Sermon: Going to Extremes

First Presbyterian Church

April 12, 2026, Easter 2A

John 20:19-31

 

Going to Extremes

 

In every gospel, it is made clear that the first witnesses to the resurrection, whether as recipients of the announcement of angelic beings commissioned to go and tell the disciples or simply as witnesses of the empty tomb, were women. Mary Magdalene is named in all of the gospels; Matthew, Mark, and Luke have her accompanied by one or more other women, while in John’s gospel she goes to the tomb alone.

Earlier in this chapter, Mary Magdalene has gone to the tomb and found it empty; she returned to find Peter and “the beloved disciple” and reported what she had seen, leading them to the tomb where they saw it empty. They returned to their homes, uncomprehendingly, while Mary lingered at the tomb. While she was there weeping, she became the first to see the risen Christ himself, who told her to go to the disciples and report what he told her. By “disciples” here we should understand not just the eleven, based on the Greek word used, but to the whole body of followers who had been with Jesus up to the end.

Nonetheless, by the time evening fell that same day, we find the disciples, that whole body, hiding behind locked doors. Fear of the religious authorities was still greater than any hope they had gained from Mary Magdalene’s report of her encounter with the risen Jesus.

Clearly, Jesus will have to do something extreme to get through to them. And so, even with those doors locked, Jesus is in the room with them, “all of a sudden.”

This extreme measure was joined to another, as Jesus showed the scars in his hands and feet and side, the scars of the crucifixion just days before. It was this, the ultimate verification of Jesus’s reality before them, that finally got through to these slow-of-heart disciples and finally allowed them to rejoice. Continuing to “up the ante” Jesus breathes on them and announces that they are to “receive the Holy Spirit,” setting John’s gospel apart from Luke’s, in which the Holy Spirit manifests itself on the day of Pentecost.

But understand this: after the disciples first failed, evidently, to hear Mary Magdalene’s report and take heart; after the disciples locked themselves away from the world in fear rather than allowing in hope from that news; and even after Jesus appeared before them despite those locked doors only to have to show his scars to convince them…well, the disciples had no business dumping on Thomas when they finally found them and told them what they had seen.

There is, however one thing for which you can truly dump on Thomas; why wasn't he with the other disciples to hear Mary Magdalene’s news, or especially for not being there when Jesus appeared. We have no indication of why Thomas wasn’t there, whether he had thoroughly abandoned all hope and melted back into his pre-Jesus life or whether he had been hiding separately in fear or anything else. In a time of trouble, he broke fellowship with his fellow followers of Jesus. In a time when biblical scholars seem so eager to shed the "Doubting Thomas" label, he shouldn't get off the hook for deserting his fellow disciples.

Still, what Thomas demanded when the disciples told him “We have seen the Lord!” was really not much more than it had taken for the disciples themselves to be convinced. If you are going to dump on Thomas with the label “Doubting,” you really need to hammer the rest of the disciples equally. They had not acquitted themselves particularly well before Jesus showed up and showed his scars.

Whatever level of doubt Thomas may have had, he did improve in one way: the next time the disciples came together, a week later, Thomas didn’t fail to show.

To this point Thomas’s reality was a cold, hard one: the Teacher he had followed for some part of three years had been executed in the most brutal way known to the Roman Empire, which was pretty good at being brutal. The blood, the spear piercing Jesus’s side, the nails, the lifeless body, the stone rolled before the tomb; all these Thomas saw and, evidently, said “It’s over.” Still, whatever hope he might have given up, he still found enough to be there that next week.

And whatever flicker of hope he had found was rewarded beyond his imagining.

Although Jesus offers his scars for Thomas to touch, as he had said he would have to do to believe, it isn’t recorded that Thomas actually does so. What we get instead is a first: while Jesus has been called “Lord” or “Messiah” or “Son of God” or many other titles in his time on earth, Thomas is the first to make the leap and say simply “My Lord and my God!” From a place of woundedness and doubt, Thomas comes to the most striking proclamation of Jesus’s identity we have yet received.

