Back to life
Commentary
Dry bones. Fleshly living. Stinking body in the grave. This is not a day for natural exuberance. How much nicer to look at a world in the week of its creation, when all is green and vivid with promise; to caress an animal and feel it pulsing; to reach out to the hand of a friend.
The Christian church, however, is not a museum, an antique shop, a house of the dead, a desert scene -- though it often looks like each of these. It is a place of life: of people returned from exile, of those who would naturally limp but can dance, whose eyes were dimmed but now they see.
How move from one vision to the other? In the scene with Martha in the gospel we come across a well-schooled character who had learned from the rabbis a doctrine, the doctrine of the resurrection. She knew, she said, that at the last day there would be a resurrection. But that gave her no hope. Her imagination, her field of vision, her horizon, were restricted by what the day brought. And it brought mourning, loss, hopelessness, dryness, and death.
How move from one vision to the other? The question remains. In the case of Ezekiel, by a crazy-sounding prophecy whose outcome, the new life for Israel, became the subject of realistic post-exilic headlines. In the case of Paul, by the evidence of
lives lived "in the Spirit." And in John's gospel, by the presence of Jesus who did not, does not, want Martha or any of us to wait for the last day to have something to celebrate. No, right before her, ready to be noticed and relied upon, was and is the one who is the resurrection and the life.
Being made aware of that is a gift of the word; getting to stimulate awareness is the assignment to and the gift of the preacher "in the Spirit."
Grist For The Mill
Ezekiel 37:1-14
If we had our choice, many of us, including the present writer, would just as soon skip the book of Ezekiel. One pictures Mrs. Ezekiel ("the delight of my eyes," who goes unmourned when she dies -- see Ezekiel 24, or skip it if you have trouble with such things) hearing on one more morning what her husband saw in a vision the night before: oh, no! Psychiatrists would have had a field day: Is this a schizophrenic, a maniac sort, or what? The people who like him best are literalists who take his visionary and figurative language of exile and apply it to the world covered by today's television. No, others like him, too: the filmmakers who liberalize the Apocalypse for the churchly audience gravitate to Ezekiel, too. I would not be surprised if the LSD-takers would not also find a kin in him.
And yet, in his wildest vision, his most figurative moments, his apocalyptic utterances, Ezekiel gets things right, most right. That is the case with this vision of a valley of dry bones. Some see in his prophecy an anticipation of the resurrection of the dead, an otherwise vastly undertreated concept in the Hebrew scriptures. Everyone can see in Ezekiel a word for people who have had, a people that has, an experience of exile.
The life had gone out of Israel. Israel was nothing now but a skeleton, brittle and sun-whitened skull and bones, no focus for hope or future. Whatever else is going on here, however, there is the astonishingly vivid kind of disclosure -- compare etchings of William Blake, the writings of the mystics, the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth -- in which we are pushed to the boundaries and beyond them. To a God who makes something of nothing, gives life where there had been death and promise where hope had been gone.
Romans 8:6-11
If the Old Testament reading was too remote from our usual ways of thinking to move the heart and mind of every preacher, it should be refreshing to move to the safe, secure, calm, literal world of the New Testament letters. So it would seem. But the
appearance here, as so often, deceives. Instead, reading Ezekiel turns out to be a warm-up exercise for a really shocking disclosure, a revelation of what God has in mind for people who are visited by the Spirit. In Ezekiel the spirit, the wind, was present. Here the wind, "the Spirit of God dwells in you."
Paul uses extreme language here, voicing views that are dangerous if one hears them slightly out of their own center. No one should have difficulty with the down side of Romans 8: of course, the mind set on flesh is not just dead; it "is death." It spreads contagious terminal spiritual disease; it carries the mark of the malevolent in its marrow; "those who are in the flesh cannot please God." Since we all naturally live there, in the flesh, it is easy to park the mind there, or at least to let it idle in the flesh. And beyond the zone where God is pleased.
