Readings for the Day:
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The British Football Club AFC Richmond and its owner Rebecca Welton are struggling to find life at the beginning of Ted Lasso. Richmond, while remaining in the Premier League, hasn’t had a league championship win for a long time. They are surviving but not thriving. Even its players are having a tough time. Roy Kent is closing in on the end of his career, Sam Obisanya is struggling after moving far away from his home in Nigeria, and Jamie Tartt is nothing but a wanna-be star player with no room in his heart for anything else but his own ego. Rebecca has recently divorced and is consumed with hatred trying to bring Richmond down as it is the only thing her ex-husband ever truly loved.
And then Ted Lasso comes in, an American Football coach who knows nothing about Soccer. Rebecca hires him in an attempt to bring Richmond down. Yet something completely different happens. Ted breaths new life into the team and into the individuals on it as well. He gets Roy to take his job as captain seriously again and helps him find a new career in coaching. Sam goes from underperforming to being one of the best players on the team. Jamie stops being a jerk and becomes a better person under Ted’s tutelage. Even Rebecca gives up her vendetta against her ex-husband and embraces a new goal of bringing Richmond back into glory. Thanks to Ted, the team has new life, new hope, newfound belief.
God does the same thing for us. God breathes new life in us. God grants us new hope through our belief in Him.
All our readings today point us to new life as well. We see this first in our reading from the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel. This prophet was speaking in the time of the exile, the time when the Israelites had been taken far from their homeland. It was a time of desolation, enslavement, and despair or lack of hope.
The impact of their state led to a feeling of death. This was so great, that Ezekiel in prophesying is described as speaking to dry bones. This is very significant. In those days, back in Jesus’ time even, tombs weren’t graves and columbariums like what we have now. Bodies weren’t simply buried. Instead, bodies were laid in a tomb where they would decompose and then the bones would be gathered together in a bone box and laid in their final resting place. It is rare that someone would have a fresh hewn tomb just for them, as we will see later this season with Jesus in His Death. Rather, your body might be laid in the same tomb as your ancestor or your friends, decomposing as theirs had before you.
In other words, dry bones for Ezekiel would have been bodies that were long dead. No proof of former life rested on them. Yet these are the ones God breathes on. These are the ones God restores to flesh. These are the ones who God’s words, the very words given to the Prophet Ezekiel, bring back to life.
We see something similar with Lazarus today. Because it took Jesus so long to go see Lazarus, he wasn’t just dead, he had been dead for a while. He had been dead so long that not only had he been lying in the tomb for some time, he had been there so long that there would have been a stench from decomposition. Even if Lazarus had somehow been alive when he was put in the tomb, he wouldn’t be now. He was for certain dead.
Yet Jesus, even in his sorrow over the loss of Lazarus, is able to breathe new life in him. Jesus restores him to life in a way that there can be no doubt of what Jesus has done. Jesus does so in a way that is unique, even to his own experience raising the dead, who hadn’t been so quite as long as Lazarus, before.
God does the same for us. As Paul tells us, while the way of flesh is death, the way of Spirit is life. God has granted this Spirit to us, His Spirit, His life-giving breath. For the word for breath and spirit are one and the same. Just as God breathed life into the dry bones of Israel, so too God breathes His Spirit into us.
This life God gives us goes more than just sustain our existence. It increases it. It makes us better. The life God gives is more than life. It is the forgiveness of our sins, the same forgiveness our Psalm today speaks of.
As Ted Lasso did with Richmond, God does with us. God restores us in a way that has never been done before and wasn’t even possible before He did it. God’s life is one that makes us fuller and makes us better.
Now our readings today are ones of preparation. Our reading from Ezekiel is one of the same featured for the the Great Vigil of Easter. Lazarus’ raising too is one of the events that, as John tells us, leads to the religious leaders attempt to put Jesus to death. Both of these readings help pave the way to the celebration of Easter.
That is what Lent does. It prepares us for the Eastertide. In that celebration of Easter we remember the life Jesus gave to save our own. Today helps prepare us for that moment. Today reminds us that life, true life, life even from death, comes from God and from God alone.