Along the Lenten Road: From Death to Life

March 28, 1993

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Scripture: Ezekiel 37:1-14

This is not an Easter Sermon---not yet, not quite---though from the title you might almost suspect it. We’re still in the Old Testament, still on the far side of Calvary, still moving along the Lenten road. The great breakthrough, the Easter miracle that turned everything, everything in history on its ear is still before us.

Resurrection in the full, New Testament, CHRISTIAN sense is absent from the Old Covenant narratives. You don’t find it. AND YET, there are a few glimmerings of the possibility of it back there...adumbrations, anticipations, foreshadowings is the word we’re using....

There are a few veiled hints, especially in the latter part of the Old Testament of some kind of life beyond the life of this world....There are expressions of longing for something more, expressions of wistfulness for something on the far side of the grave....

You sense as you go along, a growing restlessness under the limitations of finiteness. Maybe this is not all there is.

No explicit statements of belief, maybe, not quite, but here and there expressions of trust that God has in mind for His people more than a mere 70 or 80 years of earthly existence can hold.

By the time the curtain rings down on the Old Testament saga that latent longing and trust have begun to coalesce.

The Psalmist can say, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord FOREVER.” Is resurrection in some form implied in that?

Old Job can say, “I know that my redeemer liveth.” George Frederic Handel certainly thought that was a resurrection statement, and used it as such in the Messiah.

Jeremiah, on the brink of the destruction of Jerusalem, with Nebuchadnezzar’s army of Chaldeans breaching the walls of the city, with the wolf at the door, went out and bought a piece of real estate not even taking advantage of the panic price, but paying full market value, and doing it publicly, so he could say to the people, “Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”

It’s a reflection of his confidence that God’s purpose will not ultimately be held down. If it’s not quite a full-blown resurrection theme, it sure doesn’t miss it by more than a whisker.

The fullness of the Easter miracle was still to come, but hints, whispered hopes, hungerings, “intimations of immortality” as Wordsworth put it....dimly perceived inklings of what in retrospect would seem obvious foreshadowings, were already forming in the people God was preparing...or at least the most sensitive of them.

And one of the most vividly drawn “previews of coming attractions” is found in the curious book of Ezekiel. It’s our reading for this morning.

The vision of the boneyard in the valley, the coming to life again of those bleached physical remains out there in the cemetery, is probably as close as we’re going to get to a specific Old Testament doctrine of resurrection. It may not be quite what the New Testament has in explicit form, but at least burgeoning resurrection themes, themes of renewal in the face of hopelessness, themes of life when all seems...dead, themes of the power of God’s spirit are clearly here in embryo.

Just on its own merits, of course, its unforgettably graphic reading, indelibly picturesque.... WHAT A VISION!

The image of those dry, parched bones coming together again and being formed into renewed, living bodies is such a powerful image there’s no way you can erase it from your mind once you’ve heard it, and once you’ve visualized it.

You sure can’t forget it once you’ve sung it---“The toe bone connected to the...foot bone.” If there weren’t already a Spiritual written about it, I’d write one myself. “Now hear the Word of the Lord.”

Don’t worry I’m not going to punish you by singing, though I’m tempted....

It really comes alive, of course, when you see it in the context of its original setting. Elie Wiesel, survivor of Auschwitz, survivor of the Holocaust in Germany, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years ago, calls Ezekiel “the prophet of the imagination”, and that helps us understand this unusual man, who wrote this unusual book.

He was a painter with words, Ezekiel was, probably we should call him a “surrealist” painter, like Salvador Dali, or Paul Klee.

Sharp images are what he gives us, jagged, even, intense, passion-filled images, and always brightly colored.

No wonder he spawned so many Spirituals---“Ezekiel saw de wheel, way up in the middle of the air....” The chariot of Ezekiel’s imagination, that flaming chariot that flew off and took with it the glory of the Lord from Jerusalem, is based on the prophet’s account of his call....

“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” comes from the same reference. The man had imagination, all right.

And what do we know about him? Not much, really, apart from what we can glean from the book itself.

We know he was taken into exile in Babylon with the first group of refugees when Jerusalem fell to Nebuchadnezzar. Only the elite, only the leaders were removed at that first deportation, so that tells us something about his standing in the community. He must have been a young man at the time.

In Babylon, far removed from home, separated from most of the people who remained in Jerusalem, he waited...knowing with his prophet’s instinct that there was still doom to come. The full extent of God’s judgment on the apostate people of Jerusalem had not yet fallen.

