St Margaret's Church Prestwich

Krystyna preached this sermon on Sunday 19 May 2024 at St George’s. Here it is again for you:

Let us pray:

Holy God, break your Word as bread among us for the feeding of our souls. Speak to our hearts and strengthen our wills that we may serve you today and always. Amen

Please be seated.

Ezekiel 37, 1-2:  God’s Spirit took me up and set me down in the middle of an open plain strewn with bones. He led me around and among them—a lot of bones! There were bones all over the plain—dry bones, bleached by the sun.3 He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” I said, “Master God, only you know that.”

Dear Friends,

I would like to share one of my favourite stories with you.

There was once a mirror-maker whose greatest desire was to create a mirror that would reflect his image perfectly. He experimented with different materials, tin, silver, mercury, crystal rock, and after weeks of hard work, he finally perfected the formula for a wonderfully accurate looking glass in which he could see a clear reflection of himself. One night an envious neighbour broke into the workshop, took his mirror and threw it on the floor. It shattered into countless pieces. Some of the fragments fell shiny side up and were still able to reflect a little bit of light, others landed face down with their black coated side showing. The mirror-maker patiently gathered up the pieces and began the tedious task of repairing his once-perfect creation.

This story is a Hasidic Jewish parable which tries to explain why the world we live in is so broken and flawed. It ends with a reassuring message we can all take away: when we are frustrated with the way things are going, unhappy with ourselves, we can be sure that God’s creative Spirit is already working behind the scenes, flipping over the broken fragments of our lives reflective side up, and putting them back together. We might not be perfect, but we are work in progress and so is our faith, our relationships, our emotions, our hopes and plans for the future. No matter how bad things might seem, our lives and the world around us are in the process of being made whole, being healed by the Holy Spirit.

Out of curiosity I’ve checked and when you google the question: How to upcycle a broken mirror? thousands of results come up. Apparently, broken pieces of glass can be used to make beautiful mosaics, tealight holders, to decorate lampshades, flowerpots and garden fences. They all seem like great ideas, but – I don’t know about you – when I drop a glass, a mirror or a vase falls and breaks, I pick up the pieces and simply put them in the bin. I don’t have the time, the patience to make any of those crafts. Sadly, we live in a throwaway culture, instead of repairing, repurposing broken things, we throw them in the bin and replace them with new ones.

Thankfully, God’s way of doing things is very different. Prophet Ezekiel from our Old Testament passage for today shares his experience of how, in a dream or vision, God took him to a lonely and unpleasant place – a desert valley full of dry bones – it looked like a battlefield or desecrated cemetery, very depressing. And in that strange place God asked Ezekiel the question: Can these bones live? The logical answer was obviously “No” – but Ezekiel diplomatically said something along the lines of: ‘You tell me, Lord, this isn’t looking good, but you are in charge of the situation not me.’ And as he was speaking the dry bones twitched into life and snapped together, sinews formed, then muscles on the bones, then skin stretched over them, and the bodies were completely restored.

We live in a disposable culture, we discard relationships at the first sign of difficulty, we throw away things after just one use because…well, why not? New things, relationships, exciting new experiences are just a click away. But the story of Ezekiel reminds us that in God’s economy of grace, nothing is ever wasted, everything has a purpose – every bone, every atom of matter, every breath, every ray of light, every tear, every long-forgotten dream. That’s what Jesus taught and preached in the gospels and does also today, he is in business of ‘picking up the pieces’ of lost, wasted lives, of seemingly hopeless situations, and using them again, for His glory. We too can choose to live and serve according to this economy of grace where all people, all living creatures, all resources are valued and treated with respect.

And when we go through difficulty, instead of asking ourselves, asking God: why – Why me? Why my family? Why now?, we can choose to ask the same question Ezekiel does in the passage for today: ‘Lord, what can you bring out of this? How do you want to reshape my life, repurpose my pain and suffering, recycle my old habits, views and beliefs?

Towards the end of Ezekiel’s dream, when the bodies are completely restored, he points out: “Lord, there is no breath in them”, the last and most important piece of the puzzle is missing: the breath of life, the Spirit of God. Without Him the bodies won’t come alive. And so God tells Ezekiel to pray: ‘Come, breath of life, breathe life into these bodies, and he does and the bodies stand up on their feet, and form a huge army.

It’s difficult to describe the Holy Spirit, because well…He/She is a spirit, but based on this passage I would say that He is someone who helps us find the missing pieces of our ‘life puzzle’, see the big picture, someone in whose presence things fall into place, who draws people together and makes them click. No matter how happy, fulfilled and successful we might be, we all need Someone like that. Jesus knew this, and today we are celebrating the day when He sent us, each and every one us, an extraordinary gift, His Spirit, the Spirit of truth.

Let us pray: Holy Spirit, we have been doing our best to put things together in our lives, but you know it’s not always easy, we often feel overwhelmed and out of our depth. Today we wish to give up control and hand the pieces over to you, we thank you that you are already causing all things to fall into place and work together for our good. In Jesus’ name, Amen.