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New Math (sermon 3/9/08)
Topic Started: Mar 8 2008, 05:49 PM (156 Views)
Dewey
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HOLY CARP!!!
The worship service is canceled, but here's tomorrow's sermon anyway...

The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.” So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude. Then he said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 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 37:1-14

=========

Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” But when Jesus heard it, he said, “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. Then after this he said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them.” After saying this, he told them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.” The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.” Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.” Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him. - John 11:1-45


=========

There’s a movie that came out several years back called “Life is Beautiful.” The movie tells the story of a Jewish man, his wife, and their young son, when the man and the son are living through the horrors of life in a Nazi concentration camp during Word War II. In the movie, the father constructs an elaborate story for his son, telling him that everything going on is just part of a nig game that they’re all playing. The object of the game, the father tells the boy, is to earn more points than anyone else. You earned points by not eating. You could earn points by hiding from the guards. Every difficulty that they faced, the father explained, earned them more points, and at the end of the game, the one with the most points would win a tank. The man told his son that the guards were so mean because if they could keep everyone else from earning points, the guards would get the tank for themselves. The man’s unlikely, absurd story was meant to give the boy hope – enough hope and determination to stick it out, to survive. Several times, as the boy is about to give up, the man keeps the boy’s hope going by telling him that he’s actually in the lead in the game, and if he just holds on a little longer, the tank will be his. And it works, right up until the end of the movie, when the Allies liberate the camp – and a Sherman tank rolls through the main gate, and the boy thinks they’re delivering his prize for winning the game.

The passage that we read from Ezekiel this morning – the vision of the dry bones – was originally told to the people of Judah as they sat in captivity in Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzer overran their nation, including the city of Jerusalem, and destroyed the Temple. In that captivity, the Israelites were at the absolute rock bottom. They’d lost their land, and the very focal point of their religious and cultural existence. They were slaves taken off to another land, but as far as they could see, even if they got their freedom, life as they knew it was over. For all practical purposes, it was as if a massive tornado, or a tsunami, had rolled through and completely wiped their known world off the landscape. There just wasn’t any “there” there anymore. The ancient Israelites were living lives of hopelessness and despair, with no end in sight.

Ezekiel was one of them. He was living among them, as a captive himself. In this Book of the Old Testament, Ezekiel documents a total of four different visions that he has. This vision of the dry bones is the third of these visions. Ezekiel’s vision from God was intended to offer the Israelites hope for their future. God told the people through Ezekiel that even though their situation looked bleak and hopeless – even to the point where they had started to doubt that God cared about them, or that God even existed – God was still there. God still cared. And at the right time, God would restore the people and their fortunes.

At the time of this Babylonian captivity, it wasn’t common belief that the dead would ever be physically, bodily resurrected, as we believe. This didn’t become a common part of Jewish belief until later. In fact, in Ezekiel’s time, most Jews would have thought that such an idea was absurd. And God used that common opinion in this vision. This vision says to the Israelites, “Look – I am the sovereign, all-powerful God. I can even make these dry, pitted, chalky bones come back to physical, flesh-and-blood life. I can , and I will, restore you to faith, and freedom, and health and prosperity.”

In this vision, we’re all challenged to view our own circumstances, not through our own limited field of vision, but through God’s eyes. Sometimes, our own situation looks bleak and hopeless. Any hope for us seems as ridiculous as that field of bones miraculously taking on new flesh, and life. It’s crazy. It isn’t logical. But God’s truth goes on, far beyond the point where human logic vaporizes. I suspect that we’ve all experienced this in our own lives. Some last minute reprieve saves us from a disaster that seems unavoidable. Some money show up just before the mortgage goes past due. A medical test comes back negative when everyone expected otherwise. A friend shows up on your doorstep to offer comfort and support, just when you’re as lonely and friendless as a person can feel.

I’m not one of those people who thinks that every time three letters float together in your bowl of Alpha Bits to form a word, that it’s a message from God. But clearly, God is at work in our lives, in ways large and small, to offer us comfort and hope when we just can’t see any hope at all from our own vantage point. God showed Ezekiel dry bones coming back to life, when there was no human hope of them living. Jesus brought Lazarus back to life when his family had no hope. God reads Jesus from the dead when the disciples had no hope. And Christ works in our lives when we think all hope is lost, too.

Amos Wilder was a pastor, a scholar, and a poet. He once wrote a poem called “A Hard Death.” A few lines from the poem read,

“Accept no mitigation,
But be instructed from the null point.
The zero breeds new algebras.”

He’s saying that it’s when all of our comfortable assumptions about our lives and beliefs are challenged, or come crashing down around us – when we’re at the “Zero Point” in our lives – that God can reach our hearts, and teach us new ways, God’s ways, of seeing things – what Amos Wilder would call new algebras – “New Math.”

