Of clones and bones and the Spirit of life
Commentary
From The Washington Post, November 25, 2001: "Scientists in Massachusetts said today they had succeeded in creating the first cloned human embryos, a controversial advance intended to speed the development of new medical therapies but which could also hasten the arrival of the world's first cloned baby."
The controversy that has been on-again and off-again is on again. Cloning: the scientific manipulation of cells and their genetic structures in order to produce an identical copy of an organism. It began with Dolly, the Scottish sheep that was a clone of another sheep. It has moved on to deal with issues of abortion and stem-cell research and the possibility of growing new organs from stem cells to replace diseased and damaged organs. There is the issue of whether the government should pay for stem-cell research and whether cloning should be allowed at all. And now they have cloned human embryos.
It all seems to feed the absurd hope that some people harbor that if they could clone themselves, they would have a form of immortality, a way for them to continue their existence, as if a clone could, through some strange alchemy, have the same consciousness -- and memories and awareness -- that a person possesses now. And this is not even to mention the sheer arrogance of wanting to produce exact copies of yourself, even if it could be done.
But however strange it may sound, there is no doubt about it: for many people cloning means salvation, in some form or other.
And it all points out the extreme hope, the false hope, that human beings seek in things corporeal, things carnal, things physical. As a culture, we look for salvation in the physical things of life, not the spiritual. But the testimony of the Bible, and of these three passages, is that the physical is not the final, there is vastly more to life than the physical. There is something called a Spirit that animates us, that brings us life. And that is from God.
Ezekiel 37:1-14
One of the problems with the lectionary -- any lectionary -- is that by definition it lifts out and isolates biblical passages for study or worship. It takes them out of their context, which in turn leads to a fragmentary reading of the Bible. Ezekiel 37:1-14 falls into that category. This reading appears in the Revised Common Lectionary five times over the three-year cycle, certainly because the account is vivid and striking. Yet the fact that it is so striking makes it easy to overlook the context of the reading.
Ezekiel is an exilic prophet. That's the first piece of context, and what it means is that Israel has already ceased to exist, at least as its own nation. It means that the people have been carried away to another land. It means that the people are dispirited and any future existence of the nation is doubtful. In other words, the body is utterly still, not even warm. In fact, the image of the valley of dry bones makes it clear that the flesh is gone from the body, and that the bones have lain in the sun long enough to be bleached. Is there any hope for life when death is so clear? In the vision, death has happened, long, long before. The lament of the bones in verse 11, and therefore of Israel, is that "hope is lost; we are cut off completely." From what? From the land of Israel? From God? From their past? Let's face it, the answer is: All of the above.
The second bit of context, the more immediate context, is a section of the book of Ezekiel about the new Israel. Ezekiel has prophesied to the land and the mountains of Israel that they shall again see people and flocks upon them. There is a prophecy about the reunification of the kingdom and a prophecy about the battle of Gog and Magog, the apocalyptic battle that ends with the restoration.
In other words, the valley of dry bones is not an isolated prophecy of new life for Israel. Instead, it is one of multiple visions that together constitute a reaffirmation of God's promise. After all, in the sweeping scope of the Old Testament, God had promised the land to Abraham and had continued to promise it for the next thousand years in various ways to Isaac and Jacob, to Moses and David, to the prophets, and to other leaders of Israel. In the midst of questions and anguish, God hasn't forgotten; it is still a promise, despite the defeat and exile of the nation. In new situations, God always reiterates the promise.
But how will it happen? What is the means by which the nation will be restored? Of course, the vision is precisely that -- a vision only, not a literal account. Yet there is a distinct truth that emerges from the vision for how new life comes about.
Let's do a brief word study. The Hebrew word ruah is used 10 times in these verses, translated variously: breath, wind, or spirit. Just to get a sense of the word's breadth of meaning, remember that in Genesis 1:2, it is a rah of God that is moving across the face of the waters, and in Genesis 3:8, Adam and Eve heard the sound of God walking in the ruah of the day. It is the thing that moves, that is alive without seeing it, the thing that is sent forth from God. And it is the thing that animates the bones.
The passage has a constant interplay of meanings of ruah. So it was by the rah (NRSV: "spirit") of God that Ezekiel came to the valley. At God's direction he prophesied that ruah (NRSV: "breath") would enter the bones. He called the breath from the four ruah (NRSV: "winds").
Much of what happens in the vision is through Ezekiel, but there is no doubt at all: Even though the prophet spoke the words by which the bones came together and by which the breath entered the spiritless bodies, it was the work of God.
There is hope, says the vision, of new life for Israel; there is hope and even assurance that the nation will exist again. But it's not just new life that is important here. What's important is a new life that is given by God, through God's breath and God's wind and God's spirit, which, really, if the Hebrews are right, are the same thing.
Romans 8:6-11
If you read this passage quickly, you might come away from it thinking that Paul was down on anything to do with the body and the flesh. As a matter of fact, Paul seems to be getting perilously close to Manichaeism, the Gnostic heresy that taught the dualism that the body and flesh are bad, while the spirit and the soul are good. There were indeed in the early church Christians who saw anything material and physical as bad, the work of the so-called Demiurge, while the spirit was the creation of God.
But that's not what Paul is presenting here. First of all, Paul often engages in overstatement, and so we must take such lines as "those who are in the flesh cannot please God" as hyperbole.
