SEATTLE MENNONITE CHURCH
Fifth Sunday in Lent, March 17, 2002
Sermon: Weldon D. Nisly
TITLE: “Can these bones live?”
THEME: “Here is an astonishing thing!” “…to new life”
TEXTS: Psalm 130 “We wait for God…Out of the depths I cry to you…”
Ezekiel 37:1-14 The valley of dry bones breathed to life
Romans 8: 6-11 “…the body is dead…, the spirit is alive…”
John 11:1-45 Raising Lazarus”
Bring us ever closer to you, God of all life and breath. Lead us courageously to the cross yet help us choose life. Breath life into our bones. Raise us from the dead to new life in Jesus Christ. Amen.
We are all living toward our death. Death is the great equalizer, the end of life as we know it. Yet we avoid, deny, and fear death. There is no hope for us that does not have something to do with our dying.
Ernest Becker, in Denial of Death, said that human life is lived in a desperate attempt to deny death.
As our Lenten journey with Jesus deepens, we face death. The scriptures, our Lenten journey, and our worship force us to stare death in the face today. And they offer us signs of life.
God, through the Deuteronimist has said, “I set before you life and death, therefore choose life so that you and your children may live” Deut. 30:19.
The biblical stories this Sunday, jar us with images of death.
We, with the disciples, do not escape these views of death. Yet death is not the only view opened to us today. With death comes hints of life. True life. New life. Death and resurrection are brought into view even as we near the climax of Lent and enter Holy Week, only a week away.
SMC sermon – WDNisly – 3/17/02 – p. 2
Ezekiel is a poet and musician as well as a prophet. Out of Ezekiel’s various visions come poetry and song and drama. “Ezekiel saw a wheel” and “The leg bone connected to the hip bone” are among them.
This vision of Ezekiel comes in exile, probably about 572 BCE. Judah is exiled in Babylon. There is despair in the land of exile. Exiles were feeling hopeless. They were cut off from their homeland. They were like dry bones.
Read Ezekiel 37:1-2.
This valley of dead dry bones suggest an old battlefield. It is not just a vision for and about one person. It is a vision for and about a people.
The Spirit asks Ezekiel asks the hard question, “Can these bones live?” In the valley of
the shadow of death, “Can these bones live?”
The obvious answer from human experience is that all life has been killed and dried out of these bones that used to be very alive.
Read Ezekiel 37: 3-4….
The Spirit of God answers the hard question “Can these bones
live?” by identifying parts of the human body that dry bones must have to live
again: breath, sinews, flesh, skin, breath.
Read Ezekiel 37: 5-6.
Note where the list of what dry bones need to live begins and ends: breath and breath. There is an emphasis on breath here. But not just any breath. This is the breath of God.
The Hebrew word for breath is a wonderfully rich breathy word: ruah. Say that word a few times with me. Let it fill your lungs and your throat and your mouth and even your body: ruah! Feel God’s breath in you. We’ll come back to that in a moment.
What Ezekiel sees in this vision of a valley of dry bones into whom God breathes life, is the whole house of Israel.
SMC sermon – WDNisly – 3/17/02 – p. 3
Israel as a body has lost faith. Israel has been exiled. Israel has lost vision. Israel has become dry bones. This is death without facing death.
Ezekiel the prophet sees again that new life for dead vision
of a people comes from God. It is ruah – God-breathed life
and vision.
There is hope because of God. It is in God’s hands – or rather God’s breath – but Ezekiel must see and respond and give voice to the vision God sets before them.
One of my former Old Testament teachers, Millard Lind, has
written the Believer’s Church Commentary on Ezekiel. Millard Lind tells us that Ezekiel sees this
as a resurrection story. But “this
resurrection is no mere resuscitation and continuation of old relationships in
the land; instead, it is an elevation to a new plateau of life. This elevation to a new plateau is
characteristic also of the resurrection of Jesus” (299).
Ezekiel’s prophetic vision ends with a recognition formula. It is a very familiar refrain in Ezekiel’s prophetic poetry. It is a refrain that is music to our ears. It is the refrain from verse 14: “You shall know that I the Lord have spoke and will act.”
One version or another of that refrain is sung some 60 times by Ezekiel. God breathes life into a people. We are God-breathed people.
Read Ezekiel 37: 11-14
The story in the Gospel of John today confronts us with a similar question. Lazarus is dying. His sisters, Mary and Martha plead with Jesus to come to their brother Lazarus’ bedside. Jesus waits two days longer and then says to his disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” The disciples respond in horror, in Judea people are “trying to stone you and are you going to Judea again?”
