April 6-Ezekiel 37, John 11
Some days everything seems gray, or meh as some folks say: no color, no freshness, no life. On thursday, i heard good morning, but then again what’s good about it. Le Weekend is an OK movie about a middled aged couple trying to bring some life into a lifeless marriage after 30 years.
In Ezekiel the spirit is alive in a place of death. Verse 11 is a description of desolation, dry bones, lost hope,cut off. A cemetery, a battlefield is now the birthing room of a new vision. Life is knit together again.Part of the change comes from speech, so the word makes flesh here. so, the old spiritual, Dem Bones would be apt.Part of the hope here then is connection. that reminds me. Hope is not the same as optimism that looks for the good and expects it. in spite of the facts at hand, hope looks toward better days.
Both Mary and Martha say the exact thing to Jesus. Did Jesus weep as he looked his own tomb in the eye? Could Jesus have dawdled to give himself time to collect himself, and his powers? Or perhaps, Jesus lives in a sort of unhurried zone of serenity and calm. God’s timing hardly seems impeccable in either place-At first Lazarus, God helps does not receive that help in time. Mary lives out her name. Martha too as the mistress of the house/the lady.
All of this talk of life, eternal life seems to ride along the boundary between the physical and the spiritual myself to be so encumbered by cares, have I paralyzed myself to be not much more alive than Lazarus in the tomb.Grave clothes are swaddling cloths for Lazarus-in life they are too constricting, a sort of straitjacket. Raised Lazarus is still bound up tightly by the strips of burial cloth until he is released by others.3)Notice that the image puts flesh on the bones. This is no airy spirituality, is it? Raised from the dead to die again-It just hit me that in none of the raising from the dead accounts are we treated to accounts of the death or near death experience pre or post mortem.
How did Lazarus live out the rest of his life? At first did he notice every sense, every act as if it were fresh and new? Percolating just beneath the veneer of awareness is the great fear that we are living dying lives or a living death.Have I allowed too much time to slip away in a sort of hazy daze? Ps 130 out of the depths but the grave is silent , no? For a moment let’s see the phrase as talking about the deep dark moments and situations we face. It is living a partial life to keep skimming about on the surface. Rom. 8:11 quote here.
I find these 2 accounts ot be visualizing masterpieces. with our experience with the visual, may I suggest that you imagine yourself as the director of making movies out of these passages? Where would you like the fresh breeze of the spirit to blow through your congregation and your own life. Some people go to church and the only way they find life if the music is loud and vaguely familiar to radio songs.Church growth groups are constantly asking about how to bring life, energy, dynamism to worship.forgive me if I am being too direct at this point. Every baptized Christian has been given the gift of the spirit of new life. Every Christian church is touched in some way by the spirit of God toward new life. Can the dry bones of an older well established church be reconfigured? Yes? Can the dying moments of a life be put to death and new sparks of vitality be constantly ignited? Yes.Spirit of life for individuals or groups is the ultimate force
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