Jesus can’t resist throwing a little shade at Thomas, though, to use a bit of modern slang. It was an aside that could as easily have been directed at all of these followers, to be honest, found in verse 29. You believe because you’ve seen me? Really? So much more blessed are those who believe even they don’t get to see.

You realize that’s us, right?

The ones who believe even though we don’t see?

Yes, that’s us. Blessed.

Those final two verses, who some have suggested were originally meant to be the end of the gospel, serve as a reminder to us of just what John, and other gospel writers to a degree, are about here. They have no interest in giving us a blow-by-blow biography of Jesus’s life, and if that’s what you’re looking for you are disappointed. John is explicitly telling us that we have not gotten the whole story out of him. What he has told us, he says, is meant to help us to do exactly what Jesus described in that previous verse – to believe, even though we have not seen, and to therefore “have life in his name.” We are given this gospel that we might believe.

We are given the Spirit to sustain us, and much of what we hear in coming weeks will be the story of how the Holy Spirit acts among our ancestors in the faith. But we are given the gospel to teach us and show us the Jesus that is our life and our way to live. Grounded in gospel, we are then sustained and led by the Holy Spirit (remember Jesus breathing that on the disciples earlier in the reading?) to give that gospel to the whole world in our lives and words and actions. That’s what it is to “have life in his name.”

For the Word and the Spirit together, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #245, Christ the Lord Is Risen Today; #248, Christ Is Risen! Shout Hosanna; #240, Alleluia, Alleluia! Give Thanks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sermon: Opening Day

           

 

First Presbyterian Church

April 5, 2026, Easter Sunday A

Matthew 28:1-10, 16-20

 

Opening Day

 

 

First, an acknowledgment: I really did get the inspiration for this sermon title and theme from the church sign from a couple of weeks ago.

Did you notice that, somewhere amidst all the basketball foolishness of the past few weeks, baseball season started?

I'm old enough to remember that Major League Baseball's opening day always happened in Cincinnati, on a weekday afternoon There was a great big tradition and all behind it, with an Opening Day parade and everything. I remember it mostly because growing up in Georgia, I often saw that game on TV because Atlanta was frequently the opponent for that first game of the season. In fact I was watching to see Hank Aaron tie Babe Ruth's all-time home run record on Opening Day in Cincinnati in 1974. (And you better believe I plan to be at the River Bandits' home opener Tuesday night, if I can ever get the online ordering system to work.)

Funny thing about Opening Day; no matter how big the celebration, no matter how the big the win or heartbreaking the loss, no matter what (except maybe for rain), there was another game the next day.

There's a lesson in that. We'll get back to it later.

Every gospel’s retelling of the resurrection has its own quirks (for example, Mark barely tells you anything at all, and you never even see or hear the resurrected Jesus?), and Matthew’s definitely has its own distinct features, but there is one thing all four of them have in common: in none of the accounts does anyone actually see the resurrection happen. As Barbara Brown Taylor points out in Learning to Wait in the Dark, there is technically no such thing as a “witness to the resurrection.”

Aside from Mark’s aforementioned gospel, all of the others show us the already-resurrected Jesus, some quite extensively such as Luke’s several encounters seemingly all on the same day, and John’s extensive retelling of Thomas’s particular encounter in Chapter 20 and that breakfast scene on the lakeshore in chapter 21. Matthew’s account is a bit more terse, and appearances of the risen Christ only add up to two – the encounter with the two Marys and then the Galilee appearance to the disciples that culminates in possibly the most famous verses in this gospel, the ones at the very end that constitute what we have come to call the Great Commission – “Go ye therefore and teach all nations…” for those of you who have it memorized still in the King James Version.

The odd thing about Matthew’s account is that even though the two Marys witness quite a spectacle when they arrive at the tomb – an earthquake, a lightning-like angel descending from heaven and rolling back the stone, the guards becoming “like dead men” – all of this spectacle is prelude to the announcement that “he is not here.” Somehow, Jesus is already gone from a tomb that had (presumably) been sealed before the angel rolled it back, if 27:66 is to be believed.

Meanwhile, what the two Marys get is not to bear witness to a miracle. Instead, they get a job to do. (This is where that part about Opening Day comes back.)

