Dry Bones, Death, Not a Problem

Dry Bones, Death, Not a Problem Ezekiel 37:1-14, John 11:1-45 I’ve got a couple one-liners to get started today that will likely make you groan… Q. What do the skeletons say before eating? A. Bone appetite. Q. Who was the most famous French skeleton? A. Napoleon bone-apart. Told you they were bad. Speaking of bad, the priest and prophet Ezekiel had a bad dream about bones and skeletons coming back together and being reanimated. Sounds like a scene out of a walking dead horror movie. Ezekiel was indeed a strange man whose words and actions appear in his weird, yet wonderful, book. Besides being the sci-fi hero for alien visitations with visions of the wheels (which he meant to associate with the glory of the Lord), today we have his passage about dry bones. Stephen King, step aside. Dem bones, dem bones, dem - dry bones ... gonna rise again. Now hear the word of the Lord. As we approach Good Friday and Easter, what does Ezekiel 37 tell us? Well, at the time of Ezekiel, God's wayward people had been exiled to Babylon (modern-day Iraq) before and after the fall of Jerusalem (586 B.C.). The Babylonians had killed much of the population, had destroyed the temple and much of the rest of Jerusalem, and were taking the remainder of the populous off to Babylon. Had God abandoned them forever? Would they cease to exist as a people, hundreds of miles from home? Would they ever return? How could they survive in a strange land? Psalm 137 gives voice to their agony: "By the rivers of Babylon… there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion ... How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" Ezekiel also reflects their anguish: "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are doomed, done for, finished, cut off completely." The Lord, directly or through a vision, set Ezekiel down in a valley full of dry bones. Ezekiel said, "The hand of the Lord came upon me, and He brought me out by the Spirit (or wind) of the Lord ..." Not only were the bones dry, they were very dry. It is as though a vast army had been slaughtered, their armor and clothing stripped, and their bodies left unburied for scavenger birds and animals to pick clean and scatter, and for the winds to scour and the sun to bleach the bones dry, very dry. When God asked Ezekiel if those bones would live, he said essentially, "How should I know, Lord? Only You could possibly know that." God told Ezekiel to prophesy, to speak on His behalf, to the bones. God said that He would cause breath (spirit) to enter them, so that they would live. 2 So Ezekiel prophesied to the bones and there arose this rattling and rumbling, a violent shaking, a seismic event; and the bones from the separated skeletons came clanking together, linking bone to its bone, along with muscle, tissue and skin. The bones were rejoined and covered with flesh; but the bodies were still lifeless, there was no breath in them. In a second step, God told Ezekiel to prophesy to the breath (or wind or Spirit) that the cadavers might be reanimated. And Ezekiel prophesied, and "the breath came into them, and they arose and lived, and a vast multitude stood on their feet.” These dry bones are identified with the whole house of Israel. They are the dis-spirited people which Ezekiel had just resurrected so that they “shall know that I am the Lord." The imagery shifts from bones to graves as Ezekiel prophesies to them directly, saying that God will open their graves and bring them home. By God's words and actions, "they shall know that I am the Lord." He further calls them "My people," reaffirming the covenant. God declares, "I will put My Spirit within you, and you shall live ...." Now, take a step back. Let's say that you were praying today, and in your pray, you had a vision and God took your spirit and whisked it away to a very dry, hot place. You can hear the wind whistling among the rocks and the crackling of dry weeds brushing together. You feel the hot, desert wind on your face, your lips are becoming sore and your throat is parched; you can't even swallow; the sand is too hot to hardly stand. Now, look around and you see the bones! Hundreds, thousands of bones. Bones so dry and sun-bleached, you know they have been there for a very long time. Then you hear the voice of God saying, "Can these bones live?" You say to yourself, “Don’t think so.” But your answer is, "Only You know, O Lord." God says, "Tell these bones that they will live. They will be covered by muscle and flesh and breath will come into them and they will live." So, you tell the bones what is going to happen to them and, behold, they start coming