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Sunday 10th April, 2011 Fifth Sunday in Lent

Sentence
I am the resurrection and the life, says the Lord. Whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.
John 11: 25 – 26

Collect
Life-giving God, Your Son came into the world to free us all from sin and death: breathe upon us with the power of Your Spirit, that we may be raised to new life in Christ, and serve You in holiness and righteousness al lour days; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, Who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God now and for ever. Amen

Old Testament Lesson Ezekiel 37: 1 – 14

The hand of the LORD came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, "Mortal, can these bones live?" I answered, "O Lord GOD, you know." Then he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the LORD."
So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, "Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord GOD: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live."
I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude. Then he said to me, "Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, 'Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.' Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the LORD, have spoken and will act," says the LORD.

Psalm 130

Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD;
O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy.
If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared.
I wait for the LORD, my soul waits: and in his word I put my hope.
My soul waits for the Lord: more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning.
O Israel, put your hope in the LORD: for with the LORD is unfailing love and with him is full redemption.
He himself will redeem Israel from all their sins.

Epistle Romans 8: 6 – 11

To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God's law--indeed it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.

GOSPEL John 11: 1 – 45
Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, "Lord, he whom you love is ill." But when Jesus heard it, he said, "This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God's glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it."
Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. Then after this he said to the disciples, "Let us go to Judea again." The disciples said to him, "Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?" Jesus answered, "Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them."
After saying this, he told them, "Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him."
The disciples said to him, "Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right." Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, "Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him."
Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, "Let us also go, that we may die with him."
When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him." Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again."Martha said to him, "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day." Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?" She said to him, "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world." When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, "The Teacher is here and is calling for you." And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him.
Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, "See how he loved him!"
But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?" Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, "Take away the stone." Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, "Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days." Jesus said to her, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, "Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me." When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!"
The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him, and let him go." Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.

© New Revised Standard Version of the Bible
Copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the
Churches of Christ in the USA, and used by permission. All rights reserved
NOTES ON THE READINGS

Old Testament
This should surely be one of the best-known passages from the Old Testament, the Valley of Dry Bones. The old Negro song ‘Dem bones, dem bones’ should ring bells for many others. However the source and reason behind the vision may well be far less familiar to people.

Israel was in exile in Babylon, and like depressed people anywhere, had lost sense of value, purpose and direction. This vision of Ezekiel’s was designed to encourage exiles, offering hope of new and fresh life and purpose. The vision has impact for a lot of reasons, not least of which is the clear perception that the prophet had of what we call the Holy Spirit.

Add to that the consistent message of all Prophets of the Exile was the God was right there with them, with a renewed vision for their future and role for the world. I will leave you to ponder the impact and power of this message, but do not miss the point that this same message needs to be heard in our own day and age. Small numbers of committed people is no designation of defeat: how often has history shown that reduction in numbers usually presages a new move towards growth. It is the Gideon story all over again.

Psalm
And here is another factor in the move forward and ahead. Just as the exiles needed the refreshment of forgiveness for a rugged past, so the same need tends to apply still. Never lose sight of the value for forgiveness: it means, amongst other things, that a person can stop hiding from past sins and mistakes, examine the decisions and choices, and learn from the muck-up.

Epistle
I have often drawn people’s attention to the fact that there is a series of illustrations of the differences between ordinary human responses to crises and choices, and the deliberately Christian one. This is not a matter of piety and smugness; it is a clear difference of modus operandi. Adam and Christlike is a parallel I often use; here it is ‘spirit’ and ‘flesh.’ When I operate selfishly and self-obsessively, then I am being ‘flesh,’ or ‘Adamic.’ The outcome is, as a rule, somewhat destructive. QED.

GOSPEL
Here is another of John’s great sign stories. The raising of Lazarus. As usual the author managed to weave a whole series of significant issues into the tale, one of which tends to be overlooked because people have already made up their minds (falsely quite often) about Thomas. Please note that here you have a bloke who is prepared to go with Christ right up to death and beyond, so that is hardly the action of a doubter, now is it!

Here in this cameo (rather large one certainly!) is the precursor of Jesus’ own death for the sake of those supporting Him. Any careful reading of the Gospels will show how our Lord was at very considerable pains, firstly to get the Twelve moving on the business of understanding more fully what He was on about; and then as the crisis began to draw close, to prepare the disciples for the denouement of the Cross. Here was clear illustration that He was Lord of life and death.