He warned them, or tried to, by writing...he admonished them, cajoled them, tried to shame them, knowing all the time it was probably useless. Prophets don’t have to be successful; they just have to be faithful. The people hadn’t listened to any of his predecessors, or to any of his contemporaries, for that matter, why should they listen to him? The entire first part of his book is essentially a proclamation of impending doom.

BUT SUDDENLY THE MOOD CHANGES. It changes when the word comes---THE CITY IS SMITTEN. Jerusalem has fallen. 586 B.C. was the date.

To this day Jewish people remember it as the year the curtain fell. From 586 B.C. to 1947 A.D...2533 years later, there was no independent Jewish state. For over 2.5 millennia,

Jerusalem, the city of David, pride and product of the Hebrew dream, site of Solomon’s magnificent Temple, would be occupied and controlled territory...by somebody, by a continuing and unending series of somebodies.

In 586 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar, enraged by Hebrew refusal to pay proper obedience, marched into town, just as Jeremiah knew he would, turned his troops loose, blasted to smithereens the Temple Solomon had built---not a stone was left standing on another---and then herded the inhabitants who were left alive together, and dragged them across the desert sands to Babylon. The judgment had fallen.

One survivor of that death march and its aftermath later wrote a song about the experience and the impact it had on them. You can read it in the 137th Psalm: “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, and there we wept, when we remembered Zion.”

I’ve never been a refugee myself, but I’ve spoken with some...they all talk the same way...Cuban refugees, Vietnamese refugees, forcibly displaced American Indians...they all sound alike—identical mood, almost identical language---The depression is so thick you can almost cut it. There are people living today who can empathize with these Bible people.

“IF I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither...Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.”

IT WAS THE END....that’s how they felt. It was DEATH...it was WORSE than death. It was the total and complete collapse of God’s plan and God’s purpose. The Babylonian gods, on prima facie evidence, were more powerful than Yahweh. Isn’t that the logical explanation?

“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” It’s hard to think of a scene of greater abject despair......homes gone, Temple gone, hope gone, families separated, pride smashed, God Himself vanquished. Nothing could be more devastating than this.

EZEKIEL KNEW BETTER. Now, he wasn’t the only one, to be sure. A few others, too, principally the prophet we now call Second Isaiah, the unknown prophet of the Exile, saw in this devastation, this massive displacement of people, this shattering experience of suffering, a deeper purpose of God. God’s hand was not only in it, it was directing it.

Far from being vanquished in allowing His people to be carried away, God was opening a window into the depths of His own mighty heart. What the exile showed, they realized, was the nature of His omnipotence. God is all powerful, but that power exhibits itself not in displays of physical coerciveness, BUT IN DEMONSTRATIONS OF MORAL PERSUASIVENESS.

What’s omnipotent is not God’s might, but God’s love. That’s what this exile business is all about. GOD HIMSELF IS SUFFERING, TOO...for us, and with us. What’s happening hurts HIM even more than it hurts us.

The real power of God is not that He can make us do what we ought. The real power of God is that He won’t make us do what we ought.

Instead, He’ll kill Himself laying open His heart of compassion to make us WANT to do what we ought.

The meaning of the exile is not that God is cruel or weak. The meaning of the exile is that God is kind and strong...only His strength is the strength of controlled restraint. He will suffer, and suffer, and suffer...until we see, and He will invite us to view our suffering as His invitation to join Him as wounded healers.

Maybe only those who themselves limp can fully appreciate the glory of running free...Maybe only those who have themselves known grief can minister without patronizing to newly grief-stricken friends. God Himself speaks from experience.

SOME BACK THERE IN EXILE GOT IT...got the message.

In a way, I think it was the Israel’s finest hour. If only the mainstream of Judaism could have been captured by the extraordinary sensitivity of the few. If only the spiritual peak of that insight could have prevailed....

How different it might have turned out....How different subsequent history might have been.

I don’t say that as a Jew, of course...I can’t, obviously. I say it as a Christian, looking back at it through the prism of Calvary, seeing how that momentous experience, the experience of His spiritual ancestors, helped mold the mindset of Jesus...how He found His model in their discovery of the proper use of power...how His understanding of who He was, and what He was to do was in large measure forged out of their recognition of the redemptive power of brokenness. I THINK IT WAS ISRAEL’S FINEST HOUR.

The meaning of the exile had to await another 500 years to be implemented. The lesson, unfortunately, didn’t “take” on a widespread basis.

BUT SOME BEGAN TO GET IT, and Ezekiel was among the first, among the very first in human history. He sat out there in those drab refugee camps, listening to the despair of his countrymen, hearing their dolorous songs, looking up with spiritually attuned heart into the vast expanse of heaven...and it “hit” him---like a flash out of the blue? like a slowly arriving dawn? I have no idea....

