March 22, 2026 - 5th Sunday in Lent - Ezekiel 37:1-14

Laurie and I have gotten to be friends with a guy who is a retired Navy SEAL. Each branch of the military has its elites, those guys who are just more skilled, more capable, more dedicated than the rest. Each branch also has the elites of the elites. Those are the guys who are just cut from a different cloth altogether, capable of things that the civilian world and most regular military personnel struggle to wrap their minds around. With around 1.3 million active duty military personnel across all branches of our military, there are less than three thousand Navy SEALS, making them among the most deadly soldiers in the world.

I say this because there’s a movie that came out several years ago entitled, “Lone Survivor” that is based on a true story of a particularly harrowing SEAL operation. The director was embedded with SEALs out in the field, even going on operations with them, in order to get a genuine sense of what SEAL life is like and how to tell the story without the usual Hollywood embellishment. Even more interesting is that the opening montage has a number of photos and video clips of SEALs going through their absolutely brutal training program that prepares them to be SEALs, a program that more than 80% of applicants never complete. One of the last pictures of this opening montage shows four guys standing together on a pier. They’re wet. They’re clearly tired, but their ecstatic. Their shiny SEAL trident pins are gleaming on their chests, marking them as men who have survived the training program and now are officially recognized as SEALs. The man standing on the right side of the screen is our friend.

Seeing him on the screen is a bit different than seeing him today. We didn’t know him then, but I don’t get the impression his personality has changed all that much. From what we’ve gathered from others who have known him for a long time, he’s always been a kind and generous man, someone willing to lend a hand just because you need it.

It’s not that his personality has changed so much as that his body has. Sure, he’s not nearly as fit as he was 20+ years ago, but it’s a lot more than that. His body shows all of the evidence of the kind of life he’s led. He’s not a lot older than I am, but already he has joint and muscle problems from end to end. He needs hearing aids and he has more than a couple of scars.

I’m not surprised at all that he has these kinds of issues. When the military is throwing you into the worst places to deal with the worst problems over and over again, it’s just a matter of time before things start to break down. It’s basically what happens to all of us, his just might be moving along a little faster than the rest of us. The timeline is there for all of us. For some it’s longer, some shorter, but it all ends in the same place. Eventually it all falls apart and comes to nothing.

That’s where Ezekiel finds himself today. Not that he himself is dead, but there are a lot of people there who have met that end. A huge pile of lifeless bones lies in front of him. There’s not much to do with them. You might think Ezekiel would be surprised to be here. I would be. But, Ezekiel ends up dealing with a lot of rather bizarre things. This might not even rate in Ezekiel’s top five strangest things he’s seen and done. It shouldn’t really be all that strange anyway. This is all perfectly natural. Maybe not a big mass grave like this, but bones, bones of people long dead. Really, few things in life are more normal. We don’t tend to think about the dead who have gone before us unless we have some connection to them, relatives, friends, and maybe notable men and women of the past, but they’re all out there in the ground somewhere. Those we remember, and those long forgotten.

The particular group is a bit different, though. It isn’t just any people. These are the bones of God’s chosen people. These are the people, out of all of the people in the world, that he chose to dwell with personally. It wasn’t because they had deserved it or anything like that. Oddly, God chose them because they were the least deserving. Still, they were now special in a way no one else could claim. If anyone really understood who God was and what he was doing, they might be envious of the Israelites. There were plenty of people who did know and worship God throughout the ages who weren’t Israelites.

Their special status doesn’t seem to have helped them here though. They all still ended up in the same place, suffering the same fate. Dead and forgotten, lying here in a heap, nothing but bones.

The whole scene is pretty surreal. Ezekiel is told to prophesy to the bones. Normally, Ezekiel would have no power to do anything, but in this case, he speaks with God’s direct authority. The bones respond to he who made them. They float up and reassemble, like some kind of automated jigsaw puzzle. Each person’s bones find one another and fit back together as they had in life. Ligaments and tendons form, joining the bones to each other and to the muscles that grow on top of them. Organs reform as well, and then the whole body is covered with skin once again. God’s pronouncement to Adam and Eve after their transgression was that death would now be a natural consequence of their lives. “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” It’s that very consequence that we highlight especially on Ash Wednesday, a recognition of where we came from and where we return to.

