Based on Ezekiel 37:1-12, Romans 8:6-11, John 11:20-27, 40-44
This week we are reflecting about the actions upon humanity and our world of the oft neglected third person of the Trinity (God the Holy Spirit). The biblical symbols of the Holy Spirit are wind or breath and the Dove. Using wind or breath as the symbol in the sanctuaries proved problematic. Thus, the Dove is with us on our altars today as a visual reminder that God the Holy Spirit has been with us since “God’s Spirit hovered over the chaos” before everything came into being – and especially since Jesus sent it to be with us and in us 2000 years ago on Pentecost.
The concept of the Holy Spirit living within us created the term “inspirited” and the behaviors instigated by the Holy Spirit were said to be “inspired”. In the 14th Century before the word “inspiration” was used to refer to the intake of breath (as it is commonly used today) it had a distinctly theological meaning which referred to a divine influence upon a person, from a divine entity (according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary).
The writers of the Bible and their narratives are commonly referred to as being “inspired” or “God breathed”. This denotes that God the Holy Spirit was at work over almost 1000 years guiding and motivating people to write down their experiences with and observations of God’s actions in their world. This divine influence inspired people across all the years between then and now - and is still at work today as the Holy Spirit empowers and enables us to bring the words of the Bible to life in our day and time.
Imagining how God the Holy Spirit is alive, well and within us - making all things possible in our world is what our inspired scriptures teach us today. The Apostle Paul is writing to believers in Rome about living in the Spirit. Paul contrasts life in the Spirit with life in the “flesh”. What Paul means by flesh is living into worldly things – what Jesus called “earthly matters” when he told Peter to focus himself on heavenly matters. Paul writes that we are spiritual beings if we can imagine that “the Spirit of God lives in you…and if the Spirit of God [him] who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, God [he] who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of God’s [his] Spirit who lives in you….”
Jesus had delayed his arrival to the house of his friend Lazarus, and Lazarus had died and been laid in a tomb (which is interesting foreshadowing). Our scripture reading focuses not just on the miracle of raising Lazarus, but on the teachings of Jesus to Martha about who he is. In response to Martha’s acknowledgement that Lazarus will be resurrected on the last day, Jesus tells her to imagine that he is “…the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die….” Jesus then moves to the tomb and through the power of the Holy Spirit, Lazarus is returned to life.
The enlivening power of the Holy Spirit is at work in a powerful way in our reading from Ezekiel. The Spirit of the LORD in an imaginative dream brought the prophet to a large valley. The valley was completely filled with the desiccated bones of the dead of Israel. God asks the prophet whether the dry bones can ever live again. Ezekiel wisely answers that only God knows the answer – that only God can bring life to death. The LORD then had the prophet call on the Holy Spirit to knit the bones back together into bodies and then a second time to bring them back to life. The metaphor here works for all of us who might imagine that we are without agency to do things for God or for those who imagine that they are somehow cut off from God’s presence, power and love.
Over the last 50 years or so, it has become easier for the average Christian to imagine that hope in the God of possibilities is gone; that we have been cut off from the Holy Spirit; that the downward spiral of closing churches and declining membership in the Church of Jesus Christ is the death knell to what God has been doing over many thousands of years through countless believers. Sound familiar? I think we are in need of some divine inspiration!
Pastor M. Craig Barnes has something to share about how living in the Spirit can inspire our lives and the lives of those around us. He writes, “…the Lord’s words always make room for hope. And it is this hope that brings us back to life. Hope rises up from our bones and chooses to believe in spite of how it is.
Walter Brueggemann has written that hope proclaims that the way things appear is precarious. So, we dare not absolutize the present. Don’t take it too seriously. Don’t bank on today because it will not last. Thus, hope is revolutionary. That is why the poor are great at hoping, and why we in the middle and upper classes who are coping well in Babylon have such a hard time with hope. We think we are doing well enough. Our only worry is that we will lose ground tomorrow. But if we turn against (the possibilities of) tomorrow, we turn our back on hope. It is then that the human spirit begins to wither away.
The apostle Paul told the believers in Rome that the one ‘who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you’ (Rom. 8:11). The church has always found its life not in what it sees today but in the Spirit of the God who raises dead hopes. The day we lose our ability to envision a better tomorrow is the day we deny that we really believe in the resurrection.
Why does the church keep pouring out its little cup of water into the West Bank, Sudan and other desperate places of the world where hope has run dry? Why do we keep visiting the shut-ins and those in hospitals when we have no miracle drug to take away their pain (or change their situation)? Why do we commit ourselves to the political process when there is so much cynicism and a malaise of despair in politics today? Why? Because God (through the indwelling Holy Spirit) is not done.
So, we will take our stand beside Ezekiel and proclaim our hope to the dry bones. ‘Thus, says the Lord, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live!’ You who gave up hope, who gave up dreaming - who have settled for a comfortably routine life of work, (retirement), bills and dirty laundry. You who think your best years are behind you. You who think the Lord God has forgotten all about your little life (and our lives together).
To you, we say, ‘Arise!’ Arise from the heap of discarded dreams. Arise to discover that the Holy Spirit is breathing life back into you. Arise to live with magnificent hope! Because the world is dying for you to believe (that) God is not done….”
Rev. Barnes points to the power resident in imagining living in and through God’s Holy Spirit. God is always creating, always doing something new. Always working with us and sometimes in spite of us to make God’s preferred future a reality here on earth. Living inspirited means that we are part of that creative and transformative work – each in our own small yet vitally important way. Tomorrow is forever full of possibilities and we who live in and through the Holy Spirit can hear the truth in Jesus’ reply to Martha, “Did I not tell you that if you believe (in me), you will see the glory of God?”
We humans tend to limit God’s power with our rational and practical minds – like Ezekiel, Martha and Mary, and the believers in Rome. We are beset by seeming intractable needs and social injustices which spawn questions like: How do we find the people around us who are dying in exile from the love of God and community? How can the Church, brought to life by the breath of God, animate the desiccated souls of people who feel God or the Church has failed them? How can we renew social systems that are no longer life-giving? How can our faith live again through imagining the power and presence of God’s Holy Spirit?
Imagining we live in the Holy Spirit means that we believe in our bones that God is forever at work. This imagination is all we need to arise and live in the magnificent hope that God is not done with us or our world. Thanks be to the God who inspires, amen!