“The breath of God’s life”.   Travel has been very much in the news this week; and Portugal is about the only country in Europe on the Government’s “green” list. That means that people have been jetting off there since last Monday; I guess that most of them have been heading for the Algarve or possibly Lisbon. But there are many other places of interest in Portugal and one of these is the city of Évora, situated about 100 kilometres south of Lisbon. It features medieval city walls, a beautiful cathedral, an ancient University, and a well-preserved Roman temple. But, according to TripAdvisor, the most-visited “attraction” – if I may call it that – is the “Capela dos Ossos”, the 16^th century Chapel of Bones, situated in the basement of the Church of St. Francis.

Now, here are ossuary chapels all over Catholic Europe; in most of them the bones are simply strewn around or locked away in cabinets. But the one in Évora is different. Once visitors have passed the cheerful inscription at the entrance which reads, “Our bones which are here await yours”, they enter three rooms in which bones and skulls of all shapes and sizes have been arranged in decorative patterns around the walls and even the ceiling – it has been estimated that, in total, they would make up about 5000 skeletons. The impression is more bizarre or even artistic than macabre, but the monks who built the chapel had a serious intention: they wanted people to think of the brevity of life, and their need to turn to God.

A country which isn’t on the “green” list is Cambodia; and its Choeung Ek Genocide Museum must feel very different. This memorial to the notorious “killing fields” of the Pol Pot regime consists of a field of roughly-excavated mass graves and a tower filled with thousands of human bones and skulls. It is estimated that the graves contain the remains of over 20,000 victims, many of whom had been tortured before they were bludgeoned or shot. I don’t think I’d want to visit Choeung Ek: it must be even worse than visiting Auschwitz, although we do need reminders of just how cruel people can be. I am sure that everyone who goes to the museum comes back shocked and humbled. That tower of bones must be a truly awful sight.

Ezekiel’s vision – and of course it was just a vision – is probably closer to Choeung Ek than Évora. For I imagine him standing on the brim of a desert valley or canyon, looking down at the bones of thousands of men. We’re not told how the bones got there: has there been a famine or a deadly plague, or is this the aftermath of a bloody battle? It doesn’t really matter, for vultures have picked off the flesh, animals have gnawed at the bones and dropped them in a vast skeletal tangle. This is a picture of futility and decay reminiscent of a dinosaurs’ graveyard decaying in the shifting sands: these bones once belonged to living people, but now they are lying lifeless and bleached by the sun. In fact they barely look human at all.

But Ezekiel is told by God to do a strange thing, in fact something that’s utterly ridiculous: “Talk to these bones”, says God, “Speak my words to them and tell them that they are going to live”. You could hardly imagine anything more foolish, could you? Yet Ezekiel obeys, apparently without a qualm, and an amazing (and spooky) thing happens: there is a rattling noise, the bones move and join together, they are clothed with flesh, and they stand up. It’s an impressive sight. But, as yet, these reconstituted soldiers are no more alive than China’s famous terracotta army: the prophet has to speak again and this time they are touched by God’s breath and come to life. What an amazing dream to have, and what meanings it contains!

As we start to examine this vision, we need to notice the context in which it was given. Ezekiel is prophesying at a time when Israel is at a low ebb: its army has been defeated, its capital city of Jerusalem (including the Temple) razed to the ground, its land laid waste and its best people exiled. Humanly speaking it seems as if the nation, so proud of its heritage from the time of Abraham, has come to the end of its road. The only future can be a foreign takeover of the land which the people believed God had given to them in perpetuity, an end of their distinctive faith, and an assimilation into the nations round about. There is no reason to hope that things could ever change.

But God says, “No”. He has not given up on his people: there is still life to be had and, in the face of all odds, revival can still take place. Indeed, God longs to rebuild a nation which not only appears to be hopelessly dead but to have suffered complete disintegration. And the tool for this to happen is to be his word, spoken by the prophet. There is surely a parallel here to the creation story in Genesis, where God first speaks to bring the universe into being and then breathes life into Adam. Of course we are in the realm of myth and symbol, yet there is a great truth to be recognised: God is the life-giver, and it is through the breath of his Word and his Spirit that life is bestowed. Indeed, the two words “Breath” and “Spirit” are just one in Hebrew.

This, of course, brings me to the day of Pentecost, when the Spirit of God came in power among the gathered disciples. Now it’s easy to get side-tracked by the Spirit’s manifestations that were seen that day: the tongues of something that looked like fire (but wasn’t) hovering over the disciples’ heads, the noise that sounded like a mighty gale (but which never even twitched the curtains), and the ability to speak (or, possibly, to be heard) in languages which they had never learned. Now some Christians are put off from seeking a Pentecostal blessing because they are worried about the noise, the turmoil, the disorder, the apparent loss of control which it may cause. Yet it can’t be denied that something was happening amongst those disciples, for it was plainly visible to all, even to those who mocked and said that they were drunk at a most unseemly hour of the day. The rumpus and sheer activity of the church at Pentecost offer a total contrast to the deathly silence and stillness of that bone-filled valley – and sometimes, I have to say, to the well-behaved and dignified churches of today.