Lazarus died and his bodied was quickly placed in a grave. His too are bones now dead.
How “can these bones live?”
Dry bones and death. We stare death in the face today.
In the face of death Jesus speaks a word of life. The people have to respond to Jesus word. Jesus says: “Roll away the stone.” Jesus called for Lazarus to “come out” of his tomb. Then he tells the people to “Unbind him, and let him go.” It is a communal life.
SMC sermon – WDNisly – 3/17/02 – p. 4
Now let us change the historical time frame.
Thirty-four years ago yesterday, March 16, 1968, dawned as a “Good morning” in Vietnam – to borrow from words made famous by Robbin Williams in the movie by that name.
How many of you were NOT alive on March 16, 1968?
How many remember what happened in Vietnam on that 34 years ago yesterday?
On that morning 34 years ago, the denial of death and the horror of death was stared in the face. It was the epitome and the essence of war and Vietnam.
In the words of a very young 18 year old helicopter gunner, Lawrence Colburn, who grew up on Whidbey Island and Mt. Vernon:
We went out at 7:30 in the morning. Village called My Lai 4….It was just another mission. Started out like all of them. I remember flying between two tree-lines. You could smell the jungle, the fog rising up. It was a beautiful morning.
Lawrence Colburn to Paula
Bock, Pacific Northwest Seattle Times Magazine,
March 10, 2002, p. 17.
This “Good Morning Vietnam” soon embodied all that was not “good” in the hell that is war. On that fateful morning,
more than 500 hundred unarmed women, children, and old men were….killed by American soldiers on a rampage in the Vietnamese hamlet known as My Lai. The massacre was stopped when a 24year-old American helicopter pilot landed in the line of fire between the U. S. troops and Vietnamese civilians. While his 20-year-old crew chief and 18-year-old gunner covered his back, the pilot confronted one of the leaders of the massacre, then evacuated 10 villagers from a bunker. The crew also rescued a child clinging to his dead mother in a ditch (p. 14-15).
Thirty-three years later, just a year ago, Lawrence Colburn
met Do Hoa, who was that 8-year-old boy on that
fateful day. Colburn confesses, in a
story on this evil war and tragic day, in last Sunday’s Seattle Times
Pacific Northwest Magazine:
What happened to me and a lot of people: you start feeling a need to take revenge. It can be motivating in a perverted sort of way. You become filled with rage. That’s what motivated those people in My Lai.
Lawrence Colburn was something of an Ezekiel whose eyes were opened to see this death as bones strewn across the landscape.
Rarely are we confronted as starkly with the bones of death as Ezekiel and Colburn were. Nevertheless, we are brought face-to-face with death and even with our complicity in it.
Lent takes us there. More specifically, Jesus takes us there.
SMC sermon – WDNisly – 3/17/02 – p. 5
This gospel foreshadows Jesus’ death on the cross. It points to Jesus’ commitment to stare death in the face, even death on a cross, without choosing death or creating death.
In the face of such death, comes the question, “Will these bones live?” What gives life? What brings life? How do we choose life over death yet faithfully face our own death?
Will you continue the journey with Jesus to the cross in the coming weeks? Will you receive God’s breath of life this morning?
Read Ezekiel 37: 9-10…
I invite to sit in silence and receive this breath of life…..
Breath deeply in and out in a slow rhythm….
Let God’s breath become your breath….Let God’s breath become our breath of life.
We are God breathed people….each of us….and all of us as a body are God breathed.
Listen to our breath…..feel our breath….Let God breath within us….
SILENCE….
God of all life, open our lungs to your
breath of life.
Breathe the life of your Holy Spirit into our
bones and give us new life and new vision.
God, you call us in our loneliness.
[You call us in our death.]
You call us in our hunger.
You call us in our emptiness.
You call us back to you and your great
[life-giving breath].
God of all life, this day we give ourselves,
our whole being, to you:
through the living Jesus Christ who is
already breathing and praying within us we pray. Amen. Adapted
from David Adam, FORWARD TO FREEDOM & The Upper Room, 3/16/02.
As we continue in worship the image shifts a bit from bones and breathe to bread. Bread is another clear image for Jesus in John’s Gospel.
In the next song, the image of bread brings life. Jesus said, in John’s Gospel, “I am the bread of life.” The Folk Group will lead us in this song. Let us sing this song knowing that God is the breathe of life and Jesus Christ is the bread of life.
The Gospel and the prophet pose the answer. Life comes from breath. Death is to shun breath.
