Crafting new sinews and muscles for God's body (Sunday, March 29, 2020)

The text of the hymns and sermon from today's live-stream...

Hymn: “The Church is Wherever God’s People…”

The church is wherever God’s people are praising,

singing God’s goodness for joy on this day. 

The church is wherever disciples of Jesus

remember his story and walk in his way.

The church is wherever God’s people are helping,

caring for neighbours in sickness and need. 

The church is wherever God’s people are sharing

the words of the Bible in gift and in deed.

Reading (Ezekiel 37:1-10 Good News Translation)

A reading from a time of crisis in the history of Israel.  They are a broken people because of their own corruption and greed – a kind of rot that had eaten away the vitality of their kingdom.  They are a defeated kingdom, beaten in war and shipped off to live as exiles in a foreign land.  And in the wake of all that they wonder if they will ever be a people and a kingdom again—or are they finished?  Even more to the point, is God maybe finished with them?

I felt the powerful presence of the Lord, and God’s spirit took me and set me down in a valley where the ground was covered with bones.  The Lord God led me all around the valley; I could see that there were very many bones and that they were very dry.  The Lord God said to me, “Mortal man, can these bones come back to life?”

I replied, “Sovereign Lord, only you can answer that!”

The Lord God said, “Prophesy to the bones.  Tell these dry bones to listen to the word of the Lord.  Tell them I, the Sovereign Lord, am saying to them: I am going to … bring you back to life.  I will give you sinews and muscles, and cover you with skin.  I will put breath into you and bring you back to life.  Then you will know I am the Lord.”

So I prophesied as I had been told.  While I was speaking, I heard a rattling noise, and the bones began to join together.  While I watched, the bones were covered with sinews and muscles, and then with skin.  But there was no breath in the bodies.

God said to me, “Mortal man, prophesy to the wind.  Tell the wind that the Sovereign Lord commands it to come from every direction, to breathe into these dead bodies, and to bring them back to life.”

So I prophesied as I had been told. Breath entered the bodies, and they came to life and stood up.  There were enough of them to form an army.

Meditation     

Three things in this reading and three things in our life right now – the bones separate and disconnected, the sinews and muscles that bring them and hold them together, and the breath that comes in and gives them new and true life.

The bones. 

In Ezekiel’s vision they’re an image of the people of Israel scattered and buried all across the landscape of the Middle East between Israel and Babylon.  The first great diaspora, that the people thought they would never recover from.  They couldn’t imagine how they would ever come together again as a nation and a people in any good way.

The bones are also at times an image of individual and personal life.  We call it burnout.  Pulled in too many directions, giving time and energy to too many things, trying to live up to too many expectations until all you feel like at the end is a pile of dry bones, discarded masks and roles, hollowed out dreams and plans.

The bones are also an image of where and how we are now as church, as community and country – as the human species on the face of the Earth in this pandemic.  We’re suffering disconnection – isolation – everything seems to be falling apart – we feel buried in our bunkers and fear how things are faring out in the land beyond our control. 

Some say this time is God’s way of shaking us, judging and correcting us – a work of God’s hard will.  And some mean by this that it’s God’s way of separating good / bad, enriching the righteous and impoverishing the evil.  I don’t know; I’m not sure what to do with a God like that.

Some will profit and some will be impoverished as happens any time.  Some will win and others lose, but is that God’s doing?  The way God makes things work?  Or the way people put things together?  Often to the detriment, or at the cost of honest spiritual self-assessment, one way or the other?

The sinews and muscles.  They can be human or holy.  Made up by “the flesh” or shaped by the Word of the Holy One.  And we need to work hard at knowing the difference.

The prophet sees that God desires reconnection driven by the Word – the same Word that brought all the world into being.  A community of life, and the healing, healthy interdependence of the whole.  Ezekiel’s vision is the hope Israel needed in its time, and we need and our world need in ours.

How, though, are holy sinews grown?  How do we connect in love and towards healing and justice?  What are the practical ties that bind? 

