"'Dem Bones Get Up and They Walk Around"

Ezekiel 37:1-14
1 Peter 1:13-21

In January, 1992, I walked on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea at Haifa in Northern Israel. At that time, I was struggling with a lot of things, not the least of which was my Christian faith and its relevance to my personal life which was somewhat in chaos at that moment. I was 53 years old and could see very little difference between my life and that of any other person in pursuit of the Great American Dream.

Complicating my thoughts was the experience that I was having in the Holy Land. I was visiting what one friend calls the “Jesus sites” that have questionable historical authenticity but draw thousands of American tourists every year who see themselves as walking through the pages of the Bible.

Imagine me on a bus with seminary students half my age who were singing, “I walked today where Jesus walked.” This was so much of what one friend called “Wookie Christianity” that I was ready to bail out the first week.

Have you ever felt like that before? It comes when you spend too much time around people who are exulting in what they refer to as the “joy of the Lord.” If you don’t happen to have that joy at the moment, you are made to feel guilty or inadequate.

You don’t need to be a churchgoer to get that feeling. It comes by hanging around people who do aerobic exercise, for example, or people who have made and saved a lot of money.

You get those feelings by hanging with Christians who use sentences like, “You’ve got to be in the Word.” “You’ve got to just rest in the Lord.” All that is true enough, I guess, but I have found that people who begin sentences with “You’ve got to…” usually wind up in the ditch at one time or another. When that happens, the last thing they want to hear from anyone is the “You’ve got to’s…”

At any rate, it occurred to me in 1992 that there may have been a whole vast sea of humanity out there that had quietly left the church because of too many “You’ve got to’s…” I began to call this the “Church in Exile.”

Since that time, I have refined my thought of this Church in Exile to include those who claim Jesus Christ as Lord but who have found themselves, for one reason or another, living in the margins. In order to dig them out or even to identify them, we have to go to where they are. These are not middle class people who have just somehow decided to keep their faith a private matter and go snowmobiling or skiing on Sundays. These are people who have been pushed to the margins and can’t find their way out.

During that first trip to Israel, I became far less interested in where Jesus had been and far more interested in where He might be right then and there. I have never lost that gnawing need to find the presence of Jesus among the people in exile. As prison chaplain, I find myself always on the hunt for Jesus. Often He is very hard to find.

You might say that we here at the NMMH Church were a people in exile. There was no Christian community in which our people would find a warm welcome for long. We filled a void by coming together in search of the living Lord. Since that time, when you think about it, we have had nothing but a congregation of people in exile from the traditional church – some by choice and others by default.

Palestine is also a place where God’s people live in exile. Prison is another. The homeless have among them God’s people in exile. Christians in exile are among those living on the garbage dumps of Manila. The list is endless, I suspect. Imagine how much in exile are Christians who are very wealthy, Christians who have no health insurance and Christians who are in wheelchairs or nursing homes. What does God have to say to such people?

More to the point, how do we minister to such people without going where they are?

Ministering to Christians in exile is a tough assignment. They tend to be out of the mainstream, restless, broken and hurting. We are going to see this morning a graphic example in Ezekiel of what it is like to be one of God’s people in exile and how we can use that experience to spiritually come out of our self-imposed exile.

I like to think that we are here this morning because we are all in a restless search for Jesus, hoping to find Him in this community of worship. Those who have been here a long time know that this is a long and painful process. Don Smith has lately been encouraging us to pray for one another. That seems like a no-brainer, but it is a lot more complicated than it looks on the surface. Trust is built in baby steps and often through times in the desert, where relationships go dry and unresponsive.

Ezekiel was born at the time of the divided kingdom of Israel but at a high spiritual time for the two tribes of Judah. Faithful King Josiah had repaired the Temple, discovered the Book of the Law in the Ark of the Covenant, torn down the idols and restored the worship of God. One of the things he had to do was to clear the Temple of the living quarters of the male shrine prostitutes.

