I’ve been trying hard this past year, I hope you know, and I mean really, really hard to not make this last year of mine before retiring from the ordained ministry into one big long Greg Iverson “farewell tour.”  You, I decided, deserve something more than that.  Don’t get me wrong.  Please don’t misunderstand me.  Hanging it up after thirty-five years is a big deal to me, a very big deal.  And you certainly know by now how I can get all misty and emotional over just about anything – I mean I can work up a good cry just reciting the alphabet if I really put my mind to it – but, you know, somehow it just didn’t seem right or fair for me to take you along on my own personal sentimental journey, especially since we’ve only shared the last four years together.  I’ve been trying hard – really, really hard – not to drag you with me on my own trip down memory lane.

           But we’ve now come to our last month together and I suddenly find myself with three Sundays – today and the next two Sundays – with nothing much in particular scheduled to say to you.  I know pretty much what I’m going to say on June 1^st, my very last Sunday with you.  That will be a kind of farewell message which I hope you will allow me to share with you.  But between now and then, not counting Memorial Day weekend when Andy Wilkerson will bring the message, I’m kind of open.  I have these three Sundays with nothing much that I had planned to say.

           And so, I’ve decided to deliver three independent, stand-alone messages to you on my three very best all-time favorite scripture passages.  Actually, I have about a dozen or more favorite scripture passages and, if I were to list them for you and you were to say back to me, “But, Greg, how about this one or how about that one?” I might say to you, “Well, yes, that’s one of my favorites, too.”  Nevertheless, I want to take these first three Sundays in May to deliver some messages to you on some of my very best all-time favorite scripture passages which, obviously, I hope may speak to you as well.

           The first of these three very best all-time favorite scripture passages come from the first half of the thirty-seventh chapter of the Old Testament book of Ezekiel.  Would you please follow along as I read it to you?

           [Read Ezekiel 37:1-14, NIV]

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.”

Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord!  This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones:  I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life.  I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life.  Then you will know that I am the Lord.’”

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, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin 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 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.

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.’ 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.’”                                                   – Ezekiel 37:1-14, NIV

           Pray with me, will you please?  [Prayer]

           You know, it would be sort of easy to just dismiss old Ezekiel as some sort of kook.  I mean, what we’re talking about here, guys, is a dream, just a dream.  You can call it a vision if you want or even a revelation but those are just fancy words that the Bible uses when somebody important has a dream.  If it were you or me, you can be sure that it would be called nothing more than a dream.  This is just another dream by an old man who had lots of dreams.  Listen.  Have you ever read much of Ezekiel?  He dreamed some pretty crazy things, things like living creatures having four faces including the face of a man, the face of a lion, the face of an ox and the face of an eagle.  He dreamed about a wheel that moved but did not turn, stuff like that.  And here he dreams about a valley of dry bones – from which, of course, we get the old African-American spiritual called Dem Bones – to whom he is called to preach the Word of the Lord.  I’ve preached to some dead crowds before but nothing like that!  This is the kind of literature that scholars call apocalyptic literature.  A few books in the Old Testament and a couple of books in the New Testament, including the book of Revelation, are apocalyptic books.  They’re all about visions and revelations – dreams – of what the end-times will look like.  There’s so much more in scripture that is so much easier to understand than that.  We could so easily dismiss most of the book of Ezekiel, including this story about the valley of dry bones, as just some sort of crazy dream.

           But I’ve seen what Ezekiel saw and maybe so have you.  Oh, not bones lying around everywhere like in the first part of Ezekiel’s dream, but bones walking around with flesh and tendons and muscles and clothes on them, bones belonging to people who look like they are alive but, friends, they have no breath – no real life – in them.  You’ve seen them, haven’t you?  They’re everywhere.  From all outward appearances, they are alive.  They move from place to place.  They walk and talk.  They live in houses.  They drive cars.  They go to work.  They eat and sleep.  They sit in front of the television.  Why, they even go to church.  But somebody needs to prophesy to them, somebody needs to preach to them, somebody needs to say something to them because they’re not really alive.  They breathe but there is no breath of God – no Spirit of the living God – in them.  They are the very ones to whom Jesus said:

I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

        – Jesus (John 10:10, NRSV)

They are the very ones, like the woman at the well, to whom Jesus said that was the real water, not simple and ordinary H20, but the kind of living water that would keep you from ever getting thirsty again, the kind of living water that  would well up to eternal life.  I see these people everywhere.  In fact, the older I get, the more of them I see.  I see people whose hearts beat and whose lungs breathe in and out and who may even laugh on occasion but who live life without the joy and the peace and the contentment and the meaning and the purpose that they are meant to have.  I’ve seen with my own eyes what Ezekiel saw and maybe you have, too.

