Reflection: Flesh

First Presbyterian Church

La Salle, Colorado

March 22, 2026

Fifth Sunday of Lent

“Flesh”

Old Testament Scripture -- Ezekiel 37:1-14 (NRSV)

¹The hand of the LORD came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. ²He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. ³He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord GOD, you know.” ⁴Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. ⁵Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. ⁶I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the LORD.”

⁷So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. ⁸I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. ⁹Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord GOD: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” ¹⁰I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.

¹¹Then he said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ ¹²Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. ¹³And you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. ¹⁴I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the LORD, have spoken and will act,” says the LORD.

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.

Now hear the word of the Lord.

Toe bone connected to the foot bone

Foot bone connected to the leg bone

Leg bone connected to the knee bone...

O’ Hear the word of the Lord!

What fun.  Albeit a bit Halloween weird.  Visually dramatic, which is what Ezekiel intended.  Gets your attention.  Bones scattered about yet another battlefield – the wasteful folly of humanity.  Yet, despite, the power of the word of the Lord to reconstitute a desolate, despairing, despondent group of people.  It’s never too late.  A people who fear there is no hope left for them.   Now given the imagery of a defeated people raised up by the Word of the Lord, when the Word is heard.  Surprise! No wonder this became a favorite spiritual sung by our oppressed African-American brothers and sisters.  A provocative metaphor as provocative promise.  Bones, sinews, skin.  One more element is needed to restore life to flesh. 

I remember when it was time for us to be kind to our failing dog.  Earthquake.  Named by my sister after L’l Abner’s Earthquake Magoon.  Of course, the folks in my first church thought it odd when my rascally dog would take off and I’d chase him down the sidewalk yelling Earthquake! Earthquake!

The vet injected him.  My hand was pressed against his chest.  His heart slowed, stopped.  And my wonderful dog, full of mischievous spirit, became putty in my hands.  When he stopped breathing that fiber of life left him. 

~~~

And by breath, we mean the divine spirit we’ve been loaned for our years. 

Breath.   We breathe each other’s breath. 

What good is a body without breath? 

Breath.  First thing we do when born, cut from mommy.  Inhale.  Deep breath.  We want to breathe.  Hard not to breathe.

Last thing we do?  Exhale, returning the breath we have borrowed.  All breath is borrowed. 

O hear the word of the Lord!

~~~

Whereas Ezekiel is dramatic and stirs the imagination, the Apostle Paul, very academic, lectures and stirs the intellect.

He too talks about flesh and spirit.  Though we have to be careful because to a good Jew the body mattered.  Matter mattered.  They’d never approve of the Greek thinking that tended to disparage the flesh, the body.  As if the body was bad and corrupt and only the inner enlightened spirit was pure and divine.  Not to Hebrews. 

So when we hear Paul in his writing to the Romans this his thick theological statement of faith, when he refers to flesh it is best understood as a shorthand expression for the wasteful way of the world that contends against the resourceful way of the Lord. 

Listen please. 

New Testament Scripture -- Romans 8:6-11 (NRSV)

⁶To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. ⁷For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law — indeed it cannot, ⁸and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

⁹But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. ¹⁰But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. ¹¹If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.

Sermon “Flesh”

I’m rather fond of flesh.  I rather like flesh, despite its tendency to let you down sometimes.  Ah, the price of mortality.  That and the changes that go with this price of life.  Am I still that adolescent scamp who use to love climbing trees and could run a fast 440 for the High School track team?  No.  And yes.  Still that boy, kind of. 

So what is this flesh?

I love cartoons.  Sunday comics.  Calvin and Hobbes.  Far Side.  Political cartoons.  Especially cartoons in the New Yorker Magazine.  I spent hours turning the pages of The New Yorker Magazine Cartoon Collection in my favorite haunt in my house when growing up:  the family library.

Even at six years old, I got the joke.  It was as funny as those movies depicting Jesus as an Aryan with flowing blonde hair.  Come on, history knows Moses didn’t look like Charleston Heston. 

