TO LIFE!
May 22, 1988
11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
John 20:19-22
Ezekiel 37:1-10

“I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live."
-Ezekiel 37:10 (RSV)

Ezekiel's vision of the Valley of Dry Bones is one of the most
powerful images in all literature! Scholars suggest that it may have been
a battlefield. Whatever it was, actual place or prophetic vision, it
represented hopelessness, despair, the shattered aspirations of a people
who were convinced that God had chosen them but now abandoned them. Their
armies are defeated, their cities ruined, their people in exile. And this
final, grim field is an eloquent metaphor for the reality of their situation
~ and their hopes for the future.

"Can these bones live?” Who hasn't asked that at some time or. other?
Who hasn't looked out across a valley of dry bones ~- a landscape littered
with broken promises, shattered dreams, defeat, failure and hopelessness -
and pondered the absolute dearth of hopeful prospect? Who hasn't wondered
if there is any reason to be hopeful and confident?

- One who has recently wrote a book about it. Dan Wakefield,
journalist, author of several best sellers, screenwriter, has published a
book entitled, Returning, A Spiritual Journey. The introduction of the
book struck me as a kind of contemporary paraphrase of Ezekiel's vision of
the Valley of the Dry Bones.

"One balmy spring morning in Hoilywood, a month or so before my
forty-eighth birthday, I woke up screaming. I got out of bed, went into
the next room, sat down on a couch, and screamed again. This was not, in
other words, one of those waking nightmares left over from sleep that is
dispelled by the comforting light of day. It was, rather, a response to
the reality that another morning had broken in a life I could only deal
with sedated by wine, loud noise, moving images, and wired to electronic
games that further distracted my fragmented attention from a growing sense
of blank, nameless pain in the pit of my very being, my most essential
self. It was the beginning of a year in which I would have scored in the
upper percentile of those popular magazine tests that list the greatest
stresses of life: I left the house I owned, the city I was living in, the

work I was doing, the woman I had lived with for seven years and had hoped
to remain with the rest of my life, ran out of money, discovered I had
endangered my health and attended the funeral of my father in May and my
mother in November.

“In that first acute stage of my crisis I went to doctors for help,
physical and mental. I told an internist in Beverly Hills that I had an
odd feeling my heart was beating too fast and he confirmed my suspicion.
My ‘resting' pulse rate was 110, and the top of the normal range is 100.

He prescribed medication that would lower my racing pulse. The ‘beta
blockers' lowered my pulse but not my anxiety. The psychiatrist said I
should take a vacation; she suggested Santa Barbara. I pictured myself on
the bottom left-hand corner of the map in the dot of Los Angeles and felt I
had slid to the wrong hole on a giant pinball machine.'

In the middle of the worst of his crises Wakefield remembers the
Twenty-third Psalm. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." Having
long ago discarded the religion of his childhood as pious nonsense,
Wakefield wanders into a church around Christmas time and suddenly his
fight for his life becomes a spiritual pilgrimage. Very gradually the
reader is allowed to see a kind of quintessentially 1980s secular man
discover that there is an unseen force working in his life and the force is
not malevolent or even neutral. It is good, and healing and life giving.
It is God, a God whose spirit is the breath of life.

In the story of the Valley of Dry Bones there is a very important
idea, namely that the life in us is God's spirit. It is a lovely idea.
It is a radically Biblical idea and a very relevant one.

Perhaps its most provocative expression is the first one, in the
account of creation in the Book of Genesis. The Bible is ordinarily very
careful to avoid casting God's image in human terms. Old Testament
religion is always suspicious of idolatry. There are to be no images of
God, no idols or icons, no pictures. God, the Old Testament is sure, is
not simply a super-human being. There is a fancy name for that way of
thinking — anthropomorphism. The Old Testament is against it. And so the
Genesis 2 portrait of God is all the more remarkabie. In it the Bible
risks the crassest anthropomorphism in order to make a point. God fashions
a human being out of the dirt, you recall. But it is lifeless. The
picture is clear. The deity, slightly hunched over, holding this lifeless
lump of mud, then lifting it and breathing into it —- the lump of mud
becomes a living being. [Genesis 2:7} The Hebrew word for spirit is the
same word for breath.

