News Blog

Here's the daily devotion and children's activity.

Here's the daily devotion and children's activity.

Hespeler, 29 March, 2020 © Scott McAndless
Ezekiel 37:1-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:6-11, John 11:1-45

https://youtu.be/4-4mtq-WxOM

The Book of Ezekiel in the Bible is a strange book – I mean really strange. It is full of all of these fantastic elements. In one memorable episode, for example, Ezekiel is standing by a river when he sees these strange beings flying through the air that have made some modern readers think of UFO’s – unidentified flying objects carrying aliens. Of course, they are not that, but what are they exactly? At other points Ezekiel claims that God’s spirit literally picks him up and carries him through the air over huge distances.

This has led many scholars to wonder how, exactly, we are supposed to read this book. Clearly Ezekiel is having visions – not everything he reports is happening in the real world – but how are we to know what is real and what isn’t. Where does the vision end and the physical world begin?

For example, our reading this morning starts like this: “The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.” It makes you wonder; what kind of spiritual mode of transportation is Ezekiel describing here and does it have any applications for modern mass public transit? But is Ezekiel really saying that the spirit of the Lord physically transported him? Couldn’t he just as easily be saying that he was taken in a vision to the valley – that there was not actually a real valley full of bones?

Or here is another possibility: maybe he was just out wandering one day, and he wandered into a real valley and noticed that it was full of bones. He realized that there was something that God wanted him to see here in this valley and so he said, “It must not have been random that I walked into this place. God must have wanted to show me something here; the spirit of the Lord must have brought me here.”

I think it must have been the latter and I’ll tell you why. It is not just because it was quite possible to go wandering around the countryside in the ancient world and stumble into a valley filled with bones. It certainly happened, after some battles, that battlefields could be left littered with dead bodies. Nobody buried them and it wouldn’t take long for scavengers and decay to turn those bodies into so many old dry bones.

So yeah, Ezekiel could well have wandered into such a valley and if it really was an old battlefield (perhaps even a battlefield where his own people had been defeated by the invading Babylonians) he certainly would have seen it as a deeply meaningful place – a place where God might well have something to show him or tell him. Believing that the spirit of the Lord had brought him there would have certainly put him in the right frame of mind to receive whatever message that might be.

But that’s not the main reason why I think that that was how it happened. I think that that is how it happened because that is kind of what has happened to us. Here we were actually just a little more than a couple of weeks ago (though it seems hard to believe that it has been so little time) – we were blissfully rambling through the countryside as if we had no cares in the world. And then what? We suddenly looked up and realized that we had wandered into a valley and this valley is rather disturbing because it is filled with bones. And these are the bones of death and the threat and fear of death. This is a serious valley where we find ourselves my friends.

And, just as there were no doubt people back in Ezekiel’s day who wandered into that very same valley and noticed the bones but didn’t find any meaning or have any visions because they didn’t have any sense that the spirit of the Lord had sent them there to give them an important message, there seem to be lots of people today who are looking at our particular valley of bones called Covid-19 and they’re not detecting any messages or visions. They are just thinking of themselves and their own needs and not thinking at all about how everything that is happening ought to be making us rethink everything about how things should happen.

But there are some who are like Ezekiel. There are some who will decide that, if we are passing through, this particular valley of bones, maybe God has some lessons for us to learn here – maybe the spirit of the Lord brought us here. (Not, by the way, because God wants terrible tragedies like pandemics to occur, but because terrible things sometimes happen for reasons we may never understand and yet God has this way of bringing something good even out of the worst situations).

Now, that may seem like a hard thing to believe when you are faced with a tragedy as bad as something that leaves a valley full of bones. But that despair was something that Ezekiel felt too. As he wandered around that valley, he particularly noted how dry all those bones were – how they were completely polished clean of life. That, in itself, must have been extraordinarily discouraging. And then he is confronted with a question – a question that he says comes from God, which is to say that it is an inspired question. “Mortal,” God asks, “can these bones live?” And of course the answer to that question is obvious. Of course they can’t live – they’re bones. They’re dead. To quote a wise man, “They’ve kicked the bucket, shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!!” These bones are ex-living beings!

But, of course, that is not what Ezekiel says. He very wisely, and perhaps diplomatically, says, “O Lord God, you know.” In other words, “I’m not going to stick my neck out too far on answering this one. Things look pretty bleak, Lord, but maybe you’ve got an answer on this one.”

And I don’t know about you, but I’m going to confess that there are moments when I feel a bit like Ezekiel. I look around this valley filled with dead, dry bones and all I can see is death and decay. The fact of the matter is that it often seems as if there is little reason to trust in human nature at times like this. I can’t make dead bones live, can you? I don’t know where the hope lies but I will hold on to this: maybe, Lord God, you know.

