What is life with God really about?

Is it about something we believe, something in our heads, some teachings for us to put into practice? Or is it something more?

I remember walking into this room for worship for the first time when I was in college. I knew and believed a lot of things about Jesus, about God, and about the bible. I wanted to live according to Jesus’ teachings. I had given my life to Christ.

But the experience of being here for worship birthed a new sort of hope in me…a hope that there was something beyond my efforts at discipline and thinking correctly, a hope that God’s power might actually impact my life, a hope that God might actually speak to me and empower me.

Has that hope, that possibility, been born in you?

I’ve been reading the passage from Ezekiel, the one Bill Cathers read earlier, a lot this week.

It just reeks of hope and newness and power. It evokes all kinds of possibilities. What if God actually could break the rules of death? What if nothing was ever out of the realm of possibility?

I’m talking about in a real, day-to-day sort of way, not in a “one time God raised Jesus from the dead” sort of way. What if this weird vision or dream of Ezekiel is really what God is like? Still? Today, right now…

It’s hard to live in that kind of world, the kind of world where God can act in ways that seem impossible. Because our world is pretty defined. Logic and the laws of nature rule pretty strongly in the world we live in, and they have a way of squeezing out hope that God is still the kind of God Ezekiel watched breathe life into dry bones.

I used to have this recurring nightmare as a kid.

Nothing hopeful about it at all…in fact, it was so scary because it was so pre-determined, so exactly opposite of what Ezekiel saw.

After I had the dream the first time, every time after that, I would know exactly what was going to happen. There were always these sort of stepping stones in my dream, and I would be hopping from one stone to the next. Somewhere along the way, I would hit a stone, and there would be a gong, and this ominous laugh. And that meant everything was decided.

I couldn’t leave the stepping stones…I had to keep going forward. But I knew what was going to happen, and it couldn’t be stopped. I had tripped a sort of time delay fuse, and an explosion WAS coming. It came every time. There was no doubt about it. It WAS coming. All I could do was keep stepping from stone to stone, inevitably walking to my doom.

Depressing, huh? No wonder I woke up crying a lot.

My dream is a lot closer to the reality of our lives.

Within certain limits, many things see inevitable. There’s Murphy’s law: everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. We often live life with a relatively narrow set of options for how things will turn out, because we’ve had life remind us time and time again that our hopes rarely come into existence.

My dream is very close to how the Israelites Ezekiel spoke to saw life. They had watched their world explode around them. God had brought them out of Egypt, taken them to the promised land, established them as a nation, and now it was all gone. Completely. Their rejection of God had been punished, and the people of Israel were exiled from their land.

Jerusalem, the city that God had made his home, was completely destroyed. Everything was dead and gone and hopeless.

So Ezekiel’s vision is quite radical.

It is a defiant picture that the world can be changed by God. It is a hopeful cry against futility that says God can take broken, scattered, dead bones of dreams, put them back together, and breathe new life into them.

Ezekiel dares to tell people who have finally been beaten into submission to the practicality of an oppressive, logical, powerful world that they can hope in God to break oppression, logic, and power. They can have hope that God will breathe new life into them, make them a people once again who live in the promised land.

I’ve just finished a book by Walter Bruggemann that has a simple and profound thesis: our task as followers of God is to do what Ezekiel did. We are to speak and live out the hope that our world can be different than it currently is because God is free enough and powerful enough to bring something new into being.

Bruggemann calls it “prophetic imagination”: imagining a different way of life because of the power of God.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m brave enough to do what Ezekiel does.

We all have a fear of raising hopes that will just be crushed. One of the reasons many Christians today don’t really expect God’s Spirit to still work in power in our world is that we don’t want to let ourselves or others down.

It’s scary to talk about the spiritual realm, because by definition it’s outside the normal way of doing things. If we talk about miracles, if we say they are possible, what if they don’t happen? If we talk about the Spirit’s power, what if some don’t experience it?

Ezekiel’s vision is bravely imaginative. What if all the things we thought were impossible to change…what if the things we know can’t happen, are dead…what would God do if we saw those dead things scattered out in front of us?

Ezekiel sees a valley filled with bones, and God tells him to participate in speaking new life into them. It’s clearly God’s Spirit who puts flesh on the bones and breath in their lungs, but Ezekiel gets to speak it into being.

And then he gets to hear God say, “Let me tell you what this means. This means that all your hopes are NOT lost, because your hope is in me, who created everything to begin with and can re-create everything as well. You will know that I am God, because I am going to bring your dead nation to life, and return you to the land that I promised you. You will KNOW that I am God.”

I see in God’s words every protection we need against some of our fears.

Sometimes we rightly criticize or our fearful of more charismatic expressions of the Spirit because we hear people on tv tell us we can have whatever we want if we just name it.

God’s words to Ezekiel remind us that God’s power doesn’t give us whatever we want, doesn’t fulfill whatever hopes we have. The deepest longing of the exiled people of Israel was to return to the land God had given them.

But that wasn’t THEIR dream. That wasn’t THEIR hope. That was God’s! God had called Abraham centuries before, GOD had given all of Abraham’s descendants the promise and longing for the land.

Through Ezekiel, God is bringing back to life the dead hopes of HIS dream for his people. Not fulfilling whatever wishes they had.

More importantly, God has a reason for bringing the bones to life, for giving hope to Israel.

And it’s not centered on the people, it’s centered on God. “Then you will know that I am the Lord.”

The power of God’s Spirit to go outside what we imagine to be possible is not a power for us to control or use for our gain. It is power to remind us and the world that God is the Lord of all creation. It is power to lead people to God.

All I’ve felt clear to do today, after much prayer, is to invite you to imagine hope.

If this is the God we serve…a God of power who can break the futility and the hopelessness and the inevitability of the logical world we live in…

If we dare to imagine, as Paul says is true in Romans 8, that we live now in the power of God’s Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead…

If God’s Spirit still can work to bring hope to promises we thought were dead, to act in ways that help us know that God is Lord of everything…

If all of that is true…what might God do in your life?

My experience over the last few years is that if we give God room, he’ll do things through us that we couldn’t imagine before.

I want to invite us to give ourselves to God…imagine something different.