More importantly, Paul is describing not two different creations, which is what the Gnostics held, but two different realms, spheres of endeavor or influence or power or understanding. Jesus said, "God is spirit," so God's realm is a spiritual realm. To be sure, God is the creator of the flesh, along with everything else in creation. But it is important to affirm that we who are flesh, we who are carnal, are created to lift our eyes to God and God's Spirit, and to the world of the Spirit, which by another name is the kingdom. And not only lift our eyes to it, but in some mystical way, to dwell therein.
What Paul is speaking about is that strange Christian phenomenon that is expressed in many different ways: being "in Christ," or living "in the Spirit," or having Christ "in you," or having the Spirit "in you." Though worded variously, these are all the same. They all mean an utterly changed focus, from the body, the here and now, the material, things we admit are temporary and ephemeral, to spiritual things, lasting and deep things.
To put it plainly, as Hamlet said, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." There is vastly more to creation and life than simply the physical, just the carnal or material. There is love and hope and faith. There is aspiration and commitment and selflessness. There is spirit. There is God.
With verse 9, Paul offers a word of reassurance to the church. "You are in that spiritual realm," Paul says, "because the Spirit is in you." And therefore, even though the mortal part of us will die, we will be raised with Christ, because of the Spirit in us. In other words, Paul says to the church at Rome and, by extension, to us, "Despite appearances to the contrary, despite the body that will die, you are already in that spiritual realm, in that kingdom."
John 11:1-45
The raising of Lazarus is the sixth sign of the Gospel of John, the signs being that specific series of miracles that are reported by John in order to induce faith in the reader and the hearer. Moreover, because many Jews came to believe (v. 45), this is the particular miracle that leads to Jesus' condemnation and crucifixion.
There are in this passage many memorable and famous lines, such as verse 25, "I am the resurrection and the life," any of which could be taken as the basis for a sermon. That is not inappropriate, but for our purposes, we need to consider the story as a whole and set aside the tag lines for the moment.
The problems hit us right off the bat. In verses 4-5 we hear the strange reason that Jesus decided to tarry. It is implied that Jesus stayed longer in order that Lazarus would die, whereupon Jesus could then raise him and thus show God's glory. In fact, it is more than mere implication, because it adds the note about staying even though he loved the three of them, Lazarus and his sisters. Jesus makes the point again in verse 15, that he was glad he wasn't there for the sake of the belief of the disciples. Jesus justifies it in verse 4 on the grounds that Lazarus' illness is not one that leads to death. Well, that simply turns out to be wrong, at least in ordinary and immediate terms.
The problem here is that what Jesus does seems so calculated, so carefully crafted a plan, that he would let Lazarus die, and then go rescue him, as it were, from the clutches of death, all in order to make some point and convert a few Jews. It is very troubling.
Certainly others in the narrative have problems with it. There are at least three rebukes of Jesus for his failure to come earlier and prevent Lazarus' death. In verse 21 Martha tells Jesus, "If you had been here, my brother would not have died." Mary says the same thing in verse 32. And the crowd wonders about it in verse 37.
Of course, this is not the first time that any of them, or any of us for that matter, had asked the question: "Why didn't God...?" Heal Lazarus? Cure the cancer? Why would God let the child die of leukemia? With Job, we always rage against God's inaction in the face of tragedy.
But Jesus is not entirely cold-hearted, is he? He loved the three siblings. He was deeply moved by their grief, and he himself weeps at the loss of Lazarus. So what gives?
Well, what gives is that this is less a reporting of events and facts by the evangelist than a message, a kerygma, a point to get across. This is the story of one of the miraculous signs about Jesus. John has Jesus operating on another wavelength, with other concerns, than ordinary things of life. His main concern is not the death of one man, even a friend. Yes, it is indeed troubling to think that Jesus would let a man die whom he could have kept alive, or that Jesus would have toyed with the emotions of Martha and Mary, but he had another agenda, a heavenly agenda, a "spiritual" agenda, just as he had another agenda in the story of the first sign, the wedding at Cana, when he told his mother that his time had not yet come. In the Gospel of John, Jesus operates in his own time, and his own purpose.
So at one level this is about life, and it asks what life consists of. Is it just the body? Is it something else? But this is also about Jesus, about who he is, and about the fact that he is, ultimately, the Lord of life, and of death. Even death does not hold sway over Jesus. There are clearly anticipatory echoes in this of Jesus' own death and resurrection, which we know will affirm his sovereignty over life and death.
Application
The cloning debate is just one more small building block in a long trend in western culture: modernism. The modernist impulse in human society -- modernist meaning, for the moment, post-enlightenment -- looks toward the physical, away from the spiritual, away from the immaterial, for hope. Modernism sees and emphasizes the relentless march of scientific progress, that science will solve even the deep, existential human problems.
Consider health care. Doctors perform more tests to be absolutely sure, while hospitals add more and more high-tech equipment. Costs continually climb, more money is poured into health care, and more human hope is invested in it all the time, for the good life, for well being, for salvation.
Consider the Human Genome Project, the project to identify all of the 30,000 or so genes in human DNA, and to create a database of the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA. It holds the hope, its researchers say, of new health and the possibility of curing some of the human scourges of the past. There is an almost evangelistic fervor to the project. Here is yet another hope for human salvation.