That's the first and most important thing our religion says about
human life. It not only comes from God, it is God's Spirit - which is the
same thing as God's breath.

The idea appears obviously in Ezekiel's vision. God breathes and the
bones live. And it occurs in an intimate and moving scenario in John's
Gospel. The Risen Christ has appeared to the confused and frightened
disciples. He is commissioning them to continue his work. And, the Gospel
says, “he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit." [John
20:22}

5/97 /RR

There has always been a kind of mystery about the topic. The cid
English called the Spirit of God, the Holy Ghost with the predicatable
result that somewhere buried deeply in the theological file drawer in most
Western, English speaking novels, is a ghostly apparition, not unlike
Caspar - or Dicken's ghost of Christmas past.

Apropos of nothing in particular, except it is the kind of historical
vignette I find intriguing, there was a peculiar custom in the early Coptic
Christian Church involving breath and spirit. Apparently, when it came
time to commission new leaders in the remoter areas, the patriarch of
Alexandria would breath into a skin bag; the bag was tied up, transported
up river to Ethiopia where it was let loose on the one designated to be
the patriarch of the Ethiopian Church. [Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel
According to John, Volume IT, p. 1023]

The ancient church had no monopoly on strange customs, strange ideas
about the Spirit. In fact, the current assumption is that whatever
Christians mean by the Holy Spirit, it must be bizarre, extraordinary,
eccentric. The "sound and fury" of television charismatics have given one
of our dearest ideas a bad name.

The very word Spirit makes us nervous, anxious, embarrassed. There
are at least three reasons.

One. In our scientific, technological age, it is unsophisticated to
talk about or even acknowledge the existence of the transcendent. I ,
attended a college Baccalaureate last Sunday which somehow managed to
consume an hour without so much as a reference to God - until the end, when
the Dean pronounced the benediction. William Buckley once quipped on a
television interview that “if you mention God more than once at New York
dinner parties, you aren't invited back." And Wakefield tells about having
to sneak across Boston Commons on a Sunday morning, wearing the give-away
suit and tie, hoping his friends “would al] be home doing brunch .and the
Sunday papers so he would not be caught in the act." [Wakefield, op. cit.,
p. 15]

Two. Self—-designated spirit filled people seem to be overly enamored
with their own spiritual experiences, unable to talk about much else, and
have a tendency to expose that which you and I have been taught to regard
as personal and private. In his wonderful new book, Whistling in the Dark,
Frederick Buechner writes about spirit filled Christians -

"They are apt to have the relentless cheerfulness of car salesmen.
They speak a great deal about 'the Lord' as if they have him in their hip
pocket and seem to feel that it's no harder to figure out what he wants
them to do than to look up in Fannie Farmer how to make brownies." [p. 23]

Three. We are nervous about the idea of the Holy Spirit because of
the popular stereotypes... including the affectations of the television
healers and speakers in tongues. There is a wonderful story about a man
who wandered into a Presbyterian Church, not unlike this one I suppose,
took a seat in the back pew and promptly began to respond to the sermon —
audibly. "Amen" he said. “Halielujah." “Praise the Lord.“ People around

him got pretty uncomfortable. Finally, an usher approached. "Sir," he
said, "is there something wrong?" "Why no," the man said. “I've got the
Spirit." To which the usher responded, “Well, you certainly didn't get it
here,"

What the Bible says is that to be inspired, filled with the Spirit -
is to be full of life... full of the breath of God. Experiences of God's
Spirit, therefore, are deeply human experiences. Not so much extraordinary,
peculiar, strange - but ordinary human experiences full of God's goodness,
love and lively creativity. God breathes into the lump of mud and it becomes
a human being. God breathes on the bones and they live. Jesus breathes on
scared disciples and they become lively advocates and courageous fighters.

What the Bible means by life in the Spirit is a human being fuliy
alive. Spiritual experiences are not removed and remote, but the most
deeply and profoundly human experiences. The Holy Spirit in your life is
“not an aberration or an apparition but those times when you know yourself
most profoundly to be alive: experiences of creativity, passion,
exhilaration, hard work, beauty, love.