First the angel gives them the word to go find those other disciples and get them headed towards Galilee, where Jesus will meet them. While they were headed off to do just that, with the curious mixture of “fear and great joy” Matthew describes, Jesus himself makes his appearance – just as in John’s gospel, Jesus appears to the women first – and basically gives them the same message: go tell the disciples to meet me, not in the great city of Jerusalem, but back in rural Galilee, where Jesus spent so much of his ministry.

This is no great spectacle in front of great numbers, but only to two women, isolated from the rest of the world that was going on as if nothing had happened. No great crowds, no great gathering: just the two Marys. Later the disciples (eleven, after what Judas did) get their turn. As far as Matthew’s gospel goes, that is maybe thirteen witnesses to the resurrected Christ?  It’s almost as if it’s a secret, at least until Jesus commands them to "go therefore and make disciples of all nations..." At least we have Christ's promise that "I am with you always, to the end of the age." This is where Opening Day means there's another game tomorrow, and the next day, and so on. Easter's not over; the season is just getting started.

Maybe the point of Easter is about our job to bear witness, to testify. We receive that commission no matter where we are, no matter how big or how small, how important or unimportant. Whether anybody saw it or not, Christ is still risen and still calls us to bear witness, whether we're in the big leagues or the minors.

Easter is not the end of anything. It's Opening Day. The season is just getting started.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #232, Jesus Christ is Risen Today; #233, The Day of Resurrection; #511, Come, Behold! The Feast of Heaven; #239, Good Christians All, Rejoice and Sing!

 

 

 Opening Day, April 4, 1974. To be fair, Aaron did get the next game off. 

 

Homily: The In-Between

First Presbyterian Church

April 4, 2026, Holy Saturday A

Lamentations 3:1-9, 19-24; John 19:38-42

 

The In-Between

 

 

It isn't often we hear the kind of desperate, unadulterated, almost unhinged kind of lamentation we hear in this reading from the book of Lamentations. And yet, with the gospels remaining resolutely silent about anything on this day between the awful Good Friday and the terrifying morning of Easter Sunday, this depths-plumbing wail of suffering and, well, lament isn't the worst possibility for filling that gap.

Friday ends with the unexpected disciple Joseph of Arimathea and the unexpected sympathizer Nicodemus showing up to perform a nearly-royal burial on Jesus's body, in Joseph's own tomb at that. The narrative then goes silent until the morning of the first day of the week, when (in John's gospel at least) Mary Magdalene shows up by herself, waiting for who knows what.

What Mary Magdalene, along with Peter and the other disciples and fellow travelers might have noticed on that day in between was that the world did not stop for their grief. Just as the world is not stopping for this small observance today, just as traffic on 7th Street never stops, the world keeps doing what it normally does. Faithful Jews are not necessarily out and about because it's the Sabbath. The Romans? They're probably doing what they usually do most days: either whatever their commander tells them to do, or whatever they want. Aside from being Sabbath, it's just another day out there.

You have to wonder if these words from Lamentations came to mind for Jesus's followers on this day. Imagine Peter, three times verbally and quite loudly having denied Jesus, alone somewhere in his grief. Not to let the other disciples off the hook; at least Matthew's account makes sure we know they "deserted" Jesus, just as he said they would. For Mary Magdalene and the other women, who followed Jesus and might well have provided for the whole party out of their own resources, the one man they knew who treated them as fully human was now dead. Where could they possibly turn to now?

And yet, in even this bleakest abyss of despair, our lamenter can't avoid hope; "but this I call to mind...the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end...". You have to wonder if any of the disciples or followers of Jesus managed to have even a tiny bit of such a moment on that bleakest of Sabbaths.

For this day, Jesus was dead. We of course know what happens tomorrow morning, but for this day, Jesus was dead.

This is our day, you know, the in-between day in which we live our lives. We have seen Good Friday happen; we know Easter Sunday is coming (or at least we're about to go decorate the church for Easter Sunday, so we're acting like it's coming), but it doesn't take much of a look-around to see that we don't live in an Easter world. And our headlines remind us that some of the worst anti-Easter things out there are being done or endorsed by religious authorities and those who seek their protection, and those day-after followers of Jesus would recognize that as well.

