Spiritual Resuscitation

Ezekiel 37:1-14

William F. Schnell

May 31, 2009

     Happy Birthday!  Today is the official birthday of the Christian Church.  If you don’t get too hung up on certain aberrations of the Gregorian calendar, or some historical inconsistencies surrounding the biblical record of Jesus’ birth or some dating differences between Eastern and Western expressions of the faith then the Christian church should be 1,976 years old today as dated not from the birth of Jesus or from the beginning of his ministry or from his death, but from the first Pentecost following his death.  That is when the Holy Spirit was poured out on 3,000 souls who became mother church in Jerusalem under the leadership of the Apostles.

      Pentecost literally means “50^th day.”  It originated as a Jewish harvest festival dated 50 days after the Exodus in commemoration of when God gave the 10 Commandments at Mount Sinai.  It was during this festival in AD 33 that the Holy Spirit promised by the risen Christ came upon the 3,000 in Jerusalem.  It also happened to be 49 days after Easter, or 50 days inclusive of Easter, which is why the Church has continued the Jewish observance of Pentecost, albeit with a Christian distinctive. 

      Speaking of commonalities between the Jewish and Christian faith traditions, the Old Testament Hebrew word, “ruach,” and the New Testament Greek word, “pneuma,” both mean the same thing in three different ways.  They both mean wind, they both mean breath and they both mean spirit.  All three are invisible, yet very real.  Hold your invisible breath and see how long before you are gasping for some invisible air.  Indeed deprive the average person of air breathing for 6 minutes and that person’s invisible spirit will depart its visible body.  Hence the ancients, whether Greek or Hebrew or what-have-you, equated a body’s spirit with the air it breathed. 

      The title of our message for this morning is “Spiritual Resuscitation.”  Most of us are familiar with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.  Some of us are even certified in giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in combination with cardio-pulmonary chest compression.  That six minute interval between the cessation of breathing and giving up the spirit provides a window of opportunity for one person to share breath with another in the hopes of kick starting the latter’s respiratory system back into action. 

     Spiritual resuscitation has to do with reviving the spiritual dimension of a person’s life.  The Pentecostal expression of the Church is very big into revivals, seeking to literally reproduce the experience of Pentecost recorded in the New Testament book of Acts (and sometimes emphasizing speaking in tongues as a sign of the true believer).  The Church in Aurora is not a Pentecostal Church in the denominational sense, but it is, we will find, a church committed to spiritual resuscitation.

     Today we are going to explore the symptoms of spiritual deprivation.  We would know the signs of oxygen deprivation if we saw a person choking on something.  Maybe we would know how to respond with a Heimlich Maneuver or, that not doing the trick, performing an emergency tracheotomy with a pen knife inserted between the cartilage rings you can easily feel where neck and trachea come together (waiting, of course, until the flailing victim passed out first). 

     What is the pathology of spiritual deprivation?  What are its causes and symptoms?  What interventions can bring about a revival?  We are going to seek answers to those questions in our text for this morning from the Old Testament prophecy of Ezekiel.  It is a text about the wind, about the breath, about the spirit.  It is a text about spiritual deprivation and spiritual revival—“Spiritual Resuscitation” if you will.  It is a text about the power of the Holy Spirit of God.  It is a text about the meaning of Pentecost for our day.

      Ezekiel writes, The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.  He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry.  He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”  I said, “O Sovereign Lord, you alone know” (Verses 1-3).   What a wildly vivid image!  Are we to take it literally?  As usual, no, except in this case God explains what the images represent.

     “Then he said to me: "Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel.  They say, `Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off’” (Verse11).  Ezekiel is what we call and Exilic Prophet—one who prophesied during the Exile of God’s people from the Land of Promise.  The Exile did not occur all at once.  First the Northern Kingdom of Israel was defeated by the Assyrians and, through an act of ethnic cleansing, was relocated as a slave race to Assyria.  Then the Southern Kingdom of Judah was piece-by-piece overrun by the Babylonians and likewise exiled to Babylon. 

      It would be as if the United States was gradually overrun by its enemies.  Imagine California, Oregon and Washington falling to a foreign enemy and its citizens forcefully relocated.  Imagine Texas, the southwestern states and the north central states going next, putting the southern states at risk.  But at least we would still have the remnant here in the Midwest, and our Capital at Washington DC, together with the White House and the three branches of our government.

     Ezekiel confronted such a situation in his day.  He was among a group of exiles in Babylon, but at least the Capital city of Jerusalem still stood in Judah together with the Temple and the Palace of the King.  However the surviving nation was a shadow of its former self, and was at great risk for falling.  Indeed, Ezekiel prophesied that the same fate would certainly befall his remaining countrymen if they did not turn from their sins and turn back to the Lord.

