Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA
Lectionary readings of the day.
It’s been a hot week! 90 degrees in Northern California in March. Which is its own kind of omen. But I’m glad to see y’all made it through.
Yes, this is me doing small talk. Talking about the weather. Because I don’t want to talk about the real thing. But it’s Lent. So here we go...
Last week we learned that Cesar Chavez — labor icon, farmworker champion, an iconic name on street signs and schools and holidays across this state — was exposed as a serial abuser of women and girls. Dolores Huerta, the woman who built the movement beside Chavez for decades, came forward at age 94 to name what he did to her. Two other women came forward with similar allegations from when they were teenagers.
Immediately, we saw the response from the Latino community. Statues were covered in black sheets. Murals were painted over. They were left holding the crumbled pieces of a story they thought was rock solid.
The grief in this is real. The movement he helped build was real. He changed the lives of countless farmworkers for the better. We can hold all of that. But this week, it feels like sin has the last word. Though the wound feels fresh, the bones are very dry. This is an old story that goes back decades.
It can feel embarrassing to let ourselves feel hope in the aftermath of something like this. And this kind of thing isn’t unusual anymore. We live in an age of relentless deconstruction. Every institution is suspect. Every hero is provisional. Every narrative is waiting to be unraveled.
Now, cynicism isn’t stupid. People lie. And it’s people who make up institutions. But when it happens repeatedly, it gets really old. To continually be hurt by people and institutions that are supposed to protect us. To feel betrayed by stories that are supposed to hold us.
So the cynical response is honest. The feeling that nothing means anything. That old stories are just wishful thinking. That hope is embarrassing, naïve, cringe.
But nihilism is its own tomb. We can’t live there. Deconstruction is honest, but it isn’t a home. We are storied creatures. Homo narrans, the storytelling animal. We cannot survive without a story to live inside. The question is never whether we’ll have a story. The question is which story we’ll have.
And what happens when we keep putting the weight on human beings to hold up our stories; on charismatic figures or anyone or any group made of flesh and blood? It crushes them. And it crushes us when they fall.
So, I don’t think we just need a better hero. We need a better story to have hold us.
So let’s talk about one...
God sets Ezekiel down in a valley. Full of bones. Very dry bones (the text is insistent about the deadness of these bones). This isn’t a fresh tragedy. It’s been going on a long time. This is the Babylonian exile; a nation erased. A temple destroyed, land gone, people scattered. The story isn’t from the comfortable perspective of an empire scrolling sadly through the feeds on their phones like us. It’s written from the wasteland. In the aftermath of invasion. From the place where sin and violence and betrayal have had their way.
“Our bones are dried up. Our hope is lost. We are cut off completely.”
And God asks Ezekiel: Can these bones live?
Ezekiel doesn’t offer a cheap yes. He doesn’t perform optimism. He says: “O Lord God, you know.”
That might be the most spiritually honest sentence in Scripture. It holds the question without collapsing it into an answer. It refuses to pretend, and it refuses to despair.
Last week we talked about the man who was born blind and kept saying I don’t know, I don’t know — all I know is I was blind and now I see.
There’s a thread running through this Lenten season: the surrender of needing to have it figured out.
The German Rhineland mystics who inspired Martin Luther called it Gelassenheit (lovely German word), a releasing of the outcome into God. This isn’t defeatism or passivity. It’s just the most honest thing you can say when you’re standing in the valley knee deep in bones. And the love of God in Jesus makes us just that... Honest.
This is what it looks like to move through deconstruction without drowning in it...
Jesus arrives at the tomb of Lazarus knowing what he’s about to do. He’s just told Martha: I am the resurrection and the life. Right now, in his very person.
And then he sees Mary weeping. The crowd wept with her. And the text says he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. And then verse 35, the shortest verse in the Bible:
Jesus wept.
Jesus wept knowing what he was about to do. Which means those tears aren’t helplessness.
I grew up seeing God as a distant unmoved mover in the sky. But that’s not what we get in Jesus.
In Jesus, we see a God who did not have to feel this, and felt it anyway. He isn’t an algorithm. Or a sky fairy dispensing cash and prizes to the sufficiently faithful. He isn’t another charismatic hero climbing to popularity and power. He descends into the valley of dry bones... Walks to the sealed stone... Stands in the stench and the grief. And weeps on purpose.
This isn’t an ideological hero (aka an idol). This is Emmanuel — God with us — in the valley, at the tomb, choosing to feel the weight of it. With you. Right now. Because you have your own dry bones. You sit in front of your own sealed tomb. Whatever that is.
This Jesus is who this story asks you to trust your life to.
And then he speaks. Lazarus, come out. The command goes out to a dead man carried along in the breath of Jesus, the breath of God. The same breath (ruach) that animated the resurrected bones in Ezekiel is the same one that moves through the voice of Jesus. The animating breath (wind, spirit) arrives from outside the closed system. The bones have no role in their own resurrection... and yet they aren’t nothing. They’re just dead enough to stop grasping, managing, generating life on their own terms. Empty enough to receive what they were made for. To inhale what the Creator exhales.
I will open your graves.
Not if you believe hard enough. Or when you’ve done the work. Or when the heroes stop disappointing you. Just... I will. First person, unconditional, already spoken over the valley. Over the tomb. Over whatever you carried in here this morning that you haven’t told anyone about. Over every place where sin feels like it has the last word.
It doesn’t. That’s the whole story. That’s what we’re here to say.
Next Sunday is Palm Sunday. We begin the long walk into Holy Week — the arrest, the trial, the cross, the sealed stone. You’re going to be invited, over these next days, to let this ancient and impossible story have its way with you again. Not to believe it the way you believe a news article. And not to dismiss it the way you dismiss a fairy tale. But to do what Ezekiel did: stand in the valley, eyes open, and say O Lord God, you know. To let the story choose you because it’s true. Because it’s honest about the darkness. Because it doesn’t ask you to pretend.
In a few minutes we’ll do what we always do. We’ll come to this table. Bread and wine. The simplest, most ordinary-looking thing imaginable. No spectacle. No hero. Just the promise that the One who wept at the tomb is present here, for you, right now. That the ruach is still moving. That the graves are still being opened.
And you’re not holding this alone.