Leaning Into Lent | Leaning Into Hope (3-22-2026)

Dr. Woods Lisenby preaches on the subject, "Leaning Into Hope."

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Transcript

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Today, um, we are almost concluding our season of Lent next week, Palm Sunday, one service, 10 o'clock. We'll be the last Sunday in Lent before we make it into the season of Easter. Um, and we've been leaning into Lent. We've really been trying to embrace the season uh with our Linton sacrifices, with our devotions on Monday, Wednesday, Friday with the Old Testament, New Testament gospel. If you've been listening on the podcast, following along on the videos or reading summaries, uh, maybe even reading the everyday devotions that Huntington College has given us. The groups have gone very well. Lent has been a very rich season, it's also a heavy season. It's a time of self-examination, it's a time of reflection. We confessed earlier. But Lent is a season that's supposed to offer us hope, a way to look forward. And so this morning I'd like to preach about that. Leaning into hope. Will you pray with me? Lord, may the words of our mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight. O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. We thank you for your word. May it always be a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Now God's people said, Amen. If you are from this area and you like baseball, there's a good chance uh you're a fan of the Atlanta Braves. Uh in the Southeast, there's not a whole lot of options if you're gonna root for a baseball team. And if you like me are from this area uh and you cheer for the Braves, then you probably remember the feelings of the late 90s and the early 2000s, really all the 2000s, up until like 2021. Uh they instilled in us a sense of emotion um that that was perpetual, it is ongoing, right? Year after year, the Braves uh would have these awesome players on their team, people like Tom Lavin, John Smoltz, Tip Jones. Uh, but year after year, the Braves came up short in the postseason. It was so predictable. Every year you knew what was going to happen. Like they won the championship in 1995, um, and it felt like the sky was the limit. But I was sixth then, and so I don't really fully remember that. What I vividly remember is every single year watching them win a lot of games during the regular season and not live up to the hype come October every year, uh, getting knocked out. And it was these dashed hopes, right? You get your expectations up, you get your hopes up. And uh, after a while, it became hard for the summer to roll into fall and to have these expectations of success and uh to hold on to any hope that things are gonna work out, and then for the braves to just rip your heart out. I as much as I love them, uh the the braves tried to steal my hope from me. You know, they've tried for many years. And this morning, I I do want to talk about that, this whole idea of hope. And I use baseball as a as a silly example to talk about something much more serious, right? I think a lot of the ideas we have about hopes and expectations or everyday thoughts, they are wrapped up in like trivial things like baseball or other sports, right? There's still a lot of Auburn fans in here hoping, right? Uh Alabama fans in here, you know, hoping things go back. But but I think we also we hope for things like I hope this my favorite person wins the bachelor. I hope Cheryl's in out of college before I get over there. Right, we've got our everyday expectations, but there's a much deeper version of this reality. There is a hopelessness that is stronger than simple discouragement brought about by casual bummers. This morning, I wonder have you ever experienced the kind of hopelessness where you genuinely can't picture a future? Where the tunnel seems to have no light. There's no end in sight. Because that's where the people were whenever we enter the text of Ezekiel 37. That's where the Israelites were. The passage we just read is about a people who have completely run out of rope. And if we're going to do their story justice this morning, I think we have to go with them to that valley. We have to start out this morning, uh, and as we're winding down Lent, by considering what it's like to be hopeless as they were hopeless. The story starts out by saying that the hand of the Lord was on Ezekiel and that the Spirit carried him out to a valley of bones. And the text goes out of its way to tell us something about these bones. These aren't just your ordinary everyday bones, these are dry bones. Make sure to tell us that they are not freshly fallen. Like these weren't from a recent battle with still some flesh on them. No, they were bleached from years in the desert sun. These were ancient bones. This was a scene of finality. Death had been there a long time, and nothing had disturbed it. And so God walks Ezekiel back and forth across these bones. He takes him on a tour of the devastation, and then he asks him what must be one of the loadest, most loaded questions in all scripture. He asks, Son of man, can these bones live? Uh and Ezekiel, to his credit, to us in a human mind, there's only one logical answer. But but he says, he doesn't say yes, he doesn't say no. He says, Sovereign Lord, you alone know. Uh Ezekiel's a prophet, and uh he is aware that God knows more than he does. And he's looking at what is in front of him, and the human answer is clearly no, these bones can't live. But Ezekiel has been around the block. He's been around long enough to know that his assessment of what is and is not doesn't have the last word. And so to get the full picture of this story, to understand what's happening here, it's helpful to have a little bit of context about what's going on with the people. Because Ezekiel, he's writing to a people in an exile, right? The northern kingdom of Israel, again, it had been uh scattered and lost, swallowed by the Assyrians generations ago, hundreds of years before this. And then the the southern kingdom, Judah, where we get most of our text in the Old Testament from, uh, they had just reached, they've been carried off to Babylon. And so their temple is gone, their land is gone, the political structures that gave the people their identity is gone. These people are not struggling through a difficult season, waiting for things to turn around. No, uh, they are what these bones represent. The bones represent their dried up, lack of hope, scattered lives. They were a displaced and decimated people who could not see any path forward or any way to return to what they once were. The dry bones aren't simply a metaphor that Ezekiel introduces to them, it's a metaphor that they live with every single day. God tells Ezekiel to prophesy over the bones, to speak to them. And the Lord says, Tell those bones that they are gonna live again. And so he does. He prophesies, and then something extraordinary happens. Uh, if you read this text, there's a rattling sound, and the bones start moving, and they begin to find each other and connect in the way that bones are supposed to connect, and then there's tendons that appear, and flesh comes on the bones, and skin comes on the bones. This passage is is giving us enough detail where you can kind of uh feel the strangeness of what is happening as these things just kind of come together, but then it stops. The miracle happens, but is incomplete because there is no breath in these reconstituted bodies. And I want to make sure we don't rush past this part because the bodies are assembled, the structure is there, everything that makes a human body a human body is present, but they are still not alive. They went from being uh dead in pieces to assembled and still dead. And being put together is not the same thing as being alive, is it sometimes we get ourselves all put together while internally we are dying on the the physical restoration is not the miracle, the miracle is what comes next. God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the breath, he says to call the ruach. That's the Hebrew word that is not only for breath, but it's also spirit and wind. He says, Call the breath from the four winds into these slain. And when he does, the breath enters them. They stand up, and there is a vast army where moments ago there is a valley of scattered bones and silence. I love this story. There's so much I could talk about in this text. Uh, but the first thing I think that it shows us is that God's work of restoration is not just structural, right? It's not just about putting pieces back in order so everything looks nice. It's not just about rebuilding institutions back the way they were and how we remember them. God's not in the business of producing functional corpses. God is in the business of giving life. And the life is something that only He can provide. Now, I know it might be hard for us to identify with this like Babylonian exile, right? That seems so far-fetched of a thing. We live in a great country. Most of us can't understand what it means to be kicked out of our homeland and for our nation to have no future. But I think we can all understand what it's like to be in the valley. We've either been there before or we're there right now. I I can think of a couple of these experiences in my own life. But as I was reading this text, the one that came to mind was the one that was most recent and fresh in my soul. It's what uh my family went through last fall, and you journeyed alongside us during. It was on Saturday, September the 6th, that my wife uh won second place in a traffic line and she whooped my tail. I was nowhere close. Uh and then four days later, the whole world turned upside down. Um, she never complains of pain. Uh, but on that morning, uh uh she said there's something wrong, something didn't feel right, and she thought she should go to the hospital to get checked out. And I'm like, every alarm bell in my head is going off. Like, this this is this isn't good. Based on her symptoms, we we thought it was appendicitis. Uh, but shockingly, uh, we found out that we were pregnant for the fifth time. And uh uh it was a moment of both like surprise and like genuine excitement that quickly turned into like fear and uncertainty. Uh the pregnancy was ectopic and it had ruptured, and then within a few hours, she's in surgery. They transferred us via ambulance over to USA. Uh and uh she was in surgery, released a couple days later. You know, we were there for the rest of the weekend, a couple days to spend. Um, but she left and was still in pain and she felt like something was still wrong, but was unsure. And later uh in the week, we went back to the hospital and we were there for multiple days with very few answers until about 1 a.m. on Saturday morning, uh, after some serious issues, they did another scan and they came in like with the most somber and serious faces. These are normally the happy-go-lucky, like her OBGYN is like one of like the friendliest, bubbly people ever. And this was like, not that night. That night she came in and was just like, matter of fact, okay, this is serious. Turns out that her uh part of her bowel had died. They had to rush her back to emergency surgery, and they didn't know what was gonna happen. They they didn't want it to perforate, and they didn't know if she'd wake up in a different hospital or how long she'd be in the ICU or what. For the whole month of September, through