All Saints 6.30 pm March 9 2008 Geoff Pritchard

Ezekiel 37, 1-14

When someone feels depressed, they go to the doctor and get a pill, or if they are feeling really bad, they are offered counselling. But you can’t send a whole depressed nation for counselling, can you? The counsellors themselves would be patients.

When a whole nation is depressed, some one may come along with a vision; he may not say, “This is the way out of this mess”, he may just say, “There has to be a way out of this mess”. And suddenly things change. It happened in the deep south of America, forty years ago, with Martin Luther King; his speeches were punctuated with “I have a dream”. It was a vision of a better future, without any very clear way of getting to it.

The vision in today’s passage from Ezekiel is like Martin Luther King’s and the early stages of Barack Obama’s, because it is noticeably short on how things are going to be put things right. Other visions also appear in Scripture, stimulated by the same circumstances of exile, notably in Isaiah 65.

But in Ezekiel, we read:

“The Lord set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.” And then: “Bones that were very dry” –In other words, very dead bones. The Lord then asks Ezekiel “Can these bones live?”

The bones represented the Jewish nation and its religion, so this was a particularly appropriate question at the time; the entire Jewish middle class, all its leaders and potential leaders, had been carried off into exile into Babylon in the heart of enemy territory. Only the unskilled and the old were left behind. It was the sixth century BC. Ethnic cleansing in an unusual way.

And there seemed no escape from Babylon.

Hopelessness was the flavour of the month, of the year, and of the decade. The prophet replies to God’s question, Can these bones live, by saying diplomatically, “You alone know”. Ezekiel himself simply had no solution, but thought God might.

Have you ever been in a situation where there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel, and it really hurts?

It might not be your condition this evening, your crisis might lie way back in the past, but if we have never experienced that hopeless feeling,we shall have difficulty in understanding our fellow men and women. Because to many, even those who hide it, life can sometimes be bleak for a while.

I myself had an easy life for sixty years, and then I had seven lean years, after which I began to understand some of my fellow men and women for the very first time.

You may say it is understandable for an individual to be in the depths of despair, but it’s alien to our culture to agonise about the future of our nation. Not many of us care nowadays as desperately about nationhood as our grandparents and great-grandparents did, crouching as they did in the muddy trenches in Flanders, or fighting the battle of the Somme.

Do we English worry that the Scots might choose independence, leaving the UK considerably less influential in the world? Apparently not. About 57% of English people say, good luck to them. Most of our fellow citizens are a bit hazy about the name of our country, and do not lose any sleep over the fact that it has no national sports teams at all playing under that name.

But not everyone has stopped worrying about his nation. I once met a Welsh Nationalist who was concerned that I might not sympathise sufficiently with his despair. He said to me,

“You know, boyo, we Welsh have a special word in our language”,

(I don’t want to offend the Welsh, I am partly Welsh myself). He then pronounced a word that sounded like a prolonged dry coughing noise, as if a cat had a bone trapped in its throat,

“We have this word in the Welsh language that you English never had any equivalent for, because you have never needed it. It doesn’t apply to you.

“It means a nation utterly without hope, absolutely crushed, its identity smothered completely under the jackboot of a tyrannical oppressor”. I forgot to ask who this oppressor was.

That’s exactly how the Jews felt during the exile. With the added dimension that their protector, Jehovah, was no longer bothered to protect them.

The question, Can these dry bones live, that was put to Ezekiel so long ago, is still asked at the beginning of the 21^st century. People ask it of their marriages when the relationship has lost its shine. They ask it, as that Welshman did, of their nation. They ask it of their football team when it is relegated to the second division. (Yes, people really do go into depression over that, I once shared a lab with one. He supported Aston Villa).

They ask it of their churches when religion seems to have died for good, as it has so often in the past, only to return in a different and disconcerting form. They ask it of themselves, when they find that whatever gave them the drive to get up in the morning has mysteriously ebbed away.

Ezekiel had been a priest in the old days in Jerusalem, but he was not free to practise as one in Babylon. There was no temple. It was a trying time for him personally, more than for many other patriots. He must have spent years wondering how different life would have been for him if the exile had never happened. The great power that had taken over his country seemed impossible to overthrow.

The Lord nevertheless announces (in the vision) that the period of gloom into which the nation of Israel had fallen in captivity in Babylon WOULD come to an end. The Lord says to the bones:

“I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life.

“I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.”

As we now know, the prophecy WAS fulfilled, and not so long afterwards.

God delivered Israel out of captivity, peacefully, with the arrival of a new leader for the Babylonians, who gave them his blessing. Some of the ordinary Babylonians gave them practical assistance.

The Jews returned home to Jerusalem, and with considerable difficulty they rebuilt the temple that had been destroyed during the military assault on the city. Remember that the temple was central to their worship, and their values.

It is not always right to assume that recent trends in world history or in our own personal lives will just go on and on and on. Sometimes we see a change of direction, that we have done nothing to bring about. In the 1970s, crazy as it seems today, many people feared that England would become a Communist country. There were good reasons for this, as Communism had been gaining ground in much of the world for half a century, but the situation changed dramatically in the following decade.

A more trivial example. I had once reached a position where I was completely and utterly frustrated at work by the attitude of someone at work, who had eight more years to do before he retired. He had been there for nearly 20 years and was completely settled, and healthy. It was not a very hopeful time in my career.

But something suddenly happened to cut the knot. This guy discovered that his boss was being even more intolerable, and was handing out some humiliating treatment that I knew nothing about, so he suddenly took early retirement. What had seemed a cul-de-sac for me became a through road.

