Death of a Nation: Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent – 22 March 2026

I asked ChatGPT’s image generator, “What sort of image would you create to illustrate the concept of a dead nation?” and this is what it produced.

Nations die. Just like people. The reasons nations die are as varied and numerous as the reasons people die. Some nations die because they just get too unwieldy to survive, like the Roman Empire. It simply became too large to manage, which led to a fatal weakening of its political structure and military capability, and ultimately to its collapse. Some die because of internal rot. The German Weimar Republic, for example, died when its president appointed a madman named Adolf Hitler to be its chancellor, and he in turn dismantled its democratic institutions. The Weimar Republic died, replaced by the Third Reich, which was supposed to last a thousand years, but it died in the most common way nations die – because they are conquered.

That’s what happened to the Semitic nations of Israel and Judah during the millennium before Christ. The two nations had split apart after the death of Solomon in about 930 BCE. The northern Kingdom of Israel, centered on its capitol at Samaria, was conquered by the Assyrians in about 721 BCE and ceased to exist. Most of the Semitic inhabitants were taken away in exile and became known to history as “the ten lost tribes of Israel.”

About 140 years later, the southern Kingdom of Judah, centered on Jerusalem, was conquered by the Babylonians. Jerusalem was destroyed, the Temple torn down to the ground, and, as the Assyrians had done with the northerners, the Babylonians exiled the king and a large part of the populace. Judah, like Israel before it, died.

Ezekiel, who was an apprentice priest, was one of those taken away. He witnessed the death of his nation: the execution of King Zedekiah’s family, the blinding of the king, the ravaging of his city, and the destruction of his central place of worship. And that’s when God called him to be a prophet: “I was among the exiles by the River Chebar,” he writes, “the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.”^[1]

Not only did Ezekiel experience the same historical trauma common to all the exiles, he experienced deep personal loss as well: his wife died and God commanded him not to mourn her. Ezekiel wrote of her death this way:

The word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, with one blow I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes, yet you shall not mourn or weep, nor shall your tears run down. Groan quietly; make no mourning for the dead. Bind on your turban, and put your sandals on your feet; do not cover your upper lip or eat the bread of mourners. So I spoke to the people in the morning, and at evening my wife died. And on the next morning I did as I was commanded.^[2]

God’s command for him not to mourn her was to serve as an example for the exile community not to mourn the loss of the Temple. I don’t know about you, but if I had to endure what Ezekiel and his contemporaries went through I would be a deeply depressed person! I would sink into the depths of despair.

And that is what the exiles did. The psalms speak eloquently of their desperation: “By the waters of Babylon,” Psalm 137 begins, “there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion. *** How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”^[3] Other psalms speak for the exiles in their sadness, their weariness settling deep within them. Psalm 6, for example:

Have pity on me, Lord, for I am weak;
heal me, Lord, for my bones are racked.
My spirit shakes with terror;
how long, O Lord, how long?^[4]

Or Psalm 31:

[M]y life is wasted with grief, and my years with sighing;
my strength fails me because of affliction, and my bones are consumed.^[5]

Or Psalm 102:

[M]y days drift away like smoke,
and my bones are hot as burning coals.
My heart is smitten like grass and withered…^[6]

In these psalms and elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures, the reference to “bones” is an idiomatic way of referring to one’s deepest self, a way for a person or a community or a nation to refer to its most essential identity. And so we have Ezekiel’s vision of “dry bones,” a vision of the soul of the exile community. “Mortal,” says God, “these bones are the whole house of Israel.”^[7]

Israel was dead. Judah was dead, but since the dry bones represent the living exiles, we can see that this vision is not concerned with death; death here is a metaphor for the soul-deep desperation, the despair of the exiles. The exiles, bereft of their nation, their city, and (most importantly) their Temple, fear that God has abandoned them. Ezekiel speaks to this hopelessness with a startlingly simple metaphor of divine presence, the immediate closeness of breath, the pervading presence of wind.

Our lesson from Ezekiel is just fourteen verses, but in this short passage the Hebrew word ruach occurs nine times, translated as “breath” in verses 5, 6, 8, and 10, as “wind” in verse 9, or as God’s own Spirit in verse 14. The prophet’s repetitive use of the word drums the point of the message into his hearers’ consciousness: what we Christians call the Holy Spirit is the key. With the spirit, anything is possible. And the Spirit is as close as the wind, as close as one’s own breath; there is no place on earth, no instant in time, and no situation of sin that can separate God’s people from God’s Spirit. Not the death of one’s nation, the loss of one’s country, one’s city, one’s Temple, even one’s beloved spouse; nothing! The Holy Spirit is always and everywhere present, as close as your own breath.

Which brings me to today’s Epistle lesson taken from the eighth chapter of Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. “To set the mind on the flesh is death,” writes Paul, “but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.”^[8] We need to understand that Paul’s use of “flesh” is not a reference to the physical body. The body is ethically neutral for Paul; it is neither good nor bad in and of itself. There certainly is nothing wrong with having a body. When Paul writes about the body, he uses the Greek word soma.