And here is where we get to the real meaning of the vision that Ezekiel had in that valley full of bones. The fact of the matter was that in that situation, as well as in much of the situation that the nation of Judah was facing at that time, there was no hope in human terms. There is no human means to make your way out of a valley of bones. Death is a dead end for human beings. That’s the reality that Ezekiel didn’t want to admit. But a lack of human hope is not the same thing as a lack of hope. “O Lord God, you know. I may not know, but you know.”

And where is the hope that Ezekiel finally finds in the depths of that valley? Is it found in the discovery of a new vaccine? Is it found in the practice of social distancing or even in quarantine? Will these things bring our salvation? Well, no question, they are good things. God bless the researchers who are working on vaccines and treatments. God bless everyone who is listening to directions of the medical leaders and isolating and maintaining social distance. But these things, as good as they are, the best that they can do is get us back to where we were before all of this began. But I’m not sure there is any going back there. This crisis has just exposed too many of the flaws and weaknesses that were there in our society before all of this started. I suspect that the way out of this valley, if we’re going to do it right, is going to lead to a different place.

“Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.” That is what Ezekiel is told to do. And the word of the Lord never simply takes us back to the way that things were – it always take us to something new. The vision that Ezekiel receives when he prophesies is something quite fantastic. The dry bones come together, are covered over in muscle and sinew and then with skin.

But even this is not enough because a body is nothing if there is no life to animate it, so a final step is needed. For the ancient Hebrews, the life of a living being was always to be found in the breath. And breath was the same thing as the wind and it was the same word as spirit. So it was not enough for Ezekiel to prophecy to the bones; he had to prophesy to the wind as well: “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” And it is only at this point that the defeated and decayed host in the valley full of bones can come alive.

Note that this is a reenactment of the creation of Adam in the second chapter of Genesis: “The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” This makes a very important point. What God is offering here is not a little bit of help or a healing or a cure. God is offering a whole new creation; we are starting all over again from the very beginning.

Now, Ezekiel is quite clear. All of this was a vision. If he had it because he had wandered into a valley full of bones, then the bones were still there when he left. But the vision was a metaphor for what the hope of his people was in that time of hopelessness. This was where they were: “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” When you are in that situation, you don’t need a cure. You don’t need a vaccine, you need resurrection, which is like a whole new creation and a starting all over again from the very beginning.

I am beginning to feel as if that is what we need in our present situation. I know we all may long for things to go back to how they used to be – to how everything was just a few weeks ago – but I really do not think that that is what actually needs to happen. We can’t just go back to the old guard, the old elite who sought to control everything and manipulated it all their own profit. If we get through all of this only to find that the rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer and that thousands more have fallen through the cracks of our society, then we will have failed. We need a resurrection, a whole new beginning.

I don’t know exactly what that will look like – not any more than Ezekiel knew what vision he was about to have when he obeyed the Lord and prophesied the word of the Lord, but I know how we will get there. We will get there by doing what Ezekiel did, by not being afraid to prophesy and to speak the word of the Lord. I believe that that is our task. It is, first of all, to believe that God can create a resurrection in these circumstances – that God can even make living beings out of dead, dry bones.  Secondly, we need to not be afraid to prophesy in the name of the Lord, to declare, especially at times like this, that God does not tolerate profiteering, that God demands justice and not just a return to business as usual.

Prophesying has always been a dangerous occupation because those are things that this world will always resist, but do not forget what Ezekiel discovered, that that word of the Lord is a powerful thing – so powerful that it is able to bring new life even to valleys filled with dead, dry bones.

Please join us for worship. Please join us in "ZOOM"

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us04web.zoom.us/j/476249052

Meeting ID: 476 249 052

Go to the News menu (in the top left corner) and choose sermons/bulletins for the printed version of Scott's sermon and the complete bulletin. Blessings and peace to you this Sunday!

Music for this morning's worship. Thank you, Corey!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXK4dfMuaQo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrB8JAqDrc4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj3l_74UPs8

Find Scott's daily devotion and the daily activity for Sunday School here.

Please join us for our online worship.

Join us for an online Bible Study.

https://youtu.be/09074fJzy2c

Suddenly a man came up to Jesus. Keeping a safe two meter social distance he asked, “Teacher what good thing must I do in order to be safe in this time of corona virus?”

“Why come to me with the questions about what to do?” Jesus retorted, “You know what the authorities are saying, do that.”

“What are they saying?” he asked.

“You know,” Jesus answered, “wash your hands for twenty seconds, cancel all gatherings, keep a safe social distance of two meters. Self isolate if there’s any chance you have been exposed. Do these things and you will live.”

