June 04, 2017THE BREATH OF LIFE

Ezekiel 37:1-14Acts 2:1-21

[Scripture Reading: Acts 2:1-21

Preface to the Word

Both of the Bible readings for this Sunday, which celebrates the birthday of the Christian Church, are scriptural classics. The first one, read at the opening of our worship, reports the surprising experience of the band of Jesus’ followers, who were huddled together following his ascension and brought to life by his Spirit.

The other, which we’ll hear in just a moment, shares a vision by an ancient prophet in which dry, dead bones come to life by the breath of God.

Ezekiel’s vision comes to him shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem, which led to the Babylonian exile. Yahweh’s people were in despair. Their hearts and their lips cried out, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.”So it was that in his vision, the prophet looked out over a valley of dry, parched, scattered bones. These bones are the nation of Israel, a nation destroyed, a people who had lost their hope. The primary image is one of death and decay.

“Can these bones live again?” God asked Ezekiel. “Lord God, only you know,” Ezekiel responded. He knew that if these bones were to live again it would be God’s doing. These dried up bones were powerless to bring themselves back to life.

Let’s hear Ezekiel’s vision read to us now.

Scripture Reading:Ezekiel 37:1-14

  1. So what does God tell Ezekiel to do? The Lord instructs Ezekiel to prophesyover the dry bones and to say to these lifeless forms, “Dry bones, hearthe Lord’s word!”
  2. …By the way, I want to take a moment for a short sidebar here. Many of us have the impression that prophecy is mainly about predicting the future, but that is not what prophets do. In fact, there are numerous prophets in the Old Testament whoreally don’t predict the future as much as explain the consequences of what’s going to happen if the people don’t heed the word of the Lord. A prophet is simply someone who is given a message by God. The prophet is then told to deliver this message to God’s people, however God chooses. If the message says something about the future it’s because God wants to give a message about consequences.Jesus was called a prophet. Martin Luther King, Jr. is known as a prophet of our times. The prophet is someone who delivers this message of God.That’s prophesy in a nutshell.
  3. So here in this passage Ezekiel is told by God to “prophesy” over these dry bones… that is, to deliver a message from God. And the message is “Hear the Lord’s word!” The Lord God proclaims to these bones,“I am about to put breath in you, and you will live again.” You see, there’s a direct connection between hearing the word of the Lord and receiving God’s life-giving Spirit. It takes us right back to the opening lines of Genesis, the very first book of the Bible, which tell stories of the creation of the world, where God speaks and bones and bodies are assembled and God’s breath is breathed into them and they live.

Life comes not by human effort, but through the power of the “Lord’s word” being spoken and the working of God’s Spirit.

  1. In Ezekiel’s vision there is a new creation taking place in the valley of the dry bones. All through the vision, the words “spirit,”“breath,” and “wind” appear. In Hebrew, they are all one word, Ruach. The very breath of life that is in all of creation is God’s Spirit without which there is no life. God breathes into these dead bones and a new community comes into being, a community brought to life by the Spirit of God, as on the first days of creation.
  2. In the New Testament, the Book of Acts tells of the formation of the new Christian Church.There, in chapter 2, it happened again on that Pentecost Day when the Spirit came upon the disciples like a “rushing wind” and like fire. And interestingly enough, as it was in Ezekiel so it is in Acts, we can see a connectionbetween the life-giving power of the Spirit and the speaking and hearing of God’s Word. Filled with the Holy Spirit, the disciples began to speak as the Spirit gave them ability. The people heard and were baptized and a new community came to life, breathed into existence by God’s word.

II.

  1. Can these bones live?

It is a question that haunts the Church of Jesus Christ today. You’ve heard me mention before a recent study by the Pew Research Center that indicates an increasingly larger segment of our population nationwide identify themselves as “None” when specifying their religious preference. In the 1950s that number was about 2% of the population. In the 1970s that number grew to 7%. Today that number is 20%. All regions of the nation indicate growth in the “Nones,” but its growth is especially pronounced among whites, the young, and men. To be more specific, about 30% of this 20% (i.e., about 6% of the American public) consider themselves atheists or agnostics. The rest of that 20% consider themselves indifferent to religion. As the columnist Michael Gerson argues, “Though the nones are varied and occasionally confused, their overall growth has been swift and unprecedented. This has occasioned scholarly disagreement over the causes. Clearly, the social stigma against being religiously unaffiliated has faded . . . the decline of religious conformity is itself a major social development....”

