Pentecost: We are the Church

Scripture: Ezekiel 37:1-14

Ezekiel 37:1–14 NIV

1 The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. 3 He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.” 4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! 5 This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. 6 I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’ ” 7 So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. 8 I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them. 9 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’ ” 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army. 11 Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.’ 12 Therefore prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13 Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. 14 I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord.’ ”

5/19/2024

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Mission Moment

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Week 2: Mission Moment

First Choice Solutions (Pregnancy Center)

Opening Prayer:

Holy Spirit, You are welcome among us. Fill us with Your breath of life. Fill us with Your strength and power. Fill our minds with Your wisdom, and fill our hearts with faithfulness. We worship You and celebrate the gift of Your Church, today. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

We are the Church

Can These Bones Live?

Bekah and I have traveled to many parts of Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky over our lifetime and to several other states on vacation. One thing we have noticed is that there are many small churches sprinkled all over. Many of them have cemeteries attached to them. Some of them have changed names and denominations multiple times throughout their history. Some of them are just empty buildings next to a graveyard.

Every one of these churches had people who could tell you about the good old days. While it is easy to assume that the larger churches we passed were doing better than the smaller ones, most of my experience has shown that all churches struggle, no matter how big they are. It’s not primarily about the numbers in the pews or the bank. Most of those memories of the Good Old Days instead focused on everyone finding a place to serve God faithfully and doing it in harmony with one another. God provided, and the people were grateful, and the church grew in their love of God as they shared Him with their friends and families.

Time marches on, and the challenges arise new each morning while they forget the mercies of yesterday. Fear and doubt lead the way to distrust and despair, and before they know it, the Good Old Days are over, and they are sitting in a pile of dusty shambles while people drive by, wondering if Jesus visits there anymore because it sure doesn't look like He lives there. They see the cemeteries that used to be filled with life and wonder to themselves.

Can these bones live?

I watched a business teacher this week talk about the importance of staying on a mission. One of the things he said that stuck with me was that we cannot see or imagine very far in the future.

We can think about where we will be and what we will do next week or month.

We can think realistically about where we will be a year from now.

But when we start considering five or ten years, it almost seems like we are imagining someone else’s life. It’s as if the person living our life, won’t be us. That might be why it is so easy for us to think backward in time about our best years, and so difficult for us to consider that there are better years, maybe even the best years, ahead of us.

Thankfully, God has no trouble knowing the future. He makes thorough plans, pays careful attention to every detail, and intentionally brings goodness to our lives for His glory. As a church, God gives us life, breath, and the strength to be ‘the Church’ He has created and called us to be.

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Promise 1: Bones and Flesh

Today’s scripture was one of my favorite stories from the Old Testament, which I learned as a young boy. I did not learn it from Sunday School. I learned it at my cousin’s house, where we would stay up late and read stories from a book series that went through all the Old Testament stories. Skeleton armies in the Bible were exciting, and I remembered this passage much more easily then remembering the Ten Commandments. But it took me many years to appreciate what this passage meant to the people of God and us today.

God brought Ezekiel to the middle of a valley that had been the site of a great battle. God’s people fought many enemies over the years, and the scattered bones that lined the battlefield could have come from any number of wars and skirmishes Israel fought with their neighbors, conquerors, or even each other. Ezekiel lived and served God when the people returned to God briefly, rediscovering the Law and cleaning the idols out of the Temple. But soon after, Babylon overtook them and sent them all into exile.

This field of broken bones was a very accurate depiction of the future of God’s people. It was a vision of death and dishonor, failure and unfaithfulness. For people who believed God would raise the dead on the last day for judgment, the idea of scattered bones in the wilderness, without proper burial, was a nightmare. It would be impossible to put each person back together. They were doomed in the resurrection. To them, this was what “Too Far Gone” looked like.

God turns the question of hope back to the prophet Ezekiel. Can these bones live? And Ezekiel, being a wise prophet, does not try to educate God or tell Him what to do. Only You know, Lord.

So God tells His prophet to speak to the bones, to the dead, to the vision of hopelessness, and command the bones to join back together again, right in the places God intended to be. But even then, when the lost are found and put back into place, what will keep them there? So God commands Ezekiel to speak to them and command new flesh to form over the bones, to hold each body together and give them strength to stand and serve again. Just as if God Himself was speaking, it happens right before Ezekiel’s eyes, and Ezekiel stands there amazed. God created an army to serve Him out of the least, the last, and the lost.

