All Scriptures quoted are from The New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise quoted.

It always helps to know a little bit of history. Otherwise, it’s possible to drive right on through a place and miss the rich, though sometimes tragic, heritage that gave that place its real character. That’s the way it is if you drive through New London, Texas, without so much as stopping to read the historical marker on the main highway that runs through the center of town.

New London isn’t very much of a town now, as size goes; it never really was. But, in 1937, it was one of the richest rural school districts in all of Texas because of all the oil and gas reserves being discovered in that region of the state in those days. As it turns out, what made it the richest district also ended up defining it as the place where one of the greatest tragedies in Texas unfolded toward the end of the school day on March 18, 1937, almost seventy-one years ago to the day. Toward the end of that school day, about 3:00 p.m. a man started a sanding machine. The spark from that ignition also touched off gas that had built up in the building for some time. In its purest form, natural gas is odorless. Up until the New London explosion, there was no law requiring that odor be added to the gas so leaks could be detected. The New London tragedy changed all of that. We owe our lives to the lessons learned that sad day.

Odorless natural gas had been leaking into the New London School undetected for some time until it transformed an innocent looking school building into a bomb just waiting for a spark, the one that finally came that early spring afternoon. The explosion lifted the entire building off of its foundation, sent two-hundred-pound car-crushing concrete splinters flying hundreds of feet and collapsed what was left of the school on the unsuspecting victims. In all, some 298 of the 540 teachers and students in the school died. To this day, no event has so shaped that community’s character more than those few seconds when not one family was left unscathed by unspeakable tragedy and grief.

We find ourselves in somewhat unfamiliar territory this morning in the book of Ezekiel. It will be easy enough in a moment to see why this text is so fitting for the season of Lent, as we prepare ourselves for Easter. But, before we can appreciate what these 2500-year-old words mean for us in 2008, we need a little help with history.

Ezekiel had been a priest in Solomon’s Temple, one of the most prominent positions a man could hold in that day and time. Very shortly, he would see it all come collapsing down around him, splintered by events of history over which he had no control. In 587 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian army swept through Zion and left little standing. The Israelites were carried off into captivity. The land they had been promised was now controlled by foreign insurgents. On top of all that, on the very same day, Ezekiel’s wife died so that, in one day, Ezekiel had to let go not only of the one he called “the delight of (his) eyes (Ezekiel 24:16, NASV),” but also of his dream for his native home. Death, in more than one form, was all around. We can only imagine the sights, the stench and the sorrow of it all.

When the people of God had been held away from their homes and their dreams, when despair may have well been at its peak, God spoke to Ezekiel in something like a vision or a dream. In this dream, Ezekiel was carried by the Spirit of God to a valley full of bones. It was something like a graveyard, except that all of the bones were visible above ground. If I had a dream like that, Nancy would say of it what she says of all my dreams, “You have weird dreams!”

God told Ezekiel to walk around in the bones and contemplate what he saw there. Ezekiel reports what he saw. “There were (many bones) and they were very dry.” Death had been doing its rotten work for a long time. Evidence was everywhere to be seen. Then, God asked Ezekiel a penetrating question, “Mortal man, can these bones live?” Aside from the physiology of it all, it’s a puzzling question on its face. Why would God be asking a mortal a question mortals would more likely have asked of God? What’s up with that? Unless, maybe, God is driving home to Ezekiel and even to us what should already be the most obviously painful point.

That death is death and though we can, with good habits and good medicine, stall it at the door for a while, eventually our strength weakens. We can’t the hold the door shut anymore and we have no choice but to let the death angel have his way for a time, with us and even those we love most. The question still stands unanswered, at least by Ezekiel. “Can these bones live?”

It’s almost the question you find yourself asking if you’ve ever visited the touring phenomenon, Body Worlds. Hundreds and hundreds of human bodies, plasticized, they call it. Frozen forever in one form or another with only one thing missing, the outer skin, so that you can look inside those bodies and wonder about what is inside your own. Or, is there something else missing, too? Like the breath of life?

Take the breath away and no matter what form survives, in the ground or above the ground, we are just so many bones and muscles and sinews with no power to do anything, not even think. What is any individual person, without the Spirit-born breath of life, first promised at creation? What is a family without that breath? What is a church? Without the Spirit breath of holy God, this is nothing more than a world inhabited by lifeless bodies. It’s a body-world, not the spirit world it was meant to be, right?

Can these bones live? My bones? Yours? Our church’s? Only if present in them is the Spirit breath of life. So, God tells Ezekiel, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

Have you ever heard a sermon like that? You walked into the sanctuary and sat down and heard your bones creak with the effort. Then, when the music minister asks you to stand and sing all five verses of the hymn, you groan with all those others whose bones are creaking around. “Why can’t we just sit for a while?” you start asking about the time you turn fifty or so.

It’s a body-world, remember? Or, is it more? With all that I hope and know, I believe it is, we are, this church is, so much more! The preacher stands to preach and makes the promise of God that he will cause breath to enter us and we shall live and we shall know that he is the Lord. If that promise was only made to Israel some 2500 years ago, why bother listening to it? It’s of no value to us, unless it is more than just history we’d read on the historical marker in an obscure East Texas village. We bother now because we believe that what Ezekiel was promising the children of God 2500 years ago, God is still promising his children today. We’re sneaking up on the resurrection!

