How are we all feeling?
- Maybe we are feeling anxious about becoming ill. If we have an underlying health issue, this will be preying on our minds.
- Maybe we are keenly feeling our separation from a loved one. Separation from vulnerable parents or from children. What would we do if they had to go to hospital?
- Maybe we are worried about our finances. We have lost jobs, businesses have effectively been closed down. How will we cope? Have we made the right decisions.
- Maybe we are lonely. Our social life has come to an abrupt end and we wonder why the telephone doesn’t ring.
- Maybe we are worried about getting food. What will we do when our supplies run out?
- And then there’s this. If you worship at our church every Sunday then it is a sudden change not to be able to come to the church today and instead look at this small altar erected in a bedroom. It’s not the same is it? We have been exiled from our church building. We are a church in exile.
I want to take these feelings now and try and put them into a framework so that we can understand them and cope with them. And we are going to take our Old Testament text from Ezekiel to help us to do it.
Ezekiel knew all about exile.
We think Ezekiel was one of the priests at the temple in Jerusalem. When the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem they took the leaders of Judah, including the priests into exile in Babylon. The idea was to decapitate a nation so that it would be easier to rule as part of their empire. In total they did this three times, taking different groups of Jerusalem’s elite into exile.
Ezekiel was in the first wave of exiles. He lost his wife and some children in the accompanying violence. His whole world fell apart.
And the way he understood what happened to him and the way he coped with it was very simple. He said God has done this.
Ezekiel believed that God had torn Ezekiel’s world apart. What a thing to believe! And yet, for Ezekiel the alternatives were worse.
One alternative might be that God had tried to prevent this and had failed. In other words; God did not have enough power.
Another alternative was that God didn’t really care what happened to his people. In other words; God did not have enough love.
Ezekiel couldn’t contemplate these alternatives. God has the power to protect and God never stops loving his people so God must have done this terrible thing to his own people. It must have been God who tore the world apart.
Now we are really not used to thinking like this.
There are people who have said that the Covid 19 virus is a punishment from God for whatever it is that they think humanity should be punished for.
Just as there are people who said the virus was a hoax designed to undermine their beloved President of the United States.
These are all types of things that people believe when they believe that God shares their rather narrow objectives and I am definitely not inviting you to entertain this sort of stuff.
But in a broader sense, if we are going to get anything out of Ezekiel this morning, we are going to have to think about what God is doing with this Covid 19 virus and assume that it is a thing that lies within his power. Why has he added this to the suffering that humanity endures already?
Because humanity was already suffering before Covid 19 came along. And millions of people will die this year from other things apart from Covid 19; including preventable things like war and starvation. So what is God doing with this extra thing which we must now endure?
I think three things are happening to people living in advanced economies as a result of this virus:
- We have been exiled from our normal lives. Our lives have been stopped in their tracks.
- We have been made to feel a vulnerability which we did not feel before.
- We have been forced to examine what it is that holds our communities together.
And if Ezekiel were here, and in a sense he is here because we are reading his vision, he would say, that’s what God is doing. God is sending us into exile. He is showing us our vulnerability. He is asking us to examine our cohesion as a community.
And if Ezekiel were here, we could ask him what he thought we should do and I know exactly what he’d say. Ezekiel would say we should do what God tells us to do. All through the book of Ezekiel God tells Ezekiel what to do and Ezekiel does it.
For example, at the start of his exile God tells Ezekiel to lie on his side for 390 days, one day for each year that Israel was disobedient to God and Ezekiel does it and then after 390 days, God tells Ezekiel to lie on his other side for forty days, one day for each year that Judah was disobedient to God and there we have the familiar Lenten phrase 40 days which is the length of our season of Lent, our season of reflexion and atonement. We were wondering what our Lenten challenge should be; well now we know. To spend some time in exile, contemplating our vulnerability and contemplating our lack of community cohesion.
And after Ezekiel has lain on his side because God told him to, God tells him to do lots of other things and gives him lots of other visions; all designed to show him why God has done this terrible thing to his people, to scatter them in exile.
And then after many chapters the book changes.
God is still leading Ezekiel but the visions now contain a new message and our reading today comes from this final phase of the book.
The images of scattering come to an end and are replaced with images of gathering.
God leads Ezekiel to a valley of bones and tells Ezekiel to tell the bones to gather together, to become live bodies again and to live again, promising them that God would put a new spirit into them and take them home.
And Jesus re-enacts this vision, of course, in the raising of Lazarus. He calls Lazarus back to life. He demonstrates the power of God and the love of God, gives life to Lazarus and promises eternal life to all the people in the Kingdom of his Father.
Because Ezekiel did not believe for one minute that God did not have the power to save his people. He did not believe for one minute that God had lost his love for his people. He always believed that everything that was happening was God’s doing and in his own time God would gather his people, give them life and bring them home.
Now when we talk about this virus we talk a lot about ventilators and tests and vaccines and social isolation and protective equipment and, of course, this work must continue and we must pursue it with as much energy and creativity as we can but I don’t think any of this means that we cannot share Ezekiel’s understanding that God is at work in all this, not least because of the vision of hope that Ezekiel leaves us with.
God will gather us in, return us to life and give us a new spirit.
Our exile too will end, but just like in Ezekiel’s vision, our exile will not end just with us going back to where we were before. Our exile will also end with us embracing a new spirit that God will put within us.
What will this new spirit be?
Maybe a spirit of valuing people more. Suddenly we know who the key workers are. People working in food distribution and food retail and care homes – these are key workers. We can’t do without them. A few weeks ago they were unskilled immigrants we could do without. Well, we are glad that they are here now.
Maybe a spirit of reaching out to our neighbours, of proactively thinking who might need my help today. That’s what has been going on for the last two weeks. It seems that every time I try and help somebody, somebody else has beaten me to it.
Maybe a spirit that no challenge is too great for us. We have accepted drastic changes to our everyday lives and economic disruption at an unprecedented scale to prevent the spread of illness that won’t even kill half of us. Maybe this will give us the courage to do what it takes to protect our planet so our grandchildren can enjoy it.
And what will this new spirit be in our church?
- A spirit of confidence that we are the true heart of this community.
- A spirit of joy as we draw more families with children into our church.
- A spirit of innovation as we find new ways to worship together, reaching many more people than when we worshipped at set times in a church building.
Of course, when this is all over, we will go back into our beloved church building, we will hear our organ again and our hearts will be full of joy to have returned.
But we will never be the same again.
God is putting a new spirit within us and we shall live and we shall know that God has spoken and has acted and will act again.
Let us embrace that Spirit and give thanks for it. Amen.