The Book of Ezekiel is very specific in terms of telling when Ezekiel had his visions. He ties them to the “such-and-such year of the reign of King So-and-So,” and through archaeological evidence, we can pinpoint the time of the vision very accurately. Three of Ezekiel’s visions have a specific time assigned to them. But this vision, the vision doesn’t come with any date attached to it. Elie Weisel, the writer and Jewish Holocaust survivor, once wrote that he thought this was because its message is timeless – that every person, in every generation, needs to hear the message in his own time, that God promises us that these dry, lifeless bones will live again.

In that movie I was talking about, “Life is Beautiful,” the little boy’s father is able to give him a different picture of reality, until the very end. He gives the boy hope. He even gets the boy to laugh one last time by imitating the guard who, the boy doesn’t know, is marching his father away to be shot, just before the camp is liberated and the boy is reunited with his mother. The father’s message of hope and of new life lived on in the life of his son. Ezekiel’s message of hope and of new life lived on in the lives of the Israelites. And the hope of new life that Jesus offered lives on in us.

At various times in our lives, we all feel a sense of hopelessness, doubt, or despair. We’re at our own bottom. Our Zero point. As we move through Lent, we’re approaching Good Friday, and the observance of Christ’s crucifixion – the ultimate cosmic humiliation. The Zero point of all creation. If we allow God to show us the view from his eyes, we see the bigger picture. We see the hope. We see new flesh on old bones. We see new life where there was only death. We understand God’s new math for humanity, and we, too, see that in Christ, “Life is Beautiful.”

Thanks be to God.
"By nature, i prefer brevity." - John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 685.

"Never waste your time trying to explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." - Anonymous

"Oh sure, every once in a while a turd floated by, but other than that it was just fine." - Joe A., 2011

I'll answer your other comments later, but my primary priority for the rest of the evening is to get drunk." - Klaus, 12/31/14
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apple
one of the angels
this is my favorite so far.. very thoughtful
it behooves me to behold
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Jack Frost
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Bull-Carp
And welcome back. Please continue, preacher.

jf
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Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
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bachophile
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HOLY CARP!!!
entrance gate to yad vashem holocaust memorial and museum in jerusalem....

Posted Image
"I don't know much about classical music. For years I thought the Goldberg Variations were something Mr. and Mrs. Goldberg did on their wedding night." Woody Allen
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Frank_W
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Resident Misanthrope
How poignant... Goosebumps...
Anatomy Prof: "The human body has about 20 sq. meters of skin."
Me: "Man, that's a lot of lampshades!"
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Mikhailoh
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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
Great sermon.

But.. Dewey.. did the hope and hopelessness theme have anything to do with 20" of snow?
Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball
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Dewey
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HOLY CARP!!!
Well, as you read through the two lectionary texts for today, you see that i could have gone in any of a dozen directions for a sermon. This direction was on my mind mostly because of a home visitation I'd had with a family.

Mom has just completed her thirty-some chemo treatments, and now is beginning radiation treatments. Dad was working as a bus driver for an MRDD facility when he suffered a mini-stroke and crashed the bus with several of his client/passengers on the bus. None of them suffered more than bumps and bruises, but the mini-stroke means Dad can't drive a bus any more, which not only costs them their livelihood, but means he's separated from his mentally disabled passengers, who he'd come to love, and who love him. He wants to talk further, as all of this has caused somewhat of a crisis of faith. While I was visiting, Son and Grandson were threre. Son has a scar that runs from the top of his head, down over one eye, and continues down one side of his face to his neck. As a teen, he'd been thrown from a car in a terrible wreck, and came within a hair's breadth of losing his life. The house that we sat in to chat had been obliterated in a tornado a dozen years ago, erased down to the foundation. The community rallied to their place and hepled them salvage and secure what little was left behind.

Last Saturday, just a few days after my visit, I sat and watched them renew their wedding vows in our Youth Center. She wore the same gown that they'd been married in 30-some years before, only this time she wore a wig to cover her bald head. Dad wore a suit, as did Son who stood with him. After they renewed their vows, we were treated to the most touching a capella rendition of Amazing Grace, sung by one of the guests - Sally, one of Dad's bus passengers, who was there in her wheelchair, being cared for by her parents.

That's what was on my mind when I wrote the sermon.
"By nature, i prefer brevity." - John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, p. 685.

"Never waste your time trying to explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." - Anonymous

"Oh sure, every once in a while a turd floated by, but other than that it was just fine." - Joe A., 2011

I'll answer your other comments later, but my primary priority for the rest of the evening is to get drunk." - Klaus, 12/31/14
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Aqua Letifer
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ZOOOOOM!
Thanks for posting that, Dewey. :smile:

Your last paragraph reminded me of these two things. Yeah yeah, silly Bruce Lee quotes but I think they're applicable.


In a time when everything goes well, my mind is pampered with enjoyment, possessiveness, etc. Only in times of adversity, privation or mishap, does my mind function and think properly of my state. This close examination of self strengthens my mind and leads me to understand and be understood.

Prosperity is apt to prevent us from examining our conduct; but adversity leads us to think properly of our state, and so is beneficial to us.
I cite irreconcilable differences.
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Mikhailoh
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If you want trouble, find yourself a redhead
Was the guy's name by any chance Job? Geez.
Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead - Lucille Ball
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