Church of the Holy City

Life from Life

Life from Life
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete

Ezekiel 37:1-14 John 11:1-45 Psalm 130

Both of our Bible readings this morning are about life. And in both readings, we see that it is God who gives life. In our reading from Ezekiel, God gives dry bones the gift of life, from the Holy Spirit. And in our reading from John, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead into life. The raising of Lazarus from the dead prefigures Jesus’ resurrection, and it also symbolizes our being raised from the dead into heaven. And in both these readings about life from God, Jesus’ own words summarize the issue. Jesus says to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life.”
The life we all have is a gift from God. We don’t live by our own power. We live because the Source of all life is continually flowing into us. God is life itself. We are merely vessels that receive life.
Let me delve into science a little bit to illustrate this point. Where does life come from? We know that we humans come from our parents. And we know that our parents come from their parents. We know that some animals come from eggs. And that their parents lay the eggs. We know that plants come from seeds and fruit trees come from fruits. And we know that the seeds come from grown plants as do the fruits–oak trees come from acorns, apple trees come from apples, flowers come from the pollen of mature flowers. In the science of biology, there are few laws, unlike the sciences of physics and chemistry, for instance. But in biology there is one hard and fast rule that has no exceptions:” Only life can create life.” There are no instances of non-life creating life.
So this brings up the old question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” We know that our parents gave birth to us, and their parents to them, but try to follow the sequence back to the beginning. Somewhere way back in humanity’s origins, the first parent had to be made. There would be no parent for the first human. Something like the creation of Adam and Eve would have had to happen.
But I do think that evolution happened. Human life can be traced back to hominoid creatures. More complex creatures came from simpler forms. But there are two problems with the theory of evolution. First, there is a problem with the doctrine called “survival of the fittest.” This doctrine teaches that when mutations occur, the mutation that best suits its natural environment will survive and perpetuate itself. So in an environment where there are mostly tree-tops for food, animals will grow longer and longer necks and we will end up with giraffes. But the doctrine of the survival of the fittest works only if the gene for long necks is present in the animal. All the genes have already to be present in order for a change to happen. In other words, survival of the fittest cannot change one species into another. A cat can’t become a dog by survival of the fittest. A monkey can’t become a human by survival of the fittest. So biologists have a big problem. They need to have a way to explain how the different species differentiated–lemurs into proto-humans, into humans. And ultimately, how one celled creatures became a thinking, reasoning human being.
The second problem comes from what I was saying about our parents’ parents. Somewhere along the way, life had to come from non-life. Biologists will talk about the primordial soup. That was the ocean way back in life’s origins. The sea then was rich in carbohydrates from which amino acids are made from which proteins are made. But there is a huge difference between a protein molecule and a self-replicating DNA strand. There is a huge difference between a protein molecule and a living cell. According to the theory of evolution, non-life had to create life. And that violates about the only law that biology has.
When we consider the question of life, we have to turn to religion. Life had to come from life. Life existed before anything else. God existed before there was the Big Bang. And the whole act of creation was spun out by an all-loving God who wants there to be a heaven of humans whom God can love as a parent does his or her family. Swedenborg tells us,
God in creating [the universe] had one end in view, which was an angelic heaven from the human race; and all things of which the earth is composed are means to that end. . . . The Divine Love can intend no other end than the eternal blessedness of people from its own Divine . . . (TCR 13).
And Swedenborg reiterates the same idea later in the same book,
The very end for which the universe was created was no other than that an angelic heaven should be formed from humans, where all who believe in God shall live in eternal blessedness; for Divine love which is in God and essentially is God cannot intend anything else (TCR 773).
We can now consider our creation and our birth. We are born into this natural world as a living being. But our first birth is into an image of the world. In order for us to come into heaven, we need second birth.
Second birth is symbolized in our story from Ezekiel. It begins with dry bones scattered in a valley. This is our state before God begins to recreate us into a spiritually living being. This is also symbolized in the creation story in Genesis. Our state before second birth is compared to void and unformed darkness. This is called our proprium. It is the self that biology creates which is concerned only with self-preservation and the advancement of self.
But God, wanting so much to give us the blessings of eternal joy, moves over the waters and over the dry bones. God joins bone to bone and fixes tendons on the joints and flesh on the tendons. The final act of creation in the Ezekiel story is when God breathes into the person the breath of life. In the ancient world, wind and breath were the same. So when God commands Ezekiel to prophesy to the breath, the breath comes from the four winds from the four directions. The four winds come and fill the newly recreated human beings with life.
This living wind reminds me of two things. First it reminds me of the original creation story in Genesis 2. There a human being is formed from the dust of the ground. To give it life, God, “Breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). Our word “spirit” comes from the Latin word “spiritus” which means breath. The second thing this passage reminds me of is what little I know of Native Spirituality. The four directions are sacred to Natives. I recall a ceremony I attended at city hall that was put on by local Natives. To open the ceremony, a song was sung to the four directions. We all stood up and turned in the direction to which the cantor was singing. The opening ceremony was completed after we had one by one turned to the four directions and we ended facing front again. In Ezekiel, the wind comes from all four directions and fills the dry bones with life.
Being filled with the wind from the sacred four directions, with God’s Holy Spirit, is what gives us eternal life. As we heard in the story of the woman at the well a few Sundays back, “God is spirit, and His worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). It is not only Swedenborg’s mysticism that teaches our need to be filled with the Holy Spirit in order to enter heaven. In the Greek Orthodox tradition and in the tradition of many Pentecostal churches salvation means being filled with the Holy Spirit. Since God is Spirit, and since heaven is where God is, we need to partake of God’s Spirit to be “in God” as we read in John 15. There Jesus says, “Remain in me, and I will remain in you” (John 15:4). Later in that passage, Jesus clarifies what it means to remain “in Him,” by saying we are to remain in His love,
Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete (John 15:9-11).
With these words, the whole of salvation and blessedness to eternity are contained. When we do Jesus’ commands, we are in His love. And when we are in his love, our joy is complete. The end of creation is complete–a heaven from the human race. Our birth into this world is completed by rebirth into heaven. And our birth and our rebirth are both a miraculous gift from the Source of all life and love. God fills us with the breath of life and eternal life, and we live. And when we live in God, we live in blessedness to eternity.

PRAYER

Lord, we know that you are the source of all life. We know that we do not live by our own power, but by the influx of your life and love into us. We know that your influx of love into our hearts and of wisdom into our minds is what sustains us and renders us angelic. We pray that you help us to rid ourselves of the things that block your influx. Help us to put away worldly cravings and self-serving drives. For these are the things that come between our neighbor and ourselves and between us and you. As we put away the drives of this world, we pray that you fill us with the affections of heaven. As we break up the complexes that serve self and world, fill us with love for our neighbor and for you. And in doing this, give us heavenly life, as you have given us life in this world.

Lord, we pray for those who are sick. Send your healing love to those ailing, and comfort their family and friends. Lord, we ask for the grace of your healing love for all in need.