Willapa United Methodist Church

I can’t remember when or where I first heard that song. I know I was young and I know it had something to do with church. You will seldom, if ever, hear that song in Sunday school today. You are more likely to hear the other verses used in teaching anatomy:

Seventeen of us have learned a great deal in our Disciple Bible Study on the Old Testament. Perhaps your pastor has learned the most, as he struggled to keep far enough ahead to be able to answer the questions that were coming out of our reading and study. One of the things that I learned was that this seldom referred to story of Ezekiel and the valley of the dry bones, is the very first time that resurrection from the dead is mentioned in the Bible. I had thought that the idea of resurrection from the dead came from Daniel 12:2, where Daniel was visualizing what it will be like at the end of the world when God comes to claim victory over Satan and sin, and restore creation to way it was before we humans screwed it up. But I was wrong! Can you imagine that!

 

Ezekiel and Daniel were contemporaries. They both prophesied to the exiled Israelites who had been carried off to Babylon in 586 BC, after the Babylonians destroyed the Temple built by King Solomon and, in fact, leveled all of Jerusalem. But based on Daniel’s visions regarding empires that came after the Babylonian empire: the Persian Empire and the Greek empire of Alexander the Great; most scholars agree that Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones came first.

As I began to dig deeper, I discovered a string of connections that led me through the Old Testament to the Gospel accounts of Jesus Christ, and finally to Paul’s letter to the Romans. Then, in one of those special moments, as I was preparing for Bob Kain’s memorial service on Friday, the Holy Spirit connected a few more dots for me, and I realized that Ezekiel and Daniel and Paul…and Jesus, were all talking about the same thing: hope. Hope in the midst of sorrow. Hope in the midst of crisis. Hope for tomorrow and hope for the future. Hope based on God’s remarkable ability to bring life out of death. Please pray with me.

May the words of our mouths, the meditations of our hearts, and the conduct of our lives, be always acceptable to you, O God, our strength and our blessed redeemer. Amen.

Let me set the stage for Ezekiel’s vision. Things could not get much worse for the Israelites. Five hundred years earlier the Assyrians had conquered the Northern Kingdom and dispersed its inhabitants throughout the sprawling Assyrian Empire. The inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom included ten of the twelve tribes of Israel. Remember, only King David and his son, King Solomon, had been able to draw all the tribes together and rule over a combined Kingdom of Israel. The Southern Kingdom of Judea, which included the capital city of Jerusalem, managed to hang on as a tiny city state for several centuries. Then the mighty Babylonian army rolled over Judea in 586 BC, destroyed Jerusalem, and took most of the members of the remaining two tribes of Israel into exile, including Ezekiel and Daniel.

As our Disciple Bible Study worked its way through the Old Testament it was hard not to become discouraged because the history of God’s Chosen People and their covenant with God to become a light to the nations is a story of one failure after another. Several times I heard, “Thank God for the New Testament!” The pattern seemed to always be the same, though the names changed. The people would prosper when they put their hope in Yahweh, and they would suffer when they put their hope in other gods or in themselves. Another phrase I heard a lot around our study table was, “Gee, that sounds just like us.” That phrase always brought joy to my heart, because I knew that we were starting to experience God’s Word, not just read it!

The exiles in Babylon weren’t slaves like their ancestors had been in Egypt, but in many ways they were just as miserable. Even though they were able to marry, and farm, and become traders, and accumulate wealth, and worship, they were home sick. They were in spiritual pain. 

Rev. Ed Markquart says that all human beings have four parts: 1) We all have a physical body. 2) We all have a brain or mind. 3) We all have emotions or feelings, and 4) we all have a soul or spirit.[1] Jesus said essentially the same thing. He urged us to worship God with all our heart (our emotions), with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength (our physical strength). The Jewish exiles in Babylon couldn’t worship because their souls were home sick for Jerusalem and the Temple, God’s temple. One of our weekly Psalm readings in Disciple Bible Study was this heart-breaking lament from Psalm 137:

By the rivers of Babylon –

            there we sat down and there we wept

            when we remembered Zion.

            we hung our harps.

            asked us for songs,

            “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

            in a foreign land?

            let my right hand wither!

            if I do not remember you,

            above my highest joy.

The exiles were doing okay physically, rationally, and even emotionally, but they were in spiritual pain. Rev. Craig Barnes says that:

Like the exiles in Babylon, we try to numb the spiritual pain by making life more comfortable. We work hard. We collect a lot of things. We buy houses, plant our roots, live quietly and try to make Babylon as nice as we can. But however nicely we decorate it, Babylon is still not our home. And the day we deaden our longing for God is the day we spiritually die. Then the rest of us begins to slowly die, from the inside out.[2]

I think I just saw a few “light bulbs” go on! Okay, repeat after me, “Gee, that sounds just like us.” Maybe Willapa is the new Babylon! Maybe the United States is the new Babylon! Maybe, just maybe, the new Babylon is the same place as the old Babylon. Maybe, just maybe, Babylon is any place where we have been exiled from God, by others or by ourselves. St. Augustine said that we are restless until we find our rest in God. Maybe home is not where the heart is. Maybe home is where God is.

Paul talks to the Christians in Rome about those who are so focused on “making life more comfortable” as Craig Barnes would say, that they are unable to see the hope of a better life, a new life, that God is offering: To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” God tells Ezekiel that the “whole house of Israel” has cried out to him, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” But God says, “Not so! I will breath my Spirit into them and they will live again. I will bring life from death. It’s what I do.”

Please take out your worship bulletins and turn them over to the “Thought for the Week” on the back of the bulletin. Please follow along as I read this brief passage from Romans. To those who were able to attend Bob’s service, this may sound familiar.

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Whether God is breathing his Spirit into us or pouring his Spirit into us, the result is the same. Our hope is fulfilled and God once again brings life out of death.