The prophet Ezekiel is transported by the spirit of the Lord
to the middle of a dry valley.
And everywhere he looks.
Bones.
He is walked around the periphery of the valley.
“There were very many lying in the valley, and they were
very dry.” Bones and more bones.
The Lord said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?”
I answered, “O Lord God, you know.”
Bones are the basic structure of a human being. But with no muscles, no flesh, no blood, they
lay like rocks, weathered by the wind and sun.
Bleached and desiccated.
They will waste away and the only memory of them will be the
chance fossil found by future generations.
“Mortal, can these bones live?”
I answered, “O Lord God, you know.”
What kind of question is this? Can these bones live?
If I were Ezekiel I might have said, “is this a trick
question?”
O Lord God, you know….
Ezekiel has experienced the weariness of a people burdened
with exile.
Ezekiel was among the first group of people deported from
Israel to Babylon in 596 BC.
Ezekiel as a prophet, feels the pain of exile.
Ezekiel has seen enough death and destruction. He’s seen a whole cohort of his people carted
off like animals to a foreign country, bewildered, defeated, and depressed.
Ezekiel has seen the slow death of a people’s identity,
pride, belonging. The loss of place
which is a kind of loss of self.
And he’s heard the cries of the men who were mistreated
along the road.
He’s heard the anxious crying of the mothers worried for the
health of their children when food is scarce and work is hard to come by, as foreigners
in a strange land.
And people looked to him as a priest of God and probably in
their despair would ask him, “why is God doing this?”
And so Ezekiel has gotten used to saying, “Only God knows.”
When people come to him looking for a word of hope and he
has none, the prophet can only say those words.
“Only God knows.”
There’s a weariness in Ezekiel’s words.
“Mortal, can these bones live?”
I answered, “O Lord God, you know.”
I hear in this passage the worried sighs of many I
visit. The future of their own health
looks bleak and with the TV on in the background, selling fear and anxiety to
millions of viewers, the future of the nation’s, of the world’s health looks
bleak.
I talk with people in the hospital and they long to be home.
I talk with people in their homes and they long for the home
that they once knew in the face of huge cultural and political and
technological changes. Changes that feel
like a loss.
Many in our culture are experiencing their own form of
exile, of displacement.
We talk about how the economics of small towns is making it
more and more difficult for young families to make a move here and so our
schools are getting smaller.
Or we look at the struggle of churches in small towns and
even in large towns to maintain community, to be renewed and vibrant as they
once were.
I hear many longing for a simpler time. I hear many who long for a time when their
own health, when their community’s health was much more strong.
And it can feel like a kind of exile.
It can feel like we’ve been dropped in the middle of valley
full of dry bones.
“Mortal, can these bones live?”
I answered, “O Lord God, you know.”
But in the dryness and the heat. The Spirit moves Ezekiel to speak more than
those weary words.
“Prophesy to these bones,”
Say: “O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.”
“I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.”
“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.”
You see dry bones, Ezekiel.
But I