Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and
Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen
If you knew your story would be included in the scriptures
would it affect the way you lived your life?
Our tendency is twofold:
·
Either we read the scriptures as an old story
whose ending was written long ago. . .
·
Or we read ourselves and our situation into the
scripture, in ways that ignore the context and actual content of the scripture.
When we read the
Bible as a story that ended long ago we make Christianity, and modern Judaism,
merely a history cult.
We gather
together to celebrate our past, to claim our heritage, and understand from
whence we came. There are lessons to be
learned, but they are largely history lessons.
It’s not unlike the way we tell the history of our nation.
- · We tell the story of the pilgrims coming to Plymouth Rock, and there establishing a colony in the new world, as a way of emphasizing the importance of religious freedom in our nation. (An interest side note to this history, in most of the colonies, there was not religious freedom at all. The freedom they sought in New England was not that everyone could worship God in their own way, but rather just a freedom from the established Church of England. Other colonies, especially in the south, reestablished the Church of England as the official religion and there wasn’t freedom of religion at all.) That said, today we tell the story of the pilgrim’s journey to this land to underscore what became, much later, a principle upon which the nation was founded, religious freedom.
- · In the same way we tell the story of the Boston Tea party, to emphasize our commitment as a people to a representative government. “No taxation without representation”, right?
Well, one way to
read scripture is simply as an old story that ended long ago, but from which we
can learn a few lessons, and so we constantly look for the ‘moral of the story’.
The second way
that we have tended to read the Bible today is to read our story into the
scripture in ways that ignore the context and content about which the Bible was
originally written.
The Book of
Revelation, for example, was written to the Church during the time of great
persecution under the Roman Empire, and the events so colorfully described
there are related to that specific time period, not ours.
And so, for
example, when Revelation refers to the whore of Babylon, seated on ‘seven
mountains’ it is a direct reference to Rome, the City of Seven Hills, and would
have clearly been understood by everyone who originally heard that
message.
Likewise, when in
Revelation the time of great tribulation is described, the Churches to whom the
Letter was written, who were themselves experiencing day by day that
tribulation at the hands of the Roman Empire, knew what the book was referring to.
For
us to ignore that original context and content of the Bible is to be unfaithful
in our reading of scripture.
There is another
way to read scripture, that does not view it merely as an old story that ended
long ago, nor understands it out of context by reading into it our current
experiences.
This way to read
scripture recognizes the historical reality that is unfolding throughout
scripture, but also sees our own contemporary experience in the context of that
ongoing history of the people of God.
This Lent we have
been talking a lot about the Kingdom of God and the Exile. As Christians we have failed to understand
that these two themes ARE the contemporary situation, the story that forms and
shapes the content of the Bible as it is being written.
Part of the
problem for us is that within scripture the more historical stories, like the
Exodus, are developed more deeply.
Well that is the
Old Testament history, it is not the current situation that dominated
the hearts and minds of the Israelites at the time the scriptures were being
written.
The Exile was the
context for the writing of both the Old Testament and the New.
To review, The
Exile began with the destruction of the northern Kingdom of Israel, in about
720 b.c. Prior to that, the Kingdom of
Israel had been divided, the ten tribes to the north comprising “Israel”, and
the two tribes of the south, were called “Judah”.
Following the
collapse of the northern Kingdom, in 587 b.c. the southern Kingdom of Judah was
conquered and its people taken into captivity in Babylon. Though that exile lasted but a generation,
they returned not as an independent nation, but rather to be ruled by one
empire after another, including, at the time of Jesus, the Roman Empire.
It was Rome that
completed the destruction of Israel during the Jewish wars from 66 A.D. through
70 AD, and continuing for yet another generation.
The
result was that those Jewish people that survived were dispersed throughout the
known world, and the nation never again was reestablished until 1948, when the
modern state of Israel emerged following the holocaust, where millions of Jewish
people died in the German concentration camps.
“Mortal, can
these bones live?”
Ezekiel could
never have imagined how many of Israel’s dry bones would have piled up in that
valley.
Nor would Israel
have ever imagined that the Exile that they experienced beginning in 720 BC
would continue in one shape or another for nearly 2,700 years, but it did.
And there would
be many who would question whether or not the Zionist belief in the
reestablishment of the modern state of Israel should be seen within the context
of the end of the Exile.
But what we have
in the Bible, from the prophet Ezekiel, is a question:
“Mortal, can
these bones live?”
Ezekiel’s
response is “O Lord God, you know.”
“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.”
And 2,700 years
later, Israel is established once again as a sovereign nation on Zion, God’s
holy mountain.
The Biblical
narrative is still being written today.
But it also bears
noting that the work is hardly done.
When Isaiah
envisions the return of Israel to Zion, he writes:
6 The wolf shall
live with the lamb,
the leopard shall
lie down with the kid,
the calf and the
lion and the fatling together,
and a little
child shall lead them.
7 The cow and the
bear shall graze,
their young shall
lie down together;
and the lion
shall eat straw like the ox.
8 The nursing
child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned
child shall put its hand on the adder's den.
9 They will not
hurt or destroy
on all my holy
mountain;
for the earth
will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters
cover the sea.
The ongoing
conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis is evidence that God is not done
yet.
Resurrection.
New life in old
bones.
“Lazarus, come
out!”
As Christians we
have almost always thought of resurrection exclusively as dealing with our own
life after death.
And I’m certainly
not here to minimize that, or deny that reality in any way shape or form.
However, within
the context of the Bible, and the ongoing saga of the Exile and Return, and
Jesus’ own proclamation of the Kingdom of God, resurrection has an additional
meaning.
God can and does breathe
new life into his people, even as their dry bones lie bleached in desert sun.
This gives me
hope.
On a personal
note:
I followed my
father into the ministry nearly thirty years ago. And
when I entered ministry, it was that my ministry might be much the same
as the ministry of my father and his generation.
Karla and I had
been members of a mission congregation, established about the same time as
Peace Lutheran was established.
I hoped that I
might experience that in my own ministry.
But that mission
orientation, the building of new congregations that was part of the Churches
life from the end of WWII through about 1980, ceased.
The Church has
been on a decline, ever since.
Some trace the
beginning of that decline, interestingly enough, to the introduction of the
birth control pill, in 1960. Since then
birth rates have dropped, and the growth we were experiencing largely because
we were having lots of kids, stopped.
Today, the
birthrate is not sufficient to overcome the losses we incur by attrition.
And so the Church
is in decline. And we wonder if “these
bones can live”. It is depressing.
Unless we see
ourselves within the context of the long and ongoing saga of God’s relationship
with his people.
Unless we recognize
that God is in the business of resurrection.
Unless we hear
the words God spoke to Ezekiel once again: “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.”
That perhaps is
our mission today.
To prophesy to
the Wind. The Breath of God.
That it might
once again rattle those dried up bones and breathe life into them.
And so I hope that
we might say what Ezekiel said:
“I prophesied as
he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on
their feet, a vast multitude.”
I also hope that
it won’t take 2,700 years.
Amen
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