What we’re used to is gathering, family parties, meeting neighbours on the street or at the store, visiting, taking food to the Food Bank, making quilts around a table and taking them to a women’s shelter, volunteering at GBF or driving for the Cancer Society, holding fund-raising dinners and Open Mic nights and yard sales, having a good conversation over coffee with a co-worker or over a beer with a friend.

But those kinds of connecting tissue are now neither possible nor loving. 

We are in our homes with immediate family.  For many this can be a time and a way to reconnect, to develop new lines of communication, new kinds of activities together to deepen, enrich, change and transform our ways of being connected as parents and children, as partners.  And that’s good.  This can be a rich spiritual time for us in our families and houses.

But God is also never about saving and blessing just the family unit, and never just the community of the faithful.  God and kingdom and the good news of God’s kingdom is always ultimately about the neighbour and stranger as well, also about the enemy and “the other” whoever the other may be.

In the OT they’re lumped together usually as “the alien, fatherless and widow.”  Today we might say the foreigner and immigrant, the poor and the hungry, the laid-off and lonely and abused and fearful and other folks at risk. 

And the point of it all, is that God’s desire ultimately is the well-being of the whole of God’s family and the whole of God’s world … that the bones God wants to raise up and bring to new life are the bones of all the world God has made, no matter how and where they are,

So … what are the sinews and muscles that can bind us now with others beyond us, and bring us together ?  That create the connections now that allow God’s Spirit of true life to move among us and for others? 

I’ve made a list of just a few things I’ve become aware of just this past week among the members of our little church.  The list includes

·        -  phone calls people are making to keep in touch with one another – especially to people they haven’t seen for a while and may feel left out, and phone calls to me if someone seems in special need maybe of a pastoral call? 

·         - a number of folks who have volunteered to be available to help pick up and deliver groceries and meds for people who may need help in that regard

·         - the Quilt Club is making masks for nurses and doctors at a hospital in St Catharines, and a number of other folks have asked if they can help too

·         - people in some of our online discussion groups – our gratitude group, our family spirituality group, sharing resources and ideas to help each other out

·         - the Mission and Outreach Cttee is trying to find out how we can still live out our Lenten project of supporting and donating to the Stoney Creek Food Bank, especially needed now by some of the “hidden hungry” in our community

·         - members sharing our online worship with  friends, family and neighbours – some of them other-churched, some of them non-churched

These are some of the sinews and muscle that help connection and reconnection happen here among us in this time of pandemic. 

And it’s when this happens, when the connections of sacrificial and self-giving love are made, when connection like that is crafted with the rest of God’s world, with “the other”, that the Spirit comes.  A fresh wind starts to blow into and among us and our neighbours.  A hope of new and true life begins to grow and catch us up once again.

This is the promise of God and the way of God.  This is the hope God gives.  This is the the work and the gift God does through us and through others for the life and well-being of all.  This is the way God breathes into our time, with good news of new life for all

                                

Thanks be to God.

Hymn: “Heal the World”

There's a place in your heart and I know that it is love
And this place could be much brighter than tomorrow
And if you really try you'll find there's no need to cry
In this place you'll feel there's no hurt or sorrow

There are ways to get there if you care enough for the living
Make a little space… make a better place

Heal the world: make it a better place
For you and for me and the entire human race
There are people dying
If you care enough for the living
Make it a better place for you and for me

If you want to know why, there's love that cannot lie
Love is strong: it only cares of joyful giving
If we try we shall see in this bliss we cannot feel
Fear of dread; we stop existing and start living

Then it feels that always Love's enough for us growing
So make a better world… Make a better world

Heal the world…

And the dream we were conceived in will reveal a joyful face
And the world we once believed in will shine again in grace
Then why do we keep strangling life, wound this earth, crucify its soul?
Though it's plain to see, this world is heavenly. Be God's glow!

We could fly so high  let our spirits never die
In my heart I feel you are all my brothers
Create a world with no fear, together we cry happy tears
See the nations turn their swords into plowshares

We could really get there if you cared enough for the living
Make a little space to make a better place

Heal the world …