Imagine a bed surrounded by the debris of a week’s illness, soiled sheets and slashed pillows, pills and vodka bottles, used condoms and tissues. This is My Bed an installation by Tracy Emin which was first exhibited in 1999. You’ll probably remember reading about it in the press at the time as it prompted the usual “call that art, my two-year old could have done better” kind of articles.
A bed is a powerful symbol of birth and death, sex and intimacy but this controversial installation was perhaps an image of our culture’s sickness and dis-ease surrounded by the remnants of those things through which we seek a cure; sex, alcohol, drugs, tears, aggression. And the bed, like many lives, was empty. The morning after the cure that never came.
Our Old Testament reading from Ezekiel 37. 1-10 suggested something very similar about the people of Israel. Ezekiel saw a valley of dry bones and God said to him that the people of Israel were like those bones, dried up without any hope and with no future.
Sometimes our lives feel like these two pictures - dried up, no future, diseased, empty, dead. Our relationships may have broken down, we may have been abused, we may be anxious, stressed or worried, our work might be under threat or have ended. For all these reasons and many others, we can feel as though our lives have closed down becoming barren or dry or dead.
Our communities and culture can feel like that too. Many years ago now, at the end of the 1970’s, The Sex Pistols sang about there being no future in England’s dreaming. And many people still think that our society is changing for the worse. When I had a holiday in Spain several years ago I stayed on a street that was mainly occupied by British people who had left because they didn’t like the changes that they saw in British society. Such people think of Britain as being diseased and dead with no future for them.
Being in the Church it is also easy to feel the same. We are regularly told in the press that the Church is in decline and my Church, the Church of England, is currently dealing with major conflicts that threaten to pull it apart. Again, it is easy to feel as though the Church is washed up, dried out and dying.
Whatever we think of those issues and views, the God that we worship is in the resurrection business. And that is where we need to be too. In Ezekiel God promised that he would put his breath into the people of Israel and bring them back to life and in our Gospel reading (John 11. 1-45) Jesus said that he is the resurrection and the life and demonstrated this by bringing Lazarus back to life. Jesus was the fulfilment of God’s promise to Ezekiel that he would bring the people of Israel back to life. In Jesus, Israel lived life as God had intended and fulfilled Israel’s mission of bringing light to the rest of the world. In this way, Jesus resurrected a society and culture transforming the entire world as he did so.
He calls us to follow in his footsteps by looking for the places where our society and culture is dried up or dying and working for its transformation and resurrection. I saw several examples of that happening in my time at St Martin-in-the-Fields, particularly in our response to the pandemic.
Here’s how the Vicar of St Martin’s – Sam Wells - described our experience in the book that we wrote about that period of time (Finding Abundance in Scarcity: Steps Towards Church Transformation - A HeartEdge Handbook):
“St Martin-in-the-Fields is a complex organization. It has a large congregation, by UK standards, and a significant public ministry, involving a good deal of broadcasting. It has a trading subsidiary (two cafés, a shop, and around 175 commercial concerts annually). It has a development trust, and two homeless charities, one local, one national.
The pandemic asphyxiated its commercial activity, at a stroke deleting two-thirds of the congregation’s income. At the time of writing, we’ve had to shed three-quarters of our commercial and ministry staff. It’s been a devastating, depleting and distressing experience. Yet online, the congregation, its public ministry, and its music have found a reach, purpose, and dynamism like never before. All is made new. The musicians have recorded music, weekly, for 4,000 churches across the land. HeartEdge seminars have become a hub for innovation and evaluation. A new enquirers’ course has drawn participation from people far and wide, a good many of whom were already inhibited by chronic illness before ‘shield’ became an intransitive verb. The national homeless charity has never been more in demand, or attracted more support, fervidly working to help people find secure accommodation …
our Nazareth Community, made up of people from all classes, including those who sleep outside, seeking the heart of God through shared practices centred on silent prayer [has] grown to 81 people, with … additional … online companions. It models the way we seek to see the assets in everyone, rather than regarding some as needy and casting others as benefactors.
