Once upon a time there was a girl named Carolyn. She knew she was far from being the prettiest girl in the junior class, there in late November of 1937. Oh, she’d been to a few of the dances and parties. But she had pretty well convinced herself that she didn’t mind that she didn’t have a date on any given Saturday night. Then it happened: senior star fullback Peter Weston asked her out. She could hardly believe her good fortune. He was so handsome, so popular, and he had that wonderful easy-going grin. When they were walking down the school’s main hallway, with him carrying her books, and all the other students saw her with him, the thrill was almost more than she could bear. So this — this! — is what love is all about, she thought.

Carolyn’s parents were just as surprised as she was. Delighted, really: they hadn’t expected their plain jane daughter to have a chance with someone as fine as Peter Weston. Carolyn herself was radiant with happiness. It didn’t last, though. A couple of months, and Peter had moved on, looking for his next conquest. About a month after that, Carolyn recognized that telling her parents wasn’t going to get any easier if she waited, so she went ahead and confessed that she had in fact given more than her heart to the love of her life, and now was pregnant.

Carolyn knew she should not be surprised when the gossips agreed that it was all her fault. She felt like she deserved a lot of the blame, for she should have known better. Still, it didn’t feel fair to assign to her every single bit of the blame. She was caught off guard by how much all those cutting remarks hurt, as people scorned her for being the tramp who had seduced poor innocent Peter, obviously intending to trap him into marriage.

And yet there was no question of getting married. Peter had such a promising future, he was destined for college, everyone agreed it would be a disaster for him to get tied down to a wife and child at his age, when he had his whole life in front of him. No one seemed interested in asking what this might mean for Carolyn, who thought perhaps she also had her whole life in front of her. But truth to tell, even though a few months earlier she would gladly have married Peter, she no longer wanted that. What good could it be to marry him when he obviously had no further interest in her?

In August of 1943 Carolyn turned 23. No one scheduled a party. She had moved from her hometown to a small third-floor apartment in the city. She had been working as a nurse’s aide at Oak Hill Manor nursing home for four years. It was a drudge job in a dreary place, hopeless people sitting around waiting to die: which, Carolyn saw, kind of symbolized the story of her life. After all, the most exciting thing to happen to her recently was that after four years on night shift her supervisor had finally moved her to days, 7 am to 4:30.

At quarter past two on the afternoon of her 23rd birthday, Carolyn was pouring a glass of water for one of the patients on the west hall, Mrs. Norris. Carolyn plumped the old woman’s pillows and reset her window blinds, so that Mrs. Norris could see outside now that the sun’s glare had shifted. She turned back toward the bed to make sure she had the blinds angled properly. Mrs. Norris looked at her and said, with a voice of deep calmness, “I think I’m going to die tonight. Would you stay with me?”

Carolyn hardly knew how to answer a request like that. Does anyone know that specifically when they will die? How could Mrs. Norris say such a thing?

Carolyn wanted to say, “Today is my birthday, and no one in this whole city knows or cares. In about two hours I will get off work, and I will walk home and make a small bowl of soup for my supper. Then I’m going to listen to the radio for a little while. And I’ll think about the fact that today, at age 23, I can see the whole story of my life stretching out in front of me, established six years ago when I was a girl of 17 and I fell so much in love with a boy who didn’t love me: and then he went away to live his life. Everyone blamed me, and I had to ride a bus for 26 hours to go stay with my aunt in Virginia to have my baby girl, who then got adopted by some couple there and I’ll never know what happens in her life. And I got back on that bus and rode back home, but I could not graduate with my class, and could no longer feel at home in my own home town, so I moved here and got a job as a nurse’s aide, so that I get to change linens and clean bedpans, all the while with a cheery and helpful smile on my face. And that’s going to be the story of my life, until I end up as a patient myself in some miserable nursing home, until someday I die all alone, without a friend in the world.”

That’s what Carolyn wanted to say. But instead she stood there in silence, for a long moment, and thought about Mrs. Norris’s request. And then Carolyn said, “Mrs. Norris, after I get off work I’ll go home and have my supper, and then I’ll come back and sit with you tonight.”