     This is the message of divine wrath and judgment that we read in the beginning of Ezekiel’s prophesy—a prophesy that is fulfilled in his time.  The capital is soon overrun, its magnificent temple and palace and buildings are destroyed, and its people and king are exiled as prisoners.  The Psalmist describes the hopeless gloom: By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.  There on the poplars we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"  How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land? (Psalm 137:1-4).

     We might have expected Ezekiel to say, “I told you so,” but that is not what we read in his prophesy.  Quite the contrary, Ezekiel now prophesies comfort and hope for a hopeless people. “Therefore prophesy and say to them: `This is what the Sovereign Lord says: O my people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel.  Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them.  I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land.  Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord'" (Verses 12-14). 

     The results of Ezekiel’s prophesy will be a two-fold resuscitation of God’s people: one physical and one spiritual.  He describes the physical resuscitation in his figurative and imaginative way saying: So I prophesied as I was commanded.  And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone.  I looked, tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them (Verses 7-8). 

     Just as the scattered bones came back together and were fleshed out into people, so would the scattered exiles come back together and be fleshed out into a people once again.  But they would not be the same people they had been before: a disobedient people, an unfaithful people, and an unrighteous people.  No, they would not only be a physically resuscitated people but a spiritually resuscitated people—a people filled with the Holy Spirit of God.

     You recall that the Hebrew word for spirit is the same word for breath and wind.  With that in mind we return to Ezekiel’s prophesy: Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophecy son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’”  So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army (Verses 9-10. 

     The Word of the Lord has the power to spiritually revive a people from a hopeless scattering of exiles into a vast army that nobody can defeat—not the Babylonians, not the Assyrians, not anyone.  God concludes through the prophet Ezekiel: I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land (Verse 14) a.k.a. the Promised Land of God’s protective and providential care.  Spiritual resuscitation is the key to all manner of restoration, revival and renewal.  As one old hymn puts it: “Breathe on me breath of God, fill me with life anew.”

     And just as God used Ezekiel to breathe new life into his hopeless people, so God uses us to breathe his life-giving spirit into others who are without hope.  As with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, we have the ability to spiritually resuscitate another soul.  Yesterday the Cleveland Cavaliers lost to the Orlando Magic on the latter’s home court for game six of the playoffs, with a seventh and final game scheduled at Cleveland.  Prior to the game Orlando forward Rashard Lewis said to a reporter: "We don't want to go back and play in their arena again.  They feed off that crowd there.''  Our spirits feed off one another, and it can mean the difference between victory and defeat as the home court advantage reveals. 

     Sometimes it can make the difference between life and no life.  This past week a person I was counseling brought me some lunch.  At the end of our session I said, “Thanks for my lunch.”  This person responded, “Thanks for my life.”  Now I haven’t done anything but be a presence through a tough time.  But there is a divine power in our presence that can be just as lifesaving as a simple breath from our lungs in mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.  And I am not talking about the divine power of a pastor’s presence or a priest’s presence, unless we are talking about the priesthood of all believers.

     Maybe that is why Stephen Ministers are called Ministers.  They minister with the divine power of their presence.  Stephen Ministers have received 50 hours of training in compassionate, nonjudgmental listening skills.  They are not trained to say the right things to people who have lost a loved one through death or divorce, or who have lost a job or who have lost health or who in one way or another have lost hope.  Their presence says it all.  Their presence says “there is hope,” “this too shall pass,” God is still on his throne and he has a plan and purpose for you.”

    This past week I also received a call from a woman to thank me for referring her Mother to a Stephen Minister.  This woman was suffering with her mother, as we are inclined to do with those we love when they are hurting.  All I had done was made a call to one of our Stephen Ministry Leaders, and a referral to a trained Stephen Minister Caregiver had been made immediately.  Already new life was being breathed into a mother and daughter and I was getting serious credit for it.  Even I am not that brazen, so I picked up the phone and called our Stephen Ministry Leader to thank him and our Stephen Ministers for being there to offer spiritual resuscitation to our members in need.

    A new Stephen Ministry training class is being gathered in the fall.  But you can get information about it today by visiting the Stephen Ministry table set up in Fellowship Hall during coffee hour.  There you will find detailed literature, and live Stephen Ministers to answer any questions you have.  No commitment will be required today beyond a willingness to explore a ministry opportunity to which God may be calling you.  Otherwise you get the summer to think about it.

    Beyond that, if you are feeling a bit hopeless like those exiles from the land of promise who hung their harps in the trees and wept when recalling the life they had known, or if you know a person struggling to adapt to life’s ever-changing  circumstances, then consider giving our Stephen Ministry leaders a call.  Male and Female caregivers are ready for long or short-term service to breathe new life where there is need for spiritual resuscitation.