Can These Bones Live?

DATE: April 6, 2014
SCRIPTURE:
Ezekiel 37:1-14 – Full scripture printed following the sermon text.
© Rev. Alison J. Buttrick Patton

We are back in the wilderness, back in the desolate place where we began this Lenten Journey, in the middle of a dried out landscape, among the rocks-not-bread where Jesus fasted for 40 days, right after he was baptized and just before he began his public ministry. It seems the wilderness is not done with us yet. This time, it’s the prophet Ezekiel who is caught up by God’s Spirit, generations before Jesus was born, and set down in the middle of a valley, where bones, not rocks, are strewn across the valley floor. Dried out, sun-bleached bones scattered about, like so many abandoned snake skins, a brittle echo of life long since departed.

“Can these bones live?” The Voice of God asks the prophet Ezekiel. And as spectators to this vision of his, we pear over Ezekiel’s shoulder and say, “Surely not.” What kind of question is that, anyhow? We know dry bones, when we see them. They are the very sign and symbol of death and desolation. We know the feel of dry bones inside our own bodies, some of us. Because that valley in Ezekiel’s vision, it’s not the only place we encounter dry bones. Not nearly. Do you know what it’s like to be weary to the bone, bone tired, worked to the bone? Have you ever felt utterly spent, nothing left to give, or lose, or hope for? In Psalm 31, the poet laments: “My life leaks away, groan by groan; my years fade out in sighs. My troubles have worn me out, turned my bones to powder.”

Being homeless will do that, turn your bones to powder. When your every-day work is searching for shelter; when hunger is always right around the corner but the bathroom never is; when your fingers are chapped from the cold, your lips cracked from thirst, and your body stiff from sleeping on the ground; when your safety net is more holes than net and the soles of your shoes have worn right through, then right along with those Israelites about whom God and Ezekiel spoke, your own soul might just cry out, ‘My bones are dried up, and my hope is lost; I am cut off completely.’

Being a refugee – homeless on a larger scale – that, too, can turn your bones to dust. When you have been forced to flee in the middle of the night, with nothing to carry but the weight of your loss and the too-vivid memories of violence; when your constant companions are fear and thirst; when your only regular job is waiting – for shelter or rations or your turn at the water spigot or asylum papers or news or… the chance to go home; then surely your soul must cry out, ‘My bones are dried up, and my hope is lost; I am cut off completely.’

This is the cry of the upended and the displaced, the desperate and the utterly spent. In Ezekiel’s day, those uprooted people were the Israelites – banished from Jerusalem by the conquering Babylonians and scattered across the land. For them, being sent into exile meant being cut off from God’s presence, for it was in Jerusalem, in the temple that they felt themselves to be closest to the Creator of the Universe. Forced to live in a foreign land, they lost heart. “Ezekiel [witnessed] the soul of his people gradually wither and die, becoming as lifeless as a valley of dry bones.” ¹

Here, then, is the most urgent question: When homes are lost or dreams turned to dust; when hope has been sucked away like marrow from the bone, when there is nothing left but dried out bones, is there a way out? Of the valley? Of the tomb? Can these bones live?

Surely not, says the desiccated soul. How could they?

But God says otherwise. There in that valley, God says, “Speak to the bones, Ezekiel. Order them to put themselves back together again.” Ezekiel does… and they do, like a video on rewind, bones fly across the arid sand to reconnect with each other: phalanges find metatarsals which find tarsus and tibia; vertebrae re-stack themselves; balls drop back into sockets and teeth into jaws. With a great rattling clatter, all those bones click into place, secured by tendons, and muscle, wrapped in skin…until they stand, a great multitude of bodies, intact, but still lifeless, so not much better off than they were to start.

Still, God’s not done yet: Wind/breath/spirit – they are all the same word in the Biblical languages: Ruach in the Hebrew; Pneuma in the Greek. God tells Ezekiel to summon that Ruach – that wind/breath/spirit from the four directions… and it comes. Down into that valley it blows, stirring up the dust and clearing away the stale air. Into the valley, and then in through nostrils, between parted lips and into the lungs of the bodies-that-used-to-be-bones. Chests rise and then fall, air is gulped, there is a whoosh is they exhale together. One breath turns into many as that wind/spirit/breath blows new life into those once dead…

Who knew? Who knew such a thing was possible? But if we are surprised, then perhaps it’s because we’ve forgotten, like the Israelites were so prone to forget, just what our God can do, what God has promised to do. Indeed is doing all the time, right under our noses: breathing life into the most dried out places.