But "the spirit of God dwells in you." That is a good call for the would-be arrogant. But Paul does not treat this as a dangerous idea so much as an enabling one. More is given to and more is expected from the one in whom the Spirit of God dwells. The end of the story of Jesus' life left him entombed, dead as the Ezekielian dry bones -- and yet Israel came back from exile, which translated meant back to life, now a life without bounds. If God could do that through the spirit, the same God can work life in those of faith. The body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit lives, and lives "in you."
John 11:1-45
A standard part of the plot in the New Testament is made up of scenes in which people, by getting something a bit wrong, get it wholly wrong, and get nothing out of "it." Those who thought they could reintroduce law into the gospel got just enough wrong to get everything wrong. Those who thought they could please God by trying to please God ended up boasting and thus boasted "in vain."
So with life. The story of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus illustrates something of this get-it-a-bit-wrong syndrome. Not until Martha gets things wholly right do we feel the fresh breeze of the Spirit.
She did get things half right, and thus wrong. Her brother Lazarus had been dying and Jesus inexplicably poked along, letting him die. Since Lazarus is brought back from the tomb to look around at life and be looked at, one might think that his sisters did not have to invest too much in their grieving. But anyone who has ever been told that a loved one has died or been killed, suffers terribly as a result of the news, even if that person has not really died. He was unreal to them.
Now, Martha: Jesus finally shows up, and confronts her. Martha opens the conversation: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." Jesus: "Your brother will rise again." Cold comfort; she knows her catechism, we would say. She was close as anyone to catching on to what being in the Spirit and having life were to mean. Again, she got cold comfort.
What she missed was the presence in front of her of the one who was and is the resurrection, embodied. Jesus gave back Lazarus, and hope, and faith, and knowledge.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Coming into what is now Israel from the East requires crossing the Jordan Valley, virtually every part of it familiar from some aspect of biblical history.
When the bus approached an outlook surveying the valley, spreading north and south as far as the eye could see and miles across, the guide said, "Now you are going to do in 40 minutes what Moses wanted to do for 40 years and failed." In just that time, the Allenby Bridge -- strategically huge but physically hardly more than a creek crossing -- was under the bus, a swarm of border guards and truckloads of Palestinian workers waiting.
Through customs, a couple of hours of minute examination at maximum, a lot longer for the Palestinians, lies Jericho. There are no markers for Rahab's house or for Zacchaeus' mansion, either, but it is easy to imagine Joshua and Caleb sidling into
town or Jesus appearing in the dusty street while that little man was crawling out onto another limb. The trees are beautiful. But for all of that, the town isn't much. Aside from people's dress and the architecture, it could be in West Texas, Arizona or the Columbia Basin.
Leaving Jericho, the bus climbs again, moving through the hills on the same way that the man went in the parable of the Good Samaritan. In fact, the road ascends all the way to Jerusalem, passing Bethany and the Mount of Olives along the way.
Going north and south from Jericho isn't quite so dramatic, but either direction is the land of Scripture. South a ways, down the rift, lies the Dead Sea, beside it the Qumran Caves, above it Masada. North is the desert of John the Baptist, the Jordan in which he baptized, and finally the Sea of Galilee.
A valley of history, it is also a valley of death, one of the earliest cities of human population. It has been fought over since time immemorial, the casualties of one conflict moldering into dust to cover the remains of other generations to follow. A tell under excavation just north of the town was a 25- to 30-foot high mound of human remains, the partially decayed mingled with the fully decayed in the midst of shards of pottery and other artifacts, artifices, really, of the human quest for control, survival.
This is Ezekiel's valley, in which death ruled unchallenged for millennia until those dusty feet carried in a man from the north, in whose voice the ruah cut loose, breath of life, to fulfill the old prophet's prediction. Death assumed it could put him to sleep down there, too, bones bleaching to nothingness in a history slowly being forgotten. But God wouldn't have it, and neither will you: Lent is turning toward Easter now, the risen one is tipping his hand, even in such a graveyard.
