Knowing God Changes Everything

 December 5 2021

Ezekiel 37:1-14

         Do you know what you’re getting for Christmas? How many times, over the years, have you been asked this question. Do you remember being a kid how you would wonder just what would be under the tree just for you? Yes, you had your wish list, you know, the one that was formed from spending hours looking in the Penny’s or Sears catalog at all the latest toys and games, yet you learned quickly that what you wanted and what you got could sometimes be totally different things. So, you waited until the Christmas tree was up and decorated because you knew it wouldn’t be long until a present or two would appear there beneath the tree. This was the time when your sneaky skills would come into play and you would wait patiently until no one was looking and you would find a present and give it a little shake in order to have a few clues that would tell you what it was that was hidden under the wrapping paper. You learned over the years that you had to be gentle with your shaking of said present because if you were too rough with those boxes under the tree you might hear pieces begin to rattle around in the box. So, gently you would pick up the box, sensing just how heaven it was, and if when you moved it from side to side there were any noises emanating from inside. Through all the clues you gathered, how large the box, how heavy it was and the noises that you heard, you then would try and figure out just what it was that you might be getting for Christmas. What motivated you to spend so much time trying to discover what it was that was under the tree with your name on was this curiosity you had, this longing to know just what was it that you were getting for Christmas.

         So, yes, we can pretty easily understand that Christmas is a time of not only of giving gifts, but it is also a time when we want to know just what those gifts will be. We know that part of the Christmas joy is this element of surprise, to go from wanting to know just what it is that we will be receiving to at last tearing back the paper, and cutting through the tape so that the box might at last be opened and the truth of what it is that has been given might be at last revealed to us. Now, with all of this in mind, I wonder, do we know what we have been given that first Christmas? I mean, Jesus, is the gift of all gifts, and yes, we know that he has been given to us, but I still wonder, do we know what we were given that first Christmas? I can’t help but think about what John writes in the first chapter of his gospel account where he states that Jesus was in the world and the world was was made through him but the world did not know him. So, here was Jesus, the true gift of Christmas and as this gift was given the reaction of the world was we don’t know who or what this gift is. So, as we prepare ourselves once again for the coming of Jesus it might be good for us to ask ourselves, do we know the gift given to us that first Christmas, the gift we know as Jesus. This might seem like a silly question but as I look around at those who claim that they are Christians, people one would assume should know Jesus, I hear them say things and I see them do things and all I can think is that they do not know the Jesus that I know. Case in point: last January, in Washington, protestors there placed a cross alongside a gallows as if to say that the Jesus of the cross would have no problem with those who followed him taking the life of those who did not agree with them. To this, I would say, that they did not know the Jesus that I know. This is why I believe that now is a good time to ask yourself just how well do you know Jesus? Do you know this gift you have been given at Christmas?

         This theme of knowing Jesus, of knowing the God who came into the world as the one we know as Jesus, this is the central theme of our scripture for today. It is easy to be so shocked by the imagery of a valley of dry bones that we miss that this section of the book of Ezekiel is framed by Ezekiel telling the Lord that he was the only one who knew if these bones could live and then this section ends with God telling Ezekiel that the people of God will know him when he brings them forth from their graves. Once again, to understand what is being revealed to us in Ezekiel we have to remember the context, the situation in which Ezekiel finds himself. As we discovered last week in the book of Jeremiah, God sent his people into exile at the hands of the Babylonian army because they had become a violent people, people who had turned God’s Holy Temple into a hideout for thugs. Jeremiah, in the ninth chapter of his book, records God as telling him that his people had heaped oppression upon oppression, deceit upon deceit and what this proved is that God’s people had refused to know God. To put this another way, if God’s people knew him then they would not be people who oppressed the weak and the poor and they would not be people who saw no problem in deceiving others refusing to be people of the truth. At the end of this ninth chapter of Jeremiah, God tells Jeremiah that if people wanted to boast about something what they should boast about is that they understand and know God, that they knew that their God is a God who practices steadfast love, justice and righteousness in the earth. If God’s people knew him they would know that God is actively working at faithfully loving his people, making his goodness flourish upon the Earth and when they oppressed each other and were no longer people that could be trusted then they were coming directly against the very work of God. This is affirmed in the twenty-second chapter of Jeremiah where, speaking about the king Josiah, God says of him that he was one who did justice and righteousness, one who judged rightly the cause of the poor and needy and God concludes by asking Jeremiah, “Is this not what it means to know me?” The answer to this question, of course, is that doing justice and righteousness and watching out for the poor and needy is indeed what it means to know God.

