Sermon for Sunday--Part 1

GOD LOVES US, AND GOD AIN’T FINISHED WITH US YET

(Read the Scripture, Ezekiel 37: 1-14)

When I was in seminary there were folks of all ages, skills, and abilities there. One of the people that I went to school with was named Gloria. Gloria was in her late forties or early fifties. I am not sure how old she was exactly, except she got very offended when employees from McDonalds assumed she was ordering with the Senior Citizen discount. Gloria’s eyesight was not all that good, so she asked me to drive her from Kansas City, KS to Olathe, KS—a suburb of Kansas City. About 20 miles away. While I was waiting for her to purchase Jeanette Oke book or some other cheesy Christian romance I stumbled around the rest of the bookstore. I found a book on the bargain rack that caught my attention. It is entitled I Dream of Peace. The book is a book about the images of war as illustrated in war torn Yugoslavia in the early 90s. Listen to a couple of the letters.

The soldiers ordered us out of our house and then burned it down. After that, they took us to the train, where they ordered all the men to lie down on the ground. From the group, they chose who they were going to kill. They picked my uncle and a neighbor! Then they machine gunned them to death. After that, the soldiers put the women in the front car of the train and the men in the back. As the train started moving, they disconnected the back and took the men off to the camps. I saw it all!
Now I can’t sleep. I try to forget, but it doesn’t work. I have such difficulty feeling anything anymore.
--Alik, 13, refugee
(p.59)

It’s all so strange! Suddenly, it’s so important, everybody is asking who you are, what you do, where you come from.
So many people have been killed fighting for justice. But what justice? Do they know what they are fighting for, who they are fighting?
The weather is growing very cold now. No longer can you hear the singing of the birds, only the sound of they children crying for a lost mother or father, a brother or a sister.
We are children without hope.
--Dunja, 14, from Belgrade
(p.27)

Can you hear their cries for justice, help, and deliverance? Can you feel their hopelessness?

Maybe if it’s hard to relate to the cries of the children in the former Yugoslavia, then you can relate to some children a little closer to home. Dana is one of the street children in this country that are estimated to be one million strong. Dana was 16 years old. At a young age, her father abandoned her. Later, in her teen years, her mother had told her that she needed to get out of the house because she could not support both Dana, and her five younger brothers. So, Dana was left to live on the street, fending for herself. Dana did whatever she had to do in order to get by. She said, “I used to be from somewhere, but I am not from anywhere anymore.” 1
Can you hear her pain? Her sense of abandonment and God-forsakenness?
(Pause)
I don’t know if you hear their pain, and I have an even bigger question. Does God? That is the concern that our Biblical story addresses today. You see, Israel, unlike the examples above, was suffering because of their sin. They had turned away from God. They had ignored the cries of the poor, the widow, and the orphan. They had bowed their knees to idols. Thus, they had been drug across a desert to a strange land. There, they had been slaves and servants to the people of Babylon. To the mind of the people of Israel, the Babylonian people who were more cruel and wicked than they ever thought of being. Yet, like the examples above, they too were crying out, feeling abandoned and forsaken by God. The Israelites were also wondering if tomorrow was worth dreaming about, if there was any hope. In Ezekiel 37: 1-14, God intends to answer these cries and questions.
The Bibles says that God brought Ezekiel out by his hand, and the Spirit brought him smack dab in the middle of a valley. As he was getting adjusted to his environment by rubbing his eyes and blinking a few times, he noticed that there were a bunch of bones in the valley. Dry bones. Bones of people who had been dead for a long, long time. God walks Ezekiel back and forth across the valley, and he sees bones, piled upon bones, piled upon bones. Then God asks Ezekiel if the bones can live. Ezekiel ponders the question for a while. Can the Lord make something good out of this situation? Can the Lord make something good out of this ugliness, lifelessness, and death? Ezekiel responds, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know!”
Then, God tells Ezekiel to prophecy to the bones. To tell these dry, stale remnants of human bodies that they will once again have muscles to move with, lungs filled with oxygen, and skin to cover them. God tells Ezekiel to tell the bones that they will once again bear life!
So Ezekiel did what God said, and something amazing, something miraculous happened. The bones made a clacking, rattling sound as they raced to be attached to their original skeletons. Then, flesh and skin came upon these bodies. Finally, Ezekiel prophecies that they should have breathe, and they all stand up before him. All of the bodies were like a huge army. Can you imagine? Would you be speechless? Would you be jumping up and down for joy? Or, would you be falling on your face, begging for mercy from such a powerful God?
It is interesting to note that the Hebrew word for breathe that is used in this text is used in this passage only one other time in all of Scripture, the creation narrative. The parallel is obvious, and it is reiterated by verses 11-14 (reread that portion of the Biblical text).
What is the message? The message is that God is in the business of recreating. Recreating nations! Recreating people! Recreating his people! You see, God had a message for the people of Israel. That message was that GOD LOVES THEM, AND GOD AIN’T FINISHED WITH THEM YET.
This world is in a sad state. We need only think about the things we have heard on the news. 35,000 children head to their death writhing from either starvation or dehydration, or both. Terrorist cells are springing up in little villages all over the Middle East, Asia and in Africa, and with youth on the margins in big cities in the West. Ruthless dictators rule in all corners of the world, whether it is Kim Jong IL starving his people so he can make nuclear weapons in Korea, or the ruler of Iran doing similar things, or the nation of Sudan persecuting the Christian minority of their population in the Darfur. In the last year there have been killer tsunamis in the Pacific and record numbers of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. The avian flu threatens to mutate and has the potential to turn into a pandemic that kills millions. The AIDS virus may mutate as well, and possibly even hundreds of thousands of children will be orphaned in the next several years. Child slavery in much of the third world, and even in America is increasing at alarming rates. In the midst of this the scientists warn us about things like overpopulation and global warming. This world has lots of problems. But I have a message for this deeply troubled world—GOD LOVES US AND GOD AIN’T FINISHED WITH US YET.