I suppose it’s almost required that preachers comment on the recently released Pew Research survey which shows that Christianity, and religious belief in general, declined rapidly in the United States in the last 7 years, between 2007 and 2014. Here is a link to the Pew site and the survey for those interested in examining the data and some interpretive commentary for themselves.
And I’m sure that a number of preachers will perceive a tie between one of the text options for Pentecost Sunday, Ezekiel 37:1-14, and the declining percentage of Christian faith among the American population. The prophet’s vision of a valley of dry bones may seem like an apt picture of the religious landscape in America, particularly among Catholics and the Mainline Protestant churches, both of which shrank significantly both in numbers and as percentages of the total population. Evangelical Christians grew slightly in number, but also shrank somewhat as a percentage of the population.
The thing to remember, and constantly say aloud, is that America is not biblical Israel, not God’s chosen people. There’s a great deal of evangelical confusion on this point, along with much willingness to draw simple parallels between Scripture passages about Israel and the current American situation. That sort of thing should be resisted on every front, remembering that from the perspective of the New Testament the whole church of Jesus Christ, throughout the world, is the new Israel, the new people of God. To identify American Christianity, or even worse, the nation itself, as Israel is to disenfranchise and ignore the greater and perhaps more fervent portion of the church spread over the rest of the world.
With that caution against a simple identification of ourselves as Israel, it’s still permissible to find a message of hope and encouragement in Sunday’s text from Ezekiel. But there’s a bit of irony in the fact that if we make that move in relation to the Pew report, then Ezekiel’s message might offer the greatest hope for those shrinking, dying, Mainline and Catholic churches in America. The bones which represent Israel are “very dry” (verse 2), that is, hopeless cases. Evangelicals still holding the line in numbers and in spiritual faithfulness may not yet be dry enough to qualify for a resurrecting wind of the Spirit.
Yet there is hope and promise in Ezekiel and in the celebration of Pentecost for the whole church of Jesus Christ. Our hope is that the life of our movement, of our existence as people of God, comes not from us but from the Holy Spirit. That’s the message in all our Pentecost texts today. Psalm 104:30 declares that all life is renewed as God sends His Spirit. Acts 2 tells of the powerful beginnings of the church in Jerusalem by the wind of the Spirit. Jesus explains in John 16:7 that it is to our advantage that He depart and send the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, who will guide us into all the truth we need to know.
As I recently discussed with one of our church members, it is just exactly when the church feels oppressed, defeated, and nearly dead that God sends the Spirit to revive, empower and teach us just what God has to give us. That’s the Pentecost message for what may seem a dry time in American Christianity and what may be a dry time in our own spiritual lives.