In all of it, the thinking seems to be, save the body, and you save the soul.
But that goes dead against Christianity, and dead against the message of the three lectionary passages, which is that there is vastly more to life than the physical, indeed, the physical is not the final, it is not of supreme importance.
In the valley of dry bones, what becomes clear is that, even after the bones have flesh on them, they still depend on the spirit and the breath of God for there to be life in them. The mere physical presence of a body does not make life. In Romans, Paul makes the point that to be in Christ, to live the new life, means that we have set aside the flesh, that we are no longer people of the body, but people of the Spirit, dwelling in another realm. When Jesus raised Lazarus he said three words, "Lazarus, come out!" making the point perhaps best of all, that the death of the body is not the final outcome of who we are, or the final answer to the riddle of life, because even that natural process falls under his authority. It is all testimony to the life and the place of the Spirit.
Perhaps a trivial little parallel will enlighten: the computer that I am sitting in front of as I write. It consists of hardware -- a keyboard, a monitor, a CPU, a printer, and all of the other pieces of sub-hardware buried beneath the cover. It also consists of software, series of instructions that are recorded magnetically on floppy disks or optically on CDs. But where is the animating thing, the thing that makes it go, that makes it something more than a high-tech paperweight? For that we need to look beyond the desktop, to the plug in the wall, and beyond that to the wiring in the house, and thence to the pole outside, and to the power company and the vast infrastructure through which the computer can function. There is always something beyond the desktop.
Now there are certainly dangers of taking this comparison between body and spirit, computer and electricity too far. But the point is that so often the human focus is on the hardware and the software of life, to the neglect of the thing that animates, that makes it go. And for human beings, that is God's breath.
One of the problems with the secular, scientific findings that are being peddled as a salvation of sorts, lies in the fact that they are off in some distant future, some parallel universe, ignoring the here and now. That is, interestingly, a common criticism of Christianity, that it looks only to the future -- to heaven and the resurrection and the afterlife -- and not to the here and now.
These passages of scripture, particularly the Old Testament and the Gospel, deal with the resurrection, with rebirth, with new life. They deal with the spirit that animates each of us, which is given to us by God. Yet the focus in all of them, while they look beyond death, is really on life here and now. They are about living in hope, living knowing that Christ is Lord of life, living the life of the Spirit. In the Ezekiel reading, the prophecy is to produce hope. In Romans, Paul's exhortations are to produce reassurance. In the Gospel, John's effort is to bring people to belief. Those are all here and now things.
The world of the spirit is not in the distant future. It is with us now. Death, the thing that we who are mortal rage against, that we fight against with technology and with cloning and with our own little edifices of immortality that we build, may not be the worst thing in the world, because this life and this body that we cling to so tenaciously aren't all there is. There is the world of the spirit, the kingdom of God. And maybe we can lift our eyes from the minutiae of the material world and the material life, lift our eyes from the desktop and from the mirror, and for a while look toward heaven and the world of the spirit. And perhaps know ourselves to be citizens of that realm.
Alternative Applications
1) Ezekiel: The bone valleys of our lives. Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones is a vision about Israel. The bones symbolize a dead nation that needed new life. In the same way, they can represent parts of our lives that need reanimating, where we need newness, where we need God's breath breathed into us. What are the dry bone valleys for each of us? A lukewarm relationship? A dead-end job that no longer fulfills us? The rebirth that God promises is not just about a nation or the resurrection of the dead. It is also about the dead parts of our lives, which can take on new meaning and freshness if we actually recognize that they are dry bones, and then let ourselves be filled with God's breath. And for most of us, that happens in the community of faith.
2) John: Jesus' tears. An old lady of my acquaintance took delight in asking if I knew what the shortest verse in scripture was and delight in answering her own question, "Jesus wept." (In the KJV, that is true.) Yet for its brevity, John 11:35 covers a lot of territory. It is about Jesus' humanness and his compassion. It is about friendship and human relationships. It suggests that maybe even God can weep over human pain. It is about a visible demonstration of love.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
Ezekiel 37:1-14
We are all vaguely familiar with this passage of scripture from the spiritual based on it. "Thigh bone joined to the hip bone ... O hear the Word of the Lord." But to understand it, we must put it in its historical setting in the Old Testament.
The time is probably about 586 B.C. when most of the inhabitants of Judah have been carried into exile in Babylonia, under the rule of the great emperor Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562 B.C.). Only the poorest peasants have been allowed to remain in Jerusalem and its surrounding territory. Among the exiles in the foreign land is the prophet Ezekiel, who was carried into captivity, along with the rulers and leaders of Judah, in the first deportation of 597 B.C. Ezekiel carried on his prophetic ministry in Babylonia, and in that ministry he was granted a series of ecstatic experiences, in which he was given to see and hear the words of God (1:3; 3:22; 8:1, 3; 33:22; 40:1). This passage concerning the valley of dry bones is one of those experiences.
"The hand of the Lord was upon me," testifies Ezekiel. That is, he was given an ecstatic vision, in which he was brought by the Spirit of the Lord into the midst of a valley littered with dry human skeletons. And the Lord asks the prophet, "Son of man" -- that is, you weak mortal creature -- "can these bones live?" To the question, Ezekiel wisely replies, "O Lord God, thou knowest." That is, only the Lord God, who is the Creator and Sustainer of all life, knows whether or not persons can live. The wellspring of life, the ability to live and to exist is given from no other source. God gives life or he withholds it. "... I make alive," God declares (Deuteronomy 33:39).