together. There goes a femur by your foot and a skull rolls toward a rib cage, flesh starts growing and soon, bodies are strewn all about - but no breath is in them. Then you hear God again, "Tell the winds, ‘Blow, breathe upon these slain, that they may live.’" You do and the bodies heave as they begin to breath. They stand, and a great army of healthy bodies gather around you. These bones, whose life was long dried up and gone, now live. This vision happened to Ezekiel, and it happened 3 again in Jesus’ day, only Lazarus’ bones hadn’t dried up yet, though he was just as dead as Ezekiel’s bones. Jesus had the same quandary as Ezekiel. Lazarus had died. He had been ill but Jesus had not come back to heal Lazarus in time. Jesus was on the other side of the Jordan River, with the Jewish authorities trying to find Him and kill Him. No, Lazarus hadn’t wasted away entirely, but he had died and begun to regress, he had been dead awhile. When Jesus arrives in Bethany, the house is full of people mourning Lazarus’ demise. Martha knows Jesus is coming so she goes out to meet Him. Their conversation is interesting. Note that, while Martha believes in Jesus, she does not ask Him to raise her brother from the dead. She does declare that Jesus could have prevented his death, however. When Mary is told that Jesus is there, she goes to Him as well. The gathered crowd follows her. When Jesus sees Mary and feels the grief of the people, He weeps along with them. As a result, they are moved, seeing that He, too, loved Lazarus so much. Then Jesus did such a wonderful thing. With tears running down His face, Jesus says what is the heart of this Scripture, what is the very foundation of the entire New Testament. Jesus says, "I am the Resurrection and the Life. Those who believe in Me, even though they die, yet will they live, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die." In Ezekiel's vision, the dry bones - with not one residue of flesh or life upon them - are made to live again. In Lazarus, we have one more example of God's power to bring about life, even where there seems to be no hope for it. Lazarus, who has been dead four very long days, is brought back to life. When we lose a loved one, their absence causes us grief and sorrow. Their loss would be all the more unbearable if indeed there was a complete finality to death. Enter Jesus. It is for this reason that Jesus’ words are such a powerful response to death and grief: "I am the Resurrection and the Life." By the resurrection of Lazarus, Jesus shows the power of His word. In Jesus' own resurrection, He inaugurates the new state of affairs in which death has lost its finality, its ultimate sting, so that we may say, "Where, O Death, is thy sting? Where, O grave, is thy victory?" What death did to Jesus was nothing compared to what Jesus did to death. This is our hope. Dr. Robert Hughes was president of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia in the 1990’s until 4 he retired to return to preaching, leadership training and revitalizing congregations. Dr. Hughes' father was a coal miner in northeastern PA. His job was to check the mines for methane gas before the miners went down into the mines. Every morning he would descend alone into the mines, taking with him the safety light, and he would check out each of the tunnels and shafts of the mine to make sure that there was no deadly methane gas present. Of course, if the light of the safety lamp would so much as flicker, he would have to run for his life because it would detect the presence of methane gas, and he didn’t want to cause and be caught in an explosion. Talk about a dangerous job. After checking the mine, he would rise up to the surface and there would be all the miners gathered around expectantly waiting for him to announce, "It's OK; it's safe; you can now go down into the mine." As Dr. Hughes used the illustration, he said, "That's what Christ has done for us. Coming up out of the depths of death, He has announced to all who are gathered here in this life on earth: 'It's OK; it's safe. You can enter into death, into the darkness and the unknown. It's safe because I have been there and checked it out. It has not been victorious over Me, rather, I have overcome death, and I will be with you in this life and the next.’” This is our hope. Even when life seems hopeless, when life seems dead and dry and barren, Jesus has come to give us life, abundant life, now and everlasting life, tomorrow. Come to Jesus the Life-giver, and let Him breathe upon you. “Breathe on me , Breath of God, fill me with life anew, that I may love what Thou dost love and do what Thou wouldst do.”