Worship Leader: Paul Whiteley, LLWL Music Director: Tim Hallman, B.Mus., B.Ed.
FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT, MARCH 22, 2026
“Breathing New Life”
WELCOME / ANNOUNCEMENTS / CELEBRATIONS
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
LIGHTING OF CANDLE
Meditation:
When we arrived this morning, we entered into the normal bustle of a church on a Sunday morning: friends greeting each other, choir members getting their spots, children bringing their energy and enthusiasm. Now that we are sitting together in the pews, I invite you to close your eyes … and consider the word “sanctuary”. A sanctuary is a place set aside for sacred things. It is a place of refuge and protection. This room is a sanctuary. The season of Lent is a kind of sanctuary, extended in time. And one of the things Lent teaches is that you, too, are a sanctuary. There is inside you a place for sacred things, a place where God abides.
As we extinguish this light, we acknowledge the darkness and pain of war and oppression in the world.
Let us pray together:
Loving God, we open our hearts to you. We invite you into our innermost being, only to find you already there. Strengthen us in our quiet places and then lead us into the work of justice and peace. Amen
OPENING HYMN: MV 12 “Come Touch Our Hearts” (verses 4–5)
PASSING OF THE PEACE
OPENING PRAYER:
You, who are the Holy Spirit, moving the waters,
you, who are the Creator, whispering in Ezekiel’s ear,
you, who are the Christ, breathing new life into the church,
you, who are the Wind that Makes All Winds Blow,
your people are here.
Your world is here.
Dry bones, wondering if there is still life in us.
Speak to the winds, we pray.
Fill us again, with life, life abundant, life made new.
Fill us again, that we might breath, loving God! Amen
-Called to Be the Church, United Church of Canada, 2025
LEARNING TOGETHER
HYMN: Then Let Us Sing! 91 “In Life, In Death”
SCRIPTURE:
Ezekiel 17:1–14: “The Valley of Bones”
John 11:30–45: “The Raising of Lazarus”
ANTHEM: “How Deep The Father’s Love For Us”
REFLECTION: “Breathing New Life”
The scriptures we’ve heard this morning may seem larger than life. The valley of bones, in Ezekiel, was probably never meant to be taken as an historical event – the passage has always been true in the way a work of art or a mystery is true, not the way journalism or an eyewitness account can be true. And while the story of Lazarus seems a bit different, a bit more personal and human, the truth we are left with at the end is that Lazarus lives, and the sequence of events taking us there are sometimes mysterious and allow for different interpretations.
To begin with Lazarrus, the named characters in this story are Jesus and Mary and Martha, Lazarus’ sisters. I left out the long introduction to the story, where Martha – the pious and respectful sister, in this telling – comes to meet Jesus on the way and expresses total faith in whatever Jesus wants to say about death and resurrection.
But in this story Mary is the sister some of us can relate to – the one who gets emotional; the one who weeps at Jesus’ feet and accuses him, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died”. Lazarus’ death seems real for Mary in a way it doesn’t, quite, for Martha, and Jesus responds to Mary with real, human feelings of empathy and compassion, rather than spouting theological platitudes. Mary doesn’t always, already believe whatever Jesus says; instead she leads Jesus to the tomb where she has been mourning, which she doesn’t want opened because she recoils from the stench – the literal stench – of death.
Now, there is a reading of John’s gospel that sees most of its scenes as trying to convince the disciples – and the hearer of the stories – to believe something that Jesus already knows. This reading is supported by some of the “glosses”, the explanations presented within the gospel, where for example Jesus is said to wait on purpose for Lazarus to die so that he can demonstrate the power of resurrection and use Lazarus’ new life as a teachable moment for the disciples about a greater resurrection to come.
So I for one can’t accept that interpretation. I don’t think a loving God would create this kind of suffering for people just to manipulate them into learning some theology lesson. I also can’t see the Jesus whose story we follow as a know-it-all, as some kind of divine secret agent or magician sworn to keep everything hush-hush until God says it’s time for the big reveal. This reading seems to me to trivialize Jesus’ ministry into a series of staged events or messages in code, and it presents God as an abusive manipulator rather than the embodiment of love.