all of this, I remember sitting in waiting rooms and sleeping in the hospital and being by her side as she went through these tests, and at each step, just genuinely not knowing what the future looked like, what was gonna happen next. When you when you're sitting in that liminal space of unknown, it can feel agonizing. And I remember even like just hours before that second surgery, we thought we were going home. We actually already packed up our bags that Saturday night. I was supposed to be here that Sunday morning to preach. I was gonna come here to preach and then go back there and pick her up, and her parents were gonna sit with her. We had this hope that it was just residual pain from the previous surgery until all of a sudden uh we're sitting in the hospital bed holding each other, crying in the middle of the night with no idea about what the future was gonna hold. I didn't have any words for a moment like that. Nobody does, right? Like I held her and we cried, waiting for the doctors to come back, and and I sang some of the lullaby songs that we sing to our children. Because that's about all I could come up with. When they took her back from surgery, uh, I prayed, but there was like no rhyme or reason to those prayers. Her mom came to to sit with me, and by the time I made it back to the hospital room where we were staying, uh Lee Walters um was there to, he's a member of our church, was there to sit with us. Just as Asher Carmichael and Blair Lover have been there earlier in the week. Pastor Mike had come by. Uh and now most of you know her surgery went well, right? She's sitting right there. Hey, wait a go, babe. Um, but even though like the next few months were very slow and took a lot of healing, and now she's well enough, you know, to whoop my butt in a uh in a workout again. Like, there's no worry about she did that the other day. She had like this date night at her at her boot camp thing, and I was about to throw up everywhere. She's like, Are you okay? And I'm like, I'm never doing that again. But the thing about that kind of fear and hopelessness is it doesn't go away when you fall asleep, right? Those feelings, they stay with you. There are still moments for her and and for me where like the adhesion pain she feels from the scar tissue and her azimen, like it makes you think, like, oh no, we're going back to that place all over again. And after all of that, you we now know what it feels like in a new way to be in a valley with no idea of what comes next. That valley was very real. That hopelessness of not being able to see the future, that's something I'll never forget. But something tells me that I'm not the only one in here this morning who has that knowledge, who's felt those feelings, or experienced those valleys. I bet if we were to go around this room, there'd be a whole lot of stories about the moments where you had to walk through it, where the bones looked as dry as dry can be. Some of you are in a health crisis right now, or someone you love is, and the reports are not coming through the way you hope. Some of you are in relationships where you're wondering what comes next. Or maybe you're carrying grief that doesn't have a timeline. There's a loss that changed the geography of your life, and you're trying to figure out how to live in this new landscape. Or maybe you you have a prodigal child, one that that you haven't seen in a while, and you have uh uh desires for, but but you can see the bones, you can't see the breath. Or perhaps you're just exhausted. Like you you're you're tired in a way that starts to feel permanent, and the idea of hope is something that applies to other people in other circumstances, but not you, not right now. There are bones that are very dry in a lot of places, in a lot of our lives, and the question God put to Ezekiel hangs over all of these things. Can these bones live? You know, when we hear this story, we're left asking, what in the world do we do with a valley or a life filled with dry bones? What do we do when we can't see the hope? The first word I hear from this text, the first word that I hear God speaking into our lives, is that God does not require a living situation to work miracles. Right? God goes into the valley. He doesn't wait for the bones to show signs of life before he shows up. He walks Ezekiel through the whole scene, the full scope of devastation, and then he starts talking before there's any visible reason to hope. God is there. The valley doesn't have to clean itself up and be all presentable and look nice before Ezekiel is led there. It doesn't have to demonstrate potential. God shows up even when things are at their worst. And the same is true for our lives. God isn't waiting for you to figure things out before he shows up. The New Testament tells us that when we were even dead in our sins, Christ died for us. God was with us before we even knew who God was. God is there for you. No matter what valley you are in, and no matter when you are there, there's nothing you have to do for God to show up. But the second thing I think that this text helps us see is that God does work in stages. Uh the stage that uh we can uh participate in, those are not the stages that make everything come to life. God is the one that provides the life, God is the one who does the ultimate healing. But Ezekiel does take part in the process, right? He's prophesying to the bones and they assemble. He speaks and the tendons appear. He asks, he says, for the flesh to come on and it does. God brings the life, but God invites us to participate in the healing. This is a beautiful example of how we as Methodists understand our lives in Christ. Uh, we understand that we are not justified by works. God shows up