March 22, 2026 - Fifth Sunday in Lent: The Zero Breeds New Algebras

March 22, 2026  Fifth Sunday in Lent
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Ezekial 37:1-14
“The Zero Breeds New Algebras”
Douglas T. King

Years ago, I saw a play entitled, “When I Come to Die.”  It told the story of a man named Damon on death row who is given what should be a lethal injection but lives.  Far from being elated when he discovers that he has survived, Damon is angry and confused.  He had planned to die.  As awful as it was, that was the plan and he had prepared for that.  He had no plan for being alive.
 
Damon is called to meet with the prison chaplain, who believes that it is a miracle that Damon is alive.  He encourages Damon to find a use and purpose for his newfound time.  Damon, angrily trying to process how he has ended up in this precarious place lashes out about the time he has been given. “What you gonna do with it?  Bang on cell bars?  Do a dance?  Do something?”  Imprisoned as he was in body and in mind, Damon could not begin to fathom how this new time given to him was of any use at all.

Whenever I hear this story from Ezekiel of God putting flesh upon those old bones and bringing that community back to life, I wonder if those folks would have been keen on coming back.  I assume some of them would have been a little like Damon, experiencing a dose of anger and confusion to go along with the wonder of finding themselves alive once more.  There is something quite unnerving about these stories of God creating life where all we see is death.  

One of the ways we get by in this life, is we create some boundaries as to what reality looks like.  We figure out the rules of existence.  Gravity keeps things from floating away, but we pay a price for it when a dish slips through our fingers.  If we stay up really late, we are likely going to have to drag ourselves through the next day of work.  Everything that is born will die.  

We come up with a vision of what the world is and our place in it, we draw parameters around it, and we learn to color mostly within those lines.  We put this picture up on the wall and call it “common sense” or “that’s just the way it is” and we get on with our lives.  There is a comfort to be found in the framed little picture, even when the framed little picture is sometimes not that pretty.  We are a people who crave established expectations.  

The ministry of the prophet Ezekiel occurred during the time of the Babylonian exile. Jerusalem falls, the temple is destroyed and many people, including Ezekiel, are dragged from home and forced to live in captivity in Babylon.  All hope has been taken from them.  Their belief that God was present with them in Jerusalem and in the temple to protect them, has been destroyed.  They are not only exiled from their homeland, they no longer believe they have any access to the divine. In the midst of the hopelessness of exile, Ezekias brings a radical vision of hope.  In the midst of a people who believed that their God lived solely in the temple in Jerusalem now fallen and destroyed, he brings word of a God bigger, wider, deeper, and more powerful than any box we can imagine, even a box as large and as fine as the temple.  Bones rise up and are enfleshed and a community is reborn.  Where there was only death, there is now life.

This stark and arresting vision tells us simply one thing, there are no limits on God’s power.  There are no limits on God’s power.  On one level those words are practically trite, yes we know, God is omnipotent, all powerful.  We have heard it before and nodded our heads to it, and frankly nodded off to sleep to it, we have heard it so many times.  

But if we claimed it, there are no limits on God’s power, the implications would leave us somewhere alongside that re-enfleshed and resurrected community of bones in the desert, enlivened like never before.

Ezekiel, who was both a prophet and a priest, was strictly forbidden to be around human skeletons. As a priest it was considered ritually unclean for him to be in that valley of death.  But God and God’s power have little time for purity laws, for rules of division that stand in the way of God’s purposes.  When the temple in Jerusalem fell, the people felt that they were cut off from God because they had lost what they believed was their only access to God.  God has little concern for such limitations. In our efforts to understand the divine, we inadvertently box in and limit the ways in which we believe God can be actively engaged in our midst. And we box ourselves in about the ways in which we can be faithful.

In a world filled with toxic divisions, war, and chaos, limited expectations make sense.  In a time when mainline denominations are shrinking, limited expectations make sense.  We have plenty of reasons to hunker down and limit our expectations and stare at the little picture on the wall of what the “common sense” realities of this world are. Settle for less.  Make sure our dreams together as a community are kept within reasonable bounds.  Keep our hopes prudent and manageable.  I certainly cannot argue with any of that sound advice being drawn from an astute evaluation of the current conditions of the world.

But Ezekiel will have none of it.  He sat with the exiles in Babylon, a nation and a faith tradition destroyed, laid bare, left for dead.  And he was given a vision.  He saw the death of his community and his faith laid out before him and God asked him if these bones could live.  Ezekiel was too afraid to say, that hope could be born in the midst of hopelessness; that life could be created in the midst of death.  But God ordered him to prophesy, and he did. The winds of God’s Spirit blew over that field of death, and the bones came together, and sinew and flesh and skin covered them and they were alive, a community reborn in the breath of God’s Spirit.  

We are given a preview of the resurrection and of Pentecost all rolled into one.  Ezekiel brings us the message that we can throw out those constricted little pictures of life we have up on our walls.  We can throw out the limitations which constrain us and oddly comfort us.  There are no limits on God’s power.  When we continually lower our expectations and box ourselves in, we are denying the power of God.  When we say we do not have enough, enough time, enough talent, enough resources, to be the church in all its glory serving God and God’s children, we are denying the power of God.  When we doubt that each one of us is being healed and shaped by God for remarkable things, we are denying the power of God.  

Now, I have sat in my share of challenging budget meetings.  I have sought to rally folks to serve and have come out a few less than I had planned.  Sometimes when my phone rings and it is someone with some new and very big vision for what the church could be doing, I just want to pat them on the head and tell them about reasonable expectations.  I want to tell them a little bit about how the real world works and help them paint a smaller picture.  But then along comes Ezekiel, and he will have none of it.  

In a poem entitled “A Hard Death” by Amos Wilder, he writes, “…accept no mitigation, but be instructed at the null point.  The zero breeds new algebras.”  To put it far less eloquently, if we are a people that can find hope in a cross, there is no place and no time in which God’s power cannot intervene to change the world.  Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel writes “Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of the dried bones bears no date because every generation needs to hear in its own time that these bones can live again.”

I started this sermon telling you of Damon on death row and his anger and confusion over being given the gift of life, of more time, when he thought he should be dead.  He was eventually executed successfully, if that is the right term for such a dreadful thing.  But before he died, he was changed by the experience of the gift of new life.  He was not transformed into a choir boy but he found a way to bring comfort to a fellow death row inmate, reconnect with his estranged sister, and find satisfaction in what he could do for others.  

If we claim the reality that there are no limits on God’s power, we too will face some changes.  We will need to leave behind the assumptions that have limited who we are as people and who we are as the church.  If we claim the reality that there are no limits on God’s power, we might need to leave behind the comfort of established expectations and the safety of well-constructed limitations.  We may find ourselves face to face with the mystery of the divine Spirit, free from the boundaries by which we live.  

Now the reality of God’s power does not mean we will not fail in a variety of ways as we continue to be faithful together.  But the reality of God’s power means that we are never beyond God’s reach.  We are never limited in the ways God may transform us as individuals, and as a community of believers.  We are never without hope that new life may pop up in the most unexpected ways; that we can be peacemakers where there is conflict, healers where there is brokenness, providers where there is want.  “The zero breeds new algebras.”  

We are never without the responsibility to dream our dreams and live our lives upon the foundation that there are no limits on the power of God.  

Thanks be to God.  Amen.