Can These Bones Live?
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Fifth Sunday in Lent – March 13, 2005
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: Ezekiel 37:1-14/Psalm 130/John 11:1-45]

            “Mortal, can these bones live?”

            The question Ezekiel heard in that long ago vision has been asked thousands of times since. If you get ministers to be honest with you they will tell you that they’ve asked that question as they look at their congregations. You’d ask that question too if you read some of the stuff that we read. The research by the Barna Institute on the situation of the church in American life is enough to make your hair curl. And if the statistics don’t move you, watch Leno some night when he goes “Jay walking” and asks religious questions. Many people don’t know the basic stories of the Bible or, for that matter, the basic doctrines of the Christian faith. There’s a reason that some religious pollsters and pundits have dubbed the once “mainline” churches, like us, the “sideline.”

            Some years ago a professor at UW-Parkside wrote a book called The Empty Church in which he identified the causes for this move from “mainline” to “sideline.” What he said, in brief, was that the mainline churches had forgotten their mission and their core identity. Over the years we had become so tied to the production of programs and social work we forgot what the real reason is for our existence. After twenty plus years in the ministry in various venues and a life-time of being a church member I couldn’t agree with him more. The tragedy is that now we’re trying to “catch-up” with the growing evangelical, often so-called “mega-churches,” by doing the same sorts of programmatic things that are slowly starting not to work for them either. Again, all you have to do is log-on to the various web-sites, read the literature, and attend the various meetings and it becomes obvious. So, back to the Lord’s question to Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?”

            Ezekiel is brought to confront a scene that is at once hopeless and helpless. The promised “breath of life” is that same breath which filled the ‘groundling’ (Adam), taking the dust of the earth and turning it into a living soul. Now he looks out over a valley filled with the remnants of a people slain and is called to prophesy to them, declare to them the Lord’s word so that they might live again. He does as he is told and with a mighty rattle the bones rise up and are restored, a vast multitude.

            What he sees, we learn, is that “these bones are the whole house of Israel.” The dry, scattered bones are the choked off hopes of Israel, languishing in its bitter exile, a captive people. When God asks the prophet, “Can these bones live?” he gets a non-committal answer, “O Lord God, you know.” The prophet himself reflects part of the problem. The dried up bones are Israel’s broken faith in the covenant promise of God, the assurance that God will be with them always. Their faith is dried-up because they have become cut-off from the knowledge of God and God’s will-to-relationship that would draw them out of themselves, out of their exile and into God’s love.

            “Can these bones live?” “O Lord God, you know.” And when the prophet does what he is bid – speaks God’s word of life – the bones live again. There is a lesson for us, a lesson for all churches of the main-line, in this story and it is this – we have to learn to know God again. The bones will live when we move beyond our fears, fears of commitment, fears of institutional survival, and our fears of failure. When we open ourselves to the breath of God, to the living Spirit, then our broken faith can be reconnected and live powerfully.

            Now does that mean it “will be like it used to be”? When I talk with people about life at First they, inevitably, hearken back to the late fifties and early sixties. Beloved, speaking to you as a church historian, I’m telling you that was an anomalous time in the history of American religion. We built more church buildings, spent more money on programs, and ‘churched’ more people in a little over a ten year period than had been accomplished in the whole history of the church in America up to that point. So, I am telling you, as one scholar has commented on the passage in Ezekiel, that the restoration proclaimed by the prophet wasn’t a return to life as it was. They couldn’t go back to a pre-exilic experience of life anymore than we can go back forty or fifty years. What was restored was the knowledge of God and when the knowledge of God is restored there is new life, new hope, and a new sense of self.

            I came across something by Peter Gomes, the chaplain at Harvard that speaks to this. Gomes writes, “Left alone to a life of experience, where we deal with nothing but the facts, where we are content to address only the tangible, the material, the really real, the mundane, we are doomed to the accumulation, the sum total, of that experience. Experience tells us only where we have been, like driving a car by the light of the rearview mirror, and there can be no ultimate satisfaction in the accumulation of that experience. Christian hope is meant to guide you into the place where you have not yet been, and into becoming the person you have not yet become.” [Strength for the Journey, p.181] It is the possibility of becoming, the ability to grow, to change, to live that is held out to us in these texts today. We are not bound to our broken faith, to our broken past, or to our broken promises to God, to self, or to others. The Spirit of God calls us from hindsight to foresight, from the past into the present. The Spirit of God calls us and it is time to move on.