In the biblical prophet and gospel we are given the word of life for this fifth Sunday in Lent. Death stares us in the face. We make choices for life or death every day.
The prophet’s answer is to be led by the Spirit into that valley of dry bones to see. Ezekiel listens to God and sees death which then lets him see life.
Thus says
the Lord God to these bones; I will cause breath to enter you and you
shall live (37:5).
The word of God comes from Jesus:
“Lazarus, come out!”
“Unbind him and let him go”
These are Creation stories from the Hebrew scriptures and the Christian scriptures. God formed a human in God’s own image and breathed the breath of life into human life.
A remarkable teacher and preacher of the Gospel today, Fred
Craddock, has said, “In light of the Gospel, the one unforgivable sin is to be
dead.” (Willimon, Pulpit Resource, p. 48)
Craddock is not saying “deny death.” He is not saying, “Don’t face death.” He challenges us to receive the breath of God in the face of death.
We are approaching Holy Week. Let there be no mistake, we are approaching the cross. But we are also with Jesus entering Jerusalem in the days to come. It is a Jerusalem as sacred today as many long yesterday’s ago. It is a Jerusalem as filled with death today as many long yesterday’s ago. Here we face death and choose life. The only way we face death and choose life is by letting God’s breath of life breath within us.
I invite you to turn again to Psalm 130, as it appears in our Call to Worship. Let this Psalm again be our voice. Let it be a personal and a communal voice. This time, will these 2 sections (my right) read the light print and these 2 sections (my left) respond with the bold print. Take a moment first in silence to read through it. Let us read prayerfully.
We wait for you, O God. In the quiet of this morning, in the hidden places of
Our hearts, we wait for your renewing Word.
Out of the depths I cry
to you, O God. Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be
attentive to the voice of my supplications!
If you, O God, should mark iniquities, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered.
I wait for God, my soul
waits, and in God’s word I hope; my soul waits for God more than those who
watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.
O Israel, put your hope in God! For with God there is steadfast love, and with
God is great power to redeem. It is God who will redeem Israel from all its
iniquities.
I tell this story for two reasons. My Lai should be a hard lesson in personal, corporate and national culpability in leaving bones strewn across the valley of the shadow of death. It should e a lesson of the horror of choosing death over life. Choices large and small led to this view of death upon death. It should also be a lesson of 3 young people choosing life over death. Like the people of Judah, in our day we don’t learn those lessons well.
That is not meant to confuse the stories of Ezekiel led by the spirit into the valley of dry bones as a view of Judah’s faithlessness turning to death and Colburn’s seeing death at My Lai.
Arc or trajectory back and forward standing in present….
Ezekiel 36: 22-28 behind Ezekiel 37…..Ora et labora morning prayer Friday….
Senses: touch, taste, hear, smell, see….
Word from each text….
Write as “poetry”
As our Lenten journey with Jesus progresses, we slowly wind our way to the climax…
From source to summit, this way is not a way of denial, ignoring, circumvention…
It is inevitably the Way of the Cross, the Wisdom of the Cross…preparing us for next Sunday and Holy Week…
CLOSE
Psalm 130…wait for God, even from the depths and dark places…
Ezekiel as poet and musician, as well as prophet.
John as poet and prophet as well as seer.
********************************************************************
The Upper Room's Lenten Reflections 2002
Looking on the Heart: Into the Spiritual
Center
http://www.upperroom.org/seasonal/lent2002/
Tuesday, March 12, 2002
The
LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the
outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.
--
1 Samuel 16:7 (NRSV)
==========================
APPRENTICESHIP TO A MASTER
Discipleship is apprenticeship to a master,
so that one can learn the
master's way of doing things . . . .
We don't get there by pious aspirations,
slavish copying of rules,
well-polished public selves, or carefully
guarded inner lives. We get
there by the messier, slower path of learning
step by step and mistake
by mistake how to love, cooperate, forgive,
trust, work through harsh
and dark emotions. Part of the process of salvation, real soul
healing and transformation, is in wrestling
prayerfully with the rough
places in our souls that resist Jesus' saving
invitations . . . .
Over time "fruit" is born -- a
metaphor surely indicating the slowness
of the process.
--
Robert C. Morris
WEAVINGS(R) JOURNAL
SEEING ONE'S OWN HEART
Eternal God,
Give us discerning hearts
to recognize
the fear in our anger,
the muffled hope in our cynicism,
and the wounds we carry as weapons.
Help us see ourselves as you see us,
and love ourselves and others
with your gracious love.
Amen.
--
Melissa Tidwell, editor
ALIVE NOW(R) MAGAZINE