A Sermon by Thomas Ward, April 10, 2011

Here's what we got from Thomas (at right in his Bell ower study) after his vibrant and powerful sermon on April 10. Savor it!

Sermon for the last Sunday in Lent

10 April 2011

Ezek. 37:1-14 * Ps. 130 * Rom. 8:6-11 * John 11:1-45

· Intro: Undoing the lectionary

o Lectionary is based on the principle that events in the Old Testament prefigure those of the New Testament. Whether typologically (Isaac/Christ) or in terms of prophecies (Isaiah, “and a little child shall lead them.”) NT as fulfillment.

o Pairing of Ezekiel with Lazarus story asks us to understand this prophetic vision in terms of the Christian Resurrection.

o However: note in New Oxford Study Bible: “This vision has no direct connection with the Christian doctrine of resurrection.” à The rationalist/historicist in me would say: “of course not”: this is a Hebrew book written by someone who lived 500 years before Christ. So what would it mean to take it on its own terms?

o I want to start, somewhat heretically, by thinking about what we loose when we understand Ezekiel’s amazing vision only in the light of the Lazarus miracle, or even the Christian Resurrection more generally.

· Valley of dry bones as metaphor

o Jerusalem sacked late 6^th century BC. Ezekiel is speaking to Hebrew exiles who are loosing hope: this is explained clearly in the last section of the reading: “these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost.’”

o Earlier Ezekiel berates the Israelites for following false gods, and, indeed, their spiritually skeletal state could be attributed to their sinfulness. But it’s not only that: God appears to be absent from their lives: they are on an alien soil—or a soil that has been made alien to them.

o What are bones?

§ Memento mori (fleetingness), yet enduring

§ We say “I feel it in my bones,” but bones themselves are strange, seemingly dead things within us: reminder that our bodies are not our own.

§ Metaphor for empty cultural forms (?)

o All that remains of the Israelites is some kind of dead thing:

§ Some kind of bare essential thing that exists in a society that makes it recognizable as a society.

§ Perhaps it is language itself: the Hebrews still have their language, but it is as if they are forgetting how to put the words together in a way that allows them to remember that they are God’s people.

· First prophecy

o It is language itself—Ezekiel’s language—that causes the bones to come together: he prophecies to them.

o The bones cannot have been completely dead: they can still hear.

o Bones come together but still not fully alive

§ Aaron Todd’s elbow: put back together by doctors but still had to exercise.

§ Israelites: first step is to assemble them: reconstitute them as a community: separated they can do nothing. But this is not enough.

· Second prophecy

o “Prophesy to the breath, O mortal.” I don’t know what this means. It’s mysterious.

o Question in science about what makes something living: unanswerable.

o Perhaps (and this is just a guess) “prophesying to the breath” is purposefully mysterious: means something like “acknowledge the existence of something unavailable to the means by which we traditionally establish certainty: something fundamentally intractable to our desire to circumscribe the mysterious forces of the universe through knowledge… The breath, or the spirit, is, after all not something we can constrain—it does not require a lapse into Christian teleology to acknowledge as true Jesus’s words to Nicodemus when he says that the wind goes where it pleases.

o To speak to this uncontrollable spirit: prayer: to embrace the wild, uncontrollable love of God: to even call it “love” is, perhaps, too constraining.

· Summation of the vision:

o Easy to see why this would be paired with Lazarus and why we read it right before Easter, but

o The danger of reading Ezekiel only in terms of the Christian Resurrection is that we might not realize exactly what it is the text is trying to get us to realize: that the graves Ezekiel refers to are not those in which the Israelites will one day be buried, from which, in some kind of grisly spectacle, their corpses will one day in the future arise and be reconstituted: rather, they are the graves God’s people already inhabit—the graves we inhabit—right now, even as we live our lives.

o The kinds of graves that cause us to see each other not as living members of one another, but as alien and dead.

o Broaden this to include what is traditionally taken to be the ecological, even the “non-living” world.

o Reading Ezekiel’s text poses a challenge—and a danger—for us: we can take it two ways

1. It is a literal vision of some kind of future, supernatural event—like the seventh voyage of Sinbad—where skeletons get up and walk around. I would suggest that this reading trivializes it, makes of it a kind of fairy tale that finds its Christian analogue in cartoonish notions of an afterlife of clouds, pearly gates, harps, etc. This is the version painted on the walls of the Sistine Chapel which, as beautiful as it is, suggests that the resurrection and the eternity toward which we strive are things that are to come, things outside of time rather than (as I believe Ezekiel intends it) a potential that exists radically within the deepest core of every moment of our lives. Something for which we were best not sit around waiting.