It’s been as if we’re in a cartoon: on one side surrounded by footfall figures, government directives, church guidelines, protective equipment, and spreadsheets of redundancy calculations, earnestly trying to be humane, transparent, and compassionate as we cast staff out into a wilderness of high unemployment and considerable health anxiety; on the other side surprised by joy, with people coming to faith, hundreds of thousands downloading choral offerings, asylum seekers stepping up to leadership roles, donors tendering generous gifts, and the church reopening in July for tentative public worship, only to close again in November and open again in December.
Don’t tell anyone, but beautiful things have been happening – too many to recount. Keep it quiet, but it’s also been a complete nightmare, in which plans made and an institution crafted over generations has been torn apart in ways a raging inferno couldn’t achieve … And yet, like a ram in a thicket, something has been provided, or has emerged, or suddenly changed.”
This happened because at the beginning of the pandemic we realised that “It was in its most bewildered hour that Israel in exile found who God truly was.” As a result, we saw that this was “our chance to discover what God being with us really means.” “None of us would for a moment have wished this crisis on anybody, let alone the whole world. But our faith teaches us that we only get to see resurrection through crucifixion; that we see God most clearly in our darkest hour.” What we found was “beauty, truth and goodness in times of adversity, hardship and distress.”
I believe that each of us can have similar experiences of resurrection and new life in the midst of adversity and hardship. So, together with my colleagues and congregations, I’m seeking to apply the lessons I learnt at St Martin’s in the missional activity we’re getting started here in the Wickford and Runwell Team Ministry. I believe that, as churches in this area, and elsewhere, we all need to be asking ourselves how God wants to use us to bring new life to those parts of our society and culture that are dying.
Raising Lazarus from death was a sign of what would happen after Jesus’ own death on the cross. By rising from death himself, Jesus conquered death for all people enabling us to enter in to eternal life after our physical death. This is good news for us to share with other people around us wherever we are - in our families and among our friends, neighbours and work colleagues. Think for a moment about the people and places where you can share the good news of life after death through our Lord Jesus.
Jesus also resurrected lives before physical death came. Look for a moment at John 11 with me. In the first section of that chapter from verses 1 to 16 we see the disciples struggling to understand what Jesus is saying and doing. He is wanting them to see how God is at work in Lazarus’ illness and death. They keep looking only at their physical and material circumstances - if Jesus goes back to Judea then he will be killed, if Lazarus is asleep then he will get better, and so on. Jesus wants them to see that God can work even through death and in verse 16 he draws out of them the commitment to go with him even though they may die with him. Then in verses 17 to 27, Jesus helps Martha to move beyond her theoretical belief in the resurrection to a belief that Jesus himself is the promised Messiah. Finally, in verses 38 to 45, he helps all those present to move beyond their focus on physical realities to believe in God’s ability to do the supernatural.
Throughout, Jesus is challenging all the people he encounters to move beyond their comfort zones, to step out in faith, to encounter and trust God in new ways. He wants to do the same with each one of us. Wherever our lives have got stuck, have become dried up or closed down or have died he wants to challenge and encourage us to move out of our comfort zones and to encounter him and other people in new and risky ways. He wants us to come alive to God, to the world, to other people and to life itself in new ways.
Jesus is in the resurrection business. Whether it is transforming society, sharing the good news of eternal life or encouraging us to step out in faith, Jesus wants to bring us to life. How will you respond to Jesus this morning? Is there an area of your life that he can bring back to life or will you commit yourself to join in sharing the good news of eternal life with others and transforming society where you are?
As you think about that challenge let us pray together briefly, using the words of a song by Evanescence:
Lord Jesus, we are frozen inside without your touch, without your love. You are the life among the dead, so wake us up inside. Call our names and save us from the dark. Bid our blood to run before we come undone, save us from the nothing we’ve become. Bring us to life. Amen.
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Evanescence - Bring Me To Life.
