can these bones live?’ - can the people of Israel live again, can
they hope again? Bringing this into today, can the Church live, can the bones
of the church be infused with the breath of the Spirit, and filled with hope
for the future? Not a future which looks exactly like we do now, but a
different future. Lazarus was very likely completely changed by his experience
of going into the darkness of a tomb, only to be called out again into the same
life as before. New life doesn’t mean filling positions on committees, or
having all kinds of programs to attract people to the church or packing the
pews on Sunday morning. To me it means being propelled to open our space - to roll back the stone blocking off the
cave, and let the light and breath of the Spirit enliven us, and take us
wherever it will.
Think about the
word ‘inspiration’ – it’s in the bulletin. Inspiration comes from ‘inspire’,
which in fact means to “breath in”. To be inspired by the Spirit, is to breathe
in the Spirit. We are here, gathered together on one place - celebrating our
faith. What are the tombs which close us in? Will we allow the Spirit to
breathe into us, to unbind us and set us free?
In the book Dying We Live edited by
Helmut Gollwitzer, Czech/Austrian
Resistance leader Hanns Georg von Heintschel-Heinegg died under the axe of the
guillotine on December 6, 1944. Before he died, he had founded an order called
the “Knights of the Holy Spirit”. Here is what he wrote in his farewell letter:
“This is what I want to say: everything that
is inessential in us must fall away like ashes in a
furnace, in
order that the pure gold of our being, thus refined, may shine in the light of
grace. The Lord holds you in his hand; know then, dear friend, that you belong
to the Lord no matter whether you live or die, and who amongst us will not die,
only to live more fully afterwards?”
Can these bones
live? Can the assembled flesh and sinew that is us continue to breathe in the
Spirit, and be renewed? What are our tombs? What is it that binds each of us,
individually and collectively? How do we respond when Jesus stands at our tomb
and calls us to come out? Is it a shock to take the cloth away from our eyes,
and remove the strips of cloth which hold us?
Jesus says to the gathered people “Unbind him, and set him free!” May it
be so.
Sources:
1.
Barbara Brown Taylor . Learning to
Walk in the Dark, Harper Collins Publishers. 195 Broadway, New York NY 10007. 2014.
2.
Helmut Gollwitzer, Ed. Dying We Live: The Final Messages and Records
of the German Resistance, Wipf & Stock Reprint Edition 2009.
3.
Jurgen Moltmann. The Church in the
Power of the Spirit, Augsburg Fortress, 2008 edition.
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