           I’ve lived long enough to know that there are two kinds of life. 

           There is physical life, the kind of life that consists of heartbeats and brainwaves and breaths.  It’s the kind of life that is sustained by food and water and sleep.  It’s the kind of life where individual cells die off but where new ones are constantly being formed.  It’s the kind of life allows us to think things and to do things.  It’s the kind of life where we can see and hear and taste and feel and smell.  It’s the kind of life that even allows us to procreate, to make new life.  It’s the kind of life that gives us a certain amount of mobility, the ability to go from place to place.  It’s the kind of life that enables us to speak and to listen, to learn things and to earn a living.  That’s physical life. 

           But if that’s all life is, then that’s not enough for most people.  Life limited to its physical manifestations drives some people to depression and despair, some people to suicide, and most people to ask themselves as they lie awake in bed at night, “Is this all there is?”  Physical life is not enough for most people.

           Thankfully, wonderfully, mercifully, there is another kind of life that we can have just by claiming it called the spiritual life.  It’s the kind of life for which we were all ultimately created.  It’s not defined by heartbeats and brainwaves and breathing in and out but by what’s in our souls, something you won’t find if you cut us open but which is just as assuredly there as any internal organ.  It’s not the kind of life that is sustained by food and water and sleep but by a Savior who is our real food and water and in whom we do have our rest.  It’s not the kind of life that dies off little by little until there’s nothing left of us but rather the kind of life that grows deeper and stronger until that’s all that’s left of us.  It’s not the kind of life that allows us just to think things and to do things but the kind of life that allows us to feel things – to have compassion on others – and to do things for each other.  It’s not the kind of life limited to the five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch and smell but the kind of life that lets us experience the goodness and the greatness of God.  It’s not the kind of life where we simply reproduce ourselves and die but where God reproduces Himself in us, imagine, in us!  It’s so much more than the kind of life that allows us to go from here to there or the kind of life that simply lets us communicate with each other.  It’s the kind of life that literally takes us out of this world into our new home where we will be in eternal conversation with God.  That’s the spiritual life for which we were all created.

           The sad thing is that so many people have an awareness only of the first kind of life and know nothing of the second kind of life.  Somebody’s got to prophesy to the bones!  Somebody’s got to “breathe into these slain.”  Somebody’s got tell them about the One who is going to open their graves and who will put His Spirit in them that they can live.  How sad that so many, many people – people we know, people we don’t know, people in our own families, people we love, people we don’t love but ought to love – that they know only about the first kind of life and little or nothing about the second kind of life.

           Beethoven was only 30 when deafness began to swiftly overtake him.  It wasn’t long before he was completely deaf.  When people stood and applauded and cheered at the end of his Ninth Symphony, he did not hear it though he sat in the front row and he had to be turned around by a friend to receive the accolades of the audience.  He never heard any of the music he composed during the last fifteen or more years of his life.  To say that he was unaffected by that would not be true.  Fact is, he was suicidal at one point.  But he didn’t feel sorry for himself for long.  Rather than accept his fate, he said, “I will seize fate by the throat.”  He knew that life is more than heartbeats and brainwaves.

           What I like about this scripture passage, the thirty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel, is that it reminds us that there is so much more to life than being a bag of bones connected to each other with tendons and flesh and skin.  In a world seemingly preoccupied with how well our bones are put together and how muscular we are and how flawless our skin is – six-pack abs and wrinkles botoxed away – Ezekiel tells us that, if there is no real breath of God inside those bodies, no Spirit of God in them, that they are just as dead as if they were bones bleached dry in the desert.  In a world that seems to equate life with having more and more of the stuff that we can make with our own hands, Ezekiel tells us that none of that stuff matters even a little bit if the Spirit of God is somehow absent from your life.  In a world that thinks that life is nothing more than heartbeats and brainwaves, Ezekiel tells us that real life – life that can be called life – is not so much physical as it is spiritual.  What I like about this passage of scripture is that it tells us that bones and tendons and flesh and skin, no matter how beautifully connected they are according to the world’s standards, without the life-giving, life-breathing Spirit of God in them are still just bones rattling around.

           Ezekiel 37 tells us that there is something worse than dying and that’s never having lived at all the life we are meant to live.

           You think about that this week.  Amen!