The Christian church, however, is not a museum, an antique shop, a house of the dead, a desert scene -- though it often looks like each of these. It is a place of life: of people returned from exile, of those who would naturally limp but can dance, whose eyes were dimmed but now they see.
How move from one vision to the other? In the scene with Martha in the gospel we come across a well-schooled character who had learned from the rabbis a doctrine, the doctrine of the resurrection. She knew, she said, that at the last day there would be a resurrection. But that gave her no hope. Her imagination, her field of vision, her horizon, were restricted by what the day brought. And it brought mourning, loss, hopelessness, dryness, and death.
How move from one vision to the other? The question remains. In the case of Ezekiel, by a crazy-sounding prophecy whose outcome, the new life for Israel, became the subject of realistic post-exilic headlines. In the case of Paul, by the evidence of
lives lived "in the Spirit." And in John's gospel, by the presence of Jesus who did not, does not, want Martha or any of us to wait for the last day to have something to celebrate. No, right before her, ready to be noticed and relied upon, was and is the one who is the resurrection and the life.
Being made aware of that is a gift of the word; getting to stimulate awareness is the assignment to and the gift of the preacher "in the Spirit."
Grist For The Mill
Ezekiel 37:1-14
If we had our choice, many of us, including the present writer, would just as soon skip the book of Ezekiel. One pictures Mrs. Ezekiel ("the delight of my eyes," who goes unmourned when she dies -- see Ezekiel 24, or skip it if you have trouble with such things) hearing on one more morning what her husband saw in a vision the night before: oh, no! Psychiatrists would have had a field day: Is this a schizophrenic, a maniac sort, or what? The people who like him best are literalists who take his visionary and figurative language of exile and apply it to the world covered by today's television. No, others like him, too: the filmmakers who liberalize the Apocalypse for the churchly audience gravitate to Ezekiel, too. I would not be surprised if the LSD-takers would not also find a kin in him.
And yet, in his wildest vision, his most figurative moments, his apocalyptic utterances, Ezekiel gets things right, most right. That is the case with this vision of a valley of dry bones. Some see in his prophecy an anticipation of the resurrection of the dead, an otherwise vastly undertreated concept in the Hebrew scriptures. Everyone can see in Ezekiel a word for people who have had, a people that has, an experience of exile.
The life had gone out of Israel. Israel was nothing now but a skeleton, brittle and sun-whitened skull and bones, no focus for hope or future. Whatever else is going on here, however, there is the astonishingly vivid kind of disclosure -- compare etchings of William Blake, the writings of the mystics, the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth -- in which we are pushed to the boundaries and beyond them. To a God who makes something of nothing, gives life where there had been death and promise where hope had been gone.
Romans 8:6-11
If the Old Testament reading was too remote from our usual ways of thinking to move the heart and mind of every preacher, it should be refreshing to move to the safe, secure, calm, literal world of the New Testament letters. So it would seem. But the
appearance here, as so often, deceives. Instead, reading Ezekiel turns out to be a warm-up exercise for a really shocking disclosure, a revelation of what God has in mind for people who are visited by the Spirit. In Ezekiel the spirit, the wind, was present. Here the wind, "the Spirit of God dwells in you."
Paul uses extreme language here, voicing views that are dangerous if one hears them slightly out of their own center. No one should have difficulty with the down side of Romans 8: of course, the mind set on flesh is not just dead; it "is death." It spreads contagious terminal spiritual disease; it carries the mark of the malevolent in its marrow; "those who are in the flesh cannot please God." Since we all naturally live there, in the flesh, it is easy to park the mind there, or at least to let it idle in the flesh. And beyond the zone where God is pleased.