Sometimes it’s hard to tell how people really feel. On the inside they may be full of rage, greed, or despair: but on the outside they are pleasant, or dutiful, or quiet. We keep up a good front, most of the time, but inside we are full of unresolved squabbles, long-standing anguish from tragedy and heartbreak, forlorn longings that have ebbed into hopelessness. It’s all covered over with a veneer of respectability for the rest of the world to see.

Carolyn went home and made herself some supper, and then she came back and sat with Mrs. Norris that evening. Mrs. Norris — Lillian — told her some of the stories of what she had discovered across 91 years of life that spanned from before the Civil War to the middle of the Second World War. Stories of hunger and feasting. Stories of the children’s choir at church, and stories of funerals for children who died. Stories of faith and stories of doubt. Stories of hardship and hope.

The rules at Oak Hill Manor forbade Carolyn from ever calling the patients by their first names: but Lillian gave a quiet soft chuckle as she said, “I think that when an old woman is about to die, she has the right to be called whatever she likes: and I would like you to call me Lillian.” So Carolyn sat with Lillian Norris, and listened to her stories of life in the nineteenth century, and the first decades of the twentieth.

Lillian turned out to be quite a good listener as well. She asked the right questions. She had the wisdom to draw out the answers. She listened with an attentive soul. Much to her own surprise Carolyn ended up recounting her own story of the astonishing delight of falling so in love with Peter and then having it all end in humiliation.

Midnight came and went. Carolyn had dozed off in the chair. She came awake with a little jump when Lillian called her name. Carolyn looked at her watch. It was 1:37. Lillian stretched out her left hand, and said, “It’s almost time.”

Carolyn stood up, took a step to the side of the bed, and extended her right hand. The two of them held hands in a moment of silence. Then the woman of 91 looked at the woman of 23 and said, “Carolyn: Life is full of hardships. In the end, though, life is as good as you make it.” And she closed her eyes.

Then, lying there with her eyes closed, in a voice that had become quite whispery, Lillian said, “Thanks for sitting with me, Carolyn. And thanks for being my friend.”

Carolyn said, “Thank you, Lillian, for believing in me enough to ask me to be with you tonight. I didn’t expect to get any presents on this birthday: but your stories and your love have been great gifts to me. I know I will never forget you.”

And Lillian Norris opened her eyes, and looked at Carolyn, and smiled. And then she died. And went to heaven, to be with Jesus, to live forever in the fullness and glory of the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God. What is the kingdom of God like?

As Jesus went from town to town, he talked and preached about the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is near, he said. The kingdom of God is at hand. People must have wondered about that, back then, just as they do today, for it was no more obvious then than it is now that the kingdom is near. It is one of the primary tenets of our faith, is it not, that the kingdom is coming, and it will bring peace to hearts full of trouble and make sense of all the suffering. In the midst of the trials people face, though, in the midst of hard times, it can be hard to believe.

Suppose you lived in Galilee long ago and you heard reports about how this traveling teacher named Jesus was proclaiming that the kingdom of God is arriving right now in our midst, and this inauguration of the kingdom is demonstrated and accompanied by great works of healing and by miracles of feeding the hungry: what would that mean, if your child was one of those that was not healed, if your family was one of those that did not have enough to eat?

To a man suffering with disease and disgrace, cast away from his community by the leprosy that had destroyed his life, it could not have been obvious that the kingdom of God was present, here and now, to restore our lives and make all things new (Mark 1:40). Nor to a man whose brother has inherited everything and kicked him off the farm and left him penniless (Luke 12:13). Nor to two sisters who could not help blurting out the sense of betrayal they felt: for their family loved Jesus, and although they lived at home and did not go around with Jesus from town to town, they truly were devoted to him: and Jesus could have healed their beloved brother, but did not: and so their brother had died (John 11:21, 32). How would it have been obvious to any of them that the kingdom of God is with us, right here, right now?

Jesus himself taught us that not all the hurts were healed, back in the days of Elijah and Elishah (Luke 4:25-27). Jesus went ahead and performed healings for many people he encountered: but not all the hurts would be healed, even so: when Jesus was working miracles in one town, people were suffering and dying in other towns (Mark 1:36-39).