What are we to make of this strange vision told us by the prophet? It is intended to be a portrayal of Israel's life in Babylonian exile. In that captivity, Israel considers herself to be dead. As she says in verse 11, "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off." That is, the Judahites have lost all hope for the future, and they consider themselves to be lifeless because they are cut off from God. God has sent them away from himself into exile because of their sins against him. And separated from the one Source of life, their God, the people of Israel cannot live. They have become "no people," as the prophet Hosea foretold also of the northern Israelites who disappeared into Assyrian exile (Hosea 1:9 in the Hebrew). The thought is comparable to that in Genesis 2:7. Unless the Lord God breathes his breath of life into a human being, that being remains a dead hunk of clay, lifeless. And Israel in Babylo-nian exile considers itself to be lifeless, like a valley full of bones that have become very dry.
We might compare that picture to our own lives. Are we, too, lifeless, without a hope for the future, without vitality and any zest for living, without any animating spirit within us because we are cut off from God? Have our multiple sins of commission and omission separated us from his presence? Have a whole series of bad choices led us into some desolate valley?
In his book, Beginning Without End, Sam Keen portrays the tragedies of modern life so well. He writes, "Nearing the mythical age of 40, I fell in love with a young woman and left a home that had been rich in care, in fighting, in lovemaking on Sunday mornings, in shared memories of the birth of children, in the myriad details that weave the lives of solitary individuals into a single family. Whether divorce was an act of courage or betrayal remains moot ... One rainy morning I awoke alone in an apartment in San Francisco with the realization that my marriage had finished, my wife had remarried, my children were living far away, my lover had departed, and my academic career had been abandoned." Surely the question in regard to such failures is: "Son of Man, can these bones live?" And the only answer possible is the one that Ezekiel gave, "Oh, Lord God, thou knowest." For over against our major and minor failures, our deadly days of just one d-- thing after another, over against our lives of quiet desperation, stands only One who can give us any future and hope and any redeemed existence. Over against our lives-like-unto-death stands the God of life.
So it is in our scripture lesson that Ezekiel is given the Word of God. "O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord ... Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live" (vv. 4-5) ... "Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man" (v. 9) ... "So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great host" (v. 10). Like God breathing the breath of life into that dead hunk of clay that is Adam in Genesis 2, God breathes new life into his seemingly dead exiles in Babylonia. And what he tells them is that he will raise them from their living death and take them once more home again to their land of Israel (vv. 12, 14).
You note in our text that it is not the spirit, but the Word of God, spoken by the prophet, that gives new life and a future to the people of Israel. "Spirit" in this passage is synonymous with "breath," with the breath of life. The Word is that which gives life. And surely it is the Word of God, spoken to us not only by Ezekiel, but also by our Lord in our New Testament lesson from John that is able to raise us from our graves of sin. You and I are going to die, fellow sinners. Indeed, some of us are already as good as dead. But God in his incredible mercy does not wish our death. Instead he speaks those magnificent words to us. "I will raise you from your graves" (Ezekiel 37:13). "Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die" (John 11:26).
You see, he forgives us, doesn't he? Our sins do not determine our final fate or future. Instead, God, in love with us, gives us his Word by which we can live both now and eternally. And our valley of dry bones is transformed into a living, breathing, praising multitude of those who know that God is their Lord. For that is the purpose of God's gift of life to us, isn't it? Over and over again our text tells us that. When Israel is raised from her grave of exile, then they will know that God is the Lord (vv. 6, 13, 14). And that is the purpose for which he gives us life in Jesus Christ also -- that we may know that he is the Lord, and that we may tell all people that Good News. God is the incredible, awesome Lord of love who wills to give us life, abundant life, not only now but to all eternity. Thanks be to God!
THE POLITICAL PULPIT
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Since last summer, unemployment has been climbing, and the over-40 labor force has been hit hardest. This is evident in a comparison of employment statistics between 1970 to 1990. While nearly 80 percent of the 1970 work force was between 55 and 65, by 1990 only 65 percent of workers fell in that age group (Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, 92). In today's flexible economy, in which the bottom-line for the last quarter takes precedence over long-term productivity, older workers with higher salaries are not only expendable, they have little chance of finding a comparable position. Their bones are dry and brittle.
The problem of these numbers is even more tragic: Many of the poor were born into an environment in which education was not valued and many will raise children who will not value education. The cycle of poverty despite practicing a work ethic will continue to the next generation, and so "the bones of these working poor (as well those of the next generation) will be so dry."
Where is there hope? The church and other Americans of good will need to build coalitions that can pressure politicians to bring the dry bones to life. One considers the New Deal as an example of this dynamic. Social commentator Ellen Willis (Don't Think, Smile, 4) has observed that following World War II, business, labor and government, under pressure of socialist movements that challenged the validity of capitalism, formed a coalition that saved capitalism. Through the 1950s and 1960s, as capitalists relinquished some of their profits, this coalition produced America's most phenomenal era of economic growth, high wages, job security and social benefits. Could the church and its friends of goodwill not bring that kind of pressure to bear, to advocate for those who seem to have no hope -- the working poor and older victims of downsizing? More than money will be required. It will take educational opportunities, both affordable formal education and job retraining.