And in this dark in-between, our Lamentations reading amazingly offers the word of hope for the day: "the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end...". Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Sermon: Remember Me

First Presbyterian Church

April 2, 2026, Maundy Thursday A

Matthew 26:26-30; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26

 

Remember Me

 

 

I have very distinct memories of the Lord’s Supper, when I was a child, looking for all the world like a funeral service. Table (and all the elements on it) covered in a shroud, the church’s deacons (no elders in that denomination), all male, dressed in black and looking exactly like pallbearers at a funeral…the only reason I didn’t immediately think of it this way was because, at that young an age, I hadn’t been to enough funerals to know. When I finally did see a couple of funerals and then saw the Lord’s Supper in church on a Sunday looking pretty much the same, I honestly think I was scarred just a little bit. It might have been worse if we’d had it more than four times a year.

Since then I have studied enough history to know that such presentation of the Lord’s Supper was not only common, it even came with official backing in at least one of the ancestor denominations to the PC(USA); its Book of Order described and prescribed exactly that kind of setup for the table, even to the point of how the shroud was to be folded when removed, and how it was to be replaced over the elements when the Supper was done. This was as far back, if I remember correctly, as 1796. There is a long history of treating the Lord’s Supper primarily as a memorial.

At this point in my life and ministry I can no longer believe that’s precisely what Jesus was going for here, as recounted by Paul in what we now know as the Words of Institution.

As Paul describes the scene (in what is our earliest written account of it), Jesus performs the acts we know – breaking the bread, filling the cup – and marks each one with the appropriate theological significance – “my body that is for you,” “the new covenant in my blood.” But then what does he say? “Do this in remembrance of my sacrifice”? “Do this in remembrance of my death”? “Do this in remembrance of what’s going to happen tomorrow?”

No. “Do this in remembrance of me.”

“Do this in remembrance of me.” Remember me. Remember the one who journeyed with you all around Galilee and Judea. Remember the one who taught you, who sent you out to preach and teach and heal. Remember me, the one with whom you shared so many meals at so many tables. The one who lived with you all these years.

Later in this same letter Paul will take issue with some in the Corinthian church who somehow doubt that Christ was ever raised from the dead.  It is one of the most impassioned parts of this epistle, and in the end Paul finally goes so far as to declare that “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (15:17), and even further, “if for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (15:19).  But then the good news: “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died” (15:20).

Even back in our words of institution, Jesus instructs his disciples that in the sharing of this bread and cup, we do “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (11:26). If all we have to show here is Jesus’s funeral, if what happened in this meal and then in the garden and finally on Golgotha is all there is to the story, then we really are kinda hopeless, aren’t we?

Do this in remembrance of me. Remember me.

The animated film Coco understands what power memory has. The young boy at the center of the story, who accidentally journeys into the Land of the Dead of Mexican folklore, is in the end rushing back from that land to be at the side of his "mama Coco"; as she is slowly fading, her memories slipping away, the boy sings to her a song that her own father had sung to her as a young child, before leaving the family to try to provide for them as a musician - a journey on which he ends up being murdered, unbeknownst to his family. That song had been made famous by the man who murdered her father and stole the song, presenting it as his own and becoming famous. But in these final moments, as the boy sings her father’s song haltingly to his mama Coco, the first sparks of life come to her face. (Any good music therapist will tell you that music can sometimes do this.) Her fingers begin to move, almost imperceptibly; her eyes open, ever so slowly; in the end, her own halting voice joins with the boy’s to finish the song, as she smiles for possibly the first time in years:

Remember me, though I have to travel far
Remember me, each time you hear a sad guitar
Know that I’m with you the only way that I can be
Until you’re in my arms again
Remember me

 

In this supper, in this bread and this cup passed among us, broken however imperfectly and maybe spilled a little bit, we remember Jesus, the whole life, the whole word, and in that remembering we are brought to new life, given a song to sing, a smile amid the tears of the everyday; we live in this testimony of the Christ who is coming again, and in whose life is our life.

