The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
William Styron, born 1925, died 2006, was an American novelist and essayist, and he wrote this about hopelessness: “It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.” Before him, Pearl S. Buck, American writer, 1892 to 1973, wrote: “To eat bread without hope is still to die a death of starvation.” If you’ve been around for more than a few years, you’ve likely experienced feelings of hopelessness and despair: hopelessness over family and personal challenges, hopelessness that comes with being laid off or unemployed or job hunting, hopelessness over serious illnesses, maybe a prognosis of death of a loved one soon to come. Hopelessness is a universal feeling for sinners such as us. And the people of the Old Testament were no stranger to hopelessness. In fact, they had several different ways of speaking about it.
In the Old Testament, King David described the hopelessness he felt in this way, in Psalm 22: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; my strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.” When the prophet Hezekiah was gravely ill and near death, he said he felt like God was a lion who broke all of his bones. When the prophets of old wrote about bones either being broken or out of joint or dried up, they usually meant that the person, or the people, the nation, had lost all hope and was living in despair.
And the Old Testament lesson for this Pentecost Sunday, Ezekiel 37: the prophet Ezekiel was faced with an immense problem, a big problem, a national and spiritual problem, a problem of hopelessness, a nation of dry bones whose hope had dried up in the Lord. So the Lord God took Ezekiel to a valley and showed him dry bones, lots and lots of bones. Verse 2: “There were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry.” Not a shred of life in them. That’s what the text actually means. They were dead, dead, dead. These were the bones of the Israelites, the Hebrews, the very children of God Himself. These bones represented real people: moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas and sons and daughters, soldiers and civilians, rich and poor. These bones told the story of real people, real victories, real defeats, and people who died in sheer hopelessness. It was a valley of death, and it illustrated the point that all that they had achieved in life was but vanity. Ecclesiastes 1:2: “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.”
Death, you see, is the great equalizer. And all that was will eventually die and end in exactly that: nothing, apart from Christ. Paul said it this way, which we’ve taken into the funeral service: “For we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world.”
Even the people in Ezekiel’s day lived in a perilous time. Their defeat was certain. So they cried out to God in their hopelessness: “Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost; indeed, we are cut off.” God’s reply to their cry was to send a preacher. But first the Lord took Ezekiel to the great valley of dry bones. He took him to show him what utter hopelessness looks like, and He took him to show him what His words and the Holy Spirit could in fact do for the dead, even after decades of unfaithfulness and idolatry by the children of our heavenly Father.
Now the prophets Hosea and Isaiah had been sent to the children of Israel centuries earlier to call them back to faithfulness, to issue a call of repentance and judgments against their sin. But they didn’t listen. They didn’t heed the words of the prophets, of Isaiah and Hosea. They did not trust in the Lord, and they continued down the road of religious apathy, of compromising on doctrine and practice, seeking personal comfort and greed, immorality, and idolatry. So in 722 BC the northern kingdom fell to the Assyrian Empire. Then the Assyrian Empire fell to the Babylonian Empire. In 605 BC the noose was tightening around the southern kingdom, and the people knew they were next.
And that brings us to Ezekiel, or better, that brings Ezekiel to us. When Ezekiel was called by God to preach to the Israelites in 596 BC, things were looking pretty bad for the nation, and rightly so. The previous 24 chapters of the book of Ezekiel prophesied pretty much nothing but Law, proclaiming the sins of the people, chapter after chapter about judgment against their idolatry and their immorality. By chapter 25, the people were hopeless. The people were broken, humbled, and terrified that there would be no rescue. So they cried out, “Our bones are dried up, our hope has perished, we are completely cut off.” So the Lord God takes Ezekiel to the dry valley, to the valley full of bones and death, and the Lord God commanded him, saying, “Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.'”
And that, folks, is how salvation actually works. The Holy Spirit is not found in your emotions, your feelings, your intuition. The Holy Spirit is always with and accompanied by the very Word, or words, of God Himself. You heard that Jesus said the Holy Spirit isn’t going to speak anything on His own. He’s only going to speak that which He and the Father give the Spirit to speak. And where is that? In the biblical text. That’s Hebrews chapter 1: “In the days of old God spoke to us through the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us through his Son, Jesus Christ.” It’s through the prophecy, that is, the preaching of God’s Word and the speaking of God’s Word, that dry bones are put back together and life is restored. It is through preaching and speaking God’s Word that life comes forth from death, faith comes forth from unbelief, love comes forth from hate, and hope from despair.
We too were once dry bones, dead in our sin and our trespasses, the Scripture declares. And today there’s a great temptation to look over the landscape of our lives, to look over our family, present and past, our culture, our country, our churches, and to lose hope, to think that all is lost and that God has forgotten and forsaken our families, our churches, and our communities, as they obviously forsake Him. That’s why the Lord commanded Ezekiel to preach, that is, to prophesy. And that command applies to all generations, especially those who are turning away from the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
There’s a reason the Bible commands preachers to preach and hearers to hear: so that they can hear the judgments against their sin and the promises of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, that He has atoned for those sins and that we are forgiven. That’s why God established the preaching office. Article Five of our Lutheran Confessions: “We believe, teach, and confess: To obtain such faith God instituted the office of preaching, giving the gospel and the sacraments. Through these, as through means, he gives the Holy Spirit who produces faith, when and where he wills, in those who hear the gospel.” That’s the point of Article Five, and it’s the point of all three of our readings this morning: that God’s Word goes out, from God the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and He speaks, He breathes life into the biblical text by the authors of both the Old and the New Testament, and He breathes life into the baptized, and He breathes life into those who are converted by hearing the Word.
