By Sam Adams
Text: Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45
In a little over a week it has already become cliché to say that we live in times that are unprecedented. Ordinarily, when I sit down to write a sermon, I find myself trying to take what is in front of us every day, pick it up, turn it one way, then another, until I see it from an angle that makes it seem strange, or unfamiliar. I want to see something in a way that I hadn’t before. I do this to help us actually see the world better, more clearly, and with a truer focus on what matters.
Ordinarily, when I look at our daily lives, we seem to protect ourselves from considering our own mortality and bodily frailty. It may become important at times to lift our experiences up and point out that these lives we live, and these bodies that we are, spin and hurl themselves forward through time to the grave. We tend to block this from our thinking. There are, of course, exceptions to this. People we love die. We get sick. We struggle with our own diseases and the diseases of friends and loved ones. But, as a whole, the culture we live in is one that has done a great job of sequestering death to the fringes of our experience. This was not so for most of human history. For most of human history individuals and communities lived close to death; death was part of the regular experience of their lives. That’s not to say that death is simply a part of life. When we hear people say this, it is, I think, an attempt to domesticate death; and I suspect this is in part due to the subconscious need to keep death at the periphery so that we are not faced with our own mortality.
So here we are today, acutely aware, in a new way, of that mortality. The 24-hour news cycle reminds us of this over and over as we are told to wash our hands, cover our mouths, and as we struggle publicly with our susceptibility to disease. When we do go out, we see the others we run into as potential carriers of illness and so we stay away from them, pausing to let them pass at a distance, sensing that there is some invisible sickness to which we are vulnerable in any interaction. We are aware, more than ever, of our vulnerability in our own skin and bodily existence.
Today, as I take up our humanity and look at it, turning it around as an object to consider, I see another dimension, another angle that we need to see. Though we are mortal, and our days are numbered, nevertheless we are destined for life.
The prophet Ezekiel, confronted with the death of a people, the exile and dispersion of the people of God from their homeland out into the deadly grip of a foreign and violent empire, saw in a vision a valley of dry bones. God asked him, "Mortal, can these bones live?" Ezekiel answered, “O Lord GOD, you know” (Ezk 37:3).
Ezekiel’s answer is informative: We, being human, do not know. Our knowledge, our imaginations, are bounded in place to this mortal frame. But, because God is, there exists the possibility that there is an answer that escapes our limited knowing.
So, God says to Ezekiel, "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. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the LORD” (vv. 4-6).
Here God’s identity—knowing that God is Yahweh, the LORD—is that God puts breath in the dry bones. God brings to life that which had no life. This takes us back to Genesis when it was Gods’ breath that brought life to the human God had formed from the ground. God is known in God’s act to bring and give life to the dead.
“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. Then God said to me, "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 God commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude. "Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, 'Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.' Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and bring you up from 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.
This is, of course, a prophecy about a people. But it tells us that at the heart of the identity of God is the act of giving life. Whether to a human, or to a people, God is known by life.
The New Testament centers this and all biblical prophecy around Jesus who takes God’s identity as the one who brings life to dry bones and focuses it on our own human mortality. For Jesus the problem of humanity is not just in the survival of the nation of Israel, God’s people among the nations, but the problem of humanity is death itself. The problem is that our lives seem determined by the ultimacy of death. But with God, with the God who has given and gives life, human life can be, should be, and will be bounded by the fullness of life, not death.
In this time of a global pandemic, when hospital rooms are brought into our living rooms through cable news; when our lives seem fragile and the invisibility of disease determines our social interactions; when we are acutely aware of our own mortality; we are to be reminded that our lives are not forgotten by God. The God who remembers us is the God of life.
The gospel lesson for today comes from John 11.1-45. It’s the story of Jesus raising Lazarus, his friend, from the dead. In the midst of this story, the gospel acknowledges what we might be feeling during this pandemic.
When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died"(11:32). That’s the problem that faith must confront as we face suffering of all sorts: “Lord, if you had been here…” There are no easy answers to this. Our frailty and mortality cry out that this is not as it should be. Where is the Lord? Where is God’s healing presence? If there is comfort, it is that Jesus is there with us, weeping: When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus began to weep (11:33-35).
We might pause here. What does it mean that the God who has created all things has entered this creation so intimately that the human condition we have been talking about is not just a point of consideration for this infinite being, but is, rather, a real experience in the particular humanity of Jesus, one so deep that it “moves” him to weep? God here is being moved—the unmoved mover—is moved by the death of a friend to the point of weeping.
If we remember back to Advent when we read of Rachel, mourning for her children, refusing to be comforted, we can see here that the gospel itself—the good news of God—includes the depth of human suffering and the weeping that it entails.
The pain is not the end. The life of Jesus, the life that is in Jesus, is a life that endures through death. This is signified in Jesus’ next act after he weeps. He orders the tomb opened. Through the protest of Mary ("Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days”) he begins to undo the necessary human management of death. He then commands the one dead: “Lazarus, come out!”
In this unreal time of pandemic distancing, of businesses closing down, of our community confronting our frailty, we in the church can be reminded—comforted even—that death is not the final word about humanity. Even now, our lives are bounded not, in the end, by death, but by life. And this is the important point: That final word of life is not in our hands, but in God’s. “Can these bones live?” “Oh, Lord God, you know.” Indeed: they can, and they will. The story of Lazarus is the story of God giving us the sign that life is in God’s hands and that the life that will win in the end is not “life” as some abstract force, but God’s own movement in love toward us.
The dry bones will live. Lazarus will come out. And we will, ultimately, experience this as God’s call to each of us.
In the meantime, in this pandemic, join your neighbors, your community, your friends in helping to ease the scope of this disease. See the situation in which our nurses and doctors find themselves as they confront this disease and weep for them, feel the difficulty of these times, and do what you can to witness to the love that God has for us.