“But I’m doing all of these things,” the man answered. “I have even stored up a great supply of surgical masks and gloves and essentials in my basement, but still I do not feel safe.”

“There is one thing more,” Jesus answered, “you must give away all of those masks and gloves and essentials to the people who actually need them. Even more important you need to let go of the notion that the things that you have are what will keep you safe. It is only by making sure that everyone has what they need that we can all be safe.”

“When the young man heard him say that, he went away very sad. He had a lot of stuff stored in his basement.”

Jesus said to his disciples, “I’m telling you the truth: it’s very hard for a rich person to get into the kingdom of heaven. Let me say it again: it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter God’s Kingdom.”

---

This paraphrase was inspired by N.T. Wright's translation of Matthew 19:16-26 in Lent for Everyone Matthew, Year A (Westminster John Knox Press, 2013). A few of the phrases are lifted verbatim.

---

For commentary on this paraphrase, see the video devotional at the top of this page.

https://youtu.be/Gvxl_Kx48co

Hespeler, 22 March 2020 © Scott McAndless – 4^th Sunday in Lent
1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41

The Prophet Samuel was just feeling so depressed. He wasn’t sleeping, he hardly ate and he could hardly even work up the passion to punish any sinners or slaughter any foreigners. He had it in a bad way. And what was it that was depressing Samuel so much? Well, it was Saul. He just felt let down. He had invested so much in Saul. When Saul was just a young man, Samuel had found him and anointed him and made him king over Israel – the first king the nation had ever had. Saul had been so tall and so handsome – a good head taller than any other man in his tribe. He just really stood out from the crowd.

And what a king he had made! Saul had rescued the city of Jabesh and attacked the outpost of Geba. He had won at Gibeah and beaten the Moabites and the Amonites and the Edomites and the kings of Zobah and the Amalakites. There had been so much blood, so much death and mayhem. Ah, good times… good times.

But, all good things must come to an end sooner or later. Saul had messed up big-time. Samuel had told him that he had to do it – that he must kill all of the Amalekites and not leave one alive, but had Saul listened? No. He had gone and left one of them alive. So, Samuel really had no choice. He had to tell Saul that he was finished, that God had rejected him as king over Israel.

But Samuel just couldn’t get over it. If he couldn’t have Saul – could never enjoy the thrill of battle and the smell of blood at the side of that beautiful, tall man again – well then, what was the point of anything? What was the point of living!?

Those are the kind of dark thoughts that Samuel is dealing with in the opening of our reading this morning from the book that bears his name. That can be the only reason why God would come to him and say,“How long will you grieve over Saul?” Samuel was stuck. He couldn’t get over what he had lost in Saul, something that had given meaning to his whole life. And he didn’t know how to get past it.

And I’ve got to say that I’ve got all the sympathy in the world for Samuel here because we’ve all been there, haven’t we? Every single one of us has lost something that mattered to us. I realize that there are some who have lost loved ones who have passed away and that loss can be tremendous. But even if you haven’t suffered that, you no doubt know the meaning of losing, in some sense, someone or something that meant the world to you. We’re probably also all struggling today with the loss of things like social contact and even just good old-fashioned physical contact. It is really hard to get over any loss and, honestly, often the last thing you need to hear is someone saying to you, “How long will you grieve?”

There is an important place for grief – we should always allow the space and the time for the processing of it – but it can become a problem if we are failing to work through our grief and allow it cut off our own health and growth. I suspect that was what was happening to Samuel. And God called him on it. God called him on it because, as much as God does respect your grief, God is always interested in helping you to embrace a larger vision for your life.

God’s intervention with Samuel in this moment has a great deal to say to us as we deal with the challenges of life these days. I see a lot of grief in our world today – not just with people who have lost loved ones but also those who have lost in other ways. People are grieving the many changes in our world. Every time you hear somebody say, “Remember when…” or “Back in my day…” they are probably about to express their grief over a loss. It is especially something that we do in the church a lot. We love to talk about the church that used to be – the good old days when there were hundreds of kids in Sunday schools and the pews were packed. We have come to believe that that was the real church (even though, in many cases it was only a blip that lasted for a few decades) and that what we have in the church today just doesn’t measure up in comparison.

But what if God is saying to us in the church today, and sometimes in society today, “How long will you grieve?” How long will you grieve the loss of the church that used to be? How long will you grieve the changes of the modern world? How long will you grieve the loss of the power and influence that you once enjoyed? This is not because grief in itself is bad, but because God has some things for us to do: “Fill your horn with oil and set out.” God wants us to set out for new horizons and new beginnings but, so long as all we can do is grieve the loss of the way things used to be, it will prevent us from doing that.

