Lutheran Church of the Resurrection

Thirsty! Bone dry thirsty! The kind of thirsty the psalmist was talking about when he said, “my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.” (Psalm 22:15). Dry mouth, dry bones, dry skin. Exhausted, weary, worn out. “My strength is dried up like a piece of broken pottery.” (Psalm 22:15). A mouth full of sand and not enough saliva to spit it out. No one to give you a drink of water. Thirsty!

And we hear that “The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry.”
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Eavesdropping
A couple of years ago we had new gutters installed on our house because the old gutters weren’t doing the job anymore. They leaked and the water dropped from the eaves right to the ground. Our new gutters have been very successful in preventing ‘eavesdropping.’

The word ‘eavesdropping’ comes from the sound that drops of water that fall from the eaves of the roof make when they hit the ground. It’s a bit of a stretch, but ‘eavesdropping’ is listening in on someone else’s conversation. ‘Eavesdropping’ is usually considered to be rude and impolite. It’s said that Henry VIII had wooden figures carved into the eaves of his courtroom as a way of signaling to others that their gossip and ‘private conversations’ were being overheard.
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The text is the Gospel for reading from John 14:15-21, but especially verse 15, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

Up to this point in the gospels, Jesus has tried to impress on His disciples the fact that He LOVES THEM. Even as God is love and He is God, His love for them is God’s love for them. The well-known John 3:16 sums it up. “For God so LOVED the world that He gave His only Son.” The giving of His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ to the world to atone for the sin of the world by His suffering and death on the cross is God’s definitive proof that He loves the world… and much more personally – He loves you.
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History books tell us that when the Romans would capture foreign countries, they would sometimes put their captives through a particularly gruesome form of execution. They would take a captive and tie him face to face, hand to hand, leg to leg and ankle to ankle with a dead comrade. As the dead body strapped to the living body would decay, the smell and disease of the dead body would destroy the life of the living body.

The ancient historian Virgil describes this cruel punishment this way:
“The living and the dead at his command
were coupled face to face, and hand to hand;
Till choked with stench, in loathed embraces tied,
The lingering wretches pined away and died.”
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