Where is home?

     As The Story has progressed, home has been a significant theme.  From the start God's people have been seeking and searching for home: Adam and Eve after they were banished from the Garden; Abraham and Sarah after God asked them to leave their home and find a new one; Moses and the Israelites first slaves in Egypt and then wanderers in the dessert; the Israelites, once again, after they are conquered and exiled to far places by the Babylonians.
     Of course there was that happy time in between the wanderings when the people actually entered the Promised Land.  But in the course of history, the happiness of living in the Promised Land was relatively short.  The people were constantly at war, fighting with each other, not enjoying the peace of being home.
     Yet God promised Abraham, and if we have learned nothing else over the course of this series, it is that God always keeps God's promises.  After nearly 70 years in exile, the Babylonians are conquered by the Persians, and King Cyrus makes a way for the Israelites to return home.  We read of this return in several places throughout the Old Testament, but we are focusing on the portion from Ezra 1 this week.
     The remarkable thing about the telling of the Israelites' return home is two fold.  First, God once again uses an outsider (King Cyrus was not God-fearing, and yet still participated in God's mission to bring the Israelites home) and second, King Cyrus send the Israelites home with what would have normally been the rightful 'spoils of war' for Persia.  Gold, silver, animals, offerings...it sounds like the captors are throwing a Welcome Home party for those they exiled.
     As we contemplate the triumphant return of the Israelites, I am pondering home.  What is home?  Where is home?  Or course there are those old addages
 Home is where your heart is... or Home is where you hang your hat... Yet what I find as we read the story of scripture into our own lives, is that home is none of those things.  Home is simply where you are, being who you were created to be.  There is an excellent TED talk by Pico Iyer on home, found below, but one of my favorite things about this video is how he talks about home.  At one point he says,

Home is not about where you are from, 

but where you are going.

     As I read this story of scripture into the story of my own life - both as a person and as a member of a congregation getting ready to build - I am encouraged that God is taking us home.  For some building a bigger space to worship and have fellowship is a sad ending to a long history of ministry in this place.  Because bigger means more people, it means different programs, it means change.  For others this process of building provides exciting possibilities.  Because bigger means more people, it means different programs, it means change.
     For the Israelites going home, it means change.  It means fear of the unknown.  It meant excitement to a return to 'normal'.  Yet in the end, all of these expectations were based in hope and faith that God was leading and guiding them.  That is my hope, too, as a person and as a pastor.  God has promised to be faithful, and I trust that God is.  And that means that God is leading and guiding us home, to our future together.
     This week I invite you to ponder the mystery of home with me, and if you have the 15 minutes to watch this stunning take on what 'home' is.

Are you against the grain?

     As The Story continues, we find the Israelites living in exile, dispersed throughout the region of Babylon.  Of course as it is with any military victory, the young, talented, and valuable are all taken as political prisoners and kept under close watch.  Daniel and three of his friends, whom we know as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, were among those taken to the palace.  They were made to be part of the king's court after three years of training in the language, culture, and other aspects of Babylonian life.  Yet from the beginning these four rebelled in the ways they could.  Rather than eat meat sacrificed to the gods of the Babylonians, they refused and demanded vegetables instead.  The vegetarian diet suited these four boys as the guard observed after 10 days of this diet they appeared 'better and fatter than all the young men who had been eating the royal rations.'

Lion, by Albrecht Dürer*

     That is just the beginning.  The book of Daniel is full of the tales of how these young men remained faithful and resisted the command to forget their God and totally assimilate into the Babylonian culture.  Of course the most familiar of these stories include the Fiery Furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and Daniel in the Lion's Den.  This week we will focus on the latter, found in Daniel 6.
     In one of the tales of Daniel's rebellion, we find that Daniel has earned the jealousy of some of the native Babylonians, as his service to the king is outstanding and he is getting promoted above them.  They devise a plan in which they ask King Nebuchadnezzar has ordered a decree that anyone who prays to anyone except the king in the next 30 days shall be thrown into a den of lions.  As is the traditional literary pattern, the king does what these men ask, and orders the decree.  Daniel, however, continues to pray to God - going into his room, facing Jerusalem, and praying three times a day.  The conspirators find him in prayer and take him to the king.
     Of course the king really likes Daniel, and is heartbroken that he has signed this decree; yet before throwing him into the den he displays an amount of faith rarely seen even in the Israelites by saying:

May your God, whom you faithfully serve, deliver you!

Interestingly the only words Daniel actually says out loud in this whole account are the morning after he has spent the night with lions, when he lets the king know that he is still alive.  The rest of Daniel's words in the story are silent, or are known only between him and God as they are prayers.
     I wonder what it is about Daniel's faith that King Nebuchadnezzar is willing to pray on his behalf to God, whom we can assume King Nebuchadnezzar knows nothing about.  Was it Daniel's willingness to defy the king's decree that gives King Nebuchadnezzar this new found faith?  Was it Daniel's calm quiet in the face of hungry lions that gives the king hope? 
     Whatever it was, when the king rushes the next morning to discover Daniel's fate, and finds that Daniel is alive, he continues with a tremendous declaration of faith:

For [God] is the living God, enduring forever; 

Whose kingdom shall never be destroyed,

And whose dominion has no end.

