The Air-Stirring Spirit of God

Lent 5A; Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45; St. Paul's, Smithfield, NC 4/2/2017

Jim Melnyk “The Air-Stirring Spirit of God”

A long time ago the people of Israel, lost in exile, despaired.  Their city and temple in ruins, they felt they had lost their God.  The psalmist proclaimed:

“By the waters of Babylon there we sat down and there we wept, when we remembered you, O Zion.

On the willows there we hung up our harps.

For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither and forget its skill.

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” (Psalm 137:1-6 NRSV and BCP combined)

             

Into the midst of this great despair a prophet arises – one called upon by God to proclaim a new hope for God’s people – forgiveness and return.  Just as God had heard Israel’s cry while they were captives in Egypt, God listens to the cry of those in exile and responds in grace, offering words of hope, and a desire for a renewed commitment of love.  And still the people struggle to believe – struggle to accept that God is not only with them in exile, but is also ready to deliver them, and bring them back home. 

“The people [are] moaning: ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off’ (Ezekiel 37:11)…. But then one day God [plops] Ezekiel down in the middle of a valley of dried-up bones. This time, [it is] God [who despairs]. God [takes] a good look at God's people and [sees] dried up hopes, dried up dreams, dried up programs, and dried up congregations. And God [says to the prophet], ‘Can these bones live?’  Ezekiel [has] the wisdom and humility to respond with a confession, ‘I don't know.  Only you know, God’" (Nancy Hastings Sehested, Sojourners Online, Preaching the Word, 4/5/2017).  And so God takes the initiative – God speaks a word of resurrection power through Ezekiel – and the bones begin to rattle and shake – they are drawn together by the Spirit of God – en-fleshed and given breath.

We come across exile of a different sort in today’s gospel lesson.  At the death of their brother Lazarus, Martha and Mary both find themselves lost in despair – their deeply felt grief leaving them feeling as desolate as the dried up bones that once confronted Ezekiel.  Many of us looked at this story the first Wednesday evening in Lent.  We wondered, “Why the four days?”  Someone quite correctly pointed out that four days made us sure that Lazarus was really dead – stone dead – dead enough to stink in the grave – as dead as the bones in Ezekiel – so dried up that not even the marrow is left!

Martha, seemingly always the member of her family quick to engage Jesus with a challenging word, complains that Jesus “could have prevented this tragedy if he had gotten his priorities straight. But [even] then she [speaks] confidently of her faith in the God who hears and answers. Jesus [tells] her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life…. Do you believe this?’ [and] Martha responds in confession, ‘Yes, Lord. You are the Christ’” (ibid).

As The Rev. Nancy Hastings Sehested puts it, “Resurrection comes to despairing, dried-up people. The only hope we have is in a God who can breathe life into our dried-up lives. Beyond our despairing no and our optimistic yes comes the bone-rattling, air-stirring Spirit of new life” (ibid).  What an incredible image – “the air-stirring Spirit of new life.”

Earlier last week we explored the Lazarus story during our Clergy Lenten Quiet Day with Bishop Anne Hodges-Copple.  Concerning the raising of Lazarus, Bishop Anne offered a question I had never before considered.  “Is there something baptismal about this?” she asked.  In Holy Baptism we proclaim that we have died to this world and are raised to new life in Christ.  Isn’t this something of what happens with Lazarus?  Isn’t this something of what happens for Martha and Mary in the deepest reaches of their grief?

Lazarus does, indeed, become a baptismal figure – buried with Christ in his tomb – all of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song….  Lazarus becomes a symbol of resurrection power as well – four days dead and in the grave; and yet by the grace and love of God in Christ he lives again – becoming what Bishop Anne called the nascent sign of the Jesus Movement.  The world changes in that moment of life-giving action – for it sets in motion the final events in the life of Jesus – moving him unwaveringly toward the cross and beyond.  Lazarus’ death and new life becomes the harbinger of Good Friday – and the promise of Easter.

And while Ezekiel’s valley of the dry bones is not meant to be baptismal in its original context, it was part of the earliest glimmerings of resurrection theology – the promise that God can and does bring new life out of death.  And as modern day Jesus followers, we can see in the exile and return of Israel reminders of baptismal life.  Israel, buried in her brokenness and exile, feels the breath of God upon her dried out bones, draws the very breath of God into her newly reformed lungs, and comes alive!

Of course the easy questions to ask might be, “When have we felt like a pile of dried up, dusty, lifeless bones?” or “When have we felt grief so deeply that, like Mary, we can hardly move, or like Martha, we want to cry out in despair?”  Perhaps the easy question might be, “When have you felt bound up like Lazarus, left in tomb-like darkness, hoping for new life?”  And those are good questions to ask – simply because most of us have experienced those realities in one way or another in our lives – perhaps even right now.

In both stories, the nightmare of the world is shaken awake by the dream of God. As theologian C. S. Lewis once wrote, “God really has dived down into the bottom of creation, and has come up bringing the whole redeemed nature on His shoulders” (C. S. Lewis, Synthesis Today, 3/18/2017).  And as much as we struggle to remain in the midst of Lent, we see constant reminders of the promise God has in store for us and for all creation – as God’s Spirit moves around us and within us, breathing new life into our lungs.

Speaking through Ezekiel God proclaims, “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”  Martha began with the understanding that new life would come about in some glorious future Day of the Lord, only to hear from Jesus that resurrection life happens in the here and now. The Apostle Paul reminds us that the Spirit of God is a constant force living and moving within us – that, as Walter Brueggemann puts it, “Resurrection is not only an event; it is also a continual state of empowered living” (Sojourners Online, Preaching the Word, 4/2/2017). 

Perhaps, then, the best question we can ask ourselves has to do with what it means to live day-to-day lives as resurrection people.  What can it mean for us to live as if resurrection is real – unbound and unafraid?  How does that change the way we seek to live together in community – within the full wonder and diversity of the human race?  What are we willing to risk of our own lives knowing that the air-stirring Spirit of God is alive in us, and has the final say over death?  “I am the resurrection and the life,” says our Lord.  “Do we believe?”  

Artwork by John August Swanson: Take Away the Stone