After his death, Israel went right back into idolatry and eventually was exiled into Babylon. Among the exiles was the prophet Ezekiel. While in exile, the Jewish people held onto the hope of returning to their Temple worship. That hope was dashed when they heard, twenty years into the exile, that Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed the city and leveled the Temple.

Ezekiel gets this vision from the Lord. He finds himself in the middle of a valley. It is a dismal place, full of dry human bones baked white and dry and lying on the desert floor. Buzzards had done their work, and now all signs of life had gone.

If God asked you or me, “Son of man, can those bones live?” the answer would be an emphatic “No.” Ezekiel’s answer was, “I don’t know, Lord. Only You know.” That is Ezekiel’s testimony to the sovereignty of God when all appears to have been lost.

God says to Ezekiel, “Preach to those bones.” The bones begin to rattle and come together into skeletons – but still no life: “I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.”

That may have been enough for most Churches today. Fill it full of bodies, and it is a success! But where’s the life? There was more to be done: “Preach, Son of man, and say to this valley, ‘Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’ They came to life and stood on their feet – a vast army.”

There is a key verse in the Book of Ezekiel that explains what God is going to do with His people. It is found in Chapter 36, vs. 26-28:

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

When the Temple was leveled, the people of Israel lost their hope. They lost their hope because the very purpose of Israel was to make a nation of a people. The Temple and the Law were the essence of the Messianic promises. To lose those meant to the Jews in exile that the promises were gone as well. The valley was scattered with the dry bones of a people and a promise.

What God is telling them through this prophecy is that He can raise the hope of Israel in its deadest moment.

That should be hopeful to us as well this morning as we wonder at the church of Jesus Christ in America and its seeming deadness. We know that a church can be full of people and still be dead – a valley of dry bones. Life becomes something breathed into it by the Holy Spirit.

That is the life that each of us longs for and the reason we meet together in this place.

For those who think that the only way to bring those spiritually dead bones to life is to do something, I would remind you that in those couple of verses we just read, God is saying that it is He who will do the raising up. “I will give you a new heart and I will put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone, and I will give you a heart of flesh. I will put my Spirit in you, and I will move you to follow my decrees. I will be your God.” In v. 32, God reminds then that there is nothing that they have done that deserves His mercy: “I want you to know that I am not doing this for your sake…Be ashamed and disgraced for your conduct, O house of Israel.”

With the return of the exiles to Jerusalem 50 years later, the Messianic promise was restored to Israel. The Temple was rebuilt by Nehemiah and Ezra. Israel again became prosperous. A people who were dead like dry bones were once again made alive through the power of the Spirit. This was the first fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy.

God had bigger things in mind, however. This was just the beginning. With the Resurrection of Jesus, those dry bones of religiosity came together. The Spirit breathed on them, and they came to life as the Church of Jesus Christ. Each one of us was brought from a pile of dry bones to a people called of God to bring life to this world. Easter became the second fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy.

There are those today who are waiting for the third fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy – the Resurrection of the dead on the last day. The fact is that the Kingdom of God is the third fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy of “’Dem bones, ‘Dem bones, “Dem dry bones, now hear the word of the Lord.” This world is a valley of dry bones, rising one person at a time as called by God. Can you picture it? The Kingdom of God, filled with those saints who have gone before and those saints now walking among the living dead, is the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy, one citizen at a time.

They say that there will be final fulfillment. It will be that last day when the Lord Himself comes down from Heaven with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead will rise (1 Thess 4:16). There will be a noise, a rattling sound, perhaps, and bones will come together, bone to bone. Tendons and flesh will appear on them and skin will cover them. God will put into them the breath of life, and they will come to life and stand on their feet, a vast army of them.

We, however, are here today wondering and eager to come more fully to life – how to have life and have it more abundantly. We often talk about how spiritually dry are these times in our day. People are not as committed to church as they used to be. I was reading an article recently about how the number of Christians in Palestine has declined precipitously so that in Bethlehem, for example, it is considered to be less than 15% and 2% throughout Palestine.

