When the World is Crumbling

Sermon for Sunday, March 29, 2020

Based on Ezekiel 37:1-14 and Romans 8:6-11

We all experience earth shattering moments at some point in our lives. Moments like that are important in and of themselves, but often they divide our lives into “before” and “after.” We also have moments where we know exactly where we were when they happened. You may be thinking of the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion, or the moon landing. You may be thinking that the last two weeks feel a lot like a prolonged version of that experience. For my generation, the moment that has most defined our place in history up until now is the attacks on the World Trace Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. This moment marked a radical change in how people my age understand the world and our place in it. I was born, as some of you know, in 1988, right at the end of the Cold War. My childhood took place in the shade of a great optimism and a comfortable peace. Our nation’s great enemy, the Soviet Union, had dissolved into a collection of various smaller countries, and so I went to school without duck and cover drills and the fear of imminent nuclear attack. War seemed inconceivable to me. We saw our military as mostly engaged in police actions, defending the poor and the oppressed in the far reaches of the world, in places like Kosovo and Sarajevo, perhaps Africa or the Middle East. But surely no one could touch us. All that changed on a Tuesday morning when I was in the Eighth Grade. The first plane hit the first tower around 8:45 AM, but it was 10:00 before word got to most of the students at William Campbell Combined School. I was sitting in Latin class and my teacher got on the computer and told us something had happened. The rest of the day, time slowed down. Our teachers tried to help us process what was going to happen in our world. They had not been trained for that work, but on the whole they did the best they could. I went home that night to watch footage of towers of steel crumble to the ground like card castles. Trying to wrap my mind around the death and the destruction and the international consequences of the decisions of terrorists was a lot to ask of a thirteen year old boy. The world changed that day, because something I could never imagine had happened. How do we rebuild our perception of the world when our world crumbles around us? The people of Judah had to deal with this very question around the year 587 BC, when the Babylonians came and took everything from them. The people of Judah, with their king in Jerusalem, had been begrudgingly paying taxes and tributes to the kings of Assyria and then Babylon for a long time. But after a series of rebellions, the Babylonians finally came in and took the king and the best and the brightest from Jerusalem, and brought them to Babylon to serve as scribes and secretaries in captivity. For the Jerusalem elite, this meant separation not only from their homes, but also from the Temple, which to them represented the very presence of God. They were every bit as hopeless and helpless as a 13 year old boy in Southside Virginia in the middle of September at the beginning of a new millennium watching news coverage of buildings that he had never seen crumbling, and wondering what war would mean. Their world had crumbled around them; where could they stand? It was among these exiles in Babylon that a priest named Ezekiel began to have dreams. As a priest, he would have felt the separation from the Temple more acutely than most. Scholars believe that Ezekiel began writing his prophecies around the time that he would have been eligible to serve in the Temple, as close as anyone could get to the very presence of God on Earth. And here he was a desert away, in the heart of modern day Iraq, sitting by a river that was not the Jordan, looking at hills that were not Mount Zion. He must have felt isolated. He must have felt abandoned. He must have felt broken and afraid. And that’s when the Lord, the Lion of Judah, appeared to him in visions and gave him messages for the people. It started, famously, beside the river Chebar, when “Ezekiel saw the wheel, way up in the middle of the air.” From there he saw many other strange and wonderful things and he did a lot of wild performances to get people’s attention. He lay on one side for weeks at a time, he cooked bread over animal dung, and another time he packed a bag as though he was leaving town and dug through the wall of his house. But one of the strangest things to happen to Ezekiel happens in Chapter 37. Ezekiel is taken by God and placed in a valley; and the valley is full of bones. Reading the passage closely, we realize that the bones are in a hopeless disarray. This is no paleontologist’s dig site, where the bones have been carefully dug up and rock and dirt chiseled and brushes away to reveal a perfect skeleton. No, it seems to be the site of some ancient battle and the dead have not been given the privilege of burial. The bones are totally dry, bleached white by the sun, and scattered by animals. God doesn’t just show Ezekiel this in a vision, nor is he allowed to view the carnage from a safe distance. God leads Ezekiel through the valley, before either says a word. Ezekiel has an opportunity to see, intimately and closely, how dead and dry these bones are. When I was in Ghana last month, we had the opportunity to go to the Elmina slave castle down on the coast. It was on the thirteenth day of our fourteen day trip, and we were tired and ready to come home. It was Valentine’s Day and I missed my wife. But my second great grandfather was a slave owner. I have seen where enslaved African Americans were buried near my family farm. I have seen where they lived and where they died. So I agreed to go to the castle to see how the story of American slavery began. At its peak, it is said that 30,000 souls a year passed through Elmina castle on the way to their new life as enslaved people. They were severely beaten, half starved, and kept in