Sermon for March 31st, 2013

Ezekiel 36:26-28, 33-38

26A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. 28Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.

33 Thus says the Lord God: On the day that I cleanse you from all your iniquities, I will cause the towns to be inhabited, and the waste places shall be rebuilt. 34The land that was desolate shall be tilled, instead of being the desolation that it was in the sight of all who passed by. 35And they will say, ‘This land that was desolate has become like the garden of Eden; and the waste and desolate and ruined towns are now inhabited and fortified.’ 36Then the nations that are left all around you shall know that I, the Lord, have rebuilt the ruined places, and replanted that which was desolate; I, the Lord, have spoken, and I will do it.

37 Thus says the Lord God: I will also let the house of Israel ask me to do this for them: to increase their population like a flock. 38Like the flock for sacrifices, like the flock at Jerusalem during her appointed festivals, so shall the ruined towns be filled with flocks of people. Then they shall know that I am the Lord.

Resurrection Spirit

Over the past several months, I can't even begin to count the number of times someone has come up to me and talked about the "New Spirit" in the air here at First Presbyterian Church. Usually it's a member of our church, speaking from personal experience, but often it's someone from outside our community--a member or even a pastor of another church, who has heard about it from others, or participated in something we've done in the community.

I agree that there is a "new spirit" at work in our church. I feel it too. But when asked about the cause of that "new spirit" some people point to the new pastor, or now the new youth director, or some new program we've started. And I think that's a mistake. All these things, myself included, are not causes of a new spirit, but rather effects, results, or products of a new spirit. And that "new" spirit is really a very old spirit--God's Holy Spirit--which is simply doing a new thing, kind of like he did so long ago for the Ancient Israelites in today's scripture passage from Ezekiel:

"A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God."

So the "new spirit" is not because of the new pastor. Rather the "new pastor" is because of the new spirit." The Spirit was at work here before I was. But instead of asking "why" there is a new spirit here just yet (we'll come back to that question later), it might be helpful to ask "when." The word "new" by its very nature implies that something has changed, and recently, at that.

I don't know if I can pinpoint the exact time--God's spirit works through many people and situations all at once--but I can tell you when I first encountered it. Many of you have already heard this story, and knowing me, most of you will hear it a few more times after today, too.

It was Monday, July 11th, 2011 somewhere between two and three in the afternoon. Amy and I and the kids were here in El Paso visiting on summer break before my last year of seminary. Bob Reno was the pastor here at the time. I was getting ready for ordination exams later that summer, and so I came here every day to study in the church library. I had been studying all morning and needed a break, so I wandered into the sanctuary to pray for awhile. The air conditioning was off and it was pretty hot. I wandered up to the balcony, and stood for awhile at the top of the balcony, looking down at the empty pews. The wooden railing at the front of the balcony was dry and cracked, and as I prayed, I ran my hand over the wood, and I thought of the story of the dry bones in the book of Ezekiel. That image stuck with me, and so I came back downstairs and got out one of blue pew bibles, sat down, and turned to Ezekiel. The story of the dry bones is in chapter 37, but I never quite made it there, because my eyes came to a stop just a little before that point -- on the last two verses of chapter 36. I remembered this later, because I happened to be 36 years old at the time. This is what I read:

"Thus says the Lord God: I will also let the house of Israel ask me to do this for them: to increase their population like a flock. Like the flock for sacrifices, like the flock at Jerusalem during her appointed festivals, so shall the ruined towns be filled with flocks of people. Then they shall know that I am the Lord."

I knew immediately that it was a beautiful message, a promise not just for Ezekiel's Israel, but for First Presbyterian Church as well. A beautiful message...but...not my message. Someone else's message. I put away the bible, left the sanctuary and went back to the library. I had ordination exams to study for, and too many other things on my mind. Besides, I was a member of First Presbyterian Church at the time, but not the pastor. And besides...I had already informed God that I wanted to go into church planting...not church resurrection.

Funny how