If you wonder why Jesus hesitated to travel that little extra distance either before Lazarus’ death or soon after, the answer is not hard to find. For a culture that assumed that a person’s spirit did not leave the body for two or three days, it was ‘necessary’ for Jesus to wait out that time to prove a point: here was no resuscitation of someone comatose. Disintegration had begun, and still Jesus was in charge. “Unbind him and let him go!” was a call that would have resonated in the ears of those followers after the Resurrection: and they were the ones needing unbinding.

NOTES FOR A SERMON

If you are game to travel this route, it may well be an experience in launching out into the deep with a God Who seems to promise much, but for many people still seems to stay in the shadows of life. Part of our modern problem lies in a couple of directions: the first is the contention that so many of our issues of very existence into the future have not been encountered (to our knowledge) in history. The second problem lies, I suspect, in our lack of knowledge of history and in particular Biblical history.

It has to be said that, forever throughout human history, there have been the doomsday boys. There is nothing new in that, although – apart from some present-day sectarians – the turn of the century a decade ago brought some wild ones out of the woodwork, and recent SA news seems to indicate that there are still groups that like to prey on the fears of people.

These seems to be a supposition among many people that up to the present, our long-term history has been one of gradual progress and projection upwards - apart from a few glitches along the way, of course. Most people today are too young to remember or ever know about the enormous tumult of the First World War. That single event shattered quite utterly the Victorian and even Edwardian view that progress in social, national and international development was the miracle of the age. It came as inconceivable that so monstrous a conflict could reduce civilisation to such a vicious point.

History has never been a matter of invincible progress. Even in eras of solid development there have been downsides; and in so many of the downsides there have been opposite phases. If you are not aware of that, then the proof of the pudding is in reading history, from before Egypt and the pyramids up to the present time. Even the history of the Christian Church throughout the centuries offers great insights into human folly. And wisdom!

So where does that leave us? As Christians I offer a couple of encouragements, not from my skill but from our combined Biblical history. That Old Testament history shows up in today’s OT reading. That vision of Ezekiel’s was not there simply to generate the Negro Spiritual, Dem Bones. It was a reminder not dissimilar to this very one, for the People of God to look back and see God’s hand at work, not in the prior five minutes, but over the generations since Abraham. Those stories are not there to warm the cockles – but to be something of a kick in the pants those who had felt all sorry for themselves as they lived in imposed exile in Babylon.

‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ Poor little darlings! They could not, perhaps would not see past their rather expansive noses. But Ezekiel did, as did each of the other prophets of the Exile. Each of those remarkable men indicated quite clearly that Israel had been sidelined, because it had lost its way as the People of God, and had somewhat forgotten God Himself. They were in the ‘cooler’ for a time to ponder where to from here, and whilst some listened to their prophets, others did not. In fact there was quite a proportion of the exiles who did not wish to move back home when the opportunity came for them.

History proved the prophets correct, and a rejuvenated Israel returned to the enormous task of rebuilding – nation, capital and temple. But they did it, and their future burgeoned for some time, not without glitches. But without that burgeoning there could have been no Jesus. I kid you not.

In spite of the apparent evidence to the contrary, God was not dead. He was very much alive, and looking to enliven those people who were prepared to get on side with Him. There was only no future if people refused to take it up. Mind you, sitting on one’s backside and expecting everything to happen without their involvement or effort was not, repeat not an option.

So where does all this get us?
Simply at the foot of a fairly steep learning curve. Christians of most denominations and colours have been spoilt – or at least those of us not involved in hideous and harsh situations, like recently in Botswna, or some other African nations; or China further back, of USSR for a seventy year period not unlike ancient Israel. Or Germany. We have become somewhat effete, and some backbone needs to be restored to us, and that does not happen when people are pandered to. So, in the time left to us, it would not be a bad idea at all (a) to look again at this Faith once delivered and understand and embrace it, warts and all; and (b) get on with the job of being what we are called to be.

As they say in Football (the real sort, not that other lot!) no gain without pain. So if you wonder why God puts you through the mill now and again it is to strengthen you up. And that is why He does not answer all your little aches and pains. He and we live in the real world, without apology. And that is what the Gospel is all about.