Ezekiel 37:1-14
As many of you know, I finished my doctoral dissertation on clergy transitions last week. It’s nice to have that accomplished, but transition wasn’t my original topic. When I first started formulating ideas for the dissertation, I went to my favorite subject, which is the resurrection of Jesus. I’ve had a life-long fascination with the history and theology of that most important event, even though it can seem, on the surface, to be rather morbid. The joining together of death and life have always interested me. One of my hobbies in college, for example, was to check out cemeteries to look at old gravestones and imagine the lives of these people in their time. When Jennifer and I were dating, we’d be driving along and as we passed an old cemetery I had to stop and look it over. To this day, I don’t know why she married me!
My original dissertation plan was thus to preach a series on resurrection and then evaluate congregational response to what would be, for many, a very different view than many of us learned along the way (although, I would argue that this new view is a more biblical one). I had it all planned out but then, after I had written the first chapter, we got the call to come to Tri-Lakes, which brought the topic of transition more to the forefront. I’ve kind of become the conference’s transition expert, and have begun a season of training pastors and SPR committees on that subject.
Still, however, studying the resurrection remains my deepest passion. While I didn’t write that dissertation, I am going to preach that series, which is the one we begin today. Over the years, I read a lot of books on the subject of death and resurrection: books on burial practices, for example, the nature of human personhood, theories of afterlife in different cultures, and the biblical worldview of death and life—quite a library of stuff. One of the books that really grabbed me, however, was one by Dr. Tom Long, who teaches at Candler in Atlanta—a book titled, Accompany Them With Singing: The Christian Funeral. I know it seems weird, but this book on funerals, death, and resurrection was one of the best I’ve ever read (of course, I’m the kind of pastor who would rather officiate a funeral than a wedding any day—mostly because, at a funeral, people are paying attention as they think about their own mortality!).
I liked this book mostly because Dr. Long gets at the core understanding of death in Scripture. He argues, and I think correctly, that the Bible tends to talk about three kinds of death and, at the outset of this series, knowing the difference can help us begin to understand what’s going on in the Gospel accounts of the resurrection. Using Tom Long’s categories, we might call these “small-d” death, “capital-D” death, and, finally, the death of Christ.
Small-d death is what we might also call natural death. It’s simply the recognition that we humans are mortal—that we have a certain life span, whether it is short or long. Some might wish that we had life spans like those we read about back in Genesis (Methuselah – 969 years old—imagine how much he had to save for retirement!), but we have to remember that by chapter 6 God had already set a limit on human life – 120 years—which seems to be true even today.
Truth is that each of us has an expiration date, which reminds us that we are human and not divine. That’s what we acknowledged on Ash Wednesday this week as we took ashes on our foreheads and said those words that are so true: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Our mortality, however, is a mixed blessing. On the positive side, the fact that we don’t hang around forever means that our lives have a sense of urgency that can generate things like creativity and faith. If you’re a procrastinator, mortality reminds us that you can’t procrastinate eternally! There is a deadline for all of us. Small-d death keeps us from living in a state of atrophy.
Small-d death also has the somewhat positive affect of assuring us that suffering does not last forever. I’ve sat with a lot of families whose loved ones were suffering terribly in pain and for whom death was a blessed end to their suffering.. While we can never say that small-d death is desirable, sometimes it is a release from the prison of pain. Sometimes death might even be considered a friend to those for whom drawing breath is a struggle.
We’re even more familiar of the downsides of small-d death, however. It reminds us that every day we live we are one day closer to dying (aren’t you glad you came to hear all this today?). And when we die, there’s a pretty good chance we will be forgotten. I’ve done plenty of funerals where a family member will try to say something helpful like, “He’ll be remembered forever.” Well, the truth is that cemeteries are full of people that nobody remembers. Very few people are remembered for more than a couple of generations after their passing. Psalm 103 reminds us of this fact:
“As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it and is gone, and its place knows it no more” (v. 15-16). Knowing that we’ll likely be forgotten, we can get trapped by what Tom Long calls “the anxiety of impermanence” which can cause us to a “what’s the point?” way of thinking. When people think that their lives won’t be worth much in the long run they can wind up wasting their lives in self-destructive ways. Maybe sin itself is really a byproduct of mortality. Conversely, people may also simply try harder to stave off their mortality and drive themselves to an early grave trying to “make their mark” in the world. We all want to be remembered, but will we? Small-d death is a great equalizer, but also a great antagonist.
