Can These Bones Live?

The great Robert Farrar Capon believed that the greatest challenge facing the church wasn’t questions about the afterlife but rather our present dullness. In short, he believed we lost our astonishment. He said that the Good News preached in churches is no longer life-changing, only after-life changing. And yes, the promise is that one day God will breathe life into our old dry bones, but the promise is also that God is doing it right now. The reason the Gospel took hold after Easter is because the earliest Christians lived according to the future in the present, the promise that dry bones can live now and later. Those disciples refused to settle for anything dry. The Power and the Principalities, particularly those that perpetrate injustice, tried to stop the Gospel because in threatened to upend the status quo. But God breathed new life into the church. Then and now Christians are those whose hearts are on fire, who are continually astonished by what God did and does, and have witnessed their own bones be given new life. Christians are just people who have go down into and come out of the pit.