Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:3-7, 17, 20-27, 33-45

My calendar says that it’s almost the middle of March, but it sounds a lot more like Halloween or the Day of the Dead, doesn’t it? Today we have readings about bones, skeletons, dead men and ghosts. We read these dreary Scripture passages in Lent because they help prepare us for the days to come—death and the signs of death. Today is a preview of Easter, a resurrection rehearsal.

Lent is a journey; a journey of the spirit or the soul. We are in the fifth week of our seven-week trip from Ash Wednesday to Easter. The tradition is that we will take these 40 days to reflect on the state of our soul, to reevaluate our life and how we are doing in living out God’s Will for us. There are many traditions about giving things up, doing practices to remind us of who we are and what we are about. Many of us however, just plod through these days of winter, longing for signs of spring and new life. We are impatient with the signs of winter and death all around us and fully agree with the Scripture: death stinks!

Ezekiel, the prophet of the 5^th Century BCE, was challenged by a vision of a valley full of dry bones. The Lord God Almighty had called this faithful man to be a prophet to the Israelites in exile and to call the people back into righteousness. Symbolically, God then challenged Ezekiel to prophesy to the dry, dead-looking bones and bring them back to life. Zeke had to face the fact that the desolation and despair of death is rooted in hopelessness. When there is no hope, when there is no vision of what can or could be, the soul perishes and there are signs of death all around.

We are surrounded by signs of death, just as was Ezekiel. We personally may be sick to death of our bad habits, our addictions, our dysfunctional relationships, our destructive behavior or being stuck at a stage of life: grief, adolescence, dependence, etc. We know the death rattle of things that we do that do not enhance or enrich life—ours or others. In many cases we may turn the phrase around and say “life stinks!” We feel powerless to make any difference. Ezekiel also knew that sense of weakness. He is known for closing himself in, shutting out others and withdrawing. Avoidance—many of us are very familiar with that technique of dealing with problems, aren’t we?

But even if we personally are not going down for the last time with a kind of death rattle, we only need look as far as the daily newspaper or the broadcast news to know that death is all around us: war, AIDS, floods, famines, suicide bombers, earthquakes, fires, , corruption, crime. The list seems to go on and on and we are especially discouraged when we read the Scripture to find that it seems to say that we are the ones meant to transform those dry, dead places into living, breathing health.

How can we possibly make a change in the face of all of this death and restore life? It is easy for us to become discouraged and, dare I say it, immobilized. When we tend to see hopelessness, we often do nothing. We may be more like old Ezekiel than we dare admit. We act like ostriches and put our heads in the sand, hoping the bad things will just go away.

Then, along comes Jesus. Fortunately, we have another story to hear today and it is the one found in John’s Gospel (and only in this Gospel, I might add). When Jesus hears about the pending death of his good friend, Lazarus, he delays going to see him and doing a possible intervention. So, when he gets there, Jesus finds that Lazarus is already in the tomb and that…stinks! Indeed, the sisters of Lazarus are distraught and even blame Jesus for this predicament or this smelly kettle of fish. Jesus is so distraught that he weeps for the loss of his friend and the circumstances in which he finds himself. We can all surely understand that, can’t we? We find ourselves in a mess, things don’t go the way we would want and we dissolve into tears—a sure sign of grief and frustration. Again, we feel helpless and sink into the despair of hopelessness.

Then Jesus does the impossible. He calls for the people around him to open the tomb. Jesus calls for Lazarus to come out. Of course, all the sane, clear-headed folks around him complain (wouldn’t you??)—this man has been dead four days and without embalming, you know there will be a stench! No one wants to smell the odor of death and decay! Jesus, however, insists and lo and behold, Lazarus steps out into the daylight and lives again. Surely, this is a day of resurrection and new life!

Jesus instructs the townspeople—people like you and like me—to unbind Lazarus, but we may well wonder if it is Lazarus or the people who are bound up. Is the death in this story only that of Lazarus? Perhaps the story tells us as much about those folks gathered around who are at once weeping and sad, then immobilized, then agents of change to unbind the formerly dead man.

You might have read in last week’s edition of The UM Connector, the weekly online newsletter of the Oregon-Idaho Annual Conference (Issue 641, March 6, 2008), that thieves broke into the Rockwood United Methodist Church building, in East Portland last week and stole about $7,000 worth of electronic and video equipment. They took a 42” flat screen TV, a DVD player and recorder, a computer and other, smaller items. These possessions represented years of fund-raising and efforts on the part of the church. The story was on the local TV news broadcast. The next day a man unrelated to the church gave the church a new large, flat-screen TV that he had just won. He said, by way of explanation: “I just decided that they needed it more than I did.”

That’s a sign of life in the midst of death. Not a big deal, not going to change the world a whole lot, but a time and place that speaks of life when all around reeks of death. It’s a sign of life and hope that transforms our understanding of what is going on. That change in attitude is often all that is needed to change the way we understand death, disaster and depression.

Sometimes a phone call, sometimes a handout, sometimes simply expressing another view point and you may join Ezekiel in prophesying new life into a dead or dying situation. I believe that Jesus was not advocating death, so he could restore life, but Jesus came to take away the fear of death and to encourage us to all be agents of life. We are expected to live until we die.

As Barbara Brown Taylor (Christian Century 1996) wrote: Lord, I believe, but help thou my unbelief, because I still do not want to die. I believe Jesus has power to raise the dead, only I do not want him practicing on me. I want a God who will cut my losses and cushion my failures, a God who will grant me a life free from pain. I want a God who will rescue me from death, who will delete it from the human experience and find another way to operate.

No healthy, happy person craves death—we know that is not normal. But we also know that we will all die. How much better to come to that stage of life with a clear conscience, a comfort that you have done all that you can do to make this world a better place and to face signs of death in our society and our world with acts of life and living. A hug, a smile, a note, a dollar, we all have access to ways that will transform death into life. When there are disasters, disease or despair, we as faithful followers of Jesus the Christ are expected to show up and do what we can. To open the tombs; to unbind death, to inspire new life. We may do that in actually being physically present, we may do it by knitting a shawl, sending a card, contributing to earthquake or tornado relief. We are not only surrounded by signs of death, but we are also in the midst of many, many opportunities to do something positive and to begin to practice acts of Easter so that signs of death will not be the last word. May we all experience the sweet aroma of life in the days and weeks to come.

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