Do this and remember.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Notes on the Services for Holy Week

A few notes on the services for Holy Week at First Presbyterian Church of East Moline:

 

Thursday, April 2, 6:00 p.m.: Agape meal with communion, FPC East Moline library/meeting room

The early Christians gathered for services of worship and instruction which also included a community meal. While Christian converts from Judaism might have remembered the observance of Passover, Gentile converts were more likely to be familiar with the symposium, or banquet, and as the church spread out and became more far-flung and less focused on Jerusalem and Judea, this model was quickly adapted and fitted to Christian practice and tradition.

In addition to the meal itself, one or more teachers or evangelists would speak at such events. The remembrance of Jesus's last supper with his disciples was quickly adapted to all such gatherings, not only those for commemoration of an event like Maundy Thursday.

This meal will seek to capture the spirit, if not the actual form of such meals, with the message reminding us of Jesus's time with his disciples and how we best put into practice Jesus's instruction to "do this in remembrance of me."

 

Friday, April 3, 12:00 noon, Good Friday service, First Presbyterian Church, Milan

We are invited to join our siblings in the faith for observance of this holy day of the church year.

 

Saturday, April 4, 12:00 noon, Holy Saturday observance, the labyrinth at FPC East Moline

Weather permitting, we will commemorate the day Christ was in the tomb. Scripture, song, and a brief spoken meditation will be includedm as well as time for silent meditation and prayer. Those who are present will be invited to walk the labyrinth as part of your time here. (If weather does not permit we will gather in the sanctuary.

This is not an Easter Vigil. On this occasion we mark the fact that was indeed dead and buried, something that can often feel glossed over or rushed through to get to Easter Sunday. Participants are invited to take the time to consider the depths to which our Savior descended to reach us.

 

Sunday, April 5, 10:00 a.m., Easter Sunday service 

Traditional Sunday service for Easter Sunday, including communion. Also this year, the church's confirmation class will be presented as they begin their confirmation studies. 

 

We hope to see you at one or more or even all of these services.

 

Rev. Freeman

 

 

 

Sermon: The Saddest and Holiest Joke

First Presbyterian Church

March 29, 2026, Palm Sunday A

Matthew 21:1-17

 

The Saddest and Holiest Joke

 

 

It is common to hear the event described in today's gospel reading as Jesus "Triumphal Entry" into Jerusalem. Your Bible itself, if it's the type that includes section headings amidst the text, may give this passage exactly that heading.

What isn't exactly clear, however, is whether a disinterested observer of the event would have seen it quite that way.

The novelist, spiritual writer, and Presbyterian pastor Frederick Buechner made, in his collection Telling the Truth, a rather challenging observation about Jesus’s parables. Instead of the grave Repositories of Inviolable Sacred Truth we tend to make of them, Buechner wonders if they might have been something else, something much more bracing and vivid:

I suspect that Jesus spoke many of his parables as a kind of sad and holy joke and that that may be part of why he seemed reluctant to explain them because if you have to explain a joke, you might as well save your breath. I don't mean jokes for the joke's sake, of course. I don't mean the kind of godly jest the preacher starts his sermon with to warm people up and show them that despite his Geneva tabs or cassock he can laugh with the rest of them and is as human as everybody else. I mean the kind of joke Jesus told when he said it is harder for a rich person to enter Paradise than for a Mercedes to get through a revolving door, harder for a rich person to enter Paradise than for Nelson Rockefeller to get through the night deposit slot of the First National City Bank.

 

Buechner concludes:

 

It seems to me that more often than not the parables can be read as high and holy jokes about God and about man and about the Gospel itself as the highest and holiest joke of them all. 

 

I hope that the late Rev. Buechner will forgive me for borrowing and extending his metaphor beyond its original context. Actually, I hope he might agree that given such a setup, perhaps the saddest and holiest joke of Jesus’s earthly ministry, the one with the most outlandish setup and the most tragic punchline, is the event being commemorated today on the church’s calendar, the one known as Palm Sunday, and yes, the one often described as Jesus's "Triumphal Entry" into Jerusalem.