Let us turn to more substantial matters. While the Christian faith flourishes in most continents of the world, in fact in all except Europe and the strongly Moslem countries, we have our backs to the wall here.

Even if the situation were much better, as it is in, say, North America, any Christian who does not feel that the world is alien, who does not sense the tension between himself and the prevailing culture, needs to re-examine his values.

Many of the virtues commended in Scripture and demonstrated by Jesus Christ are despised in the world we inhabit.

I once saw some letters in a newspaper about the difficult position of Moslems in British society, and how many of them felt alienated by its sex, drink and violence culture.

Some replies were less than sympathetic. They argued that people who migrate to this country should accept what they find here, and count themselves lucky.

The most interesting letter was from a young lady who said, “never mind the Moslems, I am a British Christian living in England, and even I do not feel at all at home in British society. I find, as a young female, that my desire live a Christian life and in particular to avoid sexual promiscuity and binge drinking and materialism leads me to be classed as some kind of eccentric”.

That’s one strand of the experience of the exiled Jews that we can sympathise with: the feeling of living in a place with very different values from those we cherish. But there is an important difference between modern British Christians and the Jews.

Our feeling out of place here is not something to be surprised about; after all, we have been warned in advance that it would happen.

In fact it might be more worrying if we WERE surprised, because it would mean we had not even noticed the warnings in scripture. And if we haven’t even noticed, that’s the worst position. Because it would mean we are happy with the world as it is.

Now the Jews WERE worried and surprised by their sad position. After all, their God was their national champion, the one who looked after them and protected them against their enemies. Now they were no longer being looked after and protected. Why not?

Ezekiel’s vision is mentioned in the New Testament, where we ourselves, ordinary men and women, are compared with dry bones. Like the bones, we were all dead once---the Bible says we were dead in our sins ----until God breathed new life into us. As a result of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God brought life to the world.

You and I can have new life breathed into us by the Holy Spirit. All that is needed is to ask Him sincerely to respond to our earnest prayer for guidance. He is more willing to give than we are to ask.

See the letter to the Ephesians, chapter 2. It starts with Paul writing to a small group of disciples in the city of Ephesus. “ As for you”, he says, “you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world”. He goes on to say that God can breathe new life into what was dead.

The people of Israel were not released from captivity in Babylon simply by wanting to go home. It was only when they had reflected for a sufficiently long time on why God had delivered them into the hands of the enemy in the first place, that it ever occurred to them --- they needed to repent.

The world “repent” sounds old-fashioned today, and it is now fairly uncommon to hear Christians say they regret the way they used to live. Yet Christians whose religious experience is marked by genuine and heartfelt repentance live more effective lives and achieve more than most. A spiritual antibiotic seems to be needed to remove the disease that so hinders us.

At some point in Babylon, long ago, the light dawned; the Jews finally realised they had been punished by God for past disobedience; so they repented. If we want a vision we have to repent, believe and obey too.

The Lord told Ezekiel to prophesy, to preach to the bones.

Then he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones and say to them, 'Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD (verse 4)... Then, again through the prophet, God now addresses the people: "This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones."... and in the vision, the dry bones listened!

Paul writes about NEW LIFE in Christ. It is not what we do that brings this miracle about, it is what God does. He breathes new life into dry bones.

It’s a bit like re-modelling a derelict cottage, it doesn’t happen all at once, many old features remain, reminding us of the rot and the leaks and the decaying structures that used to typify the whole building before the work started. Theologians call this re-modelling process “regeneration” and it is never complete in this life.

This idea of renovating a home is again reflected in chapter 2, verse 22, of Ephesians, where Paul says, “And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by His Spirit”.

Notice God's instruction in verse 4 "hear the word of the Lord". The bones cannot rise unless they hear the word of God.

A friend I used to work with has a website in which he says this:

“Verse 14 of Ezekiel 37 tells us "I will put my Spirit in you and you will live….". The word of God cannot be understood without the Spirit's help. Dead bones and dead people need to be regenerated by God's Spirit. So our concern for the unbeliever must include both taking him or her to hear God's word and ardent prayer to God for His Spirit to be at work.

“There must be both word and Spirit. We must not emphasise one to the exclusion or diminution of the other.

“It is so easy to go to extremes: resulting in lifeless orthodoxy on one hand, or so-called Spirit-driven experiences with little attention the word of God on the other”.

The phrase “lifeless orthodoxy” is worth a moment’s thought. It reminds us that we can have very sound views, we can know exactly how everything is done in church, and why, and say all the right things, but doctrinal orthodoxy is not enough. There must be life in the dry bones. We must feel some emotion; it doesn’t matter whether we show it or not, but if we never feel an emotion such as joy or love we might as well be robots.

When the children of Israel were away from the temple and imprisoned in exile in Babylon, they began to realise, dimly at first, that God is not confined to a temple in Jerusalem. How could He, after it had been demolished, and he still answered prayers? This was an important step towards being able to understand Jesus, who said that worship would not always be focused on a temple in one city. God has wheels.

One final point. The Ezekiel vision tells us, that when God finally brings renewal and recovery, it will be done in style, with a bang, not a whimper:

Verse 9: Then God said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it,

This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live. "

Verse 10: So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered the bones; they came to life and stood up on their feet -a vast army.

Not just a single platoon. Not just a regiment. Not just a division. A whole army. That’s what we would expect, isn’t it, from a great God?

END