But "the spirit of God dwells in you." That is a good call for the would-be arrogant. But Paul does not treat this as a dangerous idea so much as an enabling one. More is given to and more is expected from the one in whom the Spirit of God dwells. The end of the story of Jesus' life left him entombed, dead as the Ezekielian dry bones -- and yet Israel came back from exile, which translated meant back to life, now a life without bounds. If God could do that through the spirit, the same God can work life in those of faith. The body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit lives, and lives "in you."
John 11:1-45
A standard part of the plot in the New Testament is made up of scenes in which people, by getting something a bit wrong, get it wholly wrong, and get nothing out of "it." Those who thought they could reintroduce law into the gospel got just enough wrong to get everything wrong. Those who thought they could please God by trying to please God ended up boasting and thus boasted "in vain."
So with life. The story of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus illustrates something of this get-it-a-bit-wrong syndrome. Not until Martha gets things wholly right do we feel the fresh breeze of the Spirit.
She did get things half right, and thus wrong. Her brother Lazarus had been dying and Jesus inexplicably poked along, letting him die. Since Lazarus is brought back from the tomb to look around at life and be looked at, one might think that his sisters did not have to invest too much in their grieving. But anyone who has ever been told that a loved one has died or been killed, suffers terribly as a result of the news, even if that person has not really died. He was unreal to them.
Now, Martha: Jesus finally shows up, and confronts her. Martha opens the conversation: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." Jesus: "Your brother will rise again." Cold comfort; she knows her catechism, we would say. She was close as anyone to catching on to what being in the Spirit and having life were to mean. Again, she got cold comfort.
What she missed was the presence in front of her of the one who was and is the resurrection, embodied. Jesus gave back Lazarus, and hope, and faith, and knowledge.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Coming into what is now Israel from the East requires crossing the Jordan Valley, virtually every part of it familiar from some aspect of biblical history.
When the bus approached an outlook surveying the valley, spreading north and south as far as the eye could see and miles across, the guide said, "Now you are going to do in 40 minutes what Moses wanted to do for 40 years and failed." In just that time, the Allenby Bridge -- strategically huge but physically hardly more than a creek crossing -- was under the bus, a swarm of border guards and truckloads of Palestinian workers waiting.
Through customs, a couple of hours of minute examination at maximum, a lot longer for the Palestinians, lies Jericho. There are no markers for Rahab's house or for Zacchaeus' mansion, either, but it is easy to imagine Joshua and Caleb sidling into
town or Jesus appearing in the dusty street while that little man was crawling out onto another limb. The trees are beautiful. But for all of that, the town isn't much. Aside from people's dress and the architecture, it could be in West Texas, Arizona or the Columbia Basin.
Leaving Jericho, the bus climbs again, moving through the hills on the same way that the man went in the parable of the Good Samaritan. In fact, the road ascends all the way to Jerusalem, passing Bethany and the Mount of Olives along the way.
Going north and south from Jericho isn't quite so dramatic, but either direction is the land of Scripture. South a ways, down the rift, lies the Dead Sea, beside it the Qumran Caves, above it Masada. North is the desert of John the Baptist, the Jordan in which he baptized, and finally the Sea of Galilee.
A valley of history, it is also a valley of death, one of the earliest cities of human population. It has been fought over since time immemorial, the casualties of one conflict moldering into dust to cover the remains of other generations to follow. A tell under excavation just north of the town was a 25- to 30-foot high mound of human remains, the partially decayed mingled with the fully decayed in the midst of shards of pottery and other artifacts, artifices, really, of the human quest for control, survival.
This is Ezekiel's valley, in which death ruled unchallenged for millennia until those dusty feet carried in a man from the north, in whose voice the ruah cut loose, breath of life, to fulfill the old prophet's prediction. Death assumed it could put him to sleep down there, too, bones bleaching to nothingness in a history slowly being forgotten. But God wouldn't have it, and neither will you: Lent is turning toward Easter now, the risen one is tipping his hand, even in such a graveyard.
