Once Dead
Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45

March 9, 2008


My high school class commemorated our 25th anniversary by soliciting and publishing short bios and comments from as many alumni as possible. One of these bios caught my attention, although I did not know this student: “I was dead for three days; didn’t like it much, so I decided to come back to life.”

That is real decision making! This wasn’t the kind of publication you could include a lot of detail - there were nearly 600 of us in that graduating class. For him, that was the most important fact of his last 25 years: let’s face it, he didn’t make the decision to come back to life, he was raised from the dead. Lent is the season during which we prepare for Easter, so there are some who protest that talk of resurrection now is premature. I don’t think my fellow alumnus cared whether it was Lent or not.

This is one of those Lectionary stories that didn’t make it into the Lectionary, but really should have. Acts 20:7-12 tells about Paul’s missionary journey and the teaching he did along the way. “After Thanksgiving we caught a bus in Houston and joined them in St. Louis where we stayed a week. On Sunday night we all gathered for a church supper, and Paul spoke. He kept going until midnight since he was planning to leave next day. It was hot and stuffy in the upstairs room where we were meeting.

“A young fellow named Eubanks was sitting in the window, and while Paul preached on and on, he dozed off and fell sound asleep. He was really sawing wood when all of a sudden he fell out the window to the ground three stories below. He was dead when we got to him. But Paul rushed down, knelt beside him and put his arms around him. ‘Don’t y’all get upset,’ he said, ‘he’s still breathing.’ Then Paul went back upstairs, fixed a sandwich and ate it, began a lengthy discussion that lasted till daybreak, and then left. Those in the party took the boy, Eubanks, home alive, and were thrilled no end about that. (Cotton Patch Version).”

This takes me further back than my 25th high school reunion. When I preached my very first service at my very first posting, I stumbled across this story. I figured it was a funny warning to all those who didn’t listen carefully to my sermons. It didn’t go over well, no one seemed to get the point. Maybe being raised from the dead was a normal event in Eckhart Mines, Maryland. After a year in that four-church charge, I knew that was not the case. While resurrection is inexplicable and outrageous, it is never boring.

It is also impossible. Ezekiel the prophet was known for his technicolour visions and oracles. Like most of the Old Testament prophets he preached disaster while the people of Israel were still alive and healthy, but once disaster became the reality, a different Word of the Lord was proclaimed. When things were at their very worst, when the Temple in Jerusalem had been burned to the ground by the Babylonian armies and the leaders of Israel were dragged off into exile in far away and very strange Babylon, Ezekiel saw a valley full of dry, bleached bones.

Of course, we are sitting on top of a “pile of bones”, Wascana, the barren prairie full of bison bones to which we came to in 1882. When Knox and Metropolitan churches set up the tents for their first Presbyterian and Methodist worship services, it is not unlikely that they had to kick a few bones out of the way.

Yet there was a vast difference. Those settlers in the place they were calling Regina saw the bones, but also imagined something more and full of life. It’s a long stretch to believe that they could imagine precisely what surrounds us today, but surely they saw a new life emerging on the prairie floor.

The bones on the valley floor before Ezekiel were not bison or antelope, but the dried out bones of people, massacred by the Babylonians, not even given the dignity of burial. They were beyond death, beyond hope, and we have kept seeing these bones. The trenches of WWI or in WWII bodies stacked like cordwood in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belson, Dachau; the killing fields of Cambodia; mass graves of Kurdish bones; fields of Rwandan bones, Tutsi and Hutu; graves of Bosnian and Serbian bones; in India, Hindu and Muslim bones; mountainous valleys of Afghan bones; and closer to home, the vaporized bones embedded in the ruins of the World Trade Center.

The word of the Lord came to Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones, to speak to them on God’s behalf, and Ezekiel responds, “How can I speak to something dead?” Some thing, by the way, no longer human. Just prophesy, God answered, and so he did. The noise of rattling bones overwhelms the noiselessness of solemn assemblies that an earlier prophet Amos complained about. Flesh organizes the bones together and the winds of God breathe the Spirit into these inanimate bones and a mighty army of saints is before him, brought back from utter death to new hope. The Lord declares to the resurrected Israel that God will open their graves and lead them back home.

A certain man was ill, Lazarus, brother of Mary and Martha. Illness in the first century without all our antibiotics and medical knowledge was not the bump in the road we encounter. The sisters sent word to Jesus and upon hearing it, Jesus was not greatly concerned and he stayed two days longer in his present location. Then he decided to go back to Judea to see Lazarus. The disciples knew that the religious leadership there were trying to assassinate him, but Jesus was insistent and mentioned Lazarus. As you and I sometime do, they pussy-footed around the reality of death, so finally Jesus is blunt. Moreover, Jesus tells them he was glad he had not been there for the man’s death “so that you may believe.” Believe what? Doubting Thomas is the only one who did not have a doubt of what to do, so he urges the others to go to Judea so that they may die with Jesus.

When they arrive it is Martha who springs into action meeting Jesus first, and then the nearly paralyzed Mary follows. Both of them tactlessly tell the Rabbi, “if you had been here Lazarus would not have died.” Reassuring them that Lazarus will rise again, they go to the tomb, one of those caves with a big stone rolled in front. Then Jesus wept, the shortest verse in the Bible, many claim. The depth of his love had overcome him, yet he moved forward. Martha, the supposedly practical one, reminds him of the practical matter of the odour of a four-day corpse - “Lord, he stinketh!” - according to the King James Version. That doesn’t stop him, the stone is removed.

Jesus prays first for God’s grace and then loudly cries out, “Lazarus, come out!” Lazarus does, and the last order is to unbind him from death’s swaddling clothes. They believed.

None of these stories make sense. Resurrection is impossible, but it’s what drives us here in this church. Sure, we don’t see it very often; most of the time we are stuck with dry bones and spirit-less bodies, and we are frustrated and disgusted, yet it is perhaps only here that we develop the vision to see someone raised from the dead. Paul would declare to the Corinthians (1 Cor 15:14), “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.” You and I are here in the first place to expect and wait for a resurrection. Sometimes it is our resurrection and sometimes like in Ezekiel’s valley it is our collective bones, our church.

A few years back at the Southern Baptist Convention, a preacher used John’s story, but focused on one verse, “Lo, Lord, he stinketh!” A three point sermon followed on how the church stinketh.

The first point of which was: there are always those raising a stink in the church. The second point: there are always those leaving the church because they smell a stink. The third and final point: there will always be some folk in the church who just plain stink. You can’t get around it. You just have to live with it.

All churches have their stinks - sometimes it’s the members or adherents sometimes it’s the clergy; sometimes it’s the denomination; sometimes it’s circumstances; sometimes it’s disasters.

Lo, Lord, our situation stinketh! But we have confidence that Christ is the power of life and new life in the flesh. As it was intended to be today is not the end of the story, even if it is a resurrection of a man who stinketh like many of us. Lazarus was the brother of Mary and Martha, but as far as we are told, nobody special. Mixing sensory metaphors, Lazarus is simply a taste of what our faith requires, of what we are expecting, of what we are waiting for.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan