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Do we need any reminder that life is not always easy? We remember what the people of Haiti and those who have stepped forward to help them have faced over the past three weeks. We remember the challenges that have come our way in workplace, school, family or neighborhood. We who call ZPC home are well aware of the challenges that have faced us in our life together as a church, as the people of God. This weekend we take stock of where we are and what we face as we seek to walk well as followers of Jesus right where we are. We’ll step into The Place Called Reality.

 

It was 1922 when Gaspare Sanfilippo and his son, John started a small, storefront pecan-shelling company in Chicago. Now occupying a one million square foot headquarters and distribution center in Elgin, Illinois they might be known to you not by their acronym of JBSS but by one of their acquisitions, Fisher, where they like to say they “live for nuts.” The official mission of the Fisher nut company is:

To be the global leader of quality-driven, innovative nut solutions that enhance the customer and consumer experience and achieve consistent, profitable growth for our shareholders.

That is their big picture. Interestingly Fisher’s motto is “the difference is in the details.” Obviously this company understands that the big picture drives the details and that each detail makes an impact on the big picture.

Keeping the right perspective on the details and the big picture is important. The difference any detail can make is huge. In any given week we might face details like a shattering diagnosis, a friend or spouse can admit to adultery. Despair can fall like a curtain. There can be a failed test, a lapse in recovery, a job loss, a lie, an act of rage, or words that destroy. And any given week also can bring details that are tangible blessings like in the words “the MRI is clear”, turning away from flirtation, hope like mid-winter sunshine, another day of sobriety, a job offer, the truth, an infusion of peace and words that build up. The details are sometimes bad and sometimes good. Through it all, our big picture can hold us steady. It is our calling to follow Jesus in the midst of it all. Hard and easy, details and big picture are woven together. This is the reality of our lives.

Our reality as a congregation is that we have been living in a tight spot for many, many months, even years by some calculations. Whether you’ve been aware of it or impacted by it deeply or marginally, the way has been immensely challenging. This tight spot is marked with distrust, accusation, taking sides, fretting and fuming. We have asked God for discernment and at times it seems that precious little has come. While encouraged over the past four weekends to be “all in” some of us have been thinking about being “all out”. We are caught in the vortex of the details and we are wrapped up in placing blame. There has been much that has happened in our life together that has displeased the heart of God. With an affirmation that not everyone individually has sinned against someone else, there is a corporate awareness that all has not been right.

I am amazed that we have found ourselves in this tight spot because I have experienced such blessing in and through the ministry of zpc. I first came into the orbit of this ministry in 1990 when I moved to Indiana to be senior pastor of a county seat town church just north of here. I met Glenn that same year and started getting to know him when we served on a presbytery committee on evangelism and church growth together. I met pastors Bob and Scott as they came on your staff. People in the church I served came to zpc to learn about lay-led ministry and to invest in the Great Banquet community. I filled this pulpit and met with your session a time or two. All these details were full of blessing. Through the sweeping, unfolding big picture plan of God, I was allowed the opportunity to become one of your pastors. I gave thanks for this rich, special detail added to the landscape of my walk with Jesus. That was four years ago. Never would I have imagined we would find ourselves in our present reality marked by confusion, distrust, brokenness and sadness.

We were going to start a series this weekend on the book of Ephesians. Two weeks ago we were prompted to shift away from that plan and address “Where We Go from Here”. This series invites us to examine the details while keeping in mind the big picture. The big picture is reconciliation, community and faithfulness. In the coming weeks we will go deep into humility, repentance, forgiveness, hope, love and into Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. We will find that these elements apply to every area of life where brokenness has taken root in the details.

There are many places in the bible where we could get a picture of our current reality. I have chosen to take us to the people of Israel. Sometimes they lived with God and each other in ways that were deeply faithful and God blessed them. Most often they lost sight of the big picture and messed up the details. In these times God provided prophets to speak the very words of God. These prophets affirmed that both detail and big picture were a cohesive whole in God’s eyes. Ezekiel served as one of God’s prophets. Living in exile far away from the land of promise, God used him to alert God’s people to their reality. It is a startling picture. I offer it not to be harsh but to be real and to point us toward something that has been in low supply around here lately. I offer you, God offers us, hope.

Open your bibles or the bibles around you to our text for today. It is Ezekiel chapter 37. If you pick up one of the bibles we supply, you’ll find this on page 857. I’ll start reading at verse one. Remember, this is God’s holy word. [Read through verse three.] We’ll come back and read further in a few minutes.