Capital-D death, however, is a different reality. Capital-D death is never welcome under any circumstance and is never a gentle friend, but “an alien and destructive force.” It is an enemy—in fact, Paul says that it is the enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26). It is God’s enemy, and it not only steals life from individuals but also captures “principalities and powers” (to use Paul’s terms). Capital-D death can enslave human institutions, turn people to warfare, cause hate and genocide, lead to systems of injustice and violence, and make a mockery of God’s good creation. Capital-D death seeks to destroy hope for the future, mocks our very existence, and “scorns human beings who are set down in the middle of history with aspirations for eternal worth” (Long 40). Capital-D death wreaks havoc in the world and we see it at work every time we open a newspaper and read the accounts of madness and mayhem perpetrated by human greed, malice, and sin. Capital-D death convinces humanity to embrace consumption over compassion, greed over grace, and self over our neighbors. When we begin to believe that the world is a dark and evil place, rather than God’s good creation, Capital-D death is at work.
The point is that there is a difference between small-d and Capital-D death. Small-d death ends our life in time and place. Capital-D death seeks to end humanity altogether, consigning it to a future without hope. Sure, people have often thought that they could simply act better and the world would be better, too. The whole Enlightenment project was about human progress—that things will just keep getting better and better and eventually things like war and disease and even death will be conquered by reason, science, and technology. New Atheist voices like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, direct descendants of Enlightenment thinkers like Nietzsche and Kant, write screed after screed decrying faith and calling for pure reason. But how has that Enlightenment project been working out? Is war being eradicated, for example? No—and now we have nuclear weapons (which science gave us, by the way). Try as we might, humanity hasn’t been able to beat back Capital-D death, or even small-d death for that matter. If we’re thinking that we can change things on our own, well, I’ve got bad news. On our own, we’re still subjects of King Death. So we might cry out with Paul, “Wretched people that we are. Who will rescue us from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24)
Well, the answer is why we’re here this morning. Sunday morning. An echo of Easter. We read the story of Jesus’ crucifixion last week—all that happened on a Friday—the day that Jesus was nailed to a Roman cross, enduring the pain and agony of death—small-d Death in his broken body and Capital-D death in the form of the evil and violence of empire and hate that put him there. “Death and death apparently had won, as they always do” (Long 42). And Jesus’ friends did the only thing they could do in the face of death and death—prepare for a funeral.
In Jesus’ day, burial was a two-stage process, and tombs had two parts. One part was a slab where you laid out the recently deceased, washed and wrapped the body in linen cloth, and anointed it with spices designed to both hasten decomposition and cut down the odor of decay. The family did all the preparation: no funeral home in those days. The body would thus break down in the tomb and then, exactly one year later, the family would return and collect the bones of the deceased, placing them in an ossuary or bone box, which would then be stored in a niche in another part of the tomb. The tomb had a stone door because this was repeated each time a family member died.
The people of ancient Israel were thus quite acquainted with small-d death and everything that went with it. It was not sanitized, but an everyday reality. They were also intimately acquainted with the realm of capital-D death. Remember what we said in the previous series—the history of Israel is a history of slavery and occupation by foreign powers that used death as their greatest weapon. They had seen more than their share of death and exile, the cause of which they attributed to their own sin. They understood Capital-D death as the force that still enslaved them, and until that was defeated, until God returned to Zion, until their enemy’s greatest weapon was neutralized, they would still be a subject people. As exile and occupation continued to grind them down, many of them began to look for a new hope—a hope they called resurrection.
We see that in the passage we read earlier—Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones coming to life. Read that closely and you see that Ezekiel’s prophecy connects resurrection with the return from exile. Look at verse 11: “Then he said to me, ‘Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost, we are cut off completely.’” Such is the pain of exile. But then God gives them the promise: “I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people and I will bring you back to the land of Israel…(v. 14) “I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil…” Here, resurrection is a metaphor for restoration and return—the dry bones can, indeed, live.