Does it ever occur to us that maybe the remnant that is left in Palestine is the resurrected Church in Exile? How many saints are needed for God to raise up a valley of dry bones?

Our church is small, but our hearts are full. We don’t have the numbers that other churches have; likewise, we don’t have their problems, either. We are getting older, and our future here as a church body is uncertain. Given a choice, I will take our plight over that of others. What we represent here is not another pile of dry bones in the desert. What we represent here is the makings of a great army. Ezekiel tells us a little about what it takes to rise up and live.

First, before anything can happen, the vision must come. “Without the vision, the people perish” (Prov. 29:18). I think we have the vision here – not of programs but of what God can do with the weak and the vulnerable and the unlikely.

Theologian Walter Brueggemann lists 6 qualities of a people in exile:

1. They are a community of sadness over the loss of what used to be…

2. They have lost the old family place – the sense of familiarity, the old hymns, the old church traditions, even what we call Christian morality.

3. They are keenly aware of the power of despair: “Are we moving forward, or are we just spinning our wheels?”

4. They question whether or not God is absent. Maybe we have driven Him out with our church growth plans that never factor in God and His sovereign will.

5. They play the blame game. You hear about busy families, mass media, video games, apathy, hurt feelings, sports events and any other number of excuses. The source of the problem must be outside the church, we think, since we, as the body of Christ, are so nearly perfect.

6. They are preoccupied with self. We need; we hope for; we want – all those things that make God secondary in our plans.

Here is Ezekiel, a disenfranchised priest without a temple. God shows up and says, “I want you to be a priest to the exiles.” Think about this. Ezekiel is called to generate confidence and hope in a people empty of life and to breathe fresh air into a people who had been crushed by history. What we forget is that even in exile, and especially in exile, God is in our midst: “Lo I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

God goes into exile with us, for it is only in exile that we can minister the love of Christ to others who are lost in exile.

If God is in exile with us, then surely He can show us a way out. “Don’t be afraid, Joseph, when your brothers stuff you down a well. I am with you; I’ll get you home. And David, when the odds are stacked against you and you have to face a giant with a rag and five stones, don’t be afraid, for I am with you. Daniel, don’t worry about those hungry lions. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, don’t fret when Nebuchadnezzar throws you into the fiery furnace. Paul and Peter, don’t worry when they throw you into prison for your preaching.”

“NMMH Church, don’t despair when your numbers decline and you seem to be getting too old to light the fire anymore. I am with you. I have already raised up this bunch of dry bones and will lead you home.” “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.”

The raising up of the dry bones to create the church is not an outward activity but an inward reality. “I will place in you a new heart.” This is not about how we feel or what we do. It is about who we are. The way out of exile is not cosmetic surgery. It is transplant surgery in God’s time and in His manner. God is not interested in adjusting the way we do church. He is interested in adjusting our identities.

Our heart of stone may be our inability to let go. In order to receive that heart of flesh, there is often much that must be taken away. God will not take it until we are willing to let it go.

Our heart of stone may well be our lack of passion. Can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land – our places of work, our families, in our neighborhoods? Peter thinks we can.

“Since you call on a Father who judges each man’s work impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear…In Christ you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.”

This is a direct address to us when we are tempted to join the great unwashed masses out there because it is more comfortable and because we don’t like that feeling of being in exile. “Live your lives as strangers in reverent fear.” I don’t see anything there about buttonholing people to get them to come to church or to begin each sentence with, “You’ve got to…” Do you?

As God raised Christ from the dead, so also will His church rise up as a great army from the valley of dry bones, one saint at a time; one little congregation at a time.

The question for our time is, “Can the Church live?” I read all the time about strategies to revive a dead church, as though God somehow is on vacation. The answer to the question, “Can the Church live?” is not a program or a defeatist attitude. It is, “Only you know, God.” To which God replies, “Prophesy; preach – speak my word, find your place in my body, exercise your faith and the talents I have given you, pray for one another, and allow my Spirit to breathe new life in you.”

We are a great army waiting to happen. Are we ready to rise up and be restored?