"New Life in Death Valley"

Ezekiel 37:1-14 and John 11:17-27

Passion Sunday + April 10, 2011

Reverend Dr. David C. Brown
Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ
400 Glenwood Drive, Chattanooga, TN 37404

We haven’t heard much from Sarah Palin lately. That’s a blessing in itself. But in one of her attempts to fire up a crowd of conservatives, she asked: “How’s that hopey, changey thing workin’ for ya?” A fool can ask good questions even if they don’t have a clue to the right answers. Good question, Sarah. How hopeful are you and I these days and what would it take to change things in the right way?

As I began studying this marvelous passage from Ezekiel for today’s message, the story of the valley of dry bones, I remembered singing the familiar Negro spiritual, “Dem Bones” when I was in the Otsego High School Choir. The refrain comes over and over again: “Now hear the word of the Lord.” “Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around, now hear the word of the Lord.”

That hit me. That’s the answer to Sarah’s question. Change comes when people, even as dead as dry bones, hear the word of hope. Someone makes the announcement: God is bringing new life. Then people take hope. They start moving. They get up, do things, and put their lives back together.

This marvelous text from Ezekiel is filled with the rich, imaginative imagery of the prophetic tradition, but if you don’t have an imagination you’re not going to get it. If you’re one of those dense literalists, then you’re going to have a hard time with Ezekiel because Ezekiel says use your imagination.

Imagine what it would be like to come across a valley of dry bones. You’re out walking in the mountains and you stumble on this small valley filled with bones. That’s Israel. You’re look at what is left of the nation of Israel. You remember, they were carried off lock, stock and barrel into exile in Babylon. That was King Nebuchadnessar’s policy. It was cheaper to bring a captured people back to his country than to maintain an army of occupation a thousand miles away in a foreign land. So Israel, in 587 B.C., was shipped off to Babylon.

Imagine this! An Egyptian or a Phoenician, standing on a dock in the Mediterranean saying, “By the way, whatever happened to the Jews? You don’t see them around here any more. Remember that little nation on the Fertile Crescent? Don’t even hear about them any more.” Here they are in Babylon, dead spiritually if not literally, their life now like a valley of dry bones.

But there was still some hope in them. They had hoped that their life could be renewed as long as their king was alive and free. But the king is now captured. He, too, is shipped off. It is most humiliating, the king doing common labor like everybody else. This king is Jehoiachin, the last descendant of the house of David, the last of the Davidic kings. The great kingdom of David, king of kings, is now over. That’s when everybody said: “It’s the end.” Ezekiel himself said, “We are clean cut off.” As the author of Psalm 137 put it:

“By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion . . . How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”

“Clean cut off.” That’s the way Ezekiel described it. And the result was spiritual death. The Babylonians didn’t kill the captives. They crushed their spirit. Can you imagine coming across a valley of dry bones scattered all over the place? It doesn’t get any deader than that. Ezekiel said that’s what it is like to be Israel right now. It’s like being a valley of dry bones.

Then God says to Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?”

Ezekiel replies, “Only you know that, Lord.”

And God says to Ezekiel, “Say to these bones you are going to live.”

Ezekiel does, and the bones start coming together and take on flesh. Then the wind blows from the four corners of the earth. In the Bible the wind is always the symbol of the Spirit of God. The word for spirit in Hebrew is “wind.” Whenever the wind blows you know that God is giving life to something as in the Creation story when God breathes into Adam the breath of life. So in this scene God gives back the spirit that has been crushed in the exile.

“Now hear the word of the Lord. These bones are going to live again.” You see the sequence. It’s wonderful. The word of hope: “These bones shall live,” and then the people start to stir, do something, get moving. God recreates them, gives them a new spirit, and they have new life.

In fact, in the chapter before this, the 36th chapter, God says through Ezekiel, “A new heart I will give you and a new spirit I will place within you.” Then Ezekiel says, “Now use your imagination. This is how that will happen.” Someone says the word of hope, the prophetic word. Someone has to say it: “These bones are going to live.” Then the nation or the individual will take hope, get their bones or their act together, and start doing something that looks like living. Even if they don’t feel like it they just start doing something, at least go through the motions, then God puts the spirit within them and gives them a real heart instead of a heart of stone.

That’s what this text is all about. It’s about resurrection. It announces that you can live before you die. You don’t have to die physically before you are reborn; you can have a new life right now. You can put your life back together right now. You can start doing that. Get up and start moving and you will discover that God will give you a new heart and there will be a new spirit within you. That’s exactly what our New Testament lesson from the Gospel of John says as well. Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha of Bethany, got sick. Mary and Martha send a message to Jesus, “Come quickly. Heal our brother.” For reasons unexplained, Jesus doesn’t come. That’s just the way it is sometimes. We don’t understand why Jesus doesn’t come, why Jesus doesn’t heal, why Jesus doesn’t save our loved ones. The answer is simply not given to us.

Lazarus dies. Then Jesus comes. He will explain later why it had to be this way but in this scene Martha says to him, “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.”

Jesus says, “Your brother will rise again.”

Martha says, “I know that, but that is small comfort to me now.”

She thinks Jesus is talking about the End Time, the “general resurrection,” as it is called, that “great, gettin’ up mornin’.” Jesus has something else in mind here. As always in the Gospel of John before he performs a miracle he makes a speech. Here it is. “I am the resurrection and the life and he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whosoever lives and believes in me shall never die.”