The controversy that has been on-again and off-again is on again. Cloning: the scientific manipulation of cells and their genetic structures in order to produce an identical copy of an organism. It began with Dolly, the Scottish sheep that was a clone of another sheep. It has moved on to deal with issues of abortion and stem-cell research and the possibility of growing new organs from stem cells to replace diseased and damaged organs. There is the issue of whether the government should pay for stem-cell research and whether cloning should be allowed at all. And now they have cloned human embryos.
It all seems to feed the absurd hope that some people harbor that if they could clone themselves, they would have a form of immortality, a way for them to continue their existence, as if a clone could, through some strange alchemy, have the same consciousness -- and memories and awareness -- that a person possesses now. And this is not even to mention the sheer arrogance of wanting to produce exact copies of yourself, even if it could be done.
But however strange it may sound, there is no doubt about it: for many people cloning means salvation, in some form or other.
And it all points out the extreme hope, the false hope, that human beings seek in things corporeal, things carnal, things physical. As a culture, we look for salvation in the physical things of life, not the spiritual. But the testimony of the Bible, and of these three passages, is that the physical is not the final, there is vastly more to life than the physical. There is something called a Spirit that animates us, that brings us life. And that is from God.
Ezekiel 37:1-14
One of the problems with the lectionary -- any lectionary -- is that by definition it lifts out and isolates biblical passages for study or worship. It takes them out of their context, which in turn leads to a fragmentary reading of the Bible. Ezekiel 37:1-14 falls into that category. This reading appears in the Revised Common Lectionary five times over the three-year cycle, certainly because the account is vivid and striking. Yet the fact that it is so striking makes it easy to overlook the context of the reading.
Ezekiel is an exilic prophet. That's the first piece of context, and what it means is that Israel has already ceased to exist, at least as its own nation. It means that the people have been carried away to another land. It means that the people are dispirited and any future existence of the nation is doubtful. In other words, the body is utterly still, not even warm. In fact, the image of the valley of dry bones makes it clear that the flesh is gone from the body, and that the bones have lain in the sun long enough to be bleached. Is there any hope for life when death is so clear? In the vision, death has happened, long, long before. The lament of the bones in verse 11, and therefore of Israel, is that "hope is lost; we are cut off completely." From what? From the land of Israel? From God? From their past? Let's face it, the answer is: All of the above.
The second bit of context, the more immediate context, is a section of the book of Ezekiel about the new Israel. Ezekiel has prophesied to the land and the mountains of Israel that they shall again see people and flocks upon them. There is a prophecy about the reunification of the kingdom and a prophecy about the battle of Gog and Magog, the apocalyptic battle that ends with the restoration.
In other words, the valley of dry bones is not an isolated prophecy of new life for Israel. Instead, it is one of multiple visions that together constitute a reaffirmation of God's promise. After all, in the sweeping scope of the Old Testament, God had promised the land to Abraham and had continued to promise it for the next thousand years in various ways to Isaac and Jacob, to Moses and David, to the prophets, and to other leaders of Israel. In the midst of questions and anguish, God hasn't forgotten; it is still a promise, despite the defeat and exile of the nation. In new situations, God always reiterates the promise.
But how will it happen? What is the means by which the nation will be restored? Of course, the vision is precisely that -- a vision only, not a literal account. Yet there is a distinct truth that emerges from the vision for how new life comes about.
Let's do a brief word study. The Hebrew word ruah is used 10 times in these verses, translated variously: breath, wind, or spirit. Just to get a sense of the word's breadth of meaning, remember that in Genesis 1:2, it is a rah of God that is moving across the face of the waters, and in Genesis 3:8, Adam and Eve heard the sound of God walking in the ruah of the day. It is the thing that moves, that is alive without seeing it, the thing that is sent forth from God. And it is the thing that animates the bones.
The passage has a constant interplay of meanings of ruah. So it was by the rah (NRSV: "spirit") of God that Ezekiel came to the valley. At God's direction he prophesied that ruah (NRSV: "breath") would enter the bones. He called the breath from the four ruah (NRSV: "winds").
Much of what happens in the vision is through Ezekiel, but there is no doubt at all: Even though the prophet spoke the words by which the bones came together and by which the breath entered the spiritless bodies, it was the work of God.
There is hope, says the vision, of new life for Israel; there is hope and even assurance that the nation will exist again. But it's not just new life that is important here. What's important is a new life that is given by God, through God's breath and God's wind and God's spirit, which, really, if the Hebrews are right, are the same thing.
Romans 8:6-11
If you read this passage quickly, you might come away from it thinking that Paul was down on anything to do with the body and the flesh. As a matter of fact, Paul seems to be getting perilously close to Manichaeism, the Gnostic heresy that taught the dualism that the body and flesh are bad, while the spirit and the soul are good. There were indeed in the early church Christians who saw anything material and physical as bad, the work of the so-called Demiurge, while the spirit was the creation of God.
But that's not what Paul is presenting here. First of all, Paul often engages in overstatement, and so we must take such lines as "those who are in the flesh cannot please God" as hyperbole.