Except this is all going backward. All humanity comes from dust. That’s how Adam was made and we’re all descended from him. We live for a while, and then return to dust. These people have all done that, but now they’re coming back again. That would be a pretty neat sight, but that seems to be all it is. They’re there. They’re all assembled, but something else is missing.

We look at ourselves and it doesn’t matter who you are, whether you’re always frail and sickly or whether you’re a Navy SEAL, you all end up in the same place. The problem isn’t with the body, but with the spirit. You don’t see your spirit. It just doesn’t work like that, but it isn’t any better shape than our bodies. Every sin we commit degrades it just a bit more. Every sin weakens it, corrodes it, breaks it down further. It was never perfect to begin with, but we continue to make it worse. An imperfect spirit can’t sustain our body. Like a battery that slowly runs dry, eventually it can’t keep up.

Looking at the Ezekiel reading here, you could stop after verse 8 and still have a profound miracle. Bones miraculously coming together in an orderly fashion and regrowing their flesh. That’s already something beyond human ability. It’s never happened before.

Ezekiel speaks the words given to him by God. Jesus speaks outside of the tomb four days after Lazarus died, long enough that the Jews believed the spirit had finally departed from the body. In both cases, the spirit returns to the body and their is life again.

In each case, God does something that no body builder or fitness nut could ever achieve. No yoga guru, no elite military man, no doctor could ever accomplish. To stop the decay of our bodies, something must first be done for the spirit that gives it life. What we see as inevitable, the decline of the body into eventual death, is one of the problems we all face. But, with all of the attention we give to our bodies, to our health and comfort, we neglect the other half of who we are.

We are not just a body, nor are we just a soul, a spirit. We are created as both together. Ezekiel’s job isn’t finished until he prophesies to the wind, the breath, the spirit, in Hebrew they’re all the same word. Breath enters the bodies and then, and only then, do they live.

God sees the plight of humanity after the Fall. God is not a man. He is not a physical being. He is not a creature like you and I. He is spiritual, living above and outside of his creation, except when he chooses to interact with it. With the first sin and now the inevitability of death, God chooses to do something about that, something to rescue his wayward creatures. The spiritual God takes on a physical body, human flesh. To deal with the death that comes not only for the body but also for the soul, God becomes man, soul and body together, to suffer and die that same death. He triumphs over the physical death we all see, and the spiritual death we so often ignore. Jesus became like us. Died like us, but then he rises again. He alone has the power to make us whole once more, to call us out of the grave, to breathe his spirit into us and make us live again.

Unless you see the true nature of the problem, you’ll never understand why Jesus went to the cross. He is more than a glorified doctor or miracle worker. He is the one with power over life and death, a power no one in this world, no matter how skilled or how fit, will ever have. Death is an enemy that cannot be defeated by any military. Death demands its due and its price must be paid. Through Christ, that price is paid and through him we live again.

Jesus makes a special point of explaining how the Spirit is active in baptism. The Spirit that gave life to Adam and Eve in the beginning is given to us once again. His Spirit in us, giving us his life. This is our assurance. The God who called the bones out of the grave through Ezekiel and who called Lazarus from the tomb will call us one day as well. We will not be empty bodies, but living and whole, perfect and glorified.

We look forward to the day when death will truly be behind us. While we wait in hopeful expectation, we look to the needs of our physical body, but we must not neglect the needs of our spirit either. We come to God for help with both, food and healing for the body, forgiveness and restoration for the soul. We look to him to learn how to lead better lives, so that our spirit can be as healthy as we are able to make it. We can’t avoid the inevitable death, but by working to live more Christ-like lives today, our lives now will be more at peace as we await our savior’s return. Hear his teaching. Listen to what he tells you about sin, about forgiveness, and about living as a restored creature. Don’t be slow to receive his gifts and receive the grace he gives. God is at work preparing you now to receive the greater restoration to come.