Sermon - The Promise of Life

Preached on March 9, 2008, the fifth Sunday in Lent, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC

Ezekiel 34:1-14 John11:32-45

Dedicated in memoriam to my Uncle Michael; and always to the glory of God.

The vision that Ezekiel had about new life given to the people who lay as dry bones in the valley speaks to us of the resurrection, the promise of life that follows the death we all must pass through.

The Reverend Frederick Buechner wrote about death in a book called The Eyes of the Heart. In it, he contemplates his own death and remembers those who have gone before him, including his mother, who was never a person to speak or think much about such matters of God or eternal life. But one day near the end of her life, Buechner remembers, “when in the midst of some conversation we were having about nothing in particular she suddenly turned to me and said out of the blue, ‘Do you really believe anything happens after you die?’”
That’s a question to which one might give a very nuanced, theological answer; however, since his mother’s hearing had gotten so bad that he had to say things at the top of his lungs, he simply said “YES, SOMETHING HAPPENS.”[1]

Why do we believe that something happens? Why do we believe that death is but the final station on the way to eternal life? Buechner gives three reasons, and I believe they are well worth our attention today. First, he writes, “I believe it because, if I were God and loved the people I created and wanted them to become at last the best they had it in them to be, I couldn’t imagine consigning them to oblivion when their time came with the job under the best of circumstances only a fraction done.”

I remember from my days at Miami University the men who would stand out on the sidewalks on the busiest section of campus near the student union and the central academic quad, handing out their little religious tracts, which told stories about college students who died before their time and found themselves in hell because they had not said the right words to the right God at the right time. They were illustrated with cartoon drawings and annotated with verses from the Bible. We used to take those back to the dorm and make jokes about them. And then they passed out a new tract about students who heard these street preachers and then made fun of them, and then they died and were sent to hell. I guess they knew what we were doing.

It’s an old strategy that goes back to tent revival meetings. Garrison Keillor told a story about this kind of revival once on his radio show Prairie Home Companion. He talked about going to the revival as a young boy, and the preacher told a kid who had refused to accept God at a revival meeting. Then, on the way home, a train crossing signal wasn’t working and his soul was ushered into eternity, his life ended, unsaved by God. Garrison Keillor said that as he listened to the preacher, he thought long and hard about whether there was a train crossing on his way home that night.

I think Buechner is right. Would a loving God consign us to hell, or to nothing, after all this is done? The problem is that this picture does not match up with the character I see in Jesus, and the life of Jesus is the best that I know about God. I cannot believe that the mercy and power of God, which are so great, would end at our death.

Buechner gives a second reason to believe that there is new life beyond the grave: “I believe it, apart from any religious convictions, because I have a hunch it is true. I intuit it,” he writes. Here’s the thing: we know that this life is grossly unfair. There are rich and poor, lucky and unlucky, victims who suffer greatly and oppressors who live in luxury. We know that this world is witness to severe injustice, and if that’s all there is, then life is a black comedy, and the only appropriate feeling about life is cynicism. But, Buechner continues, life doesn’t feel like a black comedy. It feels like mystery – it feels like, at the center of life, there is holiness. If we were truly cynical, we wouldn’t even mourn the horrors of the world, we’d just say “well, what else did you expect?”

I think that we all have a hunch there must be something more because this can’t be all that there is. There is too much broken in life that must be made whole, too much that must be restored and honored and loved. We have hunch, deep down, that there must be more.

Thornton Wilder said as much in his play Our Town. In the words of the stage manager, who oversees this story about Grovers Corners and reflects on what it means, Wilder wrote “Now there are some things we all know, but we don’t take’m out and look at’m very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t even the stars…everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people who ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it.”[2]

We live in a world of evidence, and empirical proof, but we shouldn’t be too quick to ignore the hunch we have, and the holiness that we experience. It cannot be so easily dismissed.

The third reason Buechner gives for believing that after we die we aren’t dead forever is “because Jesus said so.” I suppose this reason will be more or less convincing depending on what people think of Jesus. People are free to hear Ezekiel’s vision of the bones being restored to life and write it off as a nice dream. We are free to hear the story of Lazarus raised from the tomb and write if off as wishful thinking, or magical fiction. But as we prepare next week to follow Jesus into Jerusalem, to watch as he calmly walks toward his own death, without a single note of hatred in his voice for those who crucify him, I find myself trusting his promise of life.

We could stop right there and let that be all, but I think that we would be stopping too soon, because life after death is not all that God seeks to give us. Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones is a wonderful reminder of the promise of new life after death, but that is not the only meaning of his vision, and we need to listen closely to this passage, and to the place and time in which Ezekiel lived. Ezekiel is writing to his people in the sixth century before Christ. Israel lies in ruins, Jerusalem has been toppled and torched by the conquering army of Babylon, and Israel’s people have been scattered or taken into exile to the east. Ezekiel’s vision is of a people, a nation, who have been devastated, and long for a return to their homeland, their freedom, and to each other. They still have life, but they feel as though they are nothing but bones, scattered in a distant valley.

In his vision, God tells Ezekiel to call on the breath to restore life to those dry bones, to he people in exile. That word, breath, is repeated seven times in this vision, and we need to know that the Hebrew word for breath, “ruah,” also means wind, and also means spirit. This is a vision about being restored by the spirit of God, and that has to do with our lives right now. You see, there is the life that ends when our breathing stops, and then there is the spiritual life that dies when the spirit of God does not breathe within us. We cannot come to worship and speak only of the life that God gives after death, and then act as if God has nothing to do with us until we die.

Ezekiel’s people had suffered the loss of their home, their place of worship, their freedom and their security. Much like having the wind knocked out of you after a bad fall, the spirit had been knocked out of them just as the spirit is often knocked out of all of us by the loss and struggle along our paths.

Let us remember that at the center of life is holiness. Beyond all that is broken in this world, all that is unfair and incomplete, at the innermost place of existence and truth, life is holy. Let God breathe that spirit into us, that we may know that we walk on holy ground, and that the space around us is sacred space.

[1] Buechner, Frederick, 1999. The Eyes of the Heart. All references to Buechner are found on pages 14-16.

[2] Wilder, Thornton, 1938. Our Town, page 81.