That’s hard for us to grasp; most years our churches have turned it into something quite different, after all, with our waving palms and big processionals and putting the children all out front. But when you get right down to it, this was a pretty meager affair, especially considered against the spectacles promoted and perfected by the occupiers of Judea at this time, the Romans.

Now, the Romans knew from spectacle and were quite proficient at putting on a "triumphal entry." Rank upon rank of Roman horsemen riding the finest horses, banners flying, making absolutely clear you knew who was in power here (them) and who was not (you); a great place of honor for the chief figure of the procession, whether the commander of this unit or the political figure being honored, as might be the case when they were entering Jerusalem from Caesarea Philippi, the principal seat of Roman governance for the region. (A modern version of such a parade would no doubt includes soldiers marching in a crisp unison, a military band, and possibly some cannons or antiaircraft guns, or even a tank or two if the road could handle it.) As Caesarea Philippi was nearer to the coast, such processions would have entered Jerusalem from its western-facing gate, where this impromptu processional likely came from the east.

Had any Roman been sent out to investigate this suspicious activity, it is hard to imagine he’d have been all that impressed. The assembled crowd very likely did not consist of any “important” people; some of whom apparently didn’t have cloaks to spread out and were therefore committing vandalism to cut branches from the trees to spread on the road; the apparent guest of honor was some anonymous-looking rustic riding not on a fine horse, but a donkey (and apparently a borrowed donkey at that), with a donkey's colt also somehow involved. The shouting of the crowd about some “son of David” probably didn’t make much sense to our random Roman investigator (though a Jewish observer would have been much more intrigued by the claim of this man as “son of David”), and it's not likely he actually knew what the word "hosanna" meant (literally, it means "save us"). Likely this hypothetical Roman would have reported back to his superiors that it was a pretty pathetic display, and not any kind of threat, but perhaps one to keep an eye on just in case.

The city of Jerusalem did have a bit more reaction, though, as Matthew describes Jerusalem as being “in turmoil.” Again, though, it’s not clear just how impressive the little parade was to them; a bunch of unsavory characters shouting about this prophet what’s-his-name from the backwater province of Galilee, as they might have described it. Who the heck is this? is probably the best way to describe the reaction in Jerusalem proper.

If this is a sad and holy joke, to return to Frederick Buechner’s image, we’re still waiting for the punchline at the end of this processional, and that might be the saddest and holiest part. But there was more to come that day.

Jesus went next to the Temple, and as we hear in verses 12-13, some moneychangers got their tables flipped and some potential sacrificial animals got set free. This story is told in all four gospels, although John's account puts it very near the beginning of Jesus's ministry instead of near the end.

The church doesn't always want to hear this story. We are prone to live according to definitions of "peace" that mean nothing beyond "preserving the status quo."  But we need to hear this story and we particularly need to hear Matthew's telling of this story because of what happens next, in verses 14-17.

When the moneychangers and animal handlers are put to flight, there are still others in the Temple; poor ones, unable to walk or unable to see, came to Jesus as best as they could, and Jesus healed them. Between this and the children there taking up the cry from the processional, "Hosanna to the Son of David," the Temple had become a joyous place indeed. It echoes Mary's words from the Magnificat, about how "he has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich empty away."

This is, of course, quite the opposite of how any wannabe king or emperor would have conducted himself on such an occasion, as if that hadn't already been made clear by Jesus's mode of entering Jerusalem.

By our time, of course, the Palm Sunday procession has acquired a very different sheen, mostly because we know who this seemingly unimpressive backwater prophet is after all, and we can’t help but read ahead and view this parade not from the point of view of the sad and holy punchline to the sad and holy joke, but to the surprise plot twist that follows what was supposed to be the end of the story. That plot twist (we mark it next Sunday) is what makes us what we are, after all, why we take the name of that prophet as our name, why we in our fumbling and sometimes inept ways try to live as if we really do follow that prophet who rode into Jerusalem on that humble donkey from the side of town opposite the power structure that really ran everything. That plot twist is why this saddest and holiest joke of a sort even gets retold.