More importantly, Paul is describing not two different creations, which is what the Gnostics held, but two different realms, spheres of endeavor or influence or power or understanding. Jesus said, "God is spirit," so God's realm is a spiritual realm. To be sure, God is the creator of the flesh, along with everything else in creation. But it is important to affirm that we who are flesh, we who are carnal, are created to lift our eyes to God and God's Spirit, and to the world of the Spirit, which by another name is the kingdom. And not only lift our eyes to it, but in some mystical way, to dwell therein.
What Paul is speaking about is that strange Christian phenomenon that is expressed in many different ways: being "in Christ," or living "in the Spirit," or having Christ "in you," or having the Spirit "in you." Though worded variously, these are all the same. They all mean an utterly changed focus, from the body, the here and now, the material, things we admit are temporary and ephemeral, to spiritual things, lasting and deep things.
To put it plainly, as Hamlet said, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." There is vastly more to creation and life than simply the physical, just the carnal or material. There is love and hope and faith. There is aspiration and commitment and selflessness. There is spirit. There is God.
With verse 9, Paul offers a word of reassurance to the church. "You are in that spiritual realm," Paul says, "because the Spirit is in you." And therefore, even though the mortal part of us will die, we will be raised with Christ, because of the Spirit in us. In other words, Paul says to the church at Rome and, by extension, to us, "Despite appearances to the contrary, despite the body that will die, you are already in that spiritual realm, in that kingdom."
John 11:1-45
The raising of Lazarus is the sixth sign of the Gospel of John, the signs being that specific series of miracles that are reported by John in order to induce faith in the reader and the hearer. Moreover, because many Jews came to believe (v. 45), this is the particular miracle that leads to Jesus' condemnation and crucifixion.
There are in this passage many memorable and famous lines, such as verse 25, "I am the resurrection and the life," any of which could be taken as the basis for a sermon. That is not inappropriate, but for our purposes, we need to consider the story as a whole and set aside the tag lines for the moment.
The problems hit us right off the bat. In verses 4-5 we hear the strange reason that Jesus decided to tarry. It is implied that Jesus stayed longer in order that Lazarus would die, whereupon Jesus could then raise him and thus show God's glory. In fact, it is more than mere implication, because it adds the note about staying even though he loved the three of them, Lazarus and his sisters. Jesus makes the point again in verse 15, that he was glad he wasn't there for the sake of the belief of the disciples. Jesus justifies it in verse 4 on the grounds that Lazarus' illness is not one that leads to death. Well, that simply turns out to be wrong, at least in ordinary and immediate terms.
The problem here is that what Jesus does seems so calculated, so carefully crafted a plan, that he would let Lazarus die, and then go rescue him, as it were, from the clutches of death, all in order to make some point and convert a few Jews. It is very troubling.
Certainly others in the narrative have problems with it. There are at least three rebukes of Jesus for his failure to come earlier and prevent Lazarus' death. In verse 21 Martha tells Jesus, "If you had been here, my brother would not have died." Mary says the same thing in verse 32. And the crowd wonders about it in verse 37.
Of course, this is not the first time that any of them, or any of us for that matter, had asked the question: "Why didn't God...?" Heal Lazarus? Cure the cancer? Why would God let the child die of leukemia? With Job, we always rage against God's inaction in the face of tragedy.
But Jesus is not entirely cold-hearted, is he? He loved the three siblings. He was deeply moved by their grief, and he himself weeps at the loss of Lazarus. So what gives?
Well, what gives is that this is less a reporting of events and facts by the evangelist than a message, a kerygma, a point to get across. This is the story of one of the miraculous signs about Jesus. John has Jesus operating on another wavelength, with other concerns, than ordinary things of life. His main concern is not the death of one man, even a friend. Yes, it is indeed troubling to think that Jesus would let a man die whom he could have kept alive, or that Jesus would have toyed with the emotions of Martha and Mary, but he had another agenda, a heavenly agenda, a "spiritual" agenda, just as he had another agenda in the story of the first sign, the wedding at Cana, when he told his mother that his time had not yet come. In the Gospel of John, Jesus operates in his own time, and his own purpose.
So at one level this is about life, and it asks what life consists of. Is it just the body? Is it something else? But this is also about Jesus, about who he is, and about the fact that he is, ultimately, the Lord of life, and of death. Even death does not hold sway over Jesus. There are clearly anticipatory echoes in this of Jesus' own death and resurrection, which we know will affirm his sovereignty over life and death.
Application
The cloning debate is just one more small building block in a long trend in western culture: modernism. The modernist impulse in human society -- modernist meaning, for the moment, post-enlightenment -- looks toward the physical, away from the spiritual, away from the immaterial, for hope. Modernism sees and emphasizes the relentless march of scientific progress, that science will solve even the deep, existential human problems.
Consider health care. Doctors perform more tests to be absolutely sure, while hospitals add more and more high-tech equipment. Costs continually climb, more money is poured into health care, and more human hope is invested in it all the time, for the good life, for well being, for salvation.
Consider the Human Genome Project, the project to identify all of the 30,000 or so genes in human DNA, and to create a database of the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA. It holds the hope, its researchers say, of new health and the possibility of curing some of the human scourges of the past. There is an almost evangelistic fervor to the project. Here is yet another hope for human salvation.
In all of it, the thinking seems to be, save the body, and you save the soul.
