Ezekiel 37:1-14
Romans 6:23

Can these bones live? The image from Ezekiel pictures the human remains from a battlefield. The image is about as ugly as it gets. The image has haunted me all week. I couldn’t leave it because I read a story on the United States use of phosphorous weapons in Fallujah in November. The article had pictures of incinerated human skulls – dry bones. Can these bones live? I’ve been thinking about the struggles of our lives that we experience, the psychological/moral struggles made ever so real by a friend that I taught last semester whose life ended this week in carbon monoxide poisoning in his car. Can these bones live? And I need to say, Yes!! These bones can live! Here we are in the midst of our Lenten reflections, a time of fasting and self-examination. I want us to hear the good news of the Spirit’s coming upon and making these bones live – justice in creation, healing within the self. That is our hope.

Yet we need to be careful. It is so easy at this point to move to idolatry, to an animated corpse, a corpse to consume a spirit, even a spiritual corpse, and think that this is what we are about. We can hear this passage as a call to find meaning, authenticity, justice, fulfilling experience with the spirit. Listen to a contemporary psychotherapist speak about this danger that comes from the formation given to us by the fallen, sinful world around us: “The self is now not only suffering from feeling unreal, and thereby somewhat passively hoping for a cure . . . it is also aggressively, sometimes desperately, acquisitive. It must consume in order to be soothed and satisfied; it must ‘take in’ and merge with a . . . celebrity, an ideology, or a drug, or it will be in danger of feeling worthless, confused, and despairing” (Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America, p. 82). We are in danger. We can so easy turn the Spirit into some sort of soothing experience within, or the Spirit into a source of spirituality for an ideology of justice without so that we might meaningfully right all the wrongs within the world without having them acknowledge and participate in the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit. If we fall into this danger, we will discover our lives and the congregation being pulled apart in the middle, waffling back and forth between a false distinction between the private and the public, personal experience and public activism. We will find baptism, engaging together in works of mercy and devotion, reading the Scriptures, and participating together in the Lord’s Supper less and less central to who we are as we try to ask, Can these bones live? We’ll find ourselves mourning for the dead slaughtered in Iraq while celebrating the “freedom” for abortions in the United States or mourning for the slaughter of the innocents in abortion while celebrating the growth of “freedom” in Iraq, rather than confessing with Paul that “our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ”. We need to take care not to fall into idolatry to accept options that the world seems to give us as the only ones, the way the world has tried to form us into experiencing life as a consuming self in responding to “Can these bones live?” It seems to me that we need to hear the apostle Paul at this point from Romans 6. Can these bones live? Yes! For the Spirit that brings life to the dead is the Spirit of obedience for our sanctification.

1. Can these bones live? Yes, and life begins in obedience. Paul states in v. 17: Thanks be to God that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and having been freed from sin, you have become slaves to righteousness.

A. Can these bones live? Yes. But first we have to live obedient to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. If we could change the goal of our lives from trying to live meaningfully, trying to live fulfilled, trying to live purposefully, trying to live an abstract notion of justice, to living by the Spirit obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, then these bones could live. How? What is this form of teaching?

B. I am convinced that this form, this standard is found in the sayings of Jesus, recorded for us in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6. Paul here is talking in Romans 6 about the baptismal process, a movement from one realm of allegiances to another. In baptism, Christians were initiated into what the kingdom of God begun in Jesus, the kingdom for which Jesus died, the kingdom for which God the Father raised him to life, defeating sin, death, and Satan, and taught what being a part of this kingdom entailed. Already in Rome Christians had been kicked out of town because they would not be slaves to sin, the world that the Romans taught them was natural. Already many Romans, especially the elite, saw Christians as haters of humanity, intolerant, difficult, because they would not participate in the practices of the world around them, but instead, cared for each other in allegiance to this Jesus whom the Romans had crucified. Instead of members of the empire, instead of believing that they could reform the system so that it could save people, these people insisted that they were members of a kingdom that was yet to come in its fullness, a kingdom in which they already participated where the poor were blessed, the hungry fed, the outsider welcomed, the naked clothed, the sick healed. The Christians believed that they themselves were members of a kingdom in the church that did not distinguish between private piety and public acts, a personal righteousness and public just policy. They knew that one could only be part of a just community if one worshipped the true God the Father and the Son Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit. They knew that this worship had to be reflected in the habits of the individuals as they lived as part of a people called together by Jesus. These Christian people had been taught that they would not divorce and remarry because it was adultery, at the same time they were called to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Before baptism these people were taught that before you take the speck out of the eye of your brother, we’d better take the log out of our own eyes. They were taught to forgive so that they might be forgiven, to condemn not so that they not be condemned. They were taught that seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, his justice. This is how dry, dead bones live. This is the standard of teaching to which you were entrusted as well. Obedience to the kingdom of God in Jesus as recorded in the Scriptures, not some private voice within our inner person, is the obedience to the standards of teaching to which we are entrusted in our baptism.