         Well, because God’s people refused to know him, he decided that they must be carried off to Babylon to live in captivity for seventy years. As we learned last week, God sent his people in exile a letter telling them that, yes, they were going to live in Babylon for a long time, and yes, their one job was to seek the peace of Babylon, to pray to God that the very people who had captured them and had made them slaves, these were the people who they were to ask God to bless their lives with peace. When they sought the peace of their captors, then God told them, they themselves would experience peace.

         So, when we come to the book of Ezekiel, this is the story of those people to whom God sent his letter. Ezekiel was a priest who had been taken captive and was now residing in Babylon. In Babylon, Ezekiel was raised up by God to be his prophet, God’s mouth piece, to the people of God in captivity. As God’s prophet, Ezekiel’s was there not to so much to condemn God’s people but rather he was raised up by God to give his people hope in what seemed to God’s people to be a hopeless situation. What God’s people struggled to understand is that God had delivered them into what to them seemed like a desperate situation so that right there they at last might come to know him. God had to bring them to a place where the only way out of what they were going through was to stop relying upon their strength and their wisdom to at last turn to God to rescue them. Now, we have to always remember that what these same people were to do while in Babylon was to allow this time of exile to be a time when they learned to be people of peace. The way that God was training them to be people of peace was by bringing them to a point where they had to at last come to know him so that in knowing him they might trust him and his ways because knowing God and trusting God was the only way that they would ever find themselves at home once again. In this knowing and trusting God then they would at last become people who rested in the security of God no longer needing to create their own security through violence and oppression.

         We have to understand the narrative of the story of God’s people in exile in order to make sense of this vision that Ezekiel had that was given to him through the Spirit of God.  We are told that the hand of the Lord was upon Ezekiel and in the Spirit, God set Ezekiel down in a valley that was strewn with bones. As God led Ezekiel around this place there were just so many bones and we are told that they were very dry. What we have to come away with in this opening vision is a situation of utter desolation. We have to get the subtle message that these bones were scattered here because of death and violence. As we gaze upon the horror of this vast valley, we hear God ask, Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” If you had been there what would your answer to God have been to this question? Could you actually believe that these old, dusty, bones could really come to life once again? Ezekiel wisely answered by responding to this question by simply stating, “O Lord, God, you know”. It is some comfort to us that Ezekiel in this moment did not know the answer to the question. In his humility, he knew that he had to be silent and allow the answer to come from God.

         What is interesting is that God doesn’t answer the question with a simple answer but instead God tells Ezekiel to prophesy, to speak over the bones. God is involving Ezekiel in the miracle he is about to bring forth so that in this experience that Ezekiel is having he might come to know God in a deeper, more profound way. God tells Ezekiel to say to the bones, “O, dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. The Lord God says, “Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews upon you. I will cover you with skin, and put breath in you and you shall live. Then God finishes his command by telling Ezekiel that when these bones at last are living they shall know that I am the Lord. Now, this is the way that this sentence is normally translated however the reason that it states that these bones will know that God is the Lord is that the Hebrew translators at one time felt that the name of God was too sacred for them to spell it out so whenever they would come to this name they would simply write, “the name”, or “the Lord,” which is the Hebrew word, “Adonai”. In this instance though, I believe that it is important that we use the name which has been replaced by the word, “Lord”. That name is often known as Yahweh or the other way that it is translated is Jehovah. 