There is a story in the Bible about the vision that God gave to the prophet Ezekiel. It comes from around 550 BC, from the time known as the Exile: when the people of Israel had been defeated by the Babylonian army, the nation had been destroyed, and all the able-bodied men, women, and children had been driven like cattle to Babylon and sold as slaves. In this vision, recounted in chapter 37 of his book, Ezekiel saw a great valley, full of dry bones. Human bones. The results of a great battle, where thousands have been slain, tens of thousands have bled and died: the devastation so complete that no one was left to bury the dead, and so the corpses lay on the ground, eaten by the wild dogs and scavenger birds, then by insects and rot, until nothing was left but bones bleached and scorched by the heat of the desert sun.

In the vision Ezekiel saw, these dry bones were all that remained of the glory of the nation of Israel. A grand and mighty army, a people who lived in fullness and joy in the covenant of their God, a vast extended family of clans and cousins: everything was reduced to a million dried out bones scattered across the valley floor.

God asked Ezekiel, “Child of earth, can these bones live?”

And Ezekiel answered: “O Sovereign Lord! You alone know.”

I love that answer. It is so fine. It does not presume that God must do a miracle here. Nor does it presume that God can not do a miracle here. Ezekiel responded in openness, without presuming in either direction what the answer must be.

“O Sovereign Lord: you alone know.” O God! You know! I do not know if a miracle might be on the schedule: but I will dare to hope in you, for you know, O God! Sometimes when we are at the point of death, we go ahead and die, and we are glad that in life and in death we belong to the Lord. And yet sometimes when all that we can see is death, God has in mind an astonishing miracle. Which will it be, in the moment when all we can see is that the glory and splendor of our life has come down to slaughter and destruction, to scattered bones bleaching in the desert? Can these bones live? O God! You know! We do not know which one our God has in mind: but the Sovereign Lord does know!

Then God said to Ezekiel, “Tell them the word of God, Ezekiel. Prophesy to these bones.”

Now, to tell you this story well, I must tell you the story of two ancient Hebrew words. The first word is naba’, which means ‘to prophesy.’ This command to prophesy that God gives to Ezekiel is not like fortune telling, giving people a peek at some details of their future. ‘To prophesy’ is the term for proclaiming God’s word. It is what ancient prophets did when they declared, “Hear the Word of the Lord!” And it is what preachers do in our time, Sunday by Sunday as they proclaim, “Hear the Word of the Lord!” When a believer speaks up and says, “This is what God wants us to understand” – whether they do that from a pulpit, or in a Sunday School class, or at the dinner table – whenever people do that, they stand in the prophetic tradition of the Bible, telling forth the word of the Lord. Sometimes prophecy uses a pattern of words that has never been used before, and tells of an event that has not yet come to pass. Other times – indeed, most times – it is actually a restatement of something we’re all already supposed to know.

The second word is ruach, and it carries a number of meanings: breath and spirit and wind. All of these English equivalents are possible translations of the same Hebrew idea. If you take this bit of Hebrew trivia to heart, it means that on some blustery day, as your hat blows away down the street, you can turn to your neighbor and say, “Wow, it certainly is spiritual this afternoon!” And it means that when people go out to dinner at noon on Sunday and discuss that morning’s sermon, they can offer the strong compliment, “The preacher was very windy in church today.”

So then. Ezekiel is commanded to prophesy to the dry bones: to declare the word of the Lord to them. And what will the Word of God turn out to be, for these dry bones? “I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will give you sinews and flesh and skin, and I will put breath in you, and you will come to life.” And how will that happen? God commanded Ezekiel to prophesy also to the wind, so that the Spirit of God would come to these dry bones, and put breath within them once more.

God instructed Ezekiel to tell the Word of God to the bones and to the Wind. You see what it means. Ezekiel must speak to the bones: he must declare to these despairing people that God will restore them like life from the dead. And Ezekiel must speak to the Wind: he must tell the Spirit of God to get to work. So: in his proclamation and in his prayers, Ezekiel will be part of making this restoration happen.

