Pentecost Day (B)
Bones Live!
Ezekiel 37:1-14
24 May 2015 – Redeemer
Tomorrow morning many people around the nation will gather in cemeteries and remember those who died in service to our country. If you visit the state Veterans Cemetery at Camp Ripley or Fort Snelling you will see a cemetery as orderly and neat as the rank and file of soldiers on parade. Military cemeteries, cover up the ugliness and brutality of war. You don’t know if soldier died of natural causes, was killed in battle or took his own life.
Ezekiel didn’t get a tour of a cemetery. The Spirit of the Lord set him down in a battlefield. It was full of dry and scattered bones. Those bones represented the house of Israel, God’s chosen children, but obviously something had gone wrong.
This is another one of those texts that never makes the Sunday School lessons or the children’s Bible story books. We don’t want our children to look upon a battlefield of scattered bones and shattered skeletons. And yet, those dry and scattered bones of Israel not only tell the truth of sin, but the truth about us.
If you’re in a cemetery tomorrow, walk around and study the gravestones. You’ll see the graves of stillborn infants, of a 7 year old girl who died of leukemia and of the teenager killed by drunk driver. You’ll see the graves of 20 year-olds who lost their lives to depression and 30 year-olds who lost to cancer. You’ll see the graves of couples, whose marriages ended – sometimes after a year and sometimes after 75 years. You won’t see the graves of the 3000 innocents we slaughter everyday in the United States through abortion. All of these deaths are covered up under six feet of dirt and a few words on a nice slab of granite. I don’t think we could bear to see what Ezekiel saw, yet he saw reality.
Israel had lost the battle. Israel was God’s chosen people, called to be His own through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He redeemed them from slavery in Egypt and brought them by way of Sinai to the promised land. He baptized them in the Red Sea and fed them the bread of life in the wilderness to keep them alive. Finally He brought them into the land of Canaan as He had promised. Israel’s life, hope, and future, rested in the Lord, in Yahweh, the God of Israel. But they lived in a battlefield – the first enemy was in their heart and their second enemy was in the world.
Israel’s chief enemy was themselves. All you need to do is read the Old Testament. Noah was a drunk. Abraham denied he was married to Sarah. Jacob deceived his father Isaac and ripped off his brother Esau. The sons of Israel sold their brother into slavery. Judah slept with his daughter-in-law. They were sinners who sinned. They served themselves and you know – the easiest person to serve is you. The people of Israel are no different than the people of Redeemer.
Their other enemy was the false gods that surrounded them on every side. The Lord gave them the temple and the sacrifices and the blood offerings so that they would see the “wages of sin is death” but more importantly receive life the only way possible, the Lord’s way – in the sacrifices that atoned for sin. But let’s face it, the flesh and blood of lambs and bulls, and bringing offerings to the temple and facing our sin isn’t that exciting or uplifting. So Israel battled with the boredom of the Lord compared to the excitement of the false gods, who promised pleasure for their bones and a life that pretended to be real living.
Israel lost the battle because they followed their sin and their stomachs. The Spirit of the Lord gave Ezekiel a picture of his congregation, of Israel. It is also a picture of you. You cannot win the battle against sin. The false gods are easy to follow and fun to serve, but you do not want to see where that ends – it’s covered up in the cemetery. It’s dry bones, very dry bones, cut off and without hope – that’s Israel with the Lord and you without Christ.
After touring this battlefield of broken and beaten bones, the Lord asks Ezekiel, “Son of man, can these bones live?” Can my stillborn child live? Can that soldier who took his life live? Can these bones of mine that have failed to live according to the 10 commandments live? Can these bones that have worshiped the false gods with joy and been bored with the true God live? Ask the smartest scientist and the most skilled physician and the answer will be “no.” We all die and no one has ever come back to life. It’s a foolhardy question, usually, but this question is being asked by Yahweh, the God of Israel, the God who formed Adam from the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.
Ezekiel answers “O Lord God, you know.” If the dead are going to live and the beaten are going to rise, the only One who could accomplish it is the Lord God. He does this by His Spirit through His Word. “Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.” Now there’s a sure remedy for dead bones – preaching, but this how the Lord works. Ezekiel prophesied. He spoke God’s Word and the bones came together and stood up. The Lord restored organs and muscles and tendons and flesh. Israel was raised, but they weren’t alive. So Ezekiel’s sermon needed to be longer. Prophesy and call on the Spirit. And so Ezekiel spoke, and God’s Spirit came into those He raised and they were made alive again. It’s an Old Testament Pentecost day – made alive by the Spirit in the Word.
Your bones live because Jesus became bone of your bones and flesh of your flesh. He went into the battlefield and the Devil tempted him to chase every false god you’ve ever worshiped. But Jesus never grew bored with His Father’s Word. He never chose pleasure over faith, never chose glory over the cross, never chose Himself over His Father or over you. He never sought the high places – He went to the low place, to your place, dining with broken sinners, touching the least and lowest, even turning back death by raising the dead. Then to claim the final victory He offered His bones for yours. Those hands that never sinned were nailed to the cross. Those feet that always walked the extra mile were pierced for you. The head that looked with grace upon thieving tax collectors and adulterous women and cut off lepers, was crowned with thorns. Not one of His bones was broken – the perfect sacrifice for you.
And while scientists and doctors might say, “there is no scientic evidence or medical record of anyone coming back to life,” we know they’re wrong. Jesus’ body never decayed. On the third day the Spirit entered into His slain body and He rose. The 11 apostles even felt Him breath on them. And with that breath of God’s Son and Sacrifice, life started spreading out of Jerusalem. Jesus gave His Spirit to His men at Pentecost and promised that where His Word was preached, His Spirit would be and where His Spirit is there is forgiveness for sinners, and where there is forgiveness there is life and salvation and the resurrection of your body.
At the end of the text from Ezekiel, the location changes. You may not have noticed it, but the text begins on a battlefield and ends in a cemetery. The bones of Israel are no longer scattered, but buried. The Lord promises, “I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people.” The practice of burying the dead is a Christian practice – pagans leave the bones of their dead for the birds to pick clean or burn them to get them up to heaven. Already in the Old Testament and most certainly in the New, God’s people believed that their bodies were gifts from God and that their bones would live again. So they buried them – knowing with certainty that because Jesus breathed again we will breath again. That’s why sermons are stilled preached today – because God’s Word is the only certain place the Spirit of Jesus breathes His life into us, that we might breath again and forever in the name of Jesus. Amen.