In one of my first preaching classes, I took my students on a field-trip to preach. Our destination was a surprise. They showed up with Bibles and sermons in hand and loaded up in our van. Along the way, they hazarded guesses about where we were going. “The mall?” “No,” I answered. “You aren’t taking us to the prison?” “No.” Imagine their surprise when I pulled up in a neighborhood, we unloaded and walked to a deserted old cemetery. I pointed to a tombstone and said, “Preach.”
The people of Israel saw themselves as dead, cut-off from God, and hopeless. “We lost the war, were left unburied, and our bones baked in the sun.” Gruesome. About this time God gave Ezekiel an extraordinary vision (not many of his visions were ordinary). He saw a valley filled with dry bones. God asked him a question, “Can they live?” Ezekiel gave a safe answer, “Lord, you know.” “Preach,” God told Ezekiel. That must have been some sermon! The bones came together and stood up, covered with sinews and skin, but they were still dead. Then God told Ezekiel, “Preach to the wind.” When he did the bones came to life.
God wants for people in our day what he wants for us: he wants people to live. God is pro-life, pro all of life. He is in favor of people living in personal relationship with him. When we look at the broken world filled with broken people, we are tempted to despair. God asks, “Can they live?” Unsure we join Ezekiel, “Lord knows!” To be clear, the Lord knows that we know that he knows whether people can live. Mostly he wants all of us to know him, because as John would later write, “This is life eternal, to know the one true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
What means do we have to effect the resurrection God desires for people? A few of my young preachers overcame their own astonishment and preached to the tombstones. We who know the truth should definitely tell the truth, in love. After we do all we can, we preach to the wind, we speak to the breath of God, we pray that God will bring people to life. When we least expect it, he does. God who first created life is in the life-giving business. This is our business, too. Like our Father, we do not rejoice in the death of others. He brought us to life when we were dead in trespasses and sins. Now we who have come to life pray that more will come to know our Savior, Jesus.
