One and Only Pass at This Sunday's Bible Lessons (March 9, 2008)

[In these passes, I hope to help the members of the congregation I serve as pastor, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, to prepare for worship. But because the Bible lessons we use are the ones appointed by the Revised Common Lectionary, used in one form or another by Christians everywhere. I also hope others will find them useful.]

The Bible Lessons for This Week:
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 130
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45

General Comments:
1. There is an overarching theme that connects this week's lessons. Each make the common affirmation that God's Word, whether spoken by God Himself or through others, has the power to give hope in hopeless situations.

2. Ezekiel was a priest and a prophet who lived in the sixth century-BC. Scholars, in fact, can nail down when Ezekiel was active with fair specificity. As Howard Wallace notes:

His prophecies can be dated according to the book itself to the years 593-571 BCE. The book is a literary work, with tidily arranged sections, indicating the work of a literary editor. Ezekiel himself is obviously an ‘oral’ prophet, prefacing his prophecies with ‘Thus says the Lord God’. Possibly his sayings remained ‘oral’ until his death, when they were written down for preservation. In any case, the structure of the book includes four ‘visions’, all introduced by the phrase ‘the hand of the Lord was upon me’, indicating the beginning of a trance-like state common in ancient Near Eastern prophecy...

3. Like many other citizens of Judah (the Southern Kingdom), Ezekiel had been dragged off to Babylon after the Babylonians had conquered their country and desecrated the temple in Jerusalem. But, as the talented Presbyterian preacher Craig Barnes explains, this exile wasn't marked by conventional enslavement:

When the promising young Hebrews were dragged into exile in Babylon, they were not kept in prisons or even camps. They were free to marry, build homes, plant crops and exchange goods. Some became quite wealthy. They were also free to assemble, elect leaders and worship. But the Hebrews had a hard time worshiping in exile because they never got over the destruction of their holy city and temple in Zion.

They were not where they wanted to be, or where they were supposed to be. So they lived with a sadness that ran down to their bones. And they refused to "sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land."

The Babylonian captivity of God's people created a crisis of faith in at least two ways:

• (1) Because they had always associated God with the promised land, they didn't know if God was still God in a foreign land. Had God abandoned them? Was God powerless?
• (2) Did they really need God when, in modern terms, they had all the steaks and flat screen TVs they could want? It isn't the hard times that keep people from believing in God or from hoping. It's having all that you think you need. Ezekiel addressed people whose affliction wasn't deprivation, but a lack of hope.

The Babylonian conquerors of God's people made the same bet that such modern-day tyrants as Vladimir Putin in Russia and the ruling elite in China are making. Give people the stuff they crave, such rulers reason, and people will gladly submit to imprisonment. But imprisonment to material wealth and "freedom on the edges" kills the human spirit. It leads to the death of hope.

As Philip Yancey points out in his discussion of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, the cynicism and hopelessness of that book, not to mention the works of existentialist writers, was born not of impoverished people, struggling to live, but took hold among people who had plenty to eat and much to keep them entertained. It's only people who have all that the world has to offer who doubt God. When you have nothing but God, you have nothing to fear. When you have everything but God, you fear everything. Most of all, you fear that the stuff that has become your god, the means by which you measure your value and the things on which you rely for life, will be taken away from you.

The dry bones in Ezekiel's vision are the people of Judah whose hope had died because they no longer wanted to return to Jerusalem and no longer believed that God could offer them anymore than the "bread and circuses" that their Babylonian captors gave them.

4. Psalm 130 is one of the "song of ascents," sung by religious pilgrims as they climbed Mount Zion in Jerusalem, home of the temple. It's an expression of hope in the midst of despair. Though I am in a dry bone in a valley, the psalmist effectively says, I will wait for you to come and speak Your Word, O God, and I will live. The psalm ends with a call to Israel to "hope in the Lord" Who even forgives the sins of His people.

5. In Romans 8:6-11, part of just what may be the greatest chapter of the Bible, the apostle Paul sets flesh off against spirit. Here, flesh is the world system, the world's way of thinking. The flesh represents this dying world. He says that it's futile and a bad bet to place the weight of our hope and trust on flesh. Rather, we need to bet on spirit, the things of God.

Life in the spirit, which is the life we lead when we let Christ in as the authority, Lord, and Savior of our lives, animates us with the life of God, like the dry bones of Ezekiel's vision, like the once stinking corpse of Jesus' friend Lazraus from our Gospel lesson.

The believer in Jesus lives beyond death because of Christ. The same Spirit Who raised Christ will raise those in whom Christ lives.

6. The Gospel lesson, John 11:1-45, presents yet another lengthy lesson from the fourth Gospel, like those we've had over the past several weeks. It's understandable that the lessons from John over the past several weeks have been so lengthy. Each present long narratives of individual events, not easily broken down.

Yet, it's also a shame in way. John is the most accomplished artist of the Gospel writers. Each incident he recounts is filled with multiple layers of significance. It makes preaching on the text extremely difficult. What does a preacher (or a teacher) leave out this time?

7. John 11 tells what happened when Jesus' friend Lazarus died. Jesus called from outside of Lazarus' tomb and brought His friend back to life.

8. This is not a tale of resurrection. The resurrected Jesus, after all, still lives and will return to the earth in bodily form. Lazarus though, presumably died again.

But like all of Jesus' miracles, especially those in John's Gospel, referred to as "the gospel of signs," Jesus' calling Lazarus back to life is a sign. It points not to itself, but to Jesus. It points out that He has power over death and life and that He can make good on the claim He makes to Lazarus's sister:

I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.