Wairua Tapu in you
A sermon for all ages worship at St Michael’s Kelburn
Pentecost Sunday, 20 May 2018
Texts: Ezekiel 37:1–14 & Acts 2:1–21
Good morning everyone. I want to talk mostly about the Ezekiel 37 reading today and briefly touch on Acts at the end. I love this Ezekiel passage. I grew up in a church setting and it was in the air, but I’d forgotten about it for ages; so it was great to revisit it.
In a way the key to this story is a kind of pun. Do you know what a pun is? It’s a joke or a wordplay that uses more than one meaning from the same word. Do you know any puns? Here are some terrible ones:
- My socks got really holy. I can only wear them to church.
- What’s the tallest building in Wellington?
The library because it has the most stories. - Have you ever tried to eat a clock? It’s very time consuming.
(I’m sorry.) I’ll tell you about the important pun in this story in a few minutes. It’s not a funny pun, but I hope it sticks in your mind anyway.
Ezekiel grew up in Jerusalem about 620 years before Jesus was born. When he was about 25 he was carried off into exile into Babylon — present day Iraq. That was about as far away as from here to Whangarei; and I think he probably had to walk the whole way. He was a prophet. He had a lot of bad news for the people of Israel. If you think it’s bad now, it’s going to get worse: Jerusalem is going to be destroyed. It’s going to be the worst crisis the chosen people had ever faced…
But he also talked about when things would get much much better. And that’s where this part of the book of Ezekiel comes in.
The Spirit of God lifted Ezekiel up and flew him to the middle of a valley; and it was a horrible place. Perhaps it was a desert area, dry and brown. There were mountains on each side, and the floor of the valley was completely covered with bones. They weren’t even skeletons. They were all disconnected; a big jumble of bones. Perhaps there’d been a terrible battle… but if there had it must have been ages ago, because the bones were bone-dry.
God led Ezekiel all around this creepy valley and asked him: “Ezekiel, can these bones live?”. I think it was probably a trick question. If God ever asks you a trick question, probably you could copy Ezekiel’s answer: “God, only you know.”
Anyway, God tells Ezekiel to talk to the bones: “Dry bones, hear what God is saying! I’ll bring you back to life; I’ll put tendons on your bones, and muscles, and skin over the muscles; and put breath back in you.”
So Ezekiel talks to the bones, and tells them what God said. And while he’s talking — maybe he’s shouting so that they can all hear — Ezekiel starts to hear a rattling sound, it sounded like an earthquake. The bones are starting to sort themselves out and join together in their proper places. So now there’s a valley full of skeletons. And the tendons start appearing on the bones to hold them together. Do you know what they are? look at the back of your hands and wiggle your fingers. And then the muscles wrap themselves around the bones, and then finally skin covers them up.
So now Ezekiel is standing among a huge crowd of people but they’re all lying about; there’s something missing: they’re not moving, not speaking, they’re not alive. What’s missing? It’s the breath that’s missing.
And this is where that sort-of pun comes in that I mentioned. You know that most of the Old Testament is written in Hebrew — the old language of the Jewish people. And there’s a word in Hebrew: ruach. And ruach means breath, and it means wind, and it means spirit.
So now God tells Ezekiel to speak again, but this time to the wind — in fact to the four winds, North South East and West; that the wind should come and breathe on these bodies, so that they come back to life.
Ezekiel does what God told him, and the wind (ruach) comes into them, becomes their breath (ruach) and they come back to life and stand up — a vast army of people.
Maybe that pattern — where first the bodies are put back together, and then afterwards bring the body to life — reminds you of somewhere else in the Bible. You remember in the second chapter of Genesis, God takes dirt from the ground and first molds it into the shape of a human being, and then secondly breathes the breath of life into the human’s nostrils and it comes alive. And God puts the human into a beautiful garden to look after.
In fact this connection between breath and God’s Spirit turns up all through the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament. And it is a beautiful thing. Think of that: God’s spirit being as close to us as our breath is; us breathing God’s breath.
Go on and breathe in and out, and think about that. It’s a wonderful picture of a really intimate connection between God the creator of everything, and individual human beings.
God tells Ezekiel this vision is all about — the dried-up bones are Israel, their hope is lost, their best and brightest carted off into exile, the temple of God destroyed and the capital city in ruins. But God is going to bring them back from the dead, breath God’s spirit into them and bring them back home. “O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.”
This is one of a few places in Old Testament to hint at the idea of resurrection (though it’s really important in the New Testament), that people will be brought back to real bodily life to participate in God’s restored creation. Here the focus is on the nation, the people of God getting back to a healthy, flourishing situation, back on their ancestral land, their whenua.
So it’s not just about this really close me and God connection — the breath, it’s also a public thing, or a communal thing. It’s bringing a people to life. Connecting us to the source of life, to each other, and to the land.
But stepping back a bit: is this just an interesting, somewhat grisly, story about what Ezekiel hoped might happen for his people who were in a difficult situation? 2600 years is a long time ago; did people really know how the world worked then?
One reason I think it is believable, and worth paying attention to, is our Acts 2 reading, where God’s Spirit comes on the new church at the feast of Pentecost.
You know it had only been seven weeks since Jesus had been brutally put to death. And when the soldiers came to arrest Jesus to take him away to the high priest, do you remember what the disciples did? They all ran away. And Peter, when he was hanging around to find out what would happen to Jesus, when a servant girl recognised him as being one of the people who hung around with Jesus — do you remember what he said? I don’t know the man.
After Jesus died, his followers were left a timid, disorganised and depressed group. But when the Spirit came on the church everything changed. Remember the Acts reading talked about the sound of a really violent wind filling the house Jesus’ followers were sitting in — there’s that wind–spirit connection again. Suddenly the Spirit that made Jesus what he was enters his followers; and they are transformed into an energised, fearless, joyful and attractive movement that grew exponentially and thoroughly changed the world as it spread.
So it seems to me that it really happened. The Spirit of God really is active in the world.
One thing to notice: one of the first things the Spirit makes happen right at the birth of the Christian church is that it makes them able to talk to people in languages they can understand. Wouldn’t that be a good thing for us here at St Michael’s? To be able to talk about Jesus, God, faith, hope, love, etc in a way that our contemporaries can understand. Not an easy thing in our context. But that’s my prayer for our parish.
What was that Hebrew word I was telling you about earlier? Ruach. What does it mean? Wind, breath, spirit. I reckon we’re in a pretty good place, in windy Wellington — maybe next time you are out in the wild Wellington wind, you could stop for a minute, breathe in some of that wild wind, think about God’s spirit as close as your own breath; open yourself up to God; pray for that person on your prayer card.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
