Living Dead

March 22, 2026

Ezekiel 37:1-14, John 11:1-45 (Romans 8:6-11)

            Our second reading this morning is another long… but familiar… story from John’s gospel.  I want you to keep the metaphor thinking part of your brain open.  Try to listen to this story almost as if it were a parable… almost as if it were Ezekiel who is still speaking.

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            Today these two passages are trying to get us to ask the question, “What is life?”  And they are showing us the futility of our efforts as we desperately try to escape the wrong grave.

            As if you haven’t already heard enough words from scripture… I want to give you just a few more to help us enter into this question of life.  This is Paul from his letter to the church in Rome… “You are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.  Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.  If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwells in you.”

            So much of what is being packaged and sold as Christianity today is centered on biological life and death and the worry about what will happen to us after we die.  It appeals to that fear within that is grasping for certainty… and some sort of guarantee that our biological death will not be the end.  That there is more than just these days we’ve been given… that we’ve been good enough… or have done enough of the right things to secure us a spot in the afterlife.  Our three readings from the prophets, the gospel, and the Epistles… all three tell us biological life and death is not where our focus needs to be.  The focus of this faith tradition of ours has always rested on the life that is the Spirit of God dwelling within.  It is the Spirit of God that defines what it is to truly be alive… not the beating of our hearts… or the electrical storms of our brains… or even non-biological definitions of what it is to be living… materialism or positions of power within whatever society that surrounds us.  To be filled with the Spirit is to be alive.  If we are not spiritually alive… then we are dead.  If we are already among the dead, then what does it matter that our hearts stop beating.  Dead is dead… spiritual or biological.  That is the way all three of these passages define for us life and death. 

            Paul’s theology was always… let’s say… fluid when it came to understanding the nuts and bolts of resurrection… the dead coming to life.  Fluid in that he wouldn’t be pinned down on the biology of it all… because the biology didn’t matter.  Resurrection could happen to the biological dead.  Resurrection could happen to the biological living.  Resurrection could happen to a human body… it could infuse all of creation with new life.  Biology wasn’t as important as the spiritual… as the life that is the indwelling Spirit of God.  The body is dead because of sin.  This has nothing to do with our mortality and everything to do with our connection to God.  Sin is that state of disconnection with life… with that indwelling Spirit of God.  As long as there is disconnection there is death… again, no matter the state of the flesh.

            In sin, we are the dry bones in the valley.  Ezekiel was a prophet during the time of Israel’s exile in Babylon.  He spoke to a people separated from all they believed were the sure signs of God’s presence among them.  They were removed from the land where they ought to have resided.  They were removed from the Temple where they ought to have had ritual encounters with their God.  They were… in their understanding… completely disconnected from God because they were disconnected from the things that represented God’s presence to them.  Sin for those in exile was not just a spiritual experience… for those in exile, sin was real… it was tangible disconnection.  They were a dead people without the physical symbols of God among them. 

But the prophets of that time told them that their spiritual death had occurred long before the Babylonians came and took them away from the land… before the Babylonians burned the Temple to the ground.  They were already dead in sin… as they had moved away from the ways of God… as they had become a people with empty words on their lips.  Isaiah says, “Ah, sinful nation, people laden with iniquity, offspring who do evil, children who deal corruptly, who have forsaken the Lord, who have despised the Holy One of Israel, who are utterly estranged!  The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint.  From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but bruises and sores and bleeding wounds; they have not been drained, or bound up, or softened with oil.”  Sin sickness brings death. 

But death never has the final say.

Though he doesn’t use the word… Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones is resurrection. “Thus says the Lord God:  I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel.  And you will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people.  I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live…”  Ezekiel… the prophets… all tell the people how they were already dead in sin while they were in Israel.  They all tell the people how in turning away from the spirit of God… not following the ways of God… it wasn’t the Babylonian Empire that killed them… it wasn’t the Babylonians who separated them from their sure and certain signs of God’s presence… signs that for them had crossed a line and had become idols they controlled.  Idols they used to build their own sense of power and importance.  The sin… the spiritual rot had already killed them even while they prospered off the backs of the poor… even while they put their trust in their high walls and the swords of their army.  To use more words from Ezekiel… “(S)ay to the house of Israel: Thus you have said: ‘Our transgressions and our sins weigh upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live?’ Say to them: As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel? And you, mortal, say to your people: The righteousness of the righteous shall not save them when they transgress, and as for the wickedness of the wicked, it shall not make them stumble when they turn from their wickedness, and the righteous shall not be able to live by their righteousness when they sin.  Though I say to the righteous that they shall surely live, yet if they trust in their righteousness and commit iniquity, none of their righteous deeds shall be remembered, but in the iniquity that they have committed they shall die.  Again, though I say to the wicked, ‘You shall surely die,’ yet if they turn from their sin and do what is lawful and right—  if the wicked restore the pledge, give back what they have taken by robbery, and walk in the statutes of life, committing no iniquity—they shall surely live; they shall not die.  None of the sins that they have committed shall be remembered against them; they have done what is lawful and right; they shall surely live.”

Saints… when is it finally going to be enough?  When will we finally tire of grasping at death… letting sin and death fill our hands… as we cry out to God for life?  When will the emptiness of death we receive from our idols be realized… so that we would finally turn away from them… take our trust away from them4?  Where we are today is not new.  The stench of death that rises from our self-dug graves is not new.  That’s what’s so sad.  We haven’t made any spiritual progress… we are still like the people of scripture.  Unlike Ezekiel’s time, we don’t need some outside country to come and unmoor us from God’s presence.  We are our own Babylon.  We do it to ourselves.

Yet… standing outside our tombs is Christ calling us to come out.  Come out!  We cannot bomb ourselves out of the tomb.  The DOW will not cause us to rise to new life.  Our persecution of others will not finally fill this shared grave enough that we can crawl out.  Filling the grave with the lives of innocents has never saved the wicked.  We wrap ourselves tightly in the same death shroud humanity has always wrapped itself in… that death shroud that feels so secure and sure as if it were the swaddling cloths of our mothers.

The prophets, the gospels, the Epistles all teach that there is only the one way to life.  Christ stands outside of the tomb and calls us to God’s righteousness again and again… because God’s love is steadfast… because God’s indwelling is the spirit of life.

Martha said to Jesus, “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Mary said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  In the story, these are… to our ears… accusations of grief.  But in theology… they are statements of clear, spiritual truth.  Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.  I am the resurrection and the life.  I am the reconnection to God and the life that follows.  I am the death of sin and the life unbound through grace.  Because I live you also will live.  On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.  They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, I will love them and reveal myself to them.

Life and death.  Exiles in sin… dry bones in the tombs… it is time for us to know the difference… and leave the stench of death behind for the outstretched hand of Christ.  Amen.