In 2004, a pastor of a growing, thriving Presbyterian church published a book that referred to this text as both an alert and an invitation. The alert was given to churches that centered their life on transactional details. The invitation was to a way of life that focused on transformation. The zpc we love has encouraged us to be all about transformation. It rings true in our big picture expressed in our mission statement, “called together to be disciples who make disciples and release them into our broken world.” This big picture rings true in many details of our life as a church. We have been blessed and we have been a blessing. But we also have not fully lived into that big picture. We have not always stayed the course to transformation.

Like the people of Israel, we have wandered. We have not invested in all that God really desires of us. We, too, unbelievably, are faced with our own dryness and brokenness. Wherever we are out of step with God’s best, we are like the bones in that valley, dry and dead. Like the Fisher’s company motto, the difference is in the details. We know what to do and sometimes we don’t do it. We know what to say and sometimes we don’t say it. We know what to think and sometimes we don’t think it. We know what to feel and sometimes we don’t feel it. We get it right and we get it wrong. If it were not for the amazing, sweeping panorama of God’s mercy and love and grace we would be without hope. But we are not without hope.

I believe most of you are now aware that the presbytery has confidently, clearly affirmed Glenn to continue to serve as our senior pastor. This is news we waited for months to hear and we celebrate his presence. But, if you read presbytery’s decision in its entirety you were likely caught off guard or confused by one or more of the details. Among those is that Glenn is back but not yet preaching. There is a call for reconciliation about matters of “concern”. There is also a statement about a planned departure for Glenn in two to five years.

All this may leave us with more uncertainty than less. Knowing that, Glenn sent a letter out to the congregation on Friday afternoon that shares how he and his wife, Mary Sue, believe all of these conditions are spot on. In that letter, Glenn joyously celebrates God’s provision in these details as he points us to God’s big picture. He writes of his belief that the steps outlined by presbytery are a tremendous blessing to him and Mary Sue and to zpc. They see a future in which they can re-invest in their beloved church for these years to come and look forward to how the details and the big picture will align in such a way to fully honor Jesus.

Look with me again at Ezekiel chapter thirty-seven. I’ll start reading at verse four. [Read Ezek 37:4-14.] The bones that were lifeless now have been brought together and new life has entered them through the work and presence of God through his Spirit. That is what lies before us. Detail and big picture, it is all fundamentally the work of God. Another prophet of Israel reminded the people that it is “’Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord Almighty” (Zechariah 4:6).

How do we get there from where we are now? We get there by deciding that we will spend the weeks ahead opening ourselves up to God and to each other in new and fresh ways marked by humility, repentance, forgiveness, hope, love and surrender to Jesus to his honor and glory. The dust of death needs to be shaken off so we may have life. We must be knit together with God and each other. We must not just assume this happens automatically because of a decision of presbytery. We must do the work necessary to make sure we are re-connecting, person to person, so tendon and flesh and skin may form in new and fresh ways. We must receive the life giving Spirit of God once again and live so that the Spirit is not quenched but instead is allowed to bring us into the land of God’s blessing.

I mentioned earlier a Presbyterian pastor and his book that calls churches to transformation. That book is subtitled “From Dry Bones to Spiritual Vitality”. The author is our own senior pastor Glenn McDonald. Who would have thought we would ever be in our current reality where we stand in need of spiritual vitality and transformation, where we need to take up the details and the big picture and present them to God in new and fresh ways. But here we are. This is our reality. Glenn and we together in a valley of yet-dry bones where bone will connect with bone, tendon and flesh and skin will re-form and new life will come.

Novelist Ivo Andric in his remarkable novel, The Bridge on the Drina, writes of a specific place along that river where travelers passed time upon time.

Perhaps even in those far-off times, some traveler passing this way, tired and drenched, wished that by some miracle this wide and turbulent river were bridged, so that he could reach his goal more easily and quickly. For there is not doubt that men had always, ever since they first travelled here and overcame the obstacles along the way, thought how to make a crossing at this spot, even as all travelers at all times have dreamed of a good road, safe travelling companions and a warm inn. Only not every wish bears fruit, nor has everyone the will and the power to turn his dreams into reality.

Good wishes will not be enough for us to bridge the river before us from our current reality to the reality of our dreams. That reality is only reached in the power of God, by the will of the Spirit, in conformity to God’s word, in obedience to Jesus. May we walk faithfully into God’s best remembering that the difference is in the details. We start right where we are and entrust ourselves to God’s big, sweeping picture that unfolds before us.