But like the rest of scripture, there is a poetry and a humanity within the Gospel of John that breaks through the glosses and reaches out to us with a more human touch. “In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the word was God” has a poetry that seems to me as full an expression of the mystery of faith today as it was for those who first heard it. And the weeping and upset Jesus who orders the stone to be taken away and for Lazarus to come out – that is the Jesus I know, the Jesus who cares about those who care for him, who makes miracles to meet the needs of real people around him that he loves and who love him back.
So, to me, the message about Lazarus is that he lives, that Jesus cares, that in the face of tragedy and arbitrary fate, faith in a miracle can make all the difference. And the message of the valley of bones is that new breath, new life may come. For years I have been aware just how much many worship leaders love this story from Ezekiel – I’m sure many preachers find it easy to imagine that they are surrounded by dry bones in various churches, and to fancy that through prophesy the bones of beloved community around them will gain sinews and skin, and receive the breath of divine life. We might all hope for this to be true.
Once again, there are readings of Ezekiel that try to take these passages as literally as possible – so if this isn’t something that actually happened to Ezekiel, it’s an extrasensory vision of something that is supposed to happen in the future. So this is more or less the place in scripture where the “resurrection of the body” becomes an idea – this belief separates the Pharisees from the Sadducees in the gospels and from there is brought into most Christian traditions for hundreds of not thousands of years.
But the plain meaning of the valley of bones isn’t that at all. The bones are the people of Israel, who feel cut off from God, dried up and hopeless and lost. And the miracle here is the breath of life given from the divine. Yes, the breath is prophesy but it comes in simple words of hope: a promise that we once again can feel safe, can feel connected, can feel at home in our place in the world, in our place with God.
I’m sure I’m repeating myself when I say this, but the assumption that the gospels contain the good news while the Hebrew scriptures offer judgement seems to me to be just wrong, sometimes almost entirely backwards. Both of today’s stories offer hope for a miracle of love, but I think it’s actually easier to see that love in the valley of bones where the whole people will be restored to abundant life through a Godly miracle of hope. Most likely we need God’s presence in our lives at all scales, whether in our personal wrestling with family, illness, and death, or in our global predicament where we might lose our sense of security, our assurance of meaning and of home. We don’t need to choose one or the other; God’s offer of relationship doesn’t force us to decide between personal and political, between individual and community. God is everywhere, in all life’s situations and stages.
And I know I’ve said this before, but there might have been a feeling about the Church from the 1960s to the 2000s that maybe we didn’t need scripture quite so much. Many people with United Church backgrounds felt some of the time that a lot of things were proceeding as they should; that calls to justice were needed but were more like corrections to fine-tune an existing trend. There were challenges, and I remember church leaders who felt a yearning for eternity and resurrection in the face of the AIDS crisis, who felt the 9/11 attacks as a kind of disruption within the world that called for a deep, faith-based response.
But now it seems more obvious, I think, that we are living through truly difficult times of striving, of uncertainty, where feeling lost or disoriented might not be a purely personal state but could reflect the current state of the world itself. So it seems important to me to remember that it was these times – not stable, “normal” times – for which our scriptures were written. Lazarus was called back to life within small, semi-secretive communities of believers fearing persecution by their enemies of other faith perspectives and suppression by an occupying empire. The valley of bones was an image offered to the people of Israel in exile in Babylon, where there faith was forged as displaced people living in a strange land, yearning for home. In such times – in these times – we need to be reminded of God’s offer of love in all times, in all places, and even for us. And we may need to hear, again and again, in spite of everything, that we are not alone. And for this, to God be the praise and the thanks. Amen.
INVITATION FOR OFFERING
OFFERING HYMN: VU 541 “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow”
OFFERING PRAYER
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE / LORD’S PRAYER
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name;
thy kingdom come;
thy will be done;
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation;
but deliver us from the evil one.
For thine is the kingdom,
the power and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.
HYMN: MV 142 “Oh a Song Must Rise”
BENEDICTION
CHORAL BLESSING: MV 97 “Listen, God is Calling" (2x)
"A Village Church With A Heart For The World"
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