The resurrection promise of God is that, where there is no life, there will be life! Where is no breath, God will perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and there will be the breath of life eternal! Where there are only the dried out, bleached out, vulture-picked bones of our best efforts to make something of ourselves and of our church all by ourselves, God’s work has just begun. In fact, the work God wants to do he really cannot do until we have nothing left to offer but the bleached out, dried up skeletal remains of our best efforts that have left us for dead. Not even God can resurrect what has not first died.

Ezekiel, looking around at all the options he doesn’t have, decides to be faithful to God and preaches the sermon. To his amazement, the bones begin forming into skeletons, and sinews and ligaments find their proper place again. Then, God says, “Preach on, brother. This time, call to the wind and ‘say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.’” The wind to which Ezekiel was calling was the very Spirit breath of God. And, did the wind ever blow! The skeletons stood straight up, as “the breath came into them, and they lived.”

What a sermon! I’ve never seen that happen, have you? I do well if I finish a sermon with eighty percent of my congregation still awake. I’ll never forget praying over Frank Ing three years ago. Ninety-three year-old Frank had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just a few weeks before. One Sunday after worship, Nancy and I went by Methodist Hospital to see Frank. His whole family was there. I asked if I could pray for him. Frank was lying on his right side. I came up behind him, put my hand on his left shoulder and prayed a very short prayer. When I finished, Nancy leaned over Frank and said to the family, “I think he’s gone.” Frank’s body was still there, but the Spirit breath had left him.

You remember, don’t you? Several of you asked me to stop praying for you after that! Though I’ve put plenty of people to sleep, I’ve never raised a pile of bones back to full and meaningful life. It’s all a vision for Ezekiel, of course, and God rushes to tell him the meaning of it. “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.’ Therefore . . . say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves . . . and you shall know that I am the Lord . . . I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”

Though the people of Israel were dead, some literally, some spiritually, some mentally, because of the captivity they’d been in, God had other plans.* It was plan not only to give them new life, to restore them to their hope as God’s people, but also to do it in such a way that, when it was done, no one could doubt that only God could have done it.

Death, as we peer into caskets at funeral homes or stand over a grave full of a loved one’s casket or ponder our own deaths, seems nothing but tragic loss. The promise of God is to take our death and use it to his glory by breathing Spirit life back into us, resurrecting us, making us eternally new. Lent is the season of the year when we hopefully recognize how lifeless we truly are without the breath of God’s spirit filling our lungs, our hearts, our very souls.

I don’t know . . . if I’m Ezekiel and see all those dead bones before my very eyes, I’d be tempted to say that whatever God was going to do here, let’s hope he got it done before now. This is hopeless. That’s what we say standing over the grave of what once was. This is what the Lord says, standing over the same grave. “I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves . . . and you shall know that I am the Lord . . . I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”

When you think of it all like that, is this church a building full of bodies full of invisible souls? Just a body-world? Or, is this church a community of souls, temporarily inhabiting bodies, thereby making it a spirit-world? Which is it? All I know is this. When the children of Israel were being held in captivity they could only sing “Woe is upon us, for we are undone. It will never be the same again. Our captors are too great. Too many have died. We have no future.” And, God says, “I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves . . . and you shall know that I am the Lord . . . I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.” Which of those two do you choose to believe?

Remember this. This is crucial. If it has to do with life after death, that’s God terrain. Just as a leukemia victim cannot give himself a bone marrow transplant, we cannot give the breath of life to ourselves. It’s a gift, from outside of us, from God to us. We can’t make it happen. It happens to us.* Somewhere, sometimes, we have to come face-to-face with the inadequacy of our own self-reliance to make things happen. It’s in that moment of total desperation that God surprises us with Easter!

Just in case you missed it, this Old Testament vision is actually a prophecy of what God would do when he raised Christ from the dead. Remember, Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. He was raised from the dead. This promise to Ezekiel also tells us that, no matter what condition we see ourselves in, God sees us from the future, not from the past.* God does not see you, me or this church through the prism of our bone-killing sinfulness but instead through the prism of resurrection hope.

On July 17, 1979, Randall Champion took 4,160 volts from an electrical line he was attempting to repair. A co-worker, J.D. Thompson, straddling the pole with him in full harness, cradled Randall’s head in his arms and started giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Rocco Morabito took a picture of the whole thing that later won the Pulitzer Prize. Morabito ran to call an ambulance. Just as he returned to the scene he heard Thompson yelling down from the pole, “He’s breathing! He’s breathing!” Imagine the joy in heaven when God robs your grave, the grave where your bones lie silent, as the angels of heaven start shouting, “He’s breathing! She’s breathing!”*

Can you imagine? Can you? Oh, I hope so!

*(Sincere thanks to George Mason, “Graverobbery,” Wilshire Baptist Church, Dallas, TX, March 17, 2002).