But that goes dead against Christianity, and dead against the message of the three lectionary passages, which is that there is vastly more to life than the physical, indeed, the physical is not the final, it is not of supreme importance.
In the valley of dry bones, what becomes clear is that, even after the bones have flesh on them, they still depend on the spirit and the breath of God for there to be life in them. The mere physical presence of a body does not make life. In Romans, Paul makes the point that to be in Christ, to live the new life, means that we have set aside the flesh, that we are no longer people of the body, but people of the Spirit, dwelling in another realm. When Jesus raised Lazarus he said three words, "Lazarus, come out!" making the point perhaps best of all, that the death of the body is not the final outcome of who we are, or the final answer to the riddle of life, because even that natural process falls under his authority. It is all testimony to the life and the place of the Spirit.
Perhaps a trivial little parallel will enlighten: the computer that I am sitting in front of as I write. It consists of hardware -- a keyboard, a monitor, a CPU, a printer, and all of the other pieces of sub-hardware buried beneath the cover. It also consists of software, series of instructions that are recorded magnetically on floppy disks or optically on CDs. But where is the animating thing, the thing that makes it go, that makes it something more than a high-tech paperweight? For that we need to look beyond the desktop, to the plug in the wall, and beyond that to the wiring in the house, and thence to the pole outside, and to the power company and the vast infrastructure through which the computer can function. There is always something beyond the desktop.
Now there are certainly dangers of taking this comparison between body and spirit, computer and electricity too far. But the point is that so often the human focus is on the hardware and the software of life, to the neglect of the thing that animates, that makes it go. And for human beings, that is God's breath.
One of the problems with the secular, scientific findings that are being peddled as a salvation of sorts, lies in the fact that they are off in some distant future, some parallel universe, ignoring the here and now. That is, interestingly, a common criticism of Christianity, that it looks only to the future -- to heaven and the resurrection and the afterlife -- and not to the here and now.
These passages of scripture, particularly the Old Testament and the Gospel, deal with the resurrection, with rebirth, with new life. They deal with the spirit that animates each of us, which is given to us by God. Yet the focus in all of them, while they look beyond death, is really on life here and now. They are about living in hope, living knowing that Christ is Lord of life, living the life of the Spirit. In the Ezekiel reading, the prophecy is to produce hope. In Romans, Paul's exhortations are to produce reassurance. In the Gospel, John's effort is to bring people to belief. Those are all here and now things.
The world of the spirit is not in the distant future. It is with us now. Death, the thing that we who are mortal rage against, that we fight against with technology and with cloning and with our own little edifices of immortality that we build, may not be the worst thing in the world, because this life and this body that we cling to so tenaciously aren't all there is. There is the world of the spirit, the kingdom of God. And maybe we can lift our eyes from the minutiae of the material world and the material life, lift our eyes from the desktop and from the mirror, and for a while look toward heaven and the world of the spirit. And perhaps know ourselves to be citizens of that realm.
Alternative Applications
1) Ezekiel: The bone valleys of our lives. Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones is a vision about Israel. The bones symbolize a dead nation that needed new life. In the same way, they can represent parts of our lives that need reanimating, where we need newness, where we need God's breath breathed into us. What are the dry bone valleys for each of us? A lukewarm relationship? A dead-end job that no longer fulfills us? The rebirth that God promises is not just about a nation or the resurrection of the dead. It is also about the dead parts of our lives, which can take on new meaning and freshness if we actually recognize that they are dry bones, and then let ourselves be filled with God's breath. And for most of us, that happens in the community of faith.
2) John: Jesus' tears. An old lady of my acquaintance took delight in asking if I knew what the shortest verse in scripture was and delight in answering her own question, "Jesus wept." (In the KJV, that is true.) Yet for its brevity, John 11:35 covers a lot of territory. It is about Jesus' humanness and his compassion. It is about friendship and human relationships. It suggests that maybe even God can weep over human pain. It is about a visible demonstration of love.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
Ezekiel 37:1-14
We are all vaguely familiar with this passage of scripture from the spiritual based on it. "Thigh bone joined to the hip bone ... O hear the Word of the Lord." But to understand it, we must put it in its historical setting in the Old Testament.
The time is probably about 586 B.C. when most of the inhabitants of Judah have been carried into exile in Babylonia, under the rule of the great emperor Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562 B.C.). Only the poorest peasants have been allowed to remain in Jerusalem and its surrounding territory. Among the exiles in the foreign land is the prophet Ezekiel, who was carried into captivity, along with the rulers and leaders of Judah, in the first deportation of 597 B.C. Ezekiel carried on his prophetic ministry in Babylonia, and in that ministry he was granted a series of ecstatic experiences, in which he was given to see and hear the words of God (1:3; 3:22; 8:1, 3; 33:22; 40:1). This passage concerning the valley of dry bones is one of those experiences.
"The hand of the Lord was upon me," testifies Ezekiel. That is, he was given an ecstatic vision, in which he was brought by the Spirit of the Lord into the midst of a valley littered with dry human skeletons. And the Lord asks the prophet, "Son of man" -- that is, you weak mortal creature -- "can these bones live?" To the question, Ezekiel wisely replies, "O Lord God, thou knowest." That is, only the Lord God, who is the Creator and Sustainer of all life, knows whether or not persons can live. The wellspring of life, the ability to live and to exist is given from no other source. God gives life or he withholds it. "... I make alive," God declares (Deuteronomy 33:39).