In a Jordanian refugee camp, a crowd of several hundred people recently gathered to watch the camp’s children perform Shakespeare’s King Lear. The kids had been rehearsing for months. A young King Lear was dressed in ratty jeans and a homemade cape; the king’s daughters wore paper crowns over their head scarves; another child sported a rainbow wig. They were all Syrian children who had fled the war, some of the 60,000 children who now live with their families in the Zaatari Refugee Camp.² Under the watchful gaze of the scorching desert sun, nearly 100 young people with dusty feet and tormented dreams brought their own, creative spin to the story of a king who divided his country with tragic consequences. At the final bow, the crowd erupted into applause, the children wept with pleasure, and everyone boasted about the fine artistic gifts on display. So the winds of God’s Spirit blew across that arid plain, breathing life and hope into a desperate situation…

Much closer to home, the Gillespie Center here in Westport prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary in April – a quarter century of providing shelter, hot meals, and counseling to members of our extended community who are homeless. Many of you know the story: How Saugatuck Church hosted some of those homeless gentlemen in our own building, when they had nowhere else to go. Then the winds of the Spirit blew through this community, stirring up creativity and compassion, breathing life into the bare bones of an idea: what if we could house those among us who are homeless? So Interfaith Housing was born…

Who knew? Who knew such a thing was possible in a wealthy suburban town? But if we are surprised, then perhaps it’s because we’ve forgotten, like the Israelites were so prone to forget, just what our God can do, what God has promised to do, indeed, what God is doing all the time right under our noses.

Maybe that’s why we need to keep going back to the wilderness. Maybe that’s why the wilderness isn’t done with us yet. Because we need to keep being reminded of the astonishing things that God can do with dry bones. Just ask them.

The bones. Those rattling, reconstituted, Spirit-filled bones-turned-bodies, the blinking-in-the-bright-sun, deep-breathing multitude gathered in the valley of Ezekiel’s vision. We leave the vision just as they are restored to life, and I wonder, what happened next? What might that multitude have had to say, once they all caught their breath and the dust settled?

Given voice again, filled with God’s own Spirit-breath, would they speak about freedom, what it’s like to lose it, and to gain it again? Would they confess that they carried too much bitterness in life, that they might have loved more and condemned less? Having tasted dust, might they sing praises to the One who forms us from the dust, given thanks for the o-so-precious gift of skin? Would they remind us, as the wilderness in its harshness repeatedly reminds us, that there is one on whom we can always rely? Even – especially, on our most dried up days. We may forget, we may turn our backs on God, we may be betrayed by each other, but being cut off, that is not how the story ends:

For God said to Ezekiel, and to the Israelites, “I’ll breathe my life back into you, I’ll lead you straight back to your land, and you’ll realize that I am God. I am God.”

“Trust that,” whisper the bones. “Trust God.” Trust God enough to heal more and harm less; give more and clutch less; love more and blame less; dare more and fear less. Because our God is a God of covenant, a God who loves us persistently, unceasingly and calls us to love Her. It is the blessed work of Lent, to re-member that. To reassemble the parts of this sacred story for ourselves, to tell it and re-tell it, until we can feel the truth of it in our very bones: That God is worthy of trust, not just when all is going well, but in the most desperate valley-of-dry-bones seasons. That God’s Spirit continues to blow, in us, through us, among us, promising life, new life. Maybe even a resurrection.

Thanks be to God! Amen.

Scripture Texts

Ezekiel 37:1–14 – NRSV Translation

The hand of the Lord came upon me, and brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 God led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. 3 God said to me, “Human One, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” 4 Then God said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. 5 Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. 6 I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.” 7 So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. 8 I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. 9 Then God said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” 10 I prophesied as God commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude. 11 Then God said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ 12 Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13 And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. 14 I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act,” says the Lord.