Sermon: Spirit of Hope

Texts: Ezekial 37:1-14; Acts 2:1-21

Date: June 4, 2006

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational Church

            I want to begin this morning by inviting you to get in touch with your bones.  Get in touch with your boniness.  You might lightly touch some part of yourself where your bones aren’t too deep under the surface—your collarbone, or wrist, or ankle, or forehead.  Picture your skeleton down there holding up your flesh.  Toe bone connected to the ankle bone, ankle bone connected to the shin bone, shin bone connected to the knee bone, and so forth.  Can you see yourself as a skeleton?  Maybe you can imagine our whole congregation sitting here in the pews without the covering of muscles and skins and clothes we have on, a gathering of skeletons.

            We can be grateful for this foundation of bones that keeps us upright, allows us to move and not just ooze around like so many jellyfish.  But skeletons are kind of scary, aren’t they, when they aren’t covered with their normal layers of other stuff.  Skeletons come out for decorations on Halloween or the Day of the Dead.  Bones on their own make us think of death, because the only time we see the bones of some creature they are long past being alive.

            When the prophet Ezekial had the vision we heard the scripture reader recount, his people, the Israelites, were feeling pretty bony.  They were very sad and discouraged.  Their lives had changed so much they hardly felt alive at all.  This is how low they felt, according to Ezekial 37:11: “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.”

            Do you ever feel like that—dried up, hope lost, cut off?  I suspect many of us, particularly as we grow older, have our bony times of lost hope.  We might not feel hopeless about everything; but there are aspects of life where we have lost hope.  Even though it’s not much fun, I’m inviting you to get in touch with your inner boniness for a few moments as you think about some aspect of your life or the world’s life that you feel rather hopeless about.

            It might be something as personal as a friendship on the rocks or passing all the phases of the WASL [Washington Assessment of Student Learning].  It might be something as global as climate change or war or world hunger.  Is there something about which you have lost hope for a solution or resolution?

            I thought of a couple of moments of fleeing hope.  Last summer we were lucky enough to travel to New Zealand.  One day we were visiting glaciers on the South Island.  There’s a beautiful hike up to the foot of one whose name I don’t recall.  You park your car and then walk over the glacial moraine to the glacier itself; the walk is about a mile to a mile and a half.  It’s a relatively narrow valley—maybe a half mile across?--with cliffs that tower overhead.  As we were coming back out we looked at an information sign that showed where the glacier had been 75 years ago.  The whole valley we had been walking in had been filled with ice, clear down to the wider river valley and up to the top of the rock cliffs you had to tip your head back to see the top of.  It was incredible how much that enormous glacier had melted in the last century.  Glaciers in New Zealand, as in many other places in the world, are melting and receding at unprecedented rates.  I felt like I was seeing climate change with my own eyes as I stood there.  Hope about turning such a trend around fled. 

            I was courting hopelessness as I read a news article about the war in Iraq a few days ago.  The person writing the article talked about how it appears we’re kind of stuck there; there will be problems if our troops withdraw and different kinds of problems if they stay engaged.  Again, hope for peace in our time fled. 

            I learned a new word in the Seattle Times the other day—a word that will be haunting young Finola Mei Hwa Hackett, who lost the National Spelling Bee on the word “weltschmerz.”  I wouldn’t have known how to spell it, either.  Anyway, “weltschmerz” means pessimism or melancholy over the state of the world.  I wouldn’t know how to spell it, but I know how it feels to be pessimistic or melancholy over the state of the world.  Sometimes the messes we get into as individuals or as a group seem nothing less than impossible to clean up.

            The Israelites, prophet Ezekial’s people, certainly thought the mess they were in was without a solution.  The striking vision Ezekial had represented a people whose hopes had dried up and blown away.  Imagine that whole dead valley full of skeletons, dry bones.  The wind is whistling through them.  The eerie sound the wind makes is a word (even though it hadn’t been invented yet because Germans hadn’t been invented yet)—weltschmertz. 

            Their outlook was beyond bleak.  They had been overrun by a great military force; those who survived the invasion were sent into a foreign land to live.  They were living like animals in a zoo among strangers and captivity had sapped their strength.  Their temple was far away and lying in ruins to boot.  They believed their defeat was a historical judgment about their lack of faith and their sin.  Their God, Yahweh, had not protected them from the exile.  They were removed to the heart of an empire that had real power.  There was no end in sight for this empire; the Babylonians had so much power and wealth it looked like they were going to be on top of the world, ruling over the powerless forever and ever.  “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.”    