What are we to make of this strange vision told us by the prophet? It is intended to be a portrayal of Israel's life in Babylonian exile. In that captivity, Israel considers herself to be dead. As she says in verse 11, "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off." That is, the Judahites have lost all hope for the future, and they consider themselves to be lifeless because they are cut off from God. God has sent them away from himself into exile because of their sins against him. And separated from the one Source of life, their God, the people of Israel cannot live. They have become "no people," as the prophet Hosea foretold also of the northern Israelites who disappeared into Assyrian exile (Hosea 1:9 in the Hebrew). The thought is comparable to that in Genesis 2:7. Unless the Lord God breathes his breath of life into a human being, that being remains a dead hunk of clay, lifeless. And Israel in Babylo-nian exile considers itself to be lifeless, like a valley full of bones that have become very dry.
We might compare that picture to our own lives. Are we, too, lifeless, without a hope for the future, without vitality and any zest for living, without any animating spirit within us because we are cut off from God? Have our multiple sins of commission and omission separated us from his presence? Have a whole series of bad choices led us into some desolate valley?
In his book, Beginning Without End, Sam Keen portrays the tragedies of modern life so well. He writes, "Nearing the mythical age of 40, I fell in love with a young woman and left a home that had been rich in care, in fighting, in lovemaking on Sunday mornings, in shared memories of the birth of children, in the myriad details that weave the lives of solitary individuals into a single family. Whether divorce was an act of courage or betrayal remains moot ... One rainy morning I awoke alone in an apartment in San Francisco with the realization that my marriage had finished, my wife had remarried, my children were living far away, my lover had departed, and my academic career had been abandoned." Surely the question in regard to such failures is: "Son of Man, can these bones live?" And the only answer possible is the one that Ezekiel gave, "Oh, Lord God, thou knowest." For over against our major and minor failures, our deadly days of just one d-- thing after another, over against our lives of quiet desperation, stands only One who can give us any future and hope and any redeemed existence. Over against our lives-like-unto-death stands the God of life.
So it is in our scripture lesson that Ezekiel is given the Word of God. "O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord ... Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live" (vv. 4-5) ... "Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man" (v. 9) ... "So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great host" (v. 10). Like God breathing the breath of life into that dead hunk of clay that is Adam in Genesis 2, God breathes new life into his seemingly dead exiles in Babylonia. And what he tells them is that he will raise them from their living death and take them once more home again to their land of Israel (vv. 12, 14).
You note in our text that it is not the spirit, but the Word of God, spoken by the prophet, that gives new life and a future to the people of Israel. "Spirit" in this passage is synonymous with "breath," with the breath of life. The Word is that which gives life. And surely it is the Word of God, spoken to us not only by Ezekiel, but also by our Lord in our New Testament lesson from John that is able to raise us from our graves of sin. You and I are going to die, fellow sinners. Indeed, some of us are already as good as dead. But God in his incredible mercy does not wish our death. Instead he speaks those magnificent words to us. "I will raise you from your graves" (Ezekiel 37:13). "Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die" (John 11:26).
You see, he forgives us, doesn't he? Our sins do not determine our final fate or future. Instead, God, in love with us, gives us his Word by which we can live both now and eternally. And our valley of dry bones is transformed into a living, breathing, praising multitude of those who know that God is their Lord. For that is the purpose of God's gift of life to us, isn't it? Over and over again our text tells us that. When Israel is raised from her grave of exile, then they will know that God is the Lord (vv. 6, 13, 14). And that is the purpose for which he gives us life in Jesus Christ also -- that we may know that he is the Lord, and that we may tell all people that Good News. God is the incredible, awesome Lord of love who wills to give us life, abundant life, not only now but to all eternity. Thanks be to God!
THE POLITICAL PULPIT
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Since last summer, unemployment has been climbing, and the over-40 labor force has been hit hardest. This is evident in a comparison of employment statistics between 1970 to 1990. While nearly 80 percent of the 1970 work force was between 55 and 65, by 1990 only 65 percent of workers fell in that age group (Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, 92). In today's flexible economy, in which the bottom-line for the last quarter takes precedence over long-term productivity, older workers with higher salaries are not only expendable, they have little chance of finding a comparable position. Their bones are dry and brittle.
The problem of these numbers is even more tragic: Many of the poor were born into an environment in which education was not valued and many will raise children who will not value education. The cycle of poverty despite practicing a work ethic will continue to the next generation, and so "the bones of these working poor (as well those of the next generation) will be so dry."
Where is there hope? The church and other Americans of good will need to build coalitions that can pressure politicians to bring the dry bones to life. One considers the New Deal as an example of this dynamic. Social commentator Ellen Willis (Don't Think, Smile, 4) has observed that following World War II, business, labor and government, under pressure of socialist movements that challenged the validity of capitalism, formed a coalition that saved capitalism. Through the 1950s and 1960s, as capitalists relinquished some of their profits, this coalition produced America's most phenomenal era of economic growth, high wages, job security and social benefits. Could the church and its friends of goodwill not bring that kind of pressure to bear, to advocate for those who seem to have no hope -- the working poor and older victims of downsizing? More than money will be required. It will take educational opportunities, both affordable formal education and job retraining.