For today, though, maybe it is enough to see this parade as it is, a little bit shabby-looking and kind of strange, amusing to the political power structure and maybe a bit agitating to the religious structure. Maybe it can also help to remember that what follows the sad and holy joke is disrupting and healing and joyful and flies in the face of anything the empire and its religious supplicants want. to lord over us.

So the joke turns out to be on that hypothetical Roman observer, so bound to and caught up in his world’s way of seeing power that the greatest power of all slipped by him completely unnoticed. We’d do well not to fall into his trap, and yet so often we are; we get swayed by those selling and preaching the most unholy things in the name of this very Jesus at that. It is one of the great challenges of our time to stand faithful and not to be deluded by the displays of "power" and "strength" paraded before us daily, and instead to remember where, and with whom, our ultimate hope lies.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal); #196, All Glory, Laud, and Honor; #---, Prepare the way, O people; #199, Filled with Excitement; #---, Still cloaks and branches scattered; #197, Hosanna, Loud Hosanna; #199, Ride On! Ride On in Majesty

Sermon: Can These Bones Live?

First Presbyterian Church, East Moline, IL

March 22, 2026, Lent 5A

Ezekiel37:1-14; Psalm 130; John 11:1-45

 

Can These Bones Live?

 

 

You might be caught off guard by the tone of that psalm we read earlier.

It's a psalm, at least until those last two verses, that is about as frankly bleak and despair-laden as anything you might see in scripture. That opening phrase - "Out of the depths" - has proven awfully alluring for many kinds of artists seeking to portray a state of despair or darkness. It shows up on four different Sundays in the Revised Common Lectionary, has been set to music many times (sometimes under its Latin heading "De profundis"), and has inspired writers such as Elizabeth Barret Browning, Oscar Wilde, Federico Garcia Lorca, and C.S. Lewis.

It's probably not an accident that this psalm is paired with these two scriptures offered up for the church on this fifth Sunday of Lent, readings that come a little bit like a slap in the face (or maybe a slap in the faith) at this time of the liturgical year. Both of them have the temerity to offer up, two solid weeks before the observance of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, stories of new life being brought to that which was dead. "Out of the depths," indeed.

The obvious move, the one most pastors I know are likely making, would probably be to go to John’s account of Jesus’s raising of Lazarus. After all, that’s a whopper of a reading, both in terms of its sheer length (forty-five verses!) and the impact it has on the story of Jesus’s earthly ministry. Honestly, one of these years I might be tempted to take this story and break it up over the first five weeks of Lent; I honestly think there might be about five sermons in there.

You get Jesus dawdling about going to see Lazarus, and he gets a bit of what-for over that - "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." You get what was in the KJV the shortest verse in the Bible – “Jesus wept” (every kid I knew was quick to claim that as one of their "memory verses" in Sunday school). You get the warning that if Jesus really goes through with having the tomb opened after four days, it would, well, smell, as un-embalmed bodies do after a while, even today. You get, above all, Lazarus coming out of the tomb. If you push later into John's gospel, you find that his raising of Lazarus is part of why the religious authorities are so intent on getting rid of Jesus. There's so much possibility in this account, and I have no doubt that a lot of those sermons getting preached today are going to be about the best sermons that those preacher friends of mine are going to preach this season.

But I still can’t look away from Ezekiel’s story, the one that prompted James Weldon Johnson to create the song "Dry Bones" and get his brother to set it to music.

Ezekiel is, to put it in modern vernacular, one messed-up dude. He was a priest in Jerusalem who got carried away in the first wave of exile to Babylon, when the occupying forces chose only to “cut off the head” of Jerusalem – that is, take away its leaders, including its religious leaders. The puppet king installed after this turned out not to be quite such a puppet after all, and when he stopped paying tribute the Babylonians returned and destroyed the city.

This experience seems to have taken a particular toll on Ezekiel. Ezekiel was most likely, in modern terms, a victim of psychological trauma, most likely resulting in what we would call clinical depression. The outlandish nature of some of his visions (including this one), some of his prophetic behaviors that make even Jeremiah look tame by comparison, and his sometimes-extreme tone in calling out his people and their kings for their sinfulness and rebellion suggest a man who would at minimum be deep into therapy in modern times, if not something more intense.

