This morning’s word is Dormant, Not Dead.
The anchor verses are Genesis 1:26 and John 11:25.
Scientists working with the remains of a man who died over five thousand years ago have done something most of us would have thought impossible. They baked a loaf of sourdough bread using yeast they found on his body, and by their own account the result was very, very good.
The man’s name is Ötzi. He was discovered in 1991 by two hikers in the Ötztal Alps on the border of Austria and Italy, and he has become one of the most carefully studied human remains in the history of archaeology. He died sometime in the Copper Age, more than fifty-three centuries ago, and the ice that surrounded him preserved him in a way that almost no other ancient body has been preserved. The story is already strange enough at that point. What the researchers found this year took the strangeness further. Living yeast was found on his skin and inside his frozen remains, a cold-loving kind that thrives in the same icy conditions that kept him. When the scientists gave one strain the right conditions, it did what yeast has always done. It rose. It leavened bread. It fed people.
The point the scientists wanted to make is that ancient remains are not lifeless artifacts. They called Ötzi not a static relic but a living system. Life persists in places we had written off as finished, sometimes invisibly, waiting for the conditions in which it can do its work again. What we have been calling a dead relic turns out to be carrying life we could not see. Sometimes what looks dead is only dormant. Sometimes it is simply waiting.
Scripture this morning teaches us what kind of life this actually is. The Christian life is not a project of manufacturing resurrection out of our own effort. It is the slower and humbler practice of recognizing that GOD is the One who raises. Ignatius of Antioch wrote nearly two thousand years ago that on the Lord’s Day our life sprang up again by HIM and by HIS death. He said something about the prophets that should give us pause. The prophets who lived and died long before Christ came in the flesh were waiting for HIM the whole time, and when HE came, Ignatius writes, HE raised them from the dead. The prophets did not raise themselves. They could not. They had been in the ground for centuries by the time Christ walked through Galilee. The risen Christ reached backward as well as forward, and what looked finished turned out not to be finished at all.
Pastor Segun Oduyebo carries the same teaching this morning through the story of Joseph. The Lord was with Joseph in every season of his life. The Lord was with him in Potiphar’s house, with him in the prison, with him in the court of Pharaoh. Joseph did not have to manufacture his significance or perform his way into favor. He carried what he had been given, and the people around him sensed something they could not quite name. The teaching for us is the same. We do not have to perform GOD’s presence. We cultivate intimacy with HIM, and HIS presence makes itself known through the way we live.
Katie Hauck adds a guardrail this morning that matters today, especially with a story as striking as Ötzi’s. The Hebrew word in Genesis for “likeness” means resemblance, modeled after. We are made to reflect GOD, to look like HIM in the ways HE has shared with us, to carry HIS love and mercy and patience and goodness into the world. The serpent in Eden offered Eve a different word, one that meant supreme ruler and judge, and that word was never ours to claim. The oldest mistake is reaching for sovereignty that belongs to GOD alone, and you can hear that mistake whispered into almost every place where humans grasp for what was not offered to them.
Apply this guardrail to the yeast. The yeast did not preserve itself. The yeast did not climb out of the ice. The yeast did not find its own way to a laboratory and arrange the conditions in which it could rise. The scientists found it. The conditions were given to it. And when those conditions were right, the yeast did what its nature does, because the One who made it that way was the same One who tended it through all those quiet years.
This is the pattern running through every reading this morning. What GOD has placed in us, HE preserves. What HE has preserved, HE finds in HIS own time. What HE finds, HE raises. The yeast does its work, but the yeast does not declare itself the baker.
This means something for the season you are in. Whatever you have written off as finished may not actually be finished. The gift you stopped checking on five years ago, or fifteen, or fifty, may still be alive in you, dormant in a way that looks like death but is something different. The conditions have not yet come. They are not yours to manufacture, and they were never yours to control. They belong to the One who tends what HE has planted.
Your part in this is smaller and steadier than the part you might be tempted to claim. Be available. Reflect HIM rather than reaching for HIS chair. Cultivate intimacy with the One who knows what HE has preserved in you, and stop checking the calendar for what HE has not yet brought forth. The yeast was waiting, unseen, and now bread is being eaten because the conditions came right.
What in your life has felt dormant for so long that you have stopped checking on it? What did GOD plant in a season you can barely remember? When the conditions come, the One who preserves is the One who raises.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.