The life in us - the breath in our lungs is the Spirit of God.
{It is intriguing to learn that breathing is an important aspect of many of
the oldest traditions of spirituality. In a remarkable book, The
Relaxation Response, Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School documents
the connection between blood pressure, pulse, and general well-being and
the meditation techniques of Eastern religion, including disciplined
breathing. It. is the reason for the “runner's high," the experience of»
physical exhilaration known to the worldwide cult of joggers, and the
general feeling of physical and spiritual well-being which is part of |
vigorous. physical activity. Benson says we feel better and are better —
when we do some intentional and deep breathing. Somehow I think the Bible
already. knows that, i.e. that the life in us is breath - God's breath.

So, the spirit-filled life is not necessarily peculiar, esoteric: it
is surely not the superlatively pious life. Spirit-filled life - spiritual
life - is deeply, intentionally and passionately human life.

Not everyone understood what Bonhoeffer meant when he talked about
religionless Christianity. But Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his Nazi prison
cell, realized that what the Creator wants most of his creatures is for
them to be fully alive - fully human.

Bonhoeffer wrote:
"A person must plunge into life. To be a Christian does not mean to

be religious in a particular way, to cultivate some form of asceticism, but
to. be a man." {Letters And Papers From Prison, p. 222-223]

Last Sunday the Gospel was articulated at graduation, not
unfortunately at Baccalaureate, but during the commencement address by
Charlotte Hunter Gault, of the MacNeil/Lehrer Report. Miss Gault was the
first Black woman-to graduate from the University of Georgia and told a bit
about the harassment, the destruction of her property, the hatred, abuse
and the loneliness. Why? Why do it? She quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes:

5/22/88

“To be alive means to be a part of the action and the passion of one's
times; not to be a part of the action and passion of one's time is not to
have lived at all.'

That's what God wants. That's what God breathes into the lump of
lifeless dirt - gloriously human life. And that is what our religion tries
to say when it uses Holy Spirit language. We are full of God's Spirit, not
so much when we are behaving peculiarly but when we are so full of life we
can't contain ourselves; when we love life sco passionately we become angry
when it is denied or hemmed-in or oppressed. We are full of the Holy
Spirit when we are overwhelmed by the beauty, ecstasy and profundity of
life in us. When a new baby moves us to tears, when another loves us with
such grace we cannot begin to describe it, when we hold the hand of a dear
one dying and know about love deeper than words. When we walk through
profound grief. When music, art, human effort, human passion, affirm and
celebrate the life in each of us ~- that's God's Spirit.

You can see it almost anywhere... when human beings reach down inside
themselves and discover strength, character and humanness that they didn't
even know was there. When they become unusually themselves,
uncharacteristically human - the Bible would say they are full of the Holy
Spirit. It touches me deeply when human beings begin to discover how
magnificently human they are. I recall it vividly as I have watched my own
youngsters: saw them square their shoulders and play the cello solo, run
the race, or come up to bat with two out, bases loaded and a hundred
screaming parents lining the field... and they discover something of their
own humanness - which I know is God's breath in them. You have seen it
too, in your own life and the lives of those dear to you.

Today is Pentecost Sunday. On this day, for 2,000 years, the
Christian Church has remembered a day when frightened followers of a
crucified rabbi turned into courageous advocates of the Risen Christ. They
called it the descent of the Spirit and they described it with vivid images
of fire and wind. People did act strangely that day - so much so that
these around them thought they were drunk. But what that first Pentecost
really was, was the discovery of their own humanity. What it really was
about was the power and courage and love - inside them, now living in the
world.

it is one of our dearest and most important ideas... The life in
you, as close to you as the breath in your lungs, is God's Spirit...

What your Creator wants of you is for you to be fully alive... not a
spectator in life, but a passionate participant,

For each of us there is a Valiey of Dry Bones this morning... ruined
dreams, crushed expectations. It may be a marriage that seems dead. It
may be a relationship that is over. It may be a career which is at a dead-
end. It may be that you have stopped dreaming and hoping and caring.

God - we persist in believing — breathes Jife into us. There was a
picture in magazines and on posters a while ago. I believe it was an ad
for fire prevention. It showed a firefighter with the limp body of a child
in his arms, lifeless, and he was breathing his breath into the child.

If Genesis can risk a little anthropomorphism, so can we. I invite
you to ponder that. It may not be easy, but draw yourself and the God who
created you and loves you and wills your humanity --into it.

"Behold, I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live."

Thanks be to God. Amen.

5/22/88