And it is to this broken, traumatized old priest that God brings this deeply creepy, and yet deeply hopeful, vision of death being raised up into new life. Actually, that’s not quite right. This isn’t Lazarus still more or less in one piece just waiting for the call. This is not mere death; this is a destroyed, desiccated, disassembled, dehydrated kind of death, way beyond any kind of haunted house or Hollywood horror movie. And before this scene of absolute lifelessness, God asks old messed-up Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these bones live?”

There’s a lot of wisdom in Ezekiel’s answer: “O Lord God, you know.” God was clearly up to something, and Ezekiel (perhaps all the more because of his trauma) had the wit not to get in the way. God gives Ezekiel the command to “prophesy to these bones,” and maybe only someone who had seen too much, someone as broken and hurting as Ezekiel, could take such a command seriously enough to carry it out. He does, and behold, the bones find their way back to each other, they take on all the tissue and flesh that had long ago dried up and rotted away, and there are…bodies.

Not people, not yet: just bodies, bodies that were reconstructed and whole, but “there was no breath in them” – no wind, no spirit. It’s not quite like in the account from John, in which after Jesus called to Lazarus he was indeed alive, but still all bound up in the burial cloths in which he had been wrapped. Lazarus needed release; he still needed to be cut loose from the old trappings of death that still clung to him. These bodies in front of Ezekiel still needed breath, spirit, life itself. They aren't just dried-out old bones anymore, but there is still no life in them.

So, of course, God tells Ezekiel to “prophesy to the breath.” Ezekiel obeyed (what else was he going to do at this point?), and from “the four winds” came the breath that breathed life into these lifeless bodies. As Ezekiel recounts it, they stood up, a “vast multitude,” waiting.

Waiting. Is that where we are?

Verses 11-14 bring Ezekiel's bizarre experience home. In this vision, for that is what all this has been, those dried-up bones are nothing less than God's people, the ones conquered and exiled and occupied and crushed and living without any kind of hope whatsoever. All that Ezekiel has been commanded to do before the valley of the dry bones, God will do for God's people, says God to Ezekiel. It's not just about the bones taking on flesh; it's about the breath, the spirit, being placed within them. It's about being brought back to life again.

That message of hope has come through across the centuries, not least as that previously mentioned song that connected to the still-developing civil rights movement in the United States in the early twentieth century. In the early 1920s the great poet and dramatist and author James Weldon Johnson seized upon this story to evoke a movement that was itself still coming together, complete with lyrics about the foot bone connecting to the heel bone and the heel bone connecting to the ankle bone and you know how the rest of it goes. His brother Rosamond Johnson created the tune, and the rest is history (it certainly got altered in later years).

So, where are we in this trio of readings? Are we the psalmist, reduced to crying "out of the depths" but still waiting on the Lord despite it all, still not quite letting go of hope? Are we Lazarus, newly alive again but waiting to be freed from the bonds that keep us from moving and doing? Are we Martha and Mary complaining that Jesus didn't come quickly enough? Are we the dried old bones, without hope? Are we the reassembled bodies made physically whole but without breath, without spirit? Are we the newly breathing and living, standing ready, waiting for whatever God calls us to do?

Or, maybe, are we Ezekiel? Seen too much, been broken too much in too many places by too many things? Are we too broken to hope even a little bit, and yet so broken that we have nothing left to do but hope? Are we so broken that the moment we see or hear any little thing, any sign or word from God, we're going to cling to as if our lives depend on it, because maybe they do? Can we respond, along with the old prophet, with that kind of obedience to the most ridiculous or insane-sounding commands (I mean, really, "prophesy to these bones"?)? Are we desperate enough for that?

Or are we still too sure of ourselves, too much in control, too "sane" to think that any such outlandish (and kind of gruesome) command of God could be real? Are we too much "good church folk" to find a thing to hold on to in such horrific scenes, to hear God, to hear any word from God in such bizarre circumstances?

“Mortal, can these bones live?” “O Lord God, you know.” Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise indicated): #424, Out of the Depths; #---, Rise Up; #286, Breathe on Me, Breath of God