A Prelude to Pentecost
May 12, 2024 Seventh Sunday of Easter
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Ezekial 37:1-14
“A Prelude to Pentecost”
Douglas T. King
My wife, Marta, teaches science to elementary school children. One of the kids’ favorite units is on bridges. They love using the very basic understandings of physics and engineering to design their own bridge. But before they draw a single line they always want to know where the bridge will lead. Basically they are saying, “I am really excited about building a bridge, but tell me where are we heading?”
This same question comes to mind when I read this text from the prophet Ezekial. Whenever I hear this story from Ezekial about God putting flesh upon those old bones I wonder what it would be like to go through such a dramatic transformation. Goodbye rest in peace, hello, life and all of its tumultuous twists and turns. “I am really excited about being alive again but tell me, where we are heading?”
As we are in the midst of our “Building a Bridge to the Future” campaign, the question naturally arises, where are we heading?”
One of the ways we get by in this life is by having a set of defined expectations, of knowing where we are heading. We learn 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 you stay up really late you are likely going to have to drag yourself 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. We learn to color mostly within the lines. We put this picture up on the wall and call it “common sense” and we get on with our lives. There is a comfort to be found in the framed little picture, oddly enough, 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 has fallen. The temple has been destroyed and many people, including Ezekiel, have been dragged from home and forced to live in captivity in Babylon. All hope has been taken from the people. 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, Ezekial 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 and wider and deeper than any box we can imagine, even a box as large and as fine as the temple or the box of our well-crafted expectations and assumptions. Bones rise up and are enfleshed. Where there was only death, there is now life once more.
This stark and arresting vision that Ezekial brings, 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, right up there with omnipresent, and omniscient, 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 former bones in the desert.
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 the divine. God and God’s power have little concern for such limitations. In our efforts to understand the divine, we draw distinctions and create boundaries and 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.
There are other ways in which we feel boxed in and limited.
We live in what feels like limiting times. We live in a world where war and unrest and discord are commonplace. We live in a post-pandemic world where less people believe getting up and coming to worship on a Sunday morning is a priority. 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 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 and 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. At first Ezekiel was too afraid to say. Even if he wondered, even if he knew, he just could not say it out loud. He could not 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 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 has an important role to play in accomplishing God’s will in this world we are denying the power of God.
Over the years I have sat in my share of challenging budget meetings. I have sought to rally folks to serve and have come out a few shorter 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. He says, “Do not deny the power of God.” If we are a people that can find hope in a cross, there is no place and 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.”
If we claim the reality that there are no limits on God’s power, we too will face some challenges. 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 very well find ourselves confused about how to proceed. We will 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, each of us, and us as a community of believers. We are never without hope that new life may pop up in the most unexpected ways. And 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. As we “Build a Bridge to the Future,” we are increasing the size of our endowment to ensure we have the resources we need to thrive. The Deiter Heinzl Fund for Pastoral Ministries will be an endowed account from which our session can draw a prudent percentage to support all of our ministries. Our children and youth programming, our pastoral care efforts, our education for all ages, our worship life will all benefit from this fund. It is being created to serve the Gospel of Jesus Christ in all the days that are to come for Ladue Chapel.
The details of our journey together are not all known. But the destination could not be more clear. We are building a bridge to the future God has planned for us. We are building a bridge to a place where the Holy Spirit will breathe new life into us, that we may become the body of Christ we are called to be.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Ezekial 37:1-14
“A Prelude to Pentecost”
Douglas T. King
My wife, Marta, teaches science to elementary school children. One of the kids’ favorite units is on bridges. They love using the very basic understandings of physics and engineering to design their own bridge. But before they draw a single line they always want to know where the bridge will lead. Basically they are saying, “I am really excited about building a bridge, but tell me where are we heading?”
This same question comes to mind when I read this text from the prophet Ezekial. Whenever I hear this story from Ezekial about God putting flesh upon those old bones I wonder what it would be like to go through such a dramatic transformation. Goodbye rest in peace, hello, life and all of its tumultuous twists and turns. “I am really excited about being alive again but tell me, where we are heading?”
As we are in the midst of our “Building a Bridge to the Future” campaign, the question naturally arises, where are we heading?”
One of the ways we get by in this life is by having a set of defined expectations, of knowing where we are heading. We learn 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 you stay up really late you are likely going to have to drag yourself 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. We learn to color mostly within the lines. We put this picture up on the wall and call it “common sense” and we get on with our lives. There is a comfort to be found in the framed little picture, oddly enough, 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 has fallen. The temple has been destroyed and many people, including Ezekiel, have been dragged from home and forced to live in captivity in Babylon. All hope has been taken from the people. 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, Ezekial 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 and wider and deeper than any box we can imagine, even a box as large and as fine as the temple or the box of our well-crafted expectations and assumptions. Bones rise up and are enfleshed. Where there was only death, there is now life once more.
This stark and arresting vision that Ezekial brings, 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, right up there with omnipresent, and omniscient, 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 former bones in the desert.
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 the divine. God and God’s power have little concern for such limitations. In our efforts to understand the divine, we draw distinctions and create boundaries and 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.
There are other ways in which we feel boxed in and limited.
We live in what feels like limiting times. We live in a world where war and unrest and discord are commonplace. We live in a post-pandemic world where less people believe getting up and coming to worship on a Sunday morning is a priority. 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 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 and 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. At first Ezekiel was too afraid to say. Even if he wondered, even if he knew, he just could not say it out loud. He could not 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 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 has an important role to play in accomplishing God’s will in this world we are denying the power of God.
Over the years I have sat in my share of challenging budget meetings. I have sought to rally folks to serve and have come out a few shorter 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. He says, “Do not deny the power of God.” If we are a people that can find hope in a cross, there is no place and 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.”
If we claim the reality that there are no limits on God’s power, we too will face some challenges. 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 very well find ourselves confused about how to proceed. We will 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, each of us, and us as a community of believers. We are never without hope that new life may pop up in the most unexpected ways. And 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. As we “Build a Bridge to the Future,” we are increasing the size of our endowment to ensure we have the resources we need to thrive. The Deiter Heinzl Fund for Pastoral Ministries will be an endowed account from which our session can draw a prudent percentage to support all of our ministries. Our children and youth programming, our pastoral care efforts, our education for all ages, our worship life will all benefit from this fund. It is being created to serve the Gospel of Jesus Christ in all the days that are to come for Ladue Chapel.
The details of our journey together are not all known. But the destination could not be more clear. We are building a bridge to the future God has planned for us. We are building a bridge to a place where the Holy Spirit will breathe new life into us, that we may become the body of Christ we are called to be.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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