The trend runs across all Christian denominations, from evangelical to progressive, from old line to emerging church, from those who worship traditionally to those who have contemporary worship. It has certainly been true for The United Methodist Church, and it is not because of our theology or the positions our denomination has taken on social issues. All forms of organized religion are experiencing decreases.

We’ve experienced a decline in the number of members of this church, although it has stabilized in the last few years. But even so, when I’ve had the opportunity to talk to people who have become inactive or withdrawn their membership, some have told me that they just don’t get anything out of worshiping in church, or that being a member of a congregation doesn’t make them any better of a person. They don’t see the need to belong to a church.

  1. The very first congregation I was appointed to in Southeast Portland was a dying congregation. Their social hall was rented out to a Bible Church whose building had burned down. On any given Sunday morning, the elderly people in our church listened longingly to the vibrant music floating down the hallway that separated our worship services. They wondered if their church would ever have that kind of life again. The Sunday school rooms were empty, dust collecting on old curriculum materials and pictures from the 1960’s still hanging on the walls. Empty pews stared back at the pulpit on Sunday mornings. Weeds grew in the flower beds. Income from a Head Start program and newspaper recycling program helped pay the bills. We started a new path of renewal in the years I was there. That church closed a few years back. It was a sad day for me.

(But there’s hope! A new wind is blowing in a non-traditional new church start that’sconnecting again with people in that part of Portland who are unchurched and de-churched.)

  1. Can these bones live?

The valley of dry bones is a frightening, discouraging, lonely place... especially when it is your church. It’s not a new thing. Ancient Israel in exile was as good as dead, cut off, without hope. Ezekiel looked upon Israel and he saw a valley of bones… bones so dead they were dry. Yet the vision told of a wind; a holy, mysterious, life-giving wind that blew through the valley, re-membered those detached dry bones, put flesh on them, and gave life... just like God’s holy breath hovering over the dark waters of Creation, bringing forth life from chaos, just like God’s breath was breathed into the man and woman in the garden creating humanity out of the earth, whispering life.

  1. God speaks through Ezekiel’s vision to today’s church, which at times can seem as lifeless as a valley of dry bones. He speaks of the life-giving Spirit of God, at work when the word of the Lord is heard. Life…breath… wind…new creation… follows in the trail of God’s Spirit.

III.

  1. So today we gather to hear the story of the creation of the Christian Church. We say Pentecost Sunday is the church’s birthday. But there’s an elephant in the room. There’s a dark cloud hanging over us today… a nagging question that becomes more and more urgent each year that passes.

Can these bones live?

Ezekiel wasn’t the only one who wondered about the answer to that question. “Only God knows,” he said. If there is to be life for dead bones, it won’t come primarily through human effort or some act of self-improvement. As one author suggested, this question is “particularly significant in an age which seems to believe that the answer to the malaise of the churches is new structures or new organizations.”

Try as we might, tweaking our theology, changing our structures, updating our social stances, hiring slick marketing consultants, jazzing up our church programming, or replacing the leadershipis not going to give dry bones new life! It’s little more than putting fancy clothes on a skeleton!

  1. Dried up Christians and their churches find their hopelessness overcome in an openness to –in a meeting with – the living Lord, who alone gives life through the Word and the Spirit. If this congregation lives, if we survive and thrive over the long run as Christ’s people here in this place, it will be as a gift that comes from beyond ourselves; the result of God’s gracious Spirit blowing through this place, giving us that which we cannot and could not create on our own. It will be because of an act of God, some stunning act of creation, not unlike that of bringing to life those bones in a dark, stone-sealed tomb one Easter morning. Resurrection!

Can these bones live?

  1. Brothers and sisters, there are a multitude of death-dealing realities in our society today; things that divide us; boundaries of economic class, race, gender, age and belief that come between us. Even the church can be overwhelmed. It’s easy to despair! Hope begins to whither and we find ourselves mindlessly going through the motions. Or not. Some of us just walk away all together.

We live in such a fragmented world, a disjointed society, which is the very death of community and unity.

Can these bones live?

  1. How on earth can we be formed into onevigorous body, one family?How can these dry bones live?

And suddenly Pentecost happens…

Pray for the Holy Spirit, my friends. For without the Spirit of God breathed into our life together we’re as good as dead!