Advent Lungs
A sermon brought forth from Ezekiel 37:1-14 and Luke 1:57-80 preached on Sunday, December 5, 2021
In a valley gorged on dead men's bones,
With femurs and skulls twixt sticks and stones,
A graveyard prophet with Spirit breath
Exhaled a sermon that buried death.
He preached to the bones, strewn on the ground,
And crept to his ears a rattling sound.
Dismembered corpses earless to hear
Heard their living Creator draw near.
Socket to socket the bones re-wed,
Flesh-packed and skin-wrapped from toe to head.
He preached to the winds, “Breathe on these slain!”
From heaven's high lungs, life they obtained.
They stood on their feet, the Father's host,
Alive in the Son and Holy Ghost.
When hopes grow brittle and life's a grave,
The Lord of heaven's alive to save.
Heaven's High Lungs by Chad L. Bird
For the last few Sundays, we’ve reached back to the prophets of the Old Testament—Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah—to hear their Spirit-infused proclamations administered to a breathless Israelite people living in lonely exile in Babylon and beyond. The breath of God, the very same presence that blew like wind over the surface of creation’s waters, animated his prophets, gave them the full Advent lungs they needed to declare God’s truth to his wayward people.
It’s too small to say that the prophets of ancient Israel simply spoke for God or delivered divine messages to their fellow Israelites on behalf of God. That doesn’t get at it. Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel were God-infused and Spirit-responsive. But all around them, their fellow Israelites had run out of lungs. They had no vitality. They had become spiritless and weary. The exiled people of God had forgotten what God had promised them. They were languishing because of it.
Whenever a prophet like Ezekiel or Jeremiah opened his mouth, they administered a sort of spiritual CPR. They were the ones still breathing in God’s spirit, and whenever they arrived at the scene, they immediately took to reviving God’s barren people. The Hebrew prophets were those who dared to live in dynamic response to God. They were tuned into the holy. Every message from their mouths was an animated word from a breathing God delivered to a bone-weary and breathless people.
Often, their lifegiving efforts to the spirit-withered, the vanishing, and the perishing did not take because while God’s message can be imparted, it cannot be imposed. People who seek to justify their desires, rationalize their actions, or blame others for their own messed have already made themselves into their own gods. They live in answer to their personal needs, then they wonder why they fall into ruin, find themselves in exile. That’s a lonely existence, void of both hope and peace.
On the surface, Biblical peace can mean the absence of conflict, but true Biblical peace requires taking what’s broken within, around, and about us and restoring it to wholeness. Ezekiel and the many prophets before and after him had their work cut out for them. There were many broken Israelites who had no ears to hear. Most of what the prophets had to say fell to the ground unwelcomed and unheard.
Wherever God’s people lost themselves, God offers them another way and sends messengers to help them wake up to God. Prophets are those who borrow God’s hope and offer it to their own. Hope’s message is that within every one of our endings, we can find one of God’s beginnings. With our Creator God, there’s always another genesis, another Advent. Old and dried-out bones can rattle together again, take on tendons then flesh, and come into being. But nothing is truly alive until God breathes Himself into it.
“Son of man,” says God to the prophet Ezekiel, “can these bones live?”
What Ezekiel says in reply is more confession than declaration of faith.
“Sovereign Lord, You alone know.”
In his reply, Ezekiel was aware enough, hopeful enough, to hear the invitation within God’s question. Ezekiel wouldn’t dare offer an answer. So, rather than settle for what he imagined possible, Ezekiel’s responded in a way that left room for God to bring forth something better. Something holy.
Ezekiel knew that if there was a way, only God could bring it about. That’s an Advent conviction. Ezekiel was an Advent prophet. Who could ever look out on a wilderness landscape full of dried-out bones as far as the eye can see and imagine a beginning? Standing in the open grave of his own people, Ezekiel could only see an ending. Only God can bring about new creation.
Father Zechariah was rendered mute for 9 months. This was a God-imposed silence—unwelcomed by Zechariah, but necessary. Through that season of voicelessness, God meant for something new to come alive inside of Zechariah. See, both he and his wife, Elizabeth, were barren. Elizabeth’s barrenness was physical, but her husband’s was of a deeper, far more troubling, spiritual sort. Much more of a threat to God than Elizabeth’s. So, God made plans to birth something new within both. Before Zechariah could be a father to someone so central to God’s salvation story as John, this old priest had much to unlearn. There was much within him that needed to be remade. Transformed, really.
The prophet Elijah discovered that God’s still, small voice can easily be drowned out by the self-made storms that surrounded him. If it can happen to Elijah, it could happen to Zechariah. The stature and respectability that came along with being a Levite priest were self-inflicted. Zechariah was ripe for spiritual wreckage.
My guess is that Zechariah was occupied by so many drowsy, stale, and shopworn God-assertions there wasn’t anywhere left inside of him for a living God to speak into. He got so used to church that he lost sight of the One who was forever breathing the church into existence. This is an enduring and vexing vocational hazard, but it can happen to anyone whose mind and mouth are more active than their trust in God is.
God struck Zechariah silent because Zechariah’s own ideas about God were getting in the way of his ability to hear from God. Zechariah needed an intervention. A divine intervention. We all do from time to time. The Advent that God was bringing into being required far more room inside Zechariah than Zechariah was willing to make.
So, just as God saw Mother Elizabeth through nine months of pregnancy, God tended to Zechariah in his nine months of muteness. In both, through both, God was determined to bring about something new. Zechariah needed new lungs—God-responsive and Spirit-infused lungs.
Father Zechariah stands in for you, and me, and all of God’s people who long for that fuller Advent when God will arrive among His people to cast out what’s dark and lifeless, breathless and brittle, deliver us from our bone-dry ways, and revive His people. Nothing is truly alive until God breathes Himself into it.
Advent is a season for expanding our lung capacity. It’s here to open our airways. In these days, God wants us to delight in the slow and faithful work of expectation. It too comes with its strange and sudden pains, but it gives way to new life. God says to His people,
“I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.’”
May God use this pregnant season before Christ’s arrival to remove from within us what’s withered and weary. And may we create a place within us for strong Advent lungs.
All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful! Alleluia! Amen.