Beyond Our Power

Beyond Our Power
Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45

Today’s readings are among the most vivid and  dramatic of all Scripture. Both remind us that God gives life, that God restores life, that life is God’s ultimate objective, not death. Death will not have the last word, even when every last vestige of life seems to have been taken away. Even when the tomb is sealed.

Both passages happen on multiple levels. In the raising of Lazarus, we glimpse the convergence of both the human Jesus and the divine Jesus. We also have a foretaste of what awaits believers in a very short time. It is actually the new life of Lazarus which seals the death warrant for Jesus.

In the reading from Ezekiel, as have catastrophic image of Israel following the destruction of Israel by the army of Babylon. Do the dry bones represent the nation as a political entity or the people as a people set apart for God’s affection and service? Or are the dry bones the desiccated remains of the relationship which once existed between God and the people called by God’s name?

Ezekiel’s visit to the valley of bones was not a brief tourist stop on a busy itinerary. He didn’t skirt the edge of the valley. He was plopped down in the middle of it and was led around through them in an apparently intentional and thorough fashion. That is how he realized the immensity of the setting. There were great many bones and they were very dry. These were not recent bones. They were parched and dried by the sun and heat. Death is real; there can be no illusion otherwise.

If the raising of Lazarus is a premonition of what Jesus will be doing very soon, if it is a foretaste of what God’s purpose holds for believers in some future time and space dimension, then Ezekiel is past and present focused. There are allusions to the Exodus. Ezekiel is led out and set down, just as Israel was led out of Egypt and set down, ultimately in the promised land. Unlike the promised land being a destination, the valley however is a passage, much as the wilderness was a passage. The valley of bones is both opportunity and challenge. “Can these bones live again?”

Lent is the same kind of challenge and opportunity. How quickly we forget our Lord. How quickly we wander from God’s paths. How quickly we begin to breathe spirits other than the Spirit of the Lord. And it’s only been a year since we went through this discipline. On Ash Wednesday we started afresh, marked with ashes, reminding us that we come from the earth, that we share much in common with all of creation for we share the atoms and molecules of the elements God brought into being with a massive “Let it be!” and then sorted out and arranged and rearranged into all of the creation we know which currently exists, used to exist, and may yet come to exist. Lent begins, in the beginning.

But then we know what happened after that. The constraints of the garden were not enough to keep headstrong humanity from trying to do its own thing. After that came death, Babel, the Flood, and then the promise of people set aside for God-service. All that was accompanied by interpersonal highs and lows in that ever growing family until envy and greed set the stage for God to intervene in a new way through emigration, subjugation, and finally exodus. But the post-exodus experience was more like house-arrest than freedom. And parole was broken so much that a whole generation of people had to pass away before the next steps could be taken.

The land of milk and honey was both promising and pathetic. The moving in and settling down was poorly done. There were high points of leadership mixed with considerable low points. Then finally the kingdoms imploded and the powers of the world overran them, first the Northern Kingdom, Israel, and lastly Judah.
Dead, sere, strewn. Can these bones live? Can we live? Can we rise from the dry and barren times in our lives? That is the Lenten question? What can we learn from the periods in our lives which are filled with hopelessness, depression, fear, and heightened anxiety? When we feel as disconnected and brittle as the bones of Ezekiel’s valley?
Rather than trying to hurry past the dryness and get to the new life, perhaps we need to really wander around in it with our eyes wide open, as Ezekiel did. What can our spiritual dry bones teach us? What can we learn about ourselves and our relationship with the world through this spiritual aridness?
Ponder these words by Dempsy R. Calhoun:

Bone lay scattered and artifactual
Wind-rowed like dead branches
Whose tree bodies repeat the desiccation
All hope bleached and lost
Living moisture evaporated

Calcified memories of what was
Or seeds of what could be
Wandering shards and vessels
That once thrummed with pure energy
Where honor and dishonor wrestled

Stripped of living water to walk the hills
Needing only gravity to line the valley

It was never about the bones anyway
Rather a glimpse of pure power
A reminder of who’s in charge of restoration
Real hope lies in the Source.(1)

A key word in the Ezekiel vision is breath – ruach in Hebrew. “I will put breath in you, and you will live again.” The vision doesn’t stop there. Life might have been good enough for the bones, but it isn’t good enough for God. The vision goes another step and the breath grafts life to the knowledge of God. We aren’t talking 98.6 degrees body temperature, 72 heart beats a minute, 122/68 blood pressure and cholesterol readings to put all of us to shame. No. We are talking about life lived in the fullness of God.

What can we learn from our spiritual dry bones? Would a spiritual anthropologist be able to tell that we lived a spiritual diet deficient in prayer, sabbath, meditation? Would our dry bones give any evidence of the vitaminic nurture of the gifts of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Can these bones live? God is willing to breathe into us and fill us once more with the transformation that beckons, orders us, to come out of the tombs of death. Will this Lent be a time of bringing bones back to life?

Just as the baptismal waters poured over us, just as the Spirit of Christ poured over us, so the Spirit of true life can pour over us once more and more so than ever before. It has happened. The bones of a crucified man did live. We can live in him, with him, through him, and for him. Life is beyond our power, but not beyond the power of God. Can these bones live? The power beyond us says, “Yes, most certainly.” Will you say “Yes,” too?

(1) Unpublished. Cited by Katherine E. Amos, “Ezekiel 37:1-14 – Pastoral Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), Year A, Volume 2, p. 124.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com 

Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.