Sermon: Any Life Here?

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Any Life Here?

James Sledge                                                                           Pentecost, May 20, 2018

   The scene is a battlefield where one army had annihilated another. The defeat has been so total, there were either no survivors, or all those who lived had been taken prisoner. No one left to care for the dying; no one to bury the dead. All who fell on the battlefield remained there, scavengers and nature gradually doing their work. When only bones were left, they baked in the sun, drying and bleaching as months turned to years.

   As Ezekiel gazes on this desolate scene, God speaks. “Mortal, can these bones live?” What a ridiculous question. The situation is beyond hopeless. There is nothing here to be resuscitated. There’s nothing left but bones strewn and scattered about, like puzzle pieces that have been shaken up and then thrown all over the floor. 

   As far as the prophet can tell, it’s an impossible situation. There is no way. But the prophet has been surprised by the strange ways of God before, and so he throws the question back. “O Lord God, you know.”

   Sure enough, God provides the answer by giving the prophet instructions. “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.” The prophet does as he’s told, and the bones began to reassemble and take on muscles and skin. Then there is a movement of wind/breath/Spirit, and the reassembled, fleshed out bones come to life.

   Some Christians have tried to make this vision about resurrection and eternal life, but that’s not what God says it’s about. “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel.” Israel may lost all hope, yet God will restore them. God still has plans for them.

   Israel and the prophet are in Babylon, exiled from Jerusalem, which now lies in ruins, Solomon’s great temple nothing but rubble. The walls of David’s great city have been torn down. God’s promise of a house and kingdom that would last forever, of descendants who would always sit on the throne of David, has apparently been revoked.

   In exile, Israel’s theologians and faith leaders struggle to make sense of things. What does it mean to be God’s chosen people when God has allowed them to be utterly defeated and carried into exile? Has Israel’s failure to keep covenant brought it all to an end? Is there any going back? It is a time of crisis, a faith crisis, an existential crisis. Is there any future for Israel? Or is she just a failed experiment, a washed up relic that belongs to another time?

   In our day, some have used the image of exile for the American Church. We’ve been cast out of our central place in the culture. Society feels not the slightest need to cater to us by shutting everything down on Sunday mornings. Instead, it now engages in a vigorous competition for people’s attention on Sunday. The culture has gone from protecting and securing us to openly challenging us. Our power and influence have been ripped away, leaving us in a sort of cultural exile.

   Is there any future? Is there any hope? “The church is dying,” say many prognosticators, and signs of death are everywhere. Church involvement has been in decline for decades, and that decline is accelerating. Among millennials, disassociation from church has reached epidemic proportions. Numbers for our own denomination are sobering. In 1965, what is now the PC(USA) had around 4.3 million members. We now have less than 1.5 million. 

   FCPC enjoys a vitality that many congregations would envy, but we are hardly immune from the forces that have pushed the church toward exile. Many of you have watched your adult children turn away from church. Many of you with younger children know all about the sports and other activities that compete for the time once reserved for church.

Our glory days behind us, is the church in America inexorably sliding toward death? Is there a future for us? Is there any life left in the old bones of the church?

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   When Israel was defeated and carried into exile, prophets like Ezekiel said it was God’s doing, a reckoning for their refusal to live by God’s ways. It had to happen for Israel to learn what it meant truly to be God’s people. And I wonder if the church’s exile isn’t similar. Perhaps our glory days, like Israel’s, weren’t so glorious after all, at least not in the eyes of God. They were more about having cultural power and influence, about supporting the status quo, than they were about being Christ to the world.

   Perhaps our exile is also a chance for rebirth, for new life, not a time to long for some mythologized past, but to follow Jesus into a new future. But can an old, establishment denomination like the PC(USA) become something new? Can these old bones live? Is there any real life to be found here?

   If the church in America is to live, if FCPC is remain a vital congregation, it will not be because of how smart we are, what great plans we lay out, how well we cater to people’s needs, or how snazzy and well run our programs are. We will live, in any true sense of that word, because the wind/breath/Spirit of God fills us and gives us life.

   The wind/breath/Spirit that gave birth to the Church at Pentecost is still blowing, still bringing to life what seems dead. Yet this wind/breath/Spirit rarely forces its way into an individual’s, a congregation’s, or a denomination’s life. Rather it comes to those who wait prayerfully, who are attentive, who stand ready to fan the flames the Spirit brings.

   Throughout the Renew process here at FCPC that began way back with the CAT survey many of you took, that continued with Renew Groups and multiple Session retreats, I have watched our elders do their utmost to be attentive and responsive to the Spirit. Here and there I can see signs of the Spirit moving, embers turning to flame. But there is much left to do, and so as we ordain and install elders and deacons today, these leaders will need to remain attentive and responsive to the wind/breath/Spirit. And they will need prayers, attentiveness, and responsiveness from the entire congregation, if we are to be the body Christ calls us to be.

   “Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.” God sends us the wind/breath/Spirit. Let us embrace it. Let us breathe deeply so that we may live.