         The name Yahweh used here in Ezekiel would have been a way to anchor this experience of the dry bones upon the foundational experience of their delivery from slavery in Egypt. There in the Exodus story the people of God had found themselves in a desperate situation just like people of God were experiencing in the days of Ezekiel. And just as in the days of Ezekiel what was most important to God is that through his people’s experience with him, in their relying on him to rescue them, they might know him.  In order for God to be known though it is he who must reveal himself to his people and the way that God revealed himself to the people he rescued in the days of Moses was by the giving of this name, Yahweh.  If one studies this name in the original Hebrew, you will find that this name is a combination of three Hebrew words, the Hebrew word for “is” or to exist”, the Hebrew word for “was” and the Hebrew word for “will be”. So, God reveals himself to be the one who was, the one who is and the one who will be. What this is supposed to tell us is that God experiences time very differently from us because for us when the past is past, we can no longer live there and the future is always not here yet so we can not live their either. We can only live here in the present moment but God can live in the past, present and future all at the same time. What this tells us then is that God experiences time like he does because he is outside of time and he is outside of time because he is the creator of time. So, long story short, the name that God revealed to Moses and his people tells us that he is the Creator, the God outside of time because he is the Creator of time.

         So, getting back to Ezekiel,  God tells Ezekiel that he is going to bring all of these bones that Ezekiel sees back to life so that Ezekiel might know that God is Yahweh, the God out of time because he is the Creator of time. The point starts to become clear, doesn’t it, that what is supposed to be known about God is that he is our Creator.  If we revisit the first chapter of the gospel of John, where we are told that Jesus came into the world but the world did not know him what is not known about Jesus is that the world was made through him. Here again, the problem with knowing is that people did not know that Jesus is the one through whom the world was made, the God who is our Creator. We have to ask ourselves then just why is it so important that we know that God is our Creator? The first reason we have for knowing God as our Creator is that if God is our Creator then he must have intended us to be here as part of his creation. We are not just some random cosmic accident but instead we are alive because this God who is our Creator has given us life. If we understand then that this God who is our Creator has given us the gift of life then it’s not hard to figure out that we need to respond to our Creator for the gift of our life. It just makes sense that we should have an attitude of gratitude toward God for this gift of life. From this giving of this gift of our life by our Creator to our response of thankfulness for that gift of life comes the basis for our relationship with God. Our relationship with God is based on the fundamental idea that as our Creator, God is the one who has intentionally given us life and we in return, respond with thankfulness. So, it isn’t a leap that if we know God is the giver of our life that we would not only respond with gratitude but to go further and respond with love. The way that we demonstrate our love to God is to join him in his work of bringing steadfast love, justice and righteousness upon the earth which is the foundation for being peacemakers.

         Here in this story of Ezekiel and the dry bones coming back to life, God is reminding Ezekiel and the people in exile that he is the Creator, the very giver of life. This is who they should know him as being, the one who gave them life and in their most desperate time he can give them life once again. They were to remember the song they used to sing that we know as the one hundred and thirty ninth Psalm where the writer exclaims that if he went to heaven, he would know that God is there. If he descended in to the land of the dead, there too he could know that God would be there. Even if he found himself in the depths of the sea, the writer knows, that there as well the hand of God would lead him and hold him up. How can he have such confidence? He has this confidence about God because it was God who had formed his inmost parts. It was God who had knitted him together in his mother’s womb. He would praise his God for he knew that he was fearfully and wonderfully made by God.

         How could Ezekiel not think of this song as he watched God bring those bones to life? If God could be known as the giver of life then he most assuredly would be constantly present to watch over that life which he created. So, the people of God could find their hope in God because they would once again come to know him as their very life. He would one day bring them back to their home and then his Spirit, the very life of God, this they would come to know as their life. When they at last knew that their life was safe in the hands of God they would at last rest in faith, no longer needing violence to create their security but rather the God who gave them life would be known by them as being their place of peace.

         Jesus at the beginning of the seventeenth chapter of the gospel of John, states in his priestly prayer that the work that he was sent to do was that through him people might know the only true God and that they might know Jesus whom he had sent. Do you know this Jesus? Do you know him as the one who trusted his life to his Heavenly Father as he went to die upon the cross? Do you know him as the firstborn of those who the grave can not hold as Ezekiel saw so long ago? Is your life resting secure knowing this gift of Christmas? Amen!