            Into this dry melancholy God speaks.  God asks Ezekial if these bones could live.  Obviously, they could not, but Ezekial has the good sense to defer to God’s wisdom as he answers, “O Lord God, you know.”  God then orders Ezekial to prophesy to the dry bones—his spiritually desiccated people—and to call them back to life.  Biblical scholar Walter Wink points out that “though this miracle is one that only Yahweh can perform, it is the prophet who must, at each step of the way, speak to the dry bones.  It is the prophetic task, in a time of unraveling hopes, to declare the unimaginable, to assert the rationality of the unthinkable, to call the people to new hope, grounded not on the past but on sheer faith that God is about to do the impossible.”[1]

            It literally was impossible.  But God did literally resurrect this people and bring them back into their homeland, doing it through nothing but vision.  God promises, “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”   Wink points out that in time, the vision became an expectation.  Hope became anticipation.   The unimaginable had been imagined, and by that sovereign creative act it entered the course of history.  “That,” Wink writes, “is how history is made: by envisioning of new alternative possibilities and acting on them as if they were inevitable.  That is how despair is overcome: by the declaration of unlikelihoods welling up from the center of reality, by prophesying a course of action God is conspiring to bring to pass.”[2]

            Israel did go home.  The temple was rebuilt.  Babylon, that eternal empire, fell within 50 years.  And God’s promise to put divine spirit in the people, though not immediately fulfilled, was reiterated by Joel in his vision of spirit being poured out into all flesh and experienced in a most dramatic way by the Christians centuries later who were empowered by the Spirit to start a movement that we are a part of still today.

            God’s Spirit is still gusting through this world, here and now, blowing hope into dried-up souls.  I once heard Michael Kinnamon speak of hope as both a gift and a command.  Hope is a gift and a command.  Our hope is grounded in a God who has mastery even over the grave.  Our hope is based on our understanding that the future is God’s.  We look for God’s triumph over death, over hatred, over injustice even as we are surrounded with the powers of injustice, surrounded by death and potentially death-dealing forces.  Christians are not optimists; optimists read the data of the present for their hope for a better future.  Christians are not pessimists, reading the data of the present to confirm their convictions of doom.  Christians are neither optimists nor pessimists; Christians are hopeful. 

            Hope is a gift and a command.  Prophesy, to these bones, O mortal.  Prophesy to these bones and say to them: O dry bones, hear the Word of the Lord.  I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live.  Prophesy to your own bones, and prophesy to the bones of your neighbors who have weltschmerz whistling through their dried up bones.

            A true story, told by George R. Robie:  “Heavy rain turned a placid stream into a raging torrent.  Factories were flooded, and homes were swept off their foundations.  Store fronts were shattered, and apartment buildings were reduced to kindling.  Three railroad bridges were torn from their pilings and driven into the river bottom.  A school and a social hall floated away, never to be seen again.  Even the small, white church on the east bank of the river was not spared.  It was pounded by ice, trees, and other debris for three days.  The members responded by working long hours to fill enough sandbags to protect their meetinghouse.

            “The cold was raw and biting.  There seemed to be no end to the icy water.  At one point the water came toward the church with such force that part of the dike was washed away.  All of the workers except one dropped their shovels and ran to high ground.  The laborer who stayed behind knew that all would be lost if the dike was not rebuilt.  He climbed to the top of the barricade, reached into the rushing water, and grasped the roots of a huge tree.  He took out his pocketknife, cut two roots from the tree, and tied them together in the shape of a cross.  His act of faith rallied the workers, and the roots became a symbol of hope.

            “The laborer hung the cross on the wall of the church above the place where he and his neighbors toiled.  The area beneath the cross became a place of prayer.  Men and women joined hands and prayed for God to help them renew their strength.  They also asked God to help them grow in faith and love for each other as a result of facing this trial together.

            “The church members continued to battle the flood for the next two days, and the meetinghouse was saved.  Yet, that victory is incidental in comparison to what happened to the people.  They learned to serve each other and care for one another.  They also learned what it is like to walk into the midst of tragedy and suffering with God at one’s side.  Those who conquered the flood still gather beneath the unusual cross, and they bring their children and grandchildren with them.”[3]

            Hope is a gift and a command.  Come, Spirit of Hope.      

[1] Wink, Walter “These Bones Shall Live”  Christian Century May 11, 1994, p. 491

[2] Ibid

[3] Robie, George R.  “The Cross and Christian Hope”  Alive Now January/February 1983, p. 40-41