In the valley of the bones, God shows just how utterly hopeless and helpless the human condition is apart from His life-giving Spirit and the actual preaching and speaking of His words. Ezekiel is given to see those dry bones from every angle of the valley. He’s taken around and about them and in the midst of them, and he’s being shown that they are dead, dead, dead. There is no hope apart from the breath of the Lord God. It’s often said life and things are a matter of perspective, but when it comes to the essence of human nature, it makes no difference what angle a person looks at humanity. It always ends the same way: in physical, temporal death. And those who die apart from faith in Christ, they are in eternal death. Life apart from God’s life-giving breath is utter hopelessness and utterly impossible life.
When the Word of God is spoken, there can be faith and life abundant. Notice here in verses 12-14, God says to Ezekiel: “Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God.” A pastor can get in no more trouble than this. He can speak to somebody who’s doing something they ought not to be doing, and he can say, “Thus says the Lord,” and he’s not going to be able to complete the next sentence. The question is going to be: how can you speak for the Lord? They put the same question to all the prophets of the Old Testament as well. How do you speak for the Lord? You speak for the Lord by reading, speaking, knowing the very words of the Old and New Testament text. “Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will bring you into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people. And 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 am the Lord; I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the Lord.”
There’s no promise here that God is going to spare anybody from temporal death. Death is the just wages of sin, and all people have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. There is only the promise that God will open the graves of those who believe and trust in Him and bring them into the promised land, where they will live and reign eternally.
The Israelites didn’t deserve to be restored to life, let alone life eternal in the image of Jesus Christ. They had been an unrepentant and rebellious people. It took an invading army, an empire, for them to turn and cry out to God. They stumbled and fell again and again, and eventually to the point where they put the promised Messiah to death on the cross. But the Lord God had promised the Hebrew people a Messiah through their bloodline. The forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the dead would be sent to the four corners of the earth. And now listen: you see that text in the New Testament where the apostles and the church are commanded to go to the four corners of the earth to preach the Gospel, that is, to speak it, to actually say it to somebody else or to groups of people.
If Jesus Christ is the blueprint for the restored creation, the Holy Spirit is the builder of it. The Holy Spirit is the one who delivers Christ’s life, Christ’s perfection, Christ’s resurrection to you, your life. He is the great hope of salvation, and there is no hope apart from Him. In Him there is no hopelessness. 1 Peter 1:3: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” We are to be a people of hope, not of pessimism and fatalism: a hope of the new resurrection, of the new life, of the life of the world to come.
Ezekiel saw with his own eyes that resurrection in that valley: “And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them. But there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.’ So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army.”
The Hebrew word for breath, ruach, occurs 10 times in this text this morning. It’s a common word, used commonly just like pneuma in the Greek New Testament. Both words mean Spirit, wind, and breath. The English Standard Version translates ruach “spirit” in verse 1, “breath” in verses 5-6, 8-10, and “wind” in verse 9. They’re interchangeable. They’re also present in Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2, in the creation of the world. This very same breath that Jesus breathed on His disciples to enable them to become and to do the work of the first pastors of the New Testament Church. John 20:21-22: “As the Father sent me, I also send you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.'” On Pentecost we’re told, at the opening part of the reading: “Suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house.” And they were filled with the Holy Spirit. It’s the same Spirit He has placed in us, in the Word, in the sacrament of Holy Baptism. “Truly, truly, I say to you,” Jesus said to Nicodemus, “unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
Even though those Israelites in Ezekiel’s day lived in despair, even though they didn’t understand what God was doing to them and for them in war, in exile, in their slavery, even though they had come to doubt that God would even keep His promises, the Lord God sent yet another prophet to preach, to prophesy to them, to suffer with them, to live as they live, and to forgive them of their sins. Sounds a lot like Jesus, doesn’t it? That’s the same thing that He was doing on that first Pentecost Sunday. Through the Word and Sacrament ministry, God has breathed life into all of us. He has given us the gift of faith, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. He’s even embedded in us His very words from the biblical text. You don’t go to church your whole life and not know the Bible. It’s there. You just start the sentence, and somehow it gets finished.
Through the Word and Sacrament ministry, God breathed life into all of us. He has placed His Spirit in us, His words in us. Why? Because the Son of God had His bones hung on the cross for our sins. Though John 19:36 tells us, “For these things took place that the Scripture might be fulfilled: ‘Not one of his bones will be broken.'” The revelation of God’s power to raise the dead has implications far more than just being set free from exile in Babylon. It is a pointing forward to the eschaton, to the last day, when Christ will come back again and He will call forth from their graves all those who lived and died in this life. Romans 8:11: “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.” His Word has been preached, the Spirit has been sent, in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, in His life, death, and resurrection, and your sins are forgiven. You who were once dry bones are alive in Christ. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.