Sermon: Can these dry bones live? 18 May 2014

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 18th May 2014

Service:

Mattins

Readings:

Ezekiel 37.3

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 35.2M)

Thirty years ago this year David Jenkins became Bishop of Durham, My first reaction was not a positive one. I was 14 years old. I had been formed in what might be called a pretty standard, traditional Sunday School background, and then had felt my faith be animated and come alive in the worship of my parish church which had deeply and powerfully moved me. 1984, aside from the Orwellian connotations, was also the year I was confirmed and the year I levelled with myself that I honestly felt God calling me to be a priest.

So to hear a Bishop, a Bishop, apparently calling into question the resurrection of Jesus Christ – with unfortunate phrases like ‘conjuring tricks with bones’ - unsettled and disturbed me. And not just me. Perhaps David Jenkins didn’t help himself either; his media coverage made him sound either naive or pig-headed, or a bit of both. I wasn’t helped in coming to a balanced view either by the media storm, or by the fact that my father could do a very good take off of the Bishop, suggesting that if you offered him sugar in his tea the Bishop would say, ‘well, you see, it depends with you mean by sugar, and, and by tea’.

What I do owe to David Jenkins was first, a slightly subversive political streak in me and the need to challenge received wisdom, but also I attribute largely to him my sense of the importance of the place and task of theology within the worshipping and missionary life of the Church. David Jenkins (and I still don’t agree with some of what he has said and written) did at least teach me that words about God are profoundly important: theology matters. That means holding that which is revealed in the Scriptures and the Creeds along with openness to the promptings and guidance of the Holy Spirit fresh to each generation: faithfulness to that gives a chance to address the question, ‘Mortal, can these dry bones live?’ (Ezekiel 37.3).

Ezekiel is faced with the sight of disconnected, scattered bones. It is an arid scene of barren death. It is a charnel valley of hopelessness. Everything that relates to life has gone including any sense of the identity of these bones. The detritus of human existence litters the valley, much as the rubbish that lies around after a huge public event. And staring at those very dry bones Ezekiel is asked a striking and preposterous thing: ‘Son of Man, can these dry bones live?’ (Ezekiel 37.3). We know what Ezekiel thought of that. He responded, ‘O LORD God, you know’. That was a nice move in passing the question back. But lest we think of Ezekiel as a media savvy politician dodging the question we might just ponder what Ezekiel, and we, know of God’s creative and redeeming power.

The life of God breathed into a formless world is how the first account of creation is framed, with the Spirit brooding over the face of the waters: God’s creative power calls all things into life and being. The life of God breathed into the nostrils of a lifeless form of dust and clay is how the creation of Adam is framed: the same Creator Spirit pushing down the airways into Adam’s lungs and igniting his life. Ezekiel’s vision, in context, is almost certainly as the bones as a metaphor for the return of the exiles to Judah, but it unavoidably throws us back to the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

David Jenkins was right that the resurrection was more than, his original emphasis, more than a conjuring trick with bones. It is also important to ask, as he did, what does resurrection mean? That’s an important question but risks over-spiritualising the resurrection of Christ. The resurrection isn’t just about what it means but how we see and know God’s ‘lively life’ in our lives and world. In that we cannot take away the particularity of Jesus’ resurrection. That goes beyond a general sense of resurrection as an almost inevitable springtime where we see daffodils and say, ‘there is resurrection’, but rather to the particular action of the loving, living God in the face of death and disembodiment. Lambs, chicks and green leaves on trees, the images of spring, all look lovely but as images of resurrection they are inadequate. They are part of the rhythm of the world whereas as the resurrection of Jesus is a radical intrusion into the rhythms of death in the world. Dry bones, dead bodies do not rise in the rhythms of the world; they decay and crumble.

Something quite different is going on here in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are unavoidably presented in the resurrection appearances and the apostolic witness which are portrayed in art around the walls of the cathedral with particular, embodied encounters person to person.

The Resurrection of Christ reveals the capacity of the Father and the Holy Spirit to raise Christ, the first fruits, and then us all from the aridity of death into the vibrant life of the Trinity. So resurrection is about bodies, not just minds, because it is about the Spirit which forms and animates not just our human bodies but our embodied life as the Church; resurrection is about bodies because the body of Jesus is raised from the dead.

Ezekiel was told, and so are we today:

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. (Ezekiel 37.13, 14).

Alleluia. Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed. Alleluia!