Thought for the Week

9 March 2008 – 5th Sunday in Lent

Collect:	Most merciful God, who by the death and resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ delivered and saved the world: grant that by faith in him who suffered on the cross we may triumph in the power of his victory; through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Who is alive and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings	Ezekiel 37, 1 – 14
	Psalm 130
	Romans 8, 6 – 11
	John 11, 1 - 45

The destruction of towns and cities by war is horrific. We only have to call to mind pictures of Caen, Berlin, Coventry and innumerable others after the 2nd World War to realise this. More recently we have seen on our television screens the rudimentary homes of people in Dafour and Kenya being torched, leaving only residual ash. Freda and I were fortunate to go to Japan in 2001 to see our son, who was working there at the time, and we visited Hiroshima. I expected to see a ruined wasteland, such was the conditioning of my early years but instead, we found a bustling thriving city. The area where the atom bomb fell is now the Peace Park. It was a very, very moving experience to visit this place. The photographs in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum show total devastation over a huge area. The details of this horror are too distressing to record here.

We recall the Old Testament reading this morning from Ezekiel Chapter 37 – the ‘valley of dry bones’. The picture is unrelentingly grim and desolate. ‘Mortal, can these bones live?’ – a haunting phrase. We can see in the devastated cities, towns and villages across Europe how these ‘bones’ of buildings have been restored, rebuilt and given new life. We see the same in Hiroshima, now a thriving city, with a baseball stadium and all its ensuing noise and cheering a few hundred metres from the Peace Park - a strange contrast. In the park there are many varieties of trees and among them, very close to the main Peace Memorial, are some Phoenix trees (Chinese Parasol tree or Firmiana). At the time of the atomic blast these particular trees were growing in the courtyard of a Post Office building 1.5 km away from the epicentre. The trees took the full force of the explosion’s heat, losing many of their branches and all their leaves; the sides of the trees were burned and hollowed out. Although the trees seemed dead, new buds appeared in the following spring - hence the name Phoenix tree. Seeing this new life, people who were still dazed by what had happened the previous year, took courage and began to rebuild their lives and their city. These Phoenix trees were transplanted in the Peace Park in1973. They remain alive, a silent witness to the devastation and destruction brought about by the bombing but also a sign of how new life can come out of destruction. We have two Phoenix trees which I have grown from seed in our garden – I like to think that the seed came from those trees in the Hiroshima Peace Park. They are a continual reminder to us of our visit to Japan.

There is a sad but lovely story of a young Japanese girl, Sadako. In 1954, when she was eleven, she developed leukaemia as a result of being exposed to radiation when she was a baby. Sadako was determined to get better. She heard of a Japanese tradition that if you make one thousand paper cranes then you can have your wish. So Sadako decided to do just that – make a thousand cranes - her wish was to live. Sadly, she became weaker and weaker and she died when she had made only 644 cranes. Her classmates folded 356 more and she was buried with her thousand paper cranes. The story of Sadoko travelled all over Japan and children made thousands, even millions of paper cranes. This is still done today but now, the paper cranes come from all over the world. They are placed at the foot of the Children’s Monument in the Peace Park and when they start to decay they are removed and recycled into paper notebooks which you can buy in the Peace Park shop. A statue of Sadako with her arms outstretched stands on top of the beautiful memorial to all Hiroshima’s children. Sadako’s bones did not come alive again but she lives on in the hearts and minds of millions of children the world over who make the paper cranes. The children of today have placed an inscription at the base of the statue –

This is our cry

This is our prayer

Peace in the world

‘Mortal, can these bones live?’ Sadako has brought new life to a later generation of Japanese, indeed to a country where an earlier generation was so terribly overwhelmed by the pursuit of evil and destruction and who created in their wake so many ‘valleys of dry bones’.

We all experience in our own lives ‘the valley of dry bones’ - the desert, the wilderness, despair, a time of pain, of loss, of failure. There are times when we feel utterly helpless and we seek to escape as quickly as possible. With the Psalmist we say, ‘Out of the depths have I called to you, O Lord’. May be at such times we can see this as a period of challenge, of testing, and with the Psalmist say, ‘I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him, in his word is my hope’. Let us remember that our Lord was called into the wilderness to be tested by the devil. May be, as a result of our times of challenge, we will find something about ourselves that we would not otherwise have seen.

The scene is, however, grim and seemingly unrelentless in the ‘valley of dry bones’, as it was in destroyed Caen, in Hiroshima, in Auschwitz, - as it still is in Dafour. ‘Mortal, can these bones live?’ We have probably asked this question of ourselves, perhaps not in the same words, at times of sickness, bereavement or uncertain relationships, in a marriage, a job, a new business venture, yes, perhaps even when coming to live in another country. We find, at such times, that it is difficult to trust our own judgment. As Christians we seek the guidance of God and we bow our heads and say with Ezekiel, ‘O Lord God, you know’. But God does not provide us with an easy miracle. Out of Sadako’s death came new life, not Sadako’s life but new life and new vision for Japanese children and young people. Out of the death of Lazarus came a new life beyond death. God wants us to share in this new creation, this new life coming out of destruction and this is what we will celebrate at Easter in the resurrection of Christ. God says to us as he said to Ezekiel ’prophesy to these bones’. We are called to think, to decide, to act, to respond. When we have that courage and inner strength to trust in God, we see that something is possible after all. How do we understand the words - ‘O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord’. How do we understand God saying ‘I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live’? The process of resurrection can go on and new life can be found from despair and destruction. It did so in Hiroshima, in the revived Phoenix trees, through the death of Sadako and in the cities, towns and villages across Europe. ‘Mortal, can these bones live?’ Let us make that a message of hope for us to take to ourselves so that we may co-operate with God to find that new creation through faith in Jesus Christ. As Paul said in the New Testament reading for today – ‘If 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.’ Amen.

Revd John King: Retired Priest in Cahors

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