But as Israel continued to live under foreign occupation, the idea of resurrection began to move from metaphor to hope, from idea to reality. In the account of the Maccabean revolt in the apocrypha, for example, seven Jewish brothers and their mother stood in front of the pagan king Antiochus Epiphanes and are told to eat pork, in violation of the Jewish law, or they will be put to death. Each brother, in turn, refuses. One says, “You accursed fiend, you are depriving us of this present life, but the King of the universe will raise us up* to live again forever, because we are dying for his laws.” One has his tongue cut out and his hands cut off, but he bravely holds them out and says, “It was from Heaven that I received these; for the sake of his laws I disregard them; from him I hope to receive them again.” As the last of her sons goes to his death, the mother says to him: “I do not know how you came to be in my womb; it was not I who gave you breath and life, nor was it I who arranged the elements you are made of. 23Therefore, since it is the Creator of the universe who shaped the beginning of humankind and brought about the origin of everything, he, in his mercy, will give you back both breath and life, because you now disregard yourselves for the sake of his law.”
These Jewish martyrs believed that they would be resurrected one day—given back their bodies—and their resurrection would mean the defeat of all the powers of the earth. They were not only focused on a heavenly reward for their faithfulness, but rather the defeat of Capital D death itself and those who wield its power.
The prophet Daniel, who was hugely influential on the writers of the New Testament and, in some ways, on Jesus himself, put the Jewish hope of resurrection even more succinctly: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the starts forever and ever.” (12:2-3)
By the time of Jesus, this resurrection hope had become woven into the fabric of Jewish hope. The Pharisees, the Essenes and the zealots were proponents of resurrection, though their opposite number, the Sadducess, saw it as a dangerous belief. Resurrection hope meant that, in the end, the forces of evil and both small d and Capital D death would be defeated forever. They believed that this would happen at the last day, when God finally returned to Zion and dwelt with his people forever, judging the nations there in Jerusalem. So strong is that belief that, even today, there is a huge Jewish graveyard on the slope of the Mount of Olives facing the Temple Mount. These are prime burial plots because, in Jewish hope, the ones closest to the temple may be resurrected first and have a ringside seat for the judgment.
But that was still a long way off—a distant dream. No one expected that it would happen in their own time, to one man. No one expected that resurrection life could break in on them in the present. Easter, however, tells us that it did and when it did, it answered Paul’s question: Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:24).
In this series, we’re going to look at how the resurrection of Jesus changes everything by defeating death, inaugurating the end of exile, and leading us to a new creation in which death itself is no more. The resurrection is the central reality of Christian faith—without it, the whole project comes undone. The resurrection of Jesus was the catalyst of the early church, and can be our catalyst once again. It was the central theme of the preaching of the apostles, and should be our central theme as well. In a time when so many churches are merely offering people tips for living life just a little better, an understanding of the resurrection leads us to understanding life itself—life in the midst of death, beyond death, and over death.
The bones of Israel in Ezekiel’s vision and the bones of Jesus laid out for burial are deeply connected. Jesus is Israel, and he will prove that her bones can, indeed, live and bring life to the whole dry, dusty world. This is the best news ever, and we’re going to spend the rest of Lent exploring it and understanding it.
But to get there, we first have to be willing to address the reality of death among us—the small d death that robs us of our loved ones, and the Capital D death that drives much of our world. No, you don’t have to be the kind of strange nerd that likes browsing through cemeteries, but you might become the kind of person who faces the reality of death with the sure and certain hope of resurrection—a person who believes that these bones can live.
You know, yesterday we had a memorial service here for Ken Carlson, and then afterward the ladies prepared a feast—a celebration of life in the midst of death, a meal of promise, and fellowship, and hope. That’s the biblical way of life, indeed its whole story.
That’s one of the reasons we’ve implemented weekly communion during the Lenten season. When we come to the table, we face the reality of life and death together—Jesus’ death and his death, Jesus’ life and our life. The broken body and shed blood of Jesus, the victim of death in all of its forms and power, changes to a symbol and a promise of resurrection life. We want you to not only hear the good news, but to taste it.
I once asked a rabbi fried of mine to define Judaism and he said, “Bob, that’s easy: They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat!” That’s what we celebrate at this table, but with a little twist: “They tried to kill him, he won…let’s eat!”
These bones can live!