horrendous, unsanitary, and unventilated dungeons before being loaded onto even worse ships and sent on to a life of slavery across the sea. As I walked through the dungeons and through the prison and to the Door of No Return, where the enslaved Africans said goodbye to their homeland, I wondered to myself, how can we ever come back from this? “Mortal, can these dry bones live?” Sometimes, we have to see how bad things are in order to understand the magnitude of God’s amazing grace. My friend Otis was with me on that trip. He is a black man with whom I went to seminary and he serves as the Missions Pastor at Bon Air Baptist Church in Richmond. As I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing, as I wrestled with discomfort at the participation of my ancestors in the horrible business of enslaving other human beings, he said to me: “Look what God did with all this mess. Without this, you wouldn’t know me. We wouldn’t be friends.” God didn’t make slavery good; God brought some good out of it. Resurrection doesn’t undo death, it brings life out of it. “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.” With these words, God calls the prophet to a remarkable faithfulness. With these words, the Lord calls Ezekiel to an absurd sermon. First, there is no one there to hear. The bones are dead and dry. They have passed the point of being even frightening. They are merely a part of the landscape. “Ezekiel,” God says, “preach a revival to these scattered bones.” Believe me, no pastor wants that assignment. We long for a vibrant congregation who is ready to respond to our invitation. We long for ears that are attentive and eyes that light up as they take in our illustrations and our applications and our stories and our lessons. We don’t want God to ask us to do what seems impossible. But that’s been my preaching task for the last two weeks, preaching sermons in written form to the scattered Body of Christ, my beloved church. I don’t know if everyone is hearing these words, I don’t know what message they are drawing from them, but as we approach Easter, I am reminded that these scattered bones will live. In the coming weeks we will continue to find new ways to come together, and we will praise God in unison once again. And one day, hopefully not too far off, we will gather in the Sanctuary and celebrate the renewal of our lives and worship as normal. “So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them.” I often don’t understand God’s process. I want things to move faster than they do. I want resolution; I want to skip to the end of the story. I want Ezekiel to see the bones, to say to them live, and for the bones to form into bodies and begin to move. But here we are, step by step, walking through the process of bringing these bones back to life. The prophet pauses just before the task is done, reminding me that sometimes our projects and our prospects don’t finish themselves. My least favorite part of any long flight is the last hour. Many airplanes today have screens on the seat-backs in front of each passenger that you can use to watch movies and listen to music, but each one also has a flight tracker where you can see a map with a little plane icon corresponding to your current location. As the plane begins its final approach, it is too late to start a new movie or show, and so I often find myself staring at that little plane, slowly making its way across the surface of the Earth. The flight attendants make their final pass, collecting all the personal garbage the passengers have accumulated over the last few hours, and we wait. Lately we’ve been doing a lot of waiting. There isn’t a lot most of us can do to directly fight the virus. The main thing we have to do is to watch and pray. As we learn of progress and as the “curve” begins to “flatten,” it will be tempting to declare victory prematurely. Imagine if Ezekiel had done that. “Well, the bones turned into skeletons, and if that’s not a miracle I don’t know what is! Oh look, now the skeletons have become bodies, and don’t they look so peaceful!” But God isn’t done with his miracle yet. “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude. When God is done, we will know, and what we will know is that God is all powerful. There is a bluegrass song that tells the story from the gospel of the four friends who carry the paralyzed man to see Jesus. The first man says, “I was a leper and he cleansed me so I could return to my family and friends, but we will have to see if he can make my friend to walk.” The second friend says, “I was blind and he restored my sight, but who knows if he can give my friend feeling in his legs.” The third, likewise says, “I was deaf and he made it so I could hear again, but I’ve never heard of someone who could help a man who has never walked to walk.” But the fourth friend says, “My name is Lazarus. I was dead, and now I am alive again. This Jesus can do anything!” Ezekiel saw that the God he worshipped could restore the dead to life. A God who can do that can do anything, even bring His people home. Even preserve His people through a time of separation. So if you feel hopeless, if you feel cut off, if you feel isolated, remember the final words of God in this story to the people of Israel. God’s people might be tempted to say: “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” But God says: “I am going to open your graves, 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, says the Lord.” The Christian singer David Crowder has a song that begins: Come out of sadness From wherever you've been Come broken hearted Let rescue begin Come find your mercy Oh sinner come kneel Earth has no sorrow That heaven can't heal Earth has no sorrow That heaven can't heal This is our invitation today, to come alive again and anew with the hope that God will awaken us and keep us bound together. We are his body. All who believe in Him will never be put to shame. The Light has come and darkness can never overcome it. You can watch the video of David Crowder's "Come as You Are" by clicking here.