Samuel was stuck. That much is clear, not only from what God says to him but also from what he does. Samuel does, perhaps reluctantly, do as God says. He takes a hollowed-out ram’s horn and he fills it up with oil and sets out. The meaning of this act is clear. They didn’t crown kings back then, what they did was anoint them with oil and the oil is to go on the head of a new king.

But even as, in outer form, Samuel obeys, it is clear enough that he is still mourning for the past. How do I know that? I know that because when he arrives at the home of Jesse, the family to which he has been directed, his eye immediately falls on Jesse’s eldest son, Eliab. And what is it that attracts Samuel’s attention to Eliab? Well, this is what God says when he notices Samuel looking at the boy, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature.”

Clearly, Samuel had noticed two things about the boy: he was really, really good looking and he was tall. That’s what made him think that Eliab would make a good king. Hmm, can you remember anybody else who’s most distinguishing feature that he was really tall and good-looking? Oh yeah, that was Saul, wasn’t it? Clearly, Samuel maybe looking for another king, but he’s looking for a king just like the one that just got away. He might say he’s over Saul, but he’s not over Saul because clearly the only new king that he can imagine looks a whole lot like the old king.

That is the danger when we do not process our grief or loss in the ways that we ought to. It is alright to feel the ache of loss, it is alright to miss what you miss and it is alright to remember with sadness, but if you can only manage to imagine a successful future as basically a rerun of the past, then you have a problem.

I know that this is a problem that we run into in the life of the church all the time. I don’t know how many times I have walked into a different church and had somebody tell me, almost within the first minute, everything about how things used to be in that church. “Well you know,” they’ll say, “fifty years ago, they used to have to bring in extra chairs and have people sit in the aisle because there were so many people here for some services!” “Forty years ago, our youth group was so big that we had twenty weddings in the space of two years.” “And thirty years ago, there were so many kids in that Sunday school that we used to have to hold a class in the Men’s room!”

Oh, you give me ten minutes with most church people and I’ll be able to tell you everything about their church several decades ago, but almost nothing about how it is now. (And, by the way, I have learned that, if you say to them, “Wow, you had that many kids in Sunday school thirty years ago you must have so many people in their thirty and forties now, they tend to get really quiet.) They just aren’t as excited about talking about what is going on now.

And it is not even because there aren’t exciting things about their church now. There are often some pretty wonderful things going on now but, because they still define success in terms of that past and the exciting things that are happening there now don’t really fit with that definition of success, they don’t quite know how to talk about that. “Oh church, how long will you grieve over Saul? Fill your horn with oil and set out.” God has a new adventure for you.

Samuel doesn’t anoint Eliab, the new Saul; he ends up anointing David who is kind of the opposite of Saul. Where Saul was the tallest, David is the smallest of Jesse’s children. Where Saul had a noble bearing that immediately made the people hail him as kinglike, David was ruddy which probably meant that he looked kind of rustic and common. The future was going to look very different from the past but that didn’t mean that there would not be success in that future, it just might look very different from the success that they had known in the past. So it will be for the church. God is giving the church success and will give it, I believe, even more abundantly in the future. But if we don’t stop grieving for Saul, for the church that used to be, we will probably miss it.

All of this seems very relevant today, doesn’t it? There is a lot of change in the air. This virus has so disrupted everything that, not only is it going to take a long time for things to go back to normal, I’m beginning to suspect that “back to normal” is not really going to be possible. At the very least, today I am probably as far as I ever have been from being able to say that I have the faintest idea of what the future might look like. That is a scary thought. It is a scary thought for the church, and it is a scary thought in a lot of other ways. But should we be scared? No, the future is in the best place that it could possibly be – in the hands of God. Just because the future is different, doesn’t mean that God can’t be in it. In fact, as many of the illusions of this world and how it worked fall away, it might even be possible that the kingdom of God is closer now than it has ever been before.

But do you know what might make us miss out on whatever new thing God is doing among us? We might miss it if all we can do is imagine the future in terms of the past. We might miss it if we define the success of the future in terms of what seemed like success in the past and we will especially miss it if we are looking for a new Saul and God is putting a David in front of us.

Grief has its place and you may well find yourself in the coming times looking back and missing things that you loved and that you liked and that made your life easier. That is fine and don’t be afraid to express that grief. But when God comes to you and says “fill your horn with oil and set out,” you had better get ready to believe that the future success that he wants you to anoint will be something different from what it might have looked in the past – not Saul but David – and that is a good thing.

Follow this for prayers, scripture, music and worship.