first. But that once we've experienced God in our life, God invites us to take that next faithful step, to keep showing up, to do hard things. God invites us to be a part of what God is doing. There's a real partnership in the experience of God's goodness. But there's also a clear line, right? There's only so much we can do. We can't do it all. We can speak the words, we can be present in the valley, but the breath that turns uh assembled bones into a living army is not ours to manufacture. That belongs to God. So a word for us this morning is do not be afraid of doing the next right thing. Do not stop doing things because they are hard. We can take the next steps even if we don't know where they lead. Because God will be with us through it all. That's the last thing I hear from this scripture. The people of Israel, uh, they declared all hope is gone. They weren't being dramatic, like they were just talking about what they could see. And God didn't argue with their assessment, he did not minimize their pain, he didn't tell them that they were wrong for feeling what they felt, or that uh that things weren't as bad as they seemed, or if they just had more faith, then things would have been better. No. He says, I know these bones are you, and these bones are dry. But now listen to what I'm gonna do. God's response to hopelessness is not absence, and it's not correction, it's a promise. And that that's a different kind of comfort than ones we normally try to offer each other, right? Normally try to explain things or tell somebody why they got into this position. But this hope says even in the darkest valley, God can do more than we could ever ask for or imagine. Before we even know where to step, God is with us and can change us and bring us hope. Uh if you have been following along, you know, we've been reading from Romans 8. I mentioned it earlier. It's one of my favorite Bible verses, my text in the whole Bible. Uh, we read it at almost every funeral. I remember, in fact, we read it at my grandfather's. And uh, Paul is writing to a church who is acquainted with suffering, and he says something that is almost impossible to hold on to when you're in the valley. Uh, he says the present sufferings are not worth comparing to future glory, the glory that will be revealed. And to be honest, when you are in the valley, that sentiment can land like a lead balloon, right? When you're in those hard parts of your life, it can feel dismissive, like somebody saying that your pain doesn't exist or doesn't count. But that's not what Paul is saying. Paul is not minimizing the valley. If you look at his life, he went through a lot of them. He understands how dark they can be. What he's trying to say is that God is bringing us to something extraordinary. He's talking about the destination. He's saying that once we finally see it, it will reframe everything that came before it. He doesn't say suffering isn't real. He doesn't say your pain doesn't matter. He's saying God is even more real. And then Paul says something that I want to leave you with this morning. It's one of the most honest words in scripture. He says that in our weakness, we don't know what to pray for. When you are in the deepest valley, you don't have the right words. Like sitting in a hospital bed, and all you can do is sing lullabies. But Paul says that in those moments, the spirit intercedes for us in ways that words cannot express. The same spirit that breathed life into the valley of the dry bones, the same spirit that hovered over the waters at creation, that spirit takes our wordless grief and brings it before God. It brings it when we can't even come up with words to say, the spirit moves on our behalf. That means that even when the prayers won't form, and when all you have is fear and exhaustion and those feelings you can't even fully name, even then something is being carried to God for you. The Spirit, the Holy Spirit, is interceding in the valley and breathing life into you, even when you can't see what's next. So wherever you are this morning, I want you to hear this. The bones being dry, and if you read this whole text, those dry bones, they are not the end of the story. No, no, no. The fact that things look lifeless does not mean that God can't bring new life. That sensation that hope has left and that the future has closed off. Those feelings are real, but they don't get the last word. They don't get to speak about what God is capable of doing. Ezekiel didn't look at the valley and say, Oh, I see exactly how this is gonna work out. I know what's gonna go. He looked at it instead, God only knows. And sometimes that's the only thing I can tell you. I don't know exactly how things are gonna go in your life. I can't lead you from A to B to C. I can't tell you what steps to take, but I know that God knows and that God is with you. He looked out and he did what was right in front of him. Ezekiel did what was asked. He the bones rattled, the tendons came, the flesh, and then the breath came. When the valley had been full of dry bones, God breathed new life into it. God is not finished with what feels finished to you. He's not absent from the valley. He is walking you back and forth through it so that you can see every bone and watch him breathe life into it. That same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead rests in you, and that is no small thing. So, wherever you are, whatever valley you are in, whatever your life looks like right now, you might be asking, can these bones live? And the sovereign Lord says, Yes, no matter what you might think, God can breathe life and bring goodness even from the darkest valley. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And all God's people say, Amen.