In this passage, however, he uses the word sarx, which means “flesh,” as in “meat”. Paul uses the word in Romans in two ways. First, he uses it to describe physical descent between ancestor and descendant. In the opening greetings of the letter, Paul identifies Jesus as a descendant of David “according to the flesh”^[9] and later himself as a Jew because of “Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh.”^[10] In this sense, it is largely neutral, but in this sense also it can be negative. For Paul salvation or righteousness before God is not an honor due a particular blood line or a family heritage; it is not by the flesh but by the spirit of God that the followers of Jesus, the members of the community of faith receive life and peace.

In the second way in which Paul uses sarx or “flesh,” Paul is influenced by the dualism of his age which considered the flesh to be imperfect because it is capable of deterioration. Under that philosophical influence, Paul assigns to flesh negative characteristics such as death, hostility to God, and an incapacity to live according to God’s law. When a person’s focus in life is on the flesh and its appetites, that is a focus on death because the flesh does not last. “But,” Paul reassures his readers, “you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.”^[11] Notice that, like Ezekiel’s message to the exiles in Babylon, Paul’s message is one for the present; not a promise of a future relationship with God, but an assurance of a current one.

Paul believes that this relationship with God is a present reality; it is not a something that exists somewhere else or that is coming in the future. Paul is certain that it is real, it is here, and it is now; because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ this new reality is here today. Throughout the rest of this Chapter 8 he will develop his argument that we are currently children of the Father, that we are currently brothers and sisters of Christ, that we currently possess the gifts of the Spirit, and that we are currently enjoy the real and present love of God. He concludes this chapter asking:

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? * * * No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.^[12]

For Paul and for us, God is everywhere and always present.

And so we come to the Gospel lesson — a familiar story from the Gospel of John — the raising of Lazarus, a story about what it means to be in relationship with Jesus, what it means to love him and be loved by him. Lazarus is identified by his sisters to Jesus as “he whom you love,”^[13] and then John underscores this by telling us that “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.”^[14] The way that Jesus related to this Bethany family gives us a clue to what it means to be in relationship with him. What we learn, perhaps distressingly, is that it doesn’t mean that one is protected from bad stuff. John’s Gospel makes this painfully obvious, for in this Gospel, love is linked inextricably to death.

Remember that what is perhaps the best known verse of Christian scripture is from this Gospel: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son . . . . ”^[15] And it is in John’s Gospel that Jesus says, No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”^[16] So it is with this family; that they love Jesus and he loves them does not mean that bad things, including death, do not happen.

Lazarus dies. And in John’s story, Jesus does not prevent it, nor even arrive until after it has happened. He is met on the road by Lazarus’ sister Martha who confronts him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” In response, Jesus assures her that “your brother will rise again,” but she hears only the promise of a future resurrection: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” To which Jesus replies, “I am the resurrection and the life.”^[17] Note, if you will, the verb: Jesus’ reply is in the present tense — “I am . . . .”

The resurrection, like the breath of God in Ezekiel’s prophecy, is not a distant promise; it is not a guarantee of salvation in the future; it is not about an eternal life with God and Jesus in heaven. In the next few chapters of John’s Gospel we will encounter Lazarus reclining at the table with Jesus, sharing food and fellowship.^[18] His new relationship with Jesus is intimate and close; it is here and now. For Lazarus, as for the exiles of Ancient Israel and for us, the resurrection is not a future with God; it is a present with God. Jesus is present with Lazarus and his sisters; he is present with us, and through him God is glorified even in that which feels irredeemably bad and painful.

Being in relationship with Jesus, loving him and being loved by him, does not mean that unpleasant things do not happen. It means that when they do, he faces them, and grief that comes from them, with us. It means learning that, in spite of the worst the world can do, the worst that flesh can be subject to, even the deaths of family members, of friends, or of a nation, Jesus is the resurrection and the life. Nothing is ever so dead that it cannot, through his grace, live again.

In John’s Gospel, the resurrection is not a future hope; it is the abundant life which is always here and always now. Nothing, as Paul reminded the Romans, not “death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, [can] separate us” from it. It is, as Ezekiel prophesied to the exiles, as close as the wind, as close as one’s own breath; it is always and everywhere present. Amen.
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This homily was offered by the Rev. Dr. C. Eric Funston on the Fifth Sunday in Lent, March 22, 2026, to the people of St. Timothy’s Episccopal Church, Massillon, Ohio, where Fr. Funston was guest presider and preacher.

The illustration was produced by ChatGPT’s image generator when I asked it “What sort of image would you create to illustrate the concept of a dead nation?”

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Notes:
Click on footnote numbers to link back to associated text. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Scripture are from the New Revised Version Updated Edition.

^[1] Ezekiel 1:1

^[2] Ezekiel 24:16-18

^[3] Psalm 137:1,4

^[4] Psalm 5:2-3 (BCP version)

^[5] Psalm 31:10 (BCP version)

^[6] Psalm 102:4-5 (BCP version)

^[7] Ezekiel 37:11

^[8] Romans 8:5

^[9] Romans 1:3

^[10] Romans 4:1

^[11] Romans 8:9

^[12] Romans 8:35,37-39

^[13] John 1:3

^[14] John 1:5

^[15] John 3:16

^[16] John 15:13

^[17] John 11:21-25

^[18] John 13:28