God delivers and rescues, 

working signs and wonders in heaven and on earth...

     As I think about Daniel's witness, I am heartened.  Life wasn't exactly what Daniel would have liked.  He was a prisoner.  His people had been destroyed.  His home ruined.  There wasn't much hope in having life return to normal.  And yet in that moment he chose to remain faithful by disobeying the king's decree.  Rather than give up and assimilate, Daniel went against the grain.

     While I don't often think about having to stand fast in my faith in the face of laws against it, I do spend a lot of time thinking about, well, time.  As I look around at other families and think about my own family in the future, I wonder about things like sports, clubs, extracurricular activities, and the amount of time those things can consume.  Children are scheduled 24/7 now, with very little time to actually be kids.  I say to myself that I won't let our family get that way.  I make promises that worship will continue to remain central for us (and for me it will - by the nature of my job and calling as pastor).  Yet I know that when the time comes it will take all of us standing up and going against the grain.  It is not just a dilemma felt by families with children, but this remaining faithful can be a difficult thing for everyone, in whatever stage of life they are living.

     The mystery I am left pondering this morning as I reflect on Daniel is how against the grain are we?  Are we becoming assimilated Christians?  Have we given up with our current circumstances and just said, 'Oh well.  They schedule sports/clubs/music/etc. on Sundays and we just have to live with it or we will never succeed in life.'  Have we in subtle ways over many years, finally become irrelevant to our culture because we've made so many concessions?  It is a mystery of faith - how to live in a world that does not believe in God.  Yet we know our God is living, and that our God endures forever.  Sports don't last.  Music doesn't last. Popularity doesn't even last.  God does.  How are you going against the grain to live this out?

*Dürer, Albrecht, 1471-1528. Lion, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=46275 [retrieved February 10, 2014]. Original source: http://www.yorckproject.de.

Can these bones live?

Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones*

   Well, we're back in  The Story this week, and the news does not look good for Israel.  In chapter 17 we find out that even though the southern kingdom of Judah was spared from the Assyrians, there was another nation even more powerful and brutal than Assyria: Babylon.  The southern kingdom is destroyed and the Israelites carried off into exile, while their temple, their Promised Land, their culture, and their religion is utterly destroyed by the Babylonians who occupy and rebuild the land as their own.
     It seems that God' hopes and dreams for this nation, these chosen people who for generations have been saved time and time again, are over.  Israel is no more.  The people are scattered.  God's house is destroyed. 
     Yet even in the destruction of the nation, God is not standing idly by.  God is at work in the people, continuing to speak through prophets, continuing to teach and stand with this people who have come to live with the consequences of their actions.  In our reading for Sunday, God is talking with a prophet named Ezekiel.  It is one of my favorite stories in all of scripture, from Ezekiel 37. 
     We find as the story begins that God has brought Ezekiel to a valley that is full of old, dead, dry bones.  These are the bones of Israel, a physical sign of the hope the people have lost, the destruction they have experienced, the feeling of being abandoned by the God who promised to always be with them.  As I think about this scene, it evokes an eery sense of desolation and loneliness.  Yet in this valley one of God's greatest miracles well occur.

     God asks Ezekiel, "Mortal, can these bones live?"

And the astonishing thing is that Ezekiel does not immediately say 'No!' Rather, Ezekiel responds with a statement of such great faith I can only begin to wish  could see God's power the way he did. 

Ezekiel answered, "O Lord, God, you know."

Ezekiel sees the potential of life in dead bones, of hope in hopelessness, of power in destruction.  And so, God instructs Ezekiel to prophesy.  As he does, the bones begin to come together, (we all know the song), they form sinews and tendons, muscle, and flesh.  Yet even with all the necessary physical parts put together, they are not living.  God has one more piece of creation - the breath.  As a hearken back to Genesis, where we find that humans are the only created being that have in them God's breath, once again God breathes into these bodies and they live again. Just as the dead bones were a sign of the death and destruction felt by Israel, so now these live bodies were a sign of the life that was to come. 
     When I read this story I love the myriad ways in which our lives today reflect the lives of those bones.  If you experience something in life that leaves you utterly drained and hopeless, God is ready to raise you up.  If you feel like God has abandoned you and left you to the fates of the world, God is standing by ready to make something new happen.  If you feel like a body just going through the motions of life, God is there with the breath that makes life worth living.
     What this story reveals to us about God is that God is always standing by, always there, ready to make the miraculous happen.  Now - the bones were dead and dry.  They had been there for quite some time.  God' works don't always happen on our schedules, but even then we have the hope that God is simply waiting - for the right circumstances, for the right time, for the right day.  As we have said so often about scripture this year, "This is your story.  This is my story.  This is the greatest story ever told.". These bones are us - and the story of life out of death, resurrection and new life - is our story.  So the next time you are feeling abandoned, hopeless, or like giving up, just ponder the mystery Ezekiel did.  Can these bones live?

*Ezekiel in the Valley of the Dry Bones, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55163 [retrieved February 4, 2014]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St._Nicholas%27_Church,_Deptford_Green,_SE8_-_carved_panel_representing_Ezekiel_in_the_Valley_of_the_Dry_Bones_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1501992.jpg.