C. Paul contrasts obedience to this standard of teaching with obedience to sin – singular. Sin here is not violating the laws of the society around us – and getting caught. Sin is not irresponsible choices, nor our struggle feeling estranged and lonely. Sin is not separation. Sin is singular because it is the formation, the loyalties, obedience that a fallen world encodes into our bodies. Sin is the perversion of the good world that God created, taking God’s good creation and making it a world that leads to death, to dry bones, to incinerated bodies, to carbon monoxide poisoning, to psychological distress, to starvation because of corrupt distribution of goods, to reducing all of life to power struggles. This fallen world slices right through our bodies, obviously in the pains we feel, the past that haunts us, the type of struggles we face, even to our deepest understandings of our own self. The sinfulness of the world is so subtle. It grasps us, not as obviously evil, but as perversions of what is good. Unless we give ourselves entirely over to obedience to God as seen in Jesus and the truthfulness about ourselves this entails, to the justice, the righteousness of the kingdom where Jesus is Lord, we can’t even begin to find the depth of slavery that this world has placed upon us. Death will haunt us, for death, like sin, is the loss of what is good, that is life. We must hear that the end of obedience to sin is death, eternal death.

D. Can these bones live? Yes, but only when we commit our lives to obedience to the standard of teaching to which we have been entrusted.

2. For in obedience, we will find sanctification by the Spirit. As Paul says in v. 19, Now yield your members to righteousness for sanctification.

A. Sanctification, being made holy, is nothing more than being set apart for the glory of God, being made different from the world around us. Sanctification is separation, a holy difference from the world, not to be odd, but because the world is not all that it really is. All creation in its goodness was originally sanctified, set apart for God in its goodness, its fullness. But in the sinfulness of the world, the world, humanity, our own selves being less than what they are because of the lack that is sin, sanctification is the restoration of who we really are by participating in the Love that is the very Life that is God, Father, Son, and Spirit.

B. Obedience is for sanctification. Obedience to the standard of teaching is not for a moralism to show that we are more righteous than they are, whoever they are. Obedience is for sanctification, a setting apart, a forming of us as a people into a holy nation, a kingdom of priest, a people, communally and personally, different from the world. Obedience is for our sanctification, the removal of the inward sin that so besets us, the deprivations that take us from being who God created us to be, the obedience to the world that has become encoded into our bodies. Obedience is for sanctification. In obedience to the teachings of Jesus from the heart, the Spirit has to remake us, has to renew us by the transformation of our minds, has to teach us over and over again from within that our lives are ultimately for the love of God and neighbor, or we will be reduced back to dry bones. In obedience to such simple things as a life embedded in the acts of mercy, living out the teaching of Jesus, the Spirit must remake us into people who love others, not because people are naturally and easily loveable, but because God loves them; the Spirit must make us into persons who can forgive without resentment, not because once we forgive, other immediately change, but because we know that God has forgiven us; the Spirit must remake us beyond our own inner, psychological struggles because we are part of a people that need us if we are going to participate in a kingdom where the poor are blessed and the hungry fed; the Spirit must remake us beyond the chemical dependencies we have with alcohol, nicotine, weed, narcotics, because we recognize that our bodies are gifts of God given to us for the sake of others; the Spirit must remake us even from the lure of a spirituality that turns God into a commodity for our own personal consumption like a designer drug that wants to leave behind a commitment to a particular institution called the church because it is full of hypocrites, power hungry idiots, and interferes with my ability to set my own schedule of events; the Spirit must make us into persons who above all live thankfully because we know that God in God’s love shared the Son who gave himself in obedience for our sins that we might have life, and life everlasting;

C. Obedience is for our sanctification, personally and communally – and we cannot play those against each other. We can be holy as individuals only as we are part of a holy people, and we can only be a holy people when there are holy persons among us: You are the body of Christ, and individually members of it. And it is only as we participate in the holiness of the head, that is Christ, in obedience, that we ourselves, by the Spirit’s cleansing work within us, can be made holy.

D. God the Father calls us to obedience to Christ for a certain end: our sanctification by the Spirit, as a congregation, and as individuals within it.

Conclusion: Can these bones live? Listen, can you hear the rattling? “I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land; then you shall know that I, the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, says the Lord.” “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.” In obedience to the standard of teachings to which you have been entrusted, come in faith to the gifts of God for the people of God, the body and blood of our Lord, given for you. Coming to take the body and blood of Jesus is not our idea; it is not some form of marketing tool for a special sort of spirituality for you to find meaning in your life. It is obedience to the standard of teaching commanded us by Jesus Christ in the Gospels. And it is therefore for your sanctification. Come, please, please, please, above all else, be thankful.