2. Rather, Ezekiel’s vision is a call to arise from the graves where we are, even as we speak, rotting away and will continue to rot for as long as we placate ourselves with the same fairy-tale notions I have just given. As such, ironically enough, Ezekiel’s text itself can become a potential grave insofar as it offers itself to us as an end rather than a beginning—as a story we might trot out once a year without allowing ourselves to enter into it or it into us. When we arise from that grave, it is not just we who come alive, but the text also; or rather, we find that we are the text and that it is we and that we are alive in one another.

· The kind of resurrection Ezekiel is talking about is an invitation into a mystery, not an answer to a question. The moment we allow it to ossify into the latter is the moment we cease to participate in it.

· This is not just about how to read the Bible. The modern world we live in offers a capitalist parody of resurrection—the fetishism of commodities—whereby dead, material things seem to be brought to life as substitutes for the real relationships we ought to be having with one another as a community.

· Here I’m reminded of something Frank Innes told me about the Pepsi slogan, “Pepsi makes you come alive” being mistranslated for an African ad campaign as “Pepsi will raise your ancestors from the dead.”

· The point is, the world is full of things that masquerade as resurrection stories that, insofar as they encourage us to be passive and complacent and merely accept them as such, actually become the very death from which Ezekiel calls us to arise.

o Revision of original statement that we loose something by understanding Ez. in terms of the Christian resurrection

o For Ezekiel is equally dead if we lock his text into its own historical moment: to refuse to read it as anything other than a metaphor for a particular tribe of exiled people in the 6^th century BC.

o One of the challenges the Lectionary has for us who, after all, call ourselves people of Christ and the Ressurection is to understand how Ezekiel lives in our own stories: but also how our own stories live through it.

o In fact, if there is a danger of taking Ezekiel too literally, there is also the danger of reducing it to mere metaphor—metaphor too can have a distancing effect, unlike the intimacy of entering into an act of faith.

o I think this is just what the Gospel calls us to do. John’s words are much less metaphorical: unlike the abstract valley and the anonymous bones of Ezekiel’s vision, John’s story has a place (Bethany) and people with names (Mary, Martha, Lazarus, Jesus). In fact, it’s very hard to read this passage and imagine that John didn’t mean us to take it absolutely literally.

§ There’s even a moment where Jesus must correct what the disciples take to be the figurative language of Lazarus “falling asleep.” “No,” he tells them “plainly,” “Lazarus is dead.”

o How do we understand this? From what depths of our will power can we, realistically, ever summon the suspension of disbelief that would be necessary to take John’s story (written down a long time after it was supposed to have happened) as evidence for a bodily resurrection?

o To be honest, I come up against this passage in the same way I encounter Ezekiel’s prophesying to the winds: utter confusion. I don’t know what to say (elaborate on this).*

o The story itself offers us several models of faith:

o Good old Thomas who seems to give up right away: “Let’s go and die too.”

o Martha, always the diligent student, says she knows that Lazarus “will rise again in the resurrection, on the last day.” Like Martha, we could hold out hope that it really is possible for the dead to rise again on the last day. Interestingly Jesus responds, “I am (present tense) the Resurrection and the life.”

o Mary seems more real somehow: although she repeats Martha’s words when she tells Jesus that if he had been there her brother wouldn’t have died, she significantly falls short of echoing Martha’s faith that “even now she knows that God will give him whatever he asks.”

o And then there’s Jesus’s response—the shortest verse in the entire Bible—in which words themselves fail and he simply weeps.

o Here is really where my sermon should end because I think this failure of words might be just the point. We spend a lot of time talking about what we believe, in the hopes that by talking, we might understand. But there’s the danger that by understanding—of being certain—what we believe might stop being alive—a matter for continual engagement. Being certain is, in a sense, about controlling.

o Some words by Thomas Pynchon:

Doubt is the essence of Christ. Of the Twelve Apostles, most true to him was ever Thomas. … The final pure Christ is pure uncertainty. His become the centrall subjective fact of Faith, that risks evr’ything upon one bodily Ressurection …. Wouldn’t something less doubtable have done? Some few tatters of evidence to wrap our poor naked spirits against the coldness of a World where Mortality and its Agents may bully their way, wherever they wish to go…? (Thomas Pynchon, Mason Dixon, p. 511).

o Belief isn’t just a matter of what we tell ourselves. One of my favorite scholars, Juliet Fleming, talks about the massive and confusing changes in religious doctrine in seventeenth century England, which was a world in which people didn’t always know what they believed, but (she says) this was “not because they were confused, but because belief might be lodged in practices beyond or beside our knowledge of it.”

o Niels Bohr and the horseshoe

o Living “as if.”

o This final time before Easter is, I think, a time not so much for awaiting the certainty of an eventual resurrection but, rather, throwing oneself into the radical uncertainty that might just be the resurrection: not a closing down, but an opening up: not an end, but a beginning.

End with one more vision of the Resurrection:

">At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood. (John Donne, Holy Sonnet 7)