Here’s a favorite, one with delightfully twisted humor:  The cartoon shows the Addams family gleefully pouring boiling oil from their rooftop onto Christmas Carolers.

Then I came across this one.  It rocked my world.  Better, it shook my perception of the world.  Cartoons do that.    They skewer what deserves to be skewered.

The cartoon shows a line of people at a drug store cash register – An India Indian, an Eskimo, someone perhaps from Japan, an African-American, a White European-American, a Sheik from Arabia, and a Native American Indian.  Panic shows on the face of the pharmacist behind the cash register who has turned to yell at his partner:  “Joe, these people say they want flesh-colored Band-Aids.” 

Even at six years old I got it.  Funny, funny. 

So what color is flesh colored Band-Aids? 

Flesh – in all its varied shapes and sizes and colors and abilities.  Flesh that can even create flesh.  And us all sharing the same breath.

“I will lay sinews on you and will cause flesh to come upon you…”

~~~

Medical ethicist and pastor William May described how our body is our identity: 

q  our means of acting and exerting ourselves upon the world.  Jill with her leaf blower for her acre.

q  the means by which the world discloses itself to us, which we receive.  Art, beauty, events.

q  the means through which we reveal ourselves to the world, whether as beautiful young women or beautiful older women.

We are our bodies.   Adaptable, resilient, fragile.

What is disease then?  he asks, he answers.

Disease is the body’s loss of positive power, we lose our animating force which we need to have restored.  

Or, illness is an invasion of something negative which we need to cast out. 

Which means sickness alters our identity -- our habits, our relationships, our faith and beliefs, our character and behaviors.  Sickness is an event that breaks us from who we were, forcing us to reconstruct who we are.

True for human bodies.  True for the church body.  Both, by the way, dependent on the head.   True for the body politic.  Nation, congregation, You and me.  Subject to disease.  Loss of positives.  Infected by negatives.

Our body is our identity. 

We can be arthritic.  We can be tired.  We can be overly sensitive.  We can be stressed out.  We can be a bit deaf.  We age and we will die.  We also can dance.  We can adjust to a bad knee.  We can survive heart surgery.  We can survive an amputated arm.  We can survive acne.  We can survive trouble with boyfriends.  What we cannot survive is decapitation. 

Cut the rest of us off from the Head, from Jesus, and we ain’t much good. 

Us following the way of the world, us hostile to the will of God revealed in Jesus, and, as Paul writes, so to speak, we ain’t much good. 

⁷For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law — indeed it cannot, ⁸and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

We return to the surprising triumph of the valley of dry bones.  Spoken to a people who felt trapped, abandoned.

This graying and portly and dreadfully comical body before you isn’t the same body when a baby sitting on my grandpa lap wearing his fedora or boyishly running around the roof of my house or playing adult soccer or holding my own babies.  Yet, it is the same me.  True with you too.  

Before she died, my grandma gave her magnifying glass.  I said: “what is this?”  She answered:  “You’ll find out.”

Us cellularly renewed, again and again and again, by word, by spirit.  The spirit of Christ, summarized in the sermon on the mount, freed from base agendas, which aloneis the fiber that makes us intact as humans.  Holds fleshy us together.  Which when contrasted with the disastrous way of the world, alone makes sense.  The disastrous sin my will must dominate.  Our faith will no longer be ruled by the past.  The old forms have to die, to step aside, for the universal faith to arise, even though Jesus’ people, like Ezekiel’s people, couldn’t be sure of what it would be like. 

Which is what I am beginning to believe needs to happen to our brand of Christianity, the body of Christ I’ve always known and loved for 73 years.   Perhaps, institutionally as personally, this is my act of trust and faith. 

Our body of faith no longer will be ruled by what was.  God is God.  It will be a new thing.  Surprise!

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.

Now hear the word of the Lord.

The Head Bones Connected To The Neck BonesAnd The Neck Bones To The Back BonesAnd The Back Bones Connected To The Hip Bone.

O’ Hear the word of the Lord!