            What we see, too, is that God doesn’t simply act in our lives. Rather, as Biblical scholar Dale Andrews points out, God inter-acts within our lives. When we hesitate to answer God’s question, as did Ezekiel, we’re reflecting our fear to commit beyond our imagination or our vision of what we can be and of what life can be with God in the middle of it. To know God, to live with God doesn’t bring us back to the past, but pushes us into the wonder of God in the present moment and then offers a vision of the future. I know it sounds strange for a historian, for a guy who likes to quote “dead guys” to say that, but it is true. I suppose it’s brought powerfully home to me because of my study of history, for there I see people who understood God at work in them in their here-and-now and those inter-actions never leave them, never leave us, the same.

            When Jesus called Lazarus forth out of the tomb he knew that what would come out would be different than what had gone in. Martha knows it, even though she has some sense of what could happen here. She’s the one who reminds Jesus of just how long Lazarus has been dead, and the smell that must surely be behind that stone. Years ago I encountered a Lutheran pastor who was convinced that Lazarus came out of that grave marked by the signs of decay, restored to life, but marked by death. Lazarus was a constant reminder to those around him of what happened, and of who Jesus was. The more I think about it, the more I agree. And it is the same for us, we may be called forth to live, but we come marked by what we’ve been through and it witnesses to what God is doing in us. Over the years this church has been through its share of difficulties. It has come forth, but it has been marked by them. Some might think that in itself a difficulty, but I don’t. Rather, I see it as a sign of what God not only has done, but continues to do here, which is to call us forth into life and faith and the knowledge of God.

            Lazarus’ sisters, Martha and Mary, represent two levels of consciousness, two ways of approaching knowledge of God. Martha has an open-ended trust in Jesus, supported by all sorts of confessional language that speaks to Jesus’ importance, but, as John Shea points out, she “may not fully understand all that she is saying.” Mary represents a deeper consciousness, one that says a great deal less, but understands more. Mary comprehends because she hears and responds to Jesus’ voice.  The essence of what John is trying to tell us, that Martha wants to put into formulas and Mary wants to contemplate, is that Jesus is more than a healer. There is more going on here than a simple physical resuscitation.

            Lazarus, whose name means “God helps,” is symbolic of the human condition, just like those bones Ezekiel saw. We experience death not only physically, but spiritually. Remember the movie when the little boy says, “I see dead people”? On any given day we could look around and say the same thing. There are people who are dead inside – I can’t help but think that being spiritually dead had a hand in some of the actions we’ve seen over the last few days in West Allis, in Atlanta, and in Brookfield. That kind of spiritual death binds us. It binds us to old habits of thought, old ways of relating and acting, which can be hurtful to ourselves and to others. I would go so far as to say that there are “dead” churches as well. In both cases, all that can be seen are the dry bones, the stone across the grave, broken faith and broken hope.

            When Jesus calls Lazarus forth he speaks the same word that the prophet speaks to those dry bones in the valley. Lazarus and the dry bones of Israel are called into the possibility of life and relationship because, you see, the resurrection doesn’t just come after we’re dead. It comes now. It comes whenever we hear the voice of the Spirit of life raising us into God’s life and God’s relationship. The voice that calls us, that bids these bones to live again, teaches us a way of reconciliation, one that looks to forgive in the deepest possible way and to restore broken relationships, broken trust, and broken hope to wholeness. The voice calls us, too, to the way of right relationship that reaches beyond our fears, our narrowness of vision, and our past experiences to the possibility of what might be when God’s love is allowed to work freely. The voice bids us come forth to live, to rise up from the dead bones of our selfishness and self-centeredness to experience the fleshed-out life we can have in community. The voice calls us to the common good.

            The voice that can make Lazarus walk forth after four days in the tomb and can bid a valley full of dry bones to live is the voice that speaks to you and me in the depths of our hearts right now. It is the voice of God’s love. When Jesus stands before that tomb and weeps he shows what will take our church, and all churches like it, from the “sideline” to the “mainline.” Jesus’ tears are no less than the powerful reminder of who he is and the truth of what he teaches – God with us. God is with us, in the depths of our sorrows, in the heights of our joys, in our pain, and in our happiness. God is with us – and that is the covenant God made, “I am with you always.” In that voice we hear the truth sung in Solomon’s Song of Songs, “love is stronger than death” (8.6). It is the love of God that raises Lazarus. It is the love of God that raises us when we open the ears of our hearts to hear the voice and open our lives to inter-act with the ever-present God.

            Can these bones live? Yes. But like Mary we need to contemplate, ponder, and think deeply on what we are told. And like Martha we need to integrate it into our lives and allow it to show itself in the way we live our lives the minute we stand up to go out of this place of worship. Jesus is the resurrection and the life because of love. God’s love can make a difference in us, but only if we will allow it to do so. That love can raise the dead and put flesh on a valley full of dry bones, but only if we hear its call and answer it by the lives we lead. Can these bones live? God knows….and so do we.