“Spirit
of the Living God”
Ezekiel
37:1-14
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
June
12, 2011
Pentecost/Confirmation
Commissioning Day
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If we had unbridled time today I would
like to have read to you a passage from Ezekiel 18 in which, over and over
again, Ezekiel preached on behalf of the Lord to the people of Israel to get
themselves a new heart and a new spirit. “Cast
away all of your transgressions,” Ezekiel thundered.
“Stop doing them. Turn away
from your sin so that you may live.”
That is a familiar message heard from
pulpits even today. Repent.
Stop sinning. Or as my
parents were known to say to me from time to time, “Straighten up and fly
right.” Mostly, that kind of
preaching is well-intended for scripture tells us that the wages of sin is
death. And so we are given the
vision in the subsequent passage we read today of a valley of dry bones,
But they could not do it.
So Ezekiel tells us that the Spirit of God took him out and gave him a
vision that set him in the midst of a valley that was full of bones.
He said that the Spirit led him all around them and through them and that
there were very many of them lying in the valley, and that the bones were
“very dry.” A harvest of wrecked
humans indeed. Then the Spirit of
God asked Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these
bones live again?” And all
that Ezekiel could answer was, “O Lord
God, only you know.”
The Spirit told Ezekiel to prophesy to
the bones, to preach to them, and one can imagine that Ezekiel wanted to say to
them, “See, I told you. Look at
what has happened to you. Look at
your lives. Do you believe me now
that living in sin is going to be the death of you?
That it will spoil your life? That
it will rob you of power and joy and peace?
So why don’t you get up now and cast your sin aside and live in the
freedom and the fullness for which you were made?”
And if those bones could talk, those very dry bones, they would have
answered Ezekiel, “Because we’re dead!”
How many times have you felt impotent
to throw off the shackles of some besetting sin in your life, of acts and
actions and habits and patterns that suck the marrow from your bones, that rob
you of what is important in your life, that send you into despair or depression,
that slay your spirit? I know I have
felt the utter exasperation of
Well, the Spirit of God did tell
Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones, for scripture says that the dead can hear, but
what he told Ezekiel to preach to them was to say, “O
dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus
says the Lord God to these bones: I
will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.
I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and
cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall
know that I am God.”
But it was not only prophecy, for
Ezekiel reports that as he preached as he was told, there rose up a noise, a
rattling, and the bones began to come together – the foot bone connected to
the ankle bone, the ankle bone connected to the shin bone, the shin bone
connected to the knee bone – and that harvest of wrecked humans was being put
together again. Only there was one
problem. There yet was no breath in
them and thus, still, no life. But
God spoke once again to Ezekiel, telling him to call out to the Spirit and to
bid the Spirit to come upon these very dry bones, these dead bones, this harvest
of wrecked humans. God said to
Ezekiel,
Prophesy to the breath (and in
both of the biblical languages –
Hebrew and Greek – the word for breath and wind and
spirit all are the same) – prophesy
and say to the breath: Thus
says the Lord God: Come from
the four winds, O breath, and
breathe upon these slain, that they may live.
Poet Berrigan speaks for Ezekiel in
describing then what happened:
I spoke,
and the Spirit entered the bones.
First a whisper,
then a drumbeat,
then reverberant –
a heart beat! (Berrigan,
Daniel, Ezekiel, p.115)
That petrified forest of fallen bones
came alive again and they lived and, Ezekiel said, “They
stood on their feet again.”
It is a Pentecost story, this valley of
dry bones, this valley of wrecked human beings coming to life again by the power
of the Spirit of God that is also the Spirit of Christ.
All the preaching you may hear exhorting you to repent and to come out of
your sin and to turn around and live in the righteousness of God, to be obedient
to God’s thoughts and God’s ways, well, that preaching has its place for it
reminds us how ineffectual we are in being able to do that in any consistent
way. It might be necessary preaching
but it is only half the story because the demand for obedience is there but not
the power to fulfill it. The other
half of the story is that what is impossible for humans is possible for God and
is possible with God. God pours out
God’s Spirit on us and it is God’s Spirit who gives us the Breath of Life
and empowers us so that we do not have to live dead-end lives but what the Bible
calls “abundant” life. And
so our Pentecost prayer becomes – “Breathe
on me, breath of God, Fill me with life anew, That I may love what Thou dost
love, And do what Thou wouldst do.”
God’s Holy Spirit is what keeps us
from having to relegate the faith to the annals of history.
What good would it do if we came here week by week only to hear of what
once happened long ago but happens no more?
It would be a colossal waste of our time.
We come here as we do, as our confirmands do today, to thank God and to
be assured that God is working yet – in us, for us, among us, through us –
for the Spirit of God breathes new life into very dry bones.
The only thing that can stop him is our unbelief, is believing that we
are beyond even God’s help, that there is no hope for us, and that life is
destined for a steady slope of diminishment.
Can our dry bones live?
Yes, yes, by the power of the Pentecost Spirit, and they will.
Come from the four winds, O Spirit of God, and make these dry bones live.
Come, Holy Spirit, come.
Amen.
Copyright
© 2011 by First Presbyterian Church