Of course, Pentecost took place two thousand years ago and Ezekiel had his vision something like 600 years before that. So what might God want to say to us today through this story? I’d like to suggest two answers, one for our communities and one for the Church.

Thinking first of our communities, none of us needs reminding of the desperate time we’ve all been through during the last 15 months. The pandemic has had grave economic effects: almost daily we’ve heard of factories, shops and other businesses closing down – you only need to walk down Queen Street or through the St David’s Centre to see that. But alongside those obvious effects of Covid are the ones which are invisible but just as real: depression, grief and despair, are around us in Llanedeyrn just as elsewhere. Many people are feeling that life has changed for the worse; some folk probably see no hope at all for the future. So the churches face a challenge: do we, like Ezekiel, have any God-given words to speak which might bring new life?

That’s not an easy question to answer. Indeed, some of us might say that it isn’t the churches’ responsibility at all, that it’s the duty of the local authorities and relevant Government departments to bring about community renewal. Some of us might also ask what local residents are doing to improve their own area, or might insist that we shouldn’t stick our noses in as busy-body outsiders – and there’s truth in both those comments. Yet we know that it’s important for communities to speak up against unobservant councils, to bring their concerns to landlords and developers, to highlight issues in social media or the local press, to enable discouraged people to have a voice. We might even regard that as a form of modern prophecy.

Now I think that many of us – and I think this is true in most churches –have a bit of a “commuter mentality”: we attend services and activities in this building (and I’m pleased that you do!) but we don’t always identify with the neighbourhood around it. Yet words of life need to be spoken into, and on behalf of, this community; and churches may be some of the few organisations that can do it. I know that this isn’t evangelism in the style of Peter’s proclamation at Pentecost – and there’s certainly a need for that as well – but it may be a way of bringing God’s life into our part of this city. Although we are delighted at the Maelfa regeneration, we can still see local “dry bones” of empty shops, crumbling roads, flaking paint and weeds. So is there any way we can bring them to life? I do a tiny bit, by acting as a Trustee of the Churches Together Shop, chairing the local Police and Community meetings, picking up litter (though I haven’t that for over a year) and occasionally speaking to children in Llanedeyrn School – but is there something we could do together?

Having said all that, we must remember that Ezekiel was primarily speaking to God’s own people who, nowadays, we may wish to identify as the “new Israel” or the Church. And what God and Israel are saying could hardly be more different (yes, I know that bones can’t talk; but they do here!). For Israel says, “Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off”. But God has a very different message: “My people (how tender that sounds!), I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to your land”. Here is a promise of resurrection when all the evidence says extinction.

I want to be frank with you. Although there are some bright spots, the churches in Britain are declining fast: it’s been estimated that 20 Welsh churches or chapels close every year and I’d be surprised if Covid hasn’t made things worse. And, although young people do come to faith, most congregations are ageing and losing faithful members far more rapidly than they are gaining new ones. There are, of course, many reasons for this, which I won’t go into this morning (you can ask me if you like!). As it happens I think that we’re doing better than many other churches, yet even here our attendances are much lower than they were back in the 1970s, we aren’t running the breadth of activities we once were and we rely on a shrinking pool of enthusiastic but exhausted volunteers to “keep the show on the road”.

Dare we pray that God will turn things round? Dare we think that, if someone walks down Llanedeyrn Drive on a Sunday morning in 2041 that they’ll see people queueing outside the church because they’re so desperate to get a place? Dare we imagine that the tide of secularism will be reversed and people will come flocking back to God? That does seem a tall order; and I don’t want to be unrealistic about the way things stand. In these days it is tough being a church as the tide of faith in Britain seems to have run out a very long way. Yet Ezekiel’s vision shows us that revival can occur even in the most disheartening of situations, that awakening can come even when it appears that life has irrevocably come to its end. That must be the Pentecost message for this and many other churches in Wales today.

But what must happen for this to come about? Clearly, at the very least, God’s Spirit must breathe fresh life into his people – which means we have to be open to whatever he might wish to say to us, rather than clinging to cherished traditions. That doesn’t just mean listening to me as your Minister, although I do try to bring God’s Word to you, nor only seeking God in Church Meeting. We must also go to the source, the Bible; so we need to be serious about reading it, serious about asking the Spirit to help us understand it, serious about putting it into practice. Churches which thrive are churches in which everyone listens to God and allows his Spirit’s life to flourish.

At Pentecost we look back, perhaps a little wistfully, at a historic event. But we must do more: we must look to the present and the future. For this Christian festival gives us the chance to think very carefully about how his Spirit might come among us, might speak to us, might breathe upon us, in new and refreshing ways. For that’s what we need, if our church is to be more than a chapel of old bones and the community around us is to pulsate with God’s new life.