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Promise 2: Breath of Life

So there they stood, an army of healthy, able bodies without any life. Many churches stop there, looking for and even fighting over strong, able bodies but failing to see what kind of life is in them. Reading our English translations, we miss the play on words God gives Ezekiel when He asks the prophet to speak to the breath. Breath and wind are the same word in Hebrew, so Ezekiel is asking the wind to come into the lungs of this newly made army of bodies and make them breathe again.

But there is a third meaning to the Hebrew word “ruach,” which we see and hear translated as breath and wind, which is spirit. In many cases in scripture, it is not a matter of picking the correct English word to cover the translation but realizing that it may mean all three simultaneously. The Hebrew people here understood that breathing is like the wind coming and going through us. So when the wind outside our bodies blows, perhaps it is God’s breath. They also recognized that a person’s spirit passes after they stop breathing, that somehow, breath is tied to life, so, just as the spirits of these people were restored by the winds blowing new breath into them, like resuscitation of someone needing CPR, so that wind may be a sign of the spirit of God moving among them, giving them new life and strength.

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ReCreated

Today is Pentecost, the celebration of the day when the Holy Spirit came and filled the Disciples, giving them the ability to take the gospel of Jesus to the entire world. On that day, a mighty wind blew into the upper room, where they huddled, hiding and praying together. Tongues of fire appeared above their heads, and as they ran outdoors to see crowds of people, God gave them the ability to speak in many languages so that everyone there could understand them clearly.

Bible scholars have pointed out that this moment mirrored the consecration of Solomon’s Temple of God and the Tabernacle they used in the wilderness. As the wind blew, the Spirit of God entered, and they lit the candles that illuminated the sacred space. In this version, though, the disciples, the candles who bore the flame to illuminate the glory of God, were sent out into the streets rather than left hidden away. It was a restart of the Temple of God. This Temple was not built of stones and mortar made by human hands. This house of God was made up of people and moved according to God’s Spirit. It was the birth of the Church.

As the church today, we have spent far too many years trying to figure out how to sell our services to people who don’t even know they need them. We struggle to stay functional and don’t even want to think about what it means to be faithful. It doesn’t matter if we talk about church meetings, our workplace, or our families. We see that valley of dry bones, and we know it gets closer to us every day. How can we buy ourselves time? How can we keep it away for one more day?

We think about what it means to be full of strong, able bodies, full of possibility, and think back to our younger years when other people shouldered hard work. But the hard fact is: those days, our past actions, our history, brought us to right here, right now, today.

The birth of the Church at Pentecost was like a mini resurrection for us. It may have been part of God’s plan to kick off the end times, as He put us all on track for the day of resurrection and judgment of the living and the dead. We find new life in the “Big C” Church—not in the building or at a particular service, but in living with the people of God because God chooses to live among us. We cannot plan or make that resurrection happen. At our best, we can ask God to gather us together, put us all in the places we need to be to work together and give us the strength and leadership to hold us together.

But even then, if we look big, strong, and numerous, we are lifeless without God’s Holy Spirit blowing into us and through us, carrying His Word out of us to pass on this resurrection power to the broken world around us. Everyone needs a little Jesus to make it through the day. But if we want to do more than push back the valley of dry bones another year, another month, another week, we need to make different choices. We must be ready to face those fears, knowing that the former flesh that clung to those bones was not strong enough to hold the life God intends us to have. We have to let those desert winds pick us clean and allow God to clothe us in the new bodies He has for us. We need to stop holding our breath in fear of losing it and start realizing and trusting that every breath we have is a gift from God, and He hasn’t failed us yet.

So bring on the bones! The sooner we get free of this life’s sin-stained stuff, the sooner God will begin making us new and alive—born from above by the breath of His Holy Spirit now breathing in us. And it won’t matter if the work is still hard, if the days are still long, and if we still can’t figure each other out as we try to work together. It won’t matter to us whether it looks like things are working from the outside. It won’t matter because we will have left the desire to be functional back in the graveyard, and instead, we will be living life with the single goal of being faithful to God.

Brothers and sisters, are you willing to let go of the burdens you carry, let go of the control you crave, and let God be God in your life? Will you let Him make you new?

Will you let go of everything so He can be Lord of all, beginning in You?

Will you give up figuring out how to function and follow Him faithfully instead?

Closing Prayer

Holy Spirit, come and fill our lungs. Give us Your words of truth and love to testify to the world and share with those who need to know You more. Fill our bodies with the strength we need to go where You send us, to fulfill the tasks You set before us, and to help each other stand strong, focused, and faithful to the work You call us to do. Grant us Your wisdom to recognize You as You lead and guide us. Send us the fire of Your life and love to fill us to overflowing so that the world sees, hears, and feels You clearly, working in and through us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

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