BUT SOMEHOW, IT CAME TO HIM...these ashes of desolation, these relics of defeat, these bones of death, this end of the line, apparently hopeless situation is only hopeless when you look at it from the human side. God is in the midst of all this...brooding, molding, waiting....

Maybe there IS nothing we can do but honestly and ashamedly admit our brokenness and our death....Maybe that’s what we should have been doing all along. Maybe that IS all we have left.

BUT THERE IS SOMETHING GOD CAN DO, the God who exhibits His power through hushed restraint. He can and will bring renewal, even out of the graveyard.

So the toe bone connected to the...foot bone....And the noise, and the rattling, and the clattering, and the coming together before his eyes of bone to bone, and sinew to sinew, and flesh to flesh. The inspired imagination of Ezekiel sweeps us up in its description. The whole valley rocks with the noise of a human assembly plant.

But notice...Ezekiel’s whole point. Even when the physical bodies are intact as whole bodies once more...even when there is corporeal unity, there is still no life.

There is form, but not animation; mass, but not movement.

The bodies are but corpses, until the divine “ruach”, the Hebrew word for breath, the holy “breath” of God, the holy Spirit comes to indwell them.

They are like the inert body of Adam in Michelangelo’s immortal panel on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. No life until the finger of God bestows it with a touch.

It may be the most difficult lesson hard-driving, self-reliant moderns have to learn: THE HARD LESSON OF DEPENDENCE. We think so arrogantly that we can do it all.

Where does renewal, rejuvenation, a fresh start, new life come from? Where does it come for anybody? Where else can it come from? Only from the lovingly omnipotent power of God.

Now, I haven’t forgotten that this is still not a fully explicit resurrection story---not yet, not quite. We’re still in the Old Testament. In the context, Ezekiel is operating in the realm of HUMAN history, in the realm of this life, something THIS side of the grave.

The vision in its setting deals with God’s people, God’s specific, historically conditioned, 6th Century B.C. people...the people in exile, the chastened, humiliated, beaten down, dead people of Covenant failure.

What Ezekiel is saying to them, THOSE people, is that even that failure, painful as it is, disappointing as it is, to God, and temporarily disruptive as it is...EVEN THAT won’t stop God’s purposeful, stubborn momentum. GOD HASN’T GIVEN UP ON THEM.

They’re going back to try again, back to give it another whirl, back to start over to see if now maybe they can get it right. Maybe this time their suffering, because of God’s suffering, will make them less insufferable.

AND FOR US? In the larger context, across the sweep of the centuries, WHAT DOES IT SAY TO US? ALL THAT...and MORE.

“The toe bone connected to the...foot bone”....WITH GOD, THERE IS NO HOPELESS SITUATION. Dead lives can live; dead careers can live; dead marriages can live; dead churches can live; dead people can live.

“Now hear the Word of the Lord.”

Ezekiel prophesied better than he knew. Isn’t that exactly what inspiration means? There’s more in there than the prophet put in there. He didn’t know he was foreshadowing resurrection as well as resuscitation. He didn’t know that generations later would look back and say there’s wider implication here than the prophet ever imagined.

He didn’t know he was laying the groundwork for the return to a greater land than Judah. But he knew the HOPE, the solid rock on which all subsequent confidence in God’s power to triumph is grounded.

HE KNEW THAT WITH GOD, NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE.

Now, I close with an illustration I may have used before, one I got from Herchel Sheets, who says he got it from Garnett Wilder.[1]

It’s an excerpt from the writing of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Marguerite Higgins. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting of the Korean War, and specifically for her account of 18,000 Marines in combat with more than 100,000 Chinese soldiers.

At one point she writes of an incident she witnessed: “It was unbelievably cold that morning---MINUS 42 degrees. Several reporters were standing around. The weary soldiers, half frozen and dragging, stood by their dirty trucks, eating from tin cans. A huge Marine was eating cold beans with his trench knife. His clothes were stiff as a board. His face, covered with a heavy beard, was crusted with mud. A correspondent sauntered over to him, and asked, ‘If I were God and could grant you anything you wished, what would you most like?’

The grizzled Marine stood motionless for a moment. Then he slowly raised his head, and replied, ‘Give me tomorrow.’”

Can these bones live? Is any situation hopeless? Remember Ezekiel in the valley of the bones.

With God, tomorrow will come.

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[1] Herchel Sheets and Garnett Wilder were clergy colleagues of Tom Price.