Can these bones live?

I've been visiting there for 30 years, and the hospital and its ancillary buildings and supporting organizations have grown like a bad weed with multiple seeds.

It makes our local hospital expansion look like small potatoes.

Why have the hospitals grown so massively large?

Is it because this is the most important way in which our society has chosen to deal with the fear of dying, our permanent dread?

It seems that instead of using our best and finest to honor God and inspire devotion and faith,

is perhaps our society engaged in a new tower of Babel to build up our own futile effort to exert power over death?

The first-rank glass and marble temples in this time and place seem to be the hospitals.

Of course we will make use of the medical care that is available to us, but there is more to life than medical care alone.

[A further observation:

if controlling death doesn't work, the next tactic is to distract ourselves from it by way of sports and entertainment:

--Beaver Stadium seats 110,000 or so.

--amusement theme parks continue to grow despite the troubled economy.

--and for adult children there is the false reality of Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

Does all of this go right along with all of the lotions and potions we use in a vain attempt to preserve a youth that is past?

We are so anxious about so many things, and deal with that anxiety in less than fruitful ways.]

Did we notice that Jesus' first response to the news that Lazarus was ill was quite different from what we might have said?

Jesus commented: “This illness does not lead to death, rather it is for God's glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

Jesus is neither angry, dismayed, nor distraught.

He will deal with illness and death in due course.

But the whole situation will somehow point out the glory of God, in a way that the disciples cannot at that time discern.

We need to ponder that sentence again:

the whole situation with Lazarus and illness and death and grieving family will somehow point out the glory of God, in a way that the disciples cannot at that time discern.

We are familiar with an attitude that sickness and mortality are evils and bad things against which we are to struggle; not often do we consider that God may use that situation for positive purposes.

But that is a good attitude which we find in one of the first stories in scripture.

On Wednesday noon and evening prayers this week we remembered the culmination of the Joseph cycle in Genesis 50, where Joseph tells his stunned and powerless brothers What you did to me you meant for evil, but God meant it for good, in order to preserve the lives of your families through me.

What an amazing, unexpected, and grace-filled attitude!

God was making something good happen out of an evil situation.

We get at it another way with a question raised in the First Lesson today.

The Lord asks Ezekiel, Can these bones live?

The prophet responds: O Lord, you know.

It is not an evasive answer, but is merely the best place to start our understanding of the situation.

It is acknowledging that ultimately, we're not the ones in charge of all that is:

the Lord God is the source of life, not ourselves, thus he knows what we do not.

each step in the vision makes it clear that these bones, these dried up hopes, these dead and dying people

can do nothing by themselves.

The bones come together at the command of God.

They receive their breath from God.

Their renewed purpose is to do God's will.

The vision of Ezekiel is to give refreshed hope to the people of Israel in exile in Babylon.