God’s Vision
The Rev. Canon Frank Logue gave this sermon for a liturgy
from his home livestreamed on March 29, 2020.
Ezekiel 37:1-14 and John 11:1-45
The hand of the Lord came upon the Prophet Ezekiel. And by the spirit he finds himself in a valley filled with dry bones. It is as if he is set down by God at the site of a great and terrible battle, years after the fighting ended. Everywhere he looks are the long lifeless corpses of the fallen. God asks, “Mortal, can these bones live?” The prophet says, “O Lord God, you know.”
It is as if he says, I know that with you all things are possible, but this looks bleak. It is a gruesome scene ready made for movie special effects as God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones. Ezekiel does as God commands and he hears suddenly, a noise, a rattling, as bones come together bone to its bone, each finding its accustomed mate as sinews join them together and flesh comes upon them. But there is no breath in them. Then God urges and Ezekiel prophesies again saying, “Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” And he prophesied as God commanded, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.
And as Ezekiel looks over a vast multitude of living breathing humans who had been but dried bones minutes earlier, God tells him the meaning of the vision: “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.”
We need to recall the context for God’s vision offered to Ezekiel. The prophet writes around 622 years before Jesus. Decades earlier the Assyrians captured the northern kingdom of Israel with its ten of the twelve clans of Israel. As Ezekiel takes up the mantel of prophet five years after the Babylonians took Judah’s king, Jehoiachin, into exile. This is the beginning of perhaps the greatest saga of the Hebrew Bible not to make it into the greatest hits collection. Children’s story Bibles don’t usually set the stage for us. But all of Jewish and Christian history and tradition are marked by this cataclysmic event. Ezekiel and the Prophet Jeremiah will spend years crying out for Israel to turn back to God and live, but the rulers will put their trust in a political alliance with Egypt and remain faithless.
Then 587 years before Christ, Jerusalem falls in a siege. The Babylonians destroy the Temple, leaving only a heap of ruins. Most of the people are taken in exile to Babylon. A remnant of the poor is left in the land, but the nation of Israel is vanquished.
Ezekiel’s dry bones coming to life is God’s vision for a people who have lost hope. He shows this impossible scene of long desiccated bodies coming back to life as a sign that God can and will bring his people back to the land of Israel. God says, “O my people. 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.”
This prophecy of the dry bones came to be so significant in Judaism not because the prophet offered a vision of what God might do, but because the miracle happened. Decades more passed and the Persian king Cyrus the Great ruled over what had been Babylon. And 539 before Jesus, the foreign ruler sent the exiles back. Ezra builds the second temple in Jerusalem. The very Temple where Jesus teaches and turns over the tables of the money changers is itself a vast sign that nothing is impossible with God.
Israel had been conquered. When the Babylonians destroyed a country, there was no coming back. But the dry bones did live, the people were born anew and lived on their own soil once more. I can’t overstate the importance of Israel’s defeat and later return. The historical fact that Jerusalem fell and the people in exile came back to rebuild the Temple was a central part of the identity and hopes of Israel in Jesus’ lifetime.
Our readings place this powerful vision alongside Jesus raising his friend Lazarus from the dead. By the time Jesus arrives in Bethany, Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. There is no coming back from the grave. Everyone knows that. And yet, like the dry bones in Ezekiel’s vision, we know Lazarus too did rise.
Jesus cries, “Lazarus, come out!” and the dead man came out from his tomb, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
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“When the great crowd of the Jews learned that he was there, they came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus.” (John 12:9-11)
The plot to kill Jesus gets serious with the miracle of bringing Lazarus back to life.
Both of these readings offer us God’s vision, the way the Holy Trinity views the world. The way God looks at the world, resurrection is always possible. The wind, breath, spirit of God can always flow through our hearts, offering us hope and healing and new life. Our current situation is not so impossible as that faced captive Israel in Babylon or Lazarus entombed for four days.
Sheltering in place, unable to gather in person to worship in our churches is not easy. I don’t know about you, but March has been the longest decades I have lived through. Yet, though you and I might not have planned for how we would respond to a pandemic, our faith in Jesus has long prepared us well. We are, after all, a people who have praised God even at the grave at every funeral I have attended. We are an Easter people, even in Lent. But we have never been an Easter people in anything but a Good Friday world. We have always been in a world where hope can be hard to hang on to if what you can see is all there is.
Sheltering in place reveals that what is seen is temporary while what is unseen is eternal. I have watched as lay people in our congregations have supported one another by phone and Facebook alike. I have seen the faithful responses of our deacons, priest, and bishop as we have found ways to be the Body of Christ even while unable to gather in large groups. I have been overjoyed to see the creative ways we have still offered food to the hungry and hope to the hopeless.
When I was doing the groundwork that would lead to founding King of Peace Episcopal Church, I wanted an image that would illustrate what sort of peace we are talking about when we declare Jesus to be the King of Peace. The swirls in the cross represent the very real chaos in the world, even in our own lives. If you were as small as a period at the end of a sentence on typed page and you were placed in the center of that cross at right, you would swear that everything was out of control. Chaos would be all you could see. But looking at the cross from a distance, you see that none of that chaos extends beyond the outline of the cross.
The design of the cross looks like that to show what is declared in the Bible and proved by life experience. No matter how bad it gets; your life will not get beyond God. In all situations and circumstances you are not too far gone for God. You are always in God’s easy reach. Nothing in this world is beyond the love of God as revealed through Jesus’ death on the cross. No, this world does not seem peaceful, but yes, Jesus is the King of Peace. The king of a peace which passes all understanding. Nothing in your life is beyond God’s redeeming, not because you earn or deserve grace, but because God loves you. Everything that needs to be done, God has done.
As we gather online, we show that not only can nothing separate us from the love of God as found in Jesus, but Christian community is real and binding, even when we can’t be together. Yesterday, I gathered online and by phone with a group from Christ Church in Dublin, Georgia. They had a parishioner dying in an assisted living facility and through concerns of spreading the virus, they could not be with her physically. But we knew that God was with her and was with us as we prayed. So we prayed the Litany at the Time of Death. Often called Last Rites, this is a prayer not just for a priest to pray, but any of us can pray it for someone near death. And as we prayed together each of us in our own homes, but united in prayer, what we experienced was the very real presence of the Triune God who brought back Israel from exile in Babylon, who raised Lazarus to new life, and who never gave up on loving us even when the cost of that love was death on a cross.
Jesus taught us to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and to love our neighbors as ourselves. We are staying in our own homes out of that love for the most vulnerable among us. We are showing love by slowing the spread of this virus out of concern for the heroes in scrubs who are placing their own health at risk in order to alleviate the suffering of those who have contracted the virus. But our physical separation has not closed our churches. The church is the people of God, and the people of God are gonna be fine.
So, wash your hands. Don’t touch your face. Pray for those who are sick and for those caring for them. But be not afraid, for the Spirit that can give life to dry bones will still breathe new life into you and me giving us a peace beyond understanding.
Amen.