That’s always read at funerals, appropriately. But I want to suggest that it could just as appropriately be read as a call to worship every Sunday morning for it refers not only to those who are dead physically but to those of us who are dead spiritually. Those out of whom the spirit has been pressed by adversity and hard times, in whom the heart has turned to stone because of sorrow, or hatred, or pain. That’s who Jesus is talking to when he says, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

That’s what he is doing to prove as he raises Lazarus from the dead. He goes over to the grave. Evidently it was a tomb with a stone in front of it such as the one that Jesus himself will occupy, a point the reader is not to miss. At the end of this chapter it is made clear that because Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead he is now going to be arrested, and tried, and killed. So in a sense, when Jesus calls Lazarus out of the tomb he does it to take Lazarus’ place.

But that is later. Now he simply orders the stone to be removed and then shouts at Lazarus, “Come out!” And Lazarus walks out into new life. It’s not the last resurrection. Lazarus is not going to live forever. He will die again. The point is that Lazarus as well as you and I can experience resurrection before we die. Jesus came that you and I might have life in abundance now.

So you see, these two passages are alike. They’re both about new life and how it comes to us now. They’re both about someone bringing new life by speaking the word of hope. The words spoken in these texts are words spoken by Ezekiel and Jesus. One brought a man back from the dead, the other brought a nation back from exile. We are neither Ezekiel nor Jesus. We re not going to do anything quite that grand but we can do something like that. We can say the word of hope that God can use.

A man wrote about a friend he has known in school. He hadn’t seen her in years. They happened to meet by chance on the street one day. He remembered her as a person of great promise. She wanted to be an artist. She had great talent. She could have been an artist but, she said, when she graduated from school she decided she would put her talent to practical use and studied architecture instead.

They started their conversation with the kind of talk that you have when you see somebody you haven’t seen for a long time: “What are you doing?” “How are things going?” In the midst of the conversation she broke down and started weeping. She said the truth of the matter was her life had been miserable. She felt her life was empty. She said her heart had deserted her, but she could have said her heart had turned to stone.

They talked for some time but, he said, it wasn’t good. They parted with him feeling that he hadn’t been able to touch her life. He hadn’t been able to say the thing that he wanted to say. That night when he went home he sat down and wrote her a letter. It took most of the night as he tried to convey to her the person that she really was, the person that he saw inside trying to get out with the bright future that he envisioned for her.

As soon as he mailed the letter he wished he hadn’t. He wondered if he had stepped over the line, if he had been too bold and presumptuous in what he had said. As time went on he was even more unsure that what he had said was right. One day a letter came. He opened it. It was brief, but what it said, around the thanks, was, “What you wrote to me saved my life.”

The man who wrote the letter used it as an illustration of the different categories of letters. There are business letters, chatty letters, obligatory letters, love letters. Then he said there are letters that you have to call “saving” letters, because they are words of hope that you give to somebody else. They are words that say, as Jesus said to Lazarus, come out of that grave you are in and start living the life that God has planned for you.

Sometimes that’s all that it takes; sometimes that’s all God needs to renew a person’s life. All God needs is for someone else to say to a person, “You’re going to live.” Then they take hope and begin to move around, to stir. That’s when God gives them a new heart and puts a new spirit within them, when, in hope, they start moving.

I came across another wonderful illustration of the way this works. It seemed particularly appropriate because in a way it’s about those Jews in exile in Babylon. It’s an incident from of the life of Verdi, the great composer of opera. When he was a young man between the years 1838 and 1840 he lost his wife and two infant children. He was 27 years old when this happened, and he felt that his life had ended. It was as if he had died with them so oppressive was his sorrow.

He had a contract to write an opera, so he honored it, completing the opera on time. It was premiered in Milan in September 1840, and was called “King for a Day.” It was a comic opera and a total failure. The critics, as they love to do, used the title of the opera sarcastically to denigrate the opera, saying, “King for a Day should be called ‘Opera for a Day’ and never be repeated.”

After that Verdi went into seclusion determined he would never write another note of music again. He said, “I have lost the will to write. I will no longer do it.”

One night as he was coming back from a restaurant to his apartment he ran into a friend of his, an impresario, a man named Merelli. Merelli took Verdi by the arm and led him to La Scala, the opera house in Milan, handed him a libretto and said, “Here, read it.” Verdi refused. Merelli stuffed it in Verdi’s coat pocket, pushed him out of the door, and said, “Read it!”

Verdi returned to his home, took it out of his pocket, threw it on the table, and resolved never to look at it. But his curiosity got the best of him. He said to himself, “I’ll just skim it.” The title was “Nabucco,” and the story was about the Jews in exile in Babylon. Verdi was fascinated with it. He loved it. It spoke to him, especially those passages about the Jews longing to return to Zion, to return home. But he couldn’t bring himself to write. He couldn’t do it.

In the morning he returned the libretto to the opera house. Merelli greeted him with, “Isn’t it beautiful?” Verdi said, “Yes.” Merelli said then, “Set it to music.” Verdi said, “No, I can’t do it.” Whereupon Merelli took him by the shoulders, shook him, literally, and shouted at him, “Set it to music! Set it to music!” Then Merelli pushed him out the door, slammed the door and locked it.

Verdi went home and he began to write, one note at a time, one verse at a time, slowly and laboriously. Then he completed a page. Slowly the music came together, note by note. Then it became easier. The writing began to flow. Finally, as his biographer wrote, “His soul conquered his deep discouragement.” And a musical masterpiece was born.

Yes, it is God who gives life, that is clear. But I want you to see this: A Merelli, a concerned friend, can also say the life-giving word. In Verdi’s case, Merelli had to shout it, the way Jesus shouted at Lazarus, “Come out of that grave and start to live the life that God has created for you.”

That’s the way it happens. I have seen it. I hope you have, too. Someone speaks the word of hope and the dry bones of discouragement and despair begin to live again. The word of the Lord is a word of hope and anyone can speak it. Just say a word of hope to someone else and, believe me, God will take care of the rest. Do it! Do it now! Say the word! You know who I’m talking to.