In August of 1991 Carolyn looked around the large common dining hall at Oak Hill Manor nursing home, at the faces of all the people who had gathered for her party. It was a combination party: a party to celebrate her 71^st birthday, and also to wish her well in her retirement. Quite a few of the residents were there. Many members of their families were there as well. And even quite a few of the children and grandchildren of some former residents. One after another they spoke up, offering testimony about Carolyn’s years of service at Oak Hill Manor, first as nurse’s aide, then as secretary, then as assistant administrator: and then as program director for more than 40 years.

Ah, the things they said about her! Erika Stokowski, the head nurse, went first. She shook her head and laughed as she reminisced from 26 years earlier, when she had been a surly teenager, working at Oak Hill Manor as a candy striper. In spite of her own not-very-sweet attitude, she had seen Carolyn’s great love for the residents. And she had seen Carolyn’s passionate conviction that we never know when we’ll get a chance to say the words that will work a miracle in someone’s life. Erika Stokowski said, “The example I saw in Carolyn turned my life around, and set me on the road to my life’s vocation of nursing.”

One after another people got up and told stories like that. They told stories of how Carolyn had touched their life, or the life of their mother or father, their grandmother or grandfather. Together they offered a powerful testimonial to the way one individual’s steadfast love had made an astonishing difference.

Back in the 1920s and -30s, no administrator had ever said, “Let’s make Oak Hill Manor into a house of hopelessness.” No staff members had ever said, “This place is nothing more than a warehouse for people who are slowly dying: so let’s see just how dreary a warehouse we can make it.” And yet somehow Oak Hill Manor had indeed become a place of dreariness and hopelessness. And it might have remained that way forever. But Carolyn’s life had transformed it into a home full of love and care.

Carolyn sat in wonder, in the chair of honor up at the front. She could not name all these people. Some of the children and grandchildren of former residents, for example: some of them had come representing residents who had died fifteen and twenty and twenty-five years back. Those children and grandchildren were hard to recognize: they had changed quite a bit over the years. Carolyn smiled, and considered that she had changed quite a bit as well. And she listened as this great extended family offered their best wishes to her, and their gratitude that a member of their family could find such a lively place of compassion and hope for their last days.

It had already gotten pretty emotional, with tears and rich laughter and heart-felt hugs. Then they prevailed upon Carolyn to tell once again a story that all of them had heard many times before. She stood up, and there was a radiance in her voice as she recounted a story that had begun in anguish, when she as a teenage girl had fallen in love, had gotten spurned by her sweetheart and scorned by her family and friends, and then banished to have her baby girl and give her up for adoption. She recalled her despair on her 23^rd birthday as she saw a lifetime of dreariness stretching out before her. Then came her evening with Mrs. Lillian Norris: an encounter that had been a transforming moment for her. She drew the lesson out for the people gathered there in the dining hall. It was the lesson of her life: she had shared this lesson hundreds of times, during her four decades of program direction at Oak Hill Manor, and although there was a tremor in her voice she offered it up before them once again: you never know when your compassion will be the moment that will change a person’s life, when what you say will be the miracle that enables someone to see that her life need not be a valley of dry bones and ongoing desolation.

What is the kingdom of God like? The kingdom of God is like an old woman in a nursing home who knows she is going to die, who reaches out in loneliness and creates a friendship that changes someone’s life. The kingdom is like a prophet who tells people in despair a story about how God will raise them from the dead. The kingdom is like someone who prays: someone who talks to the Wind of God blowing across the whole face of the earth, north and south, east and west: that is, like someone whose prayers plead with the Spirit to Breathe life once again into people whose lives seem irreparably shattered. The kingdom of God is like a girl who can see she will pass all her days in stoic endurance of a miserable existence, whose life becomes established in such compassion that it transforms a place from being a holding pen for those waiting to die into a home filled with love.

The kingdom of God is like you, on the days when you feel like you’re the dry bones, parched and hopeless, and yet along comes someone who speaks to us and prays to God and the life of God somehow breathes into you and brings you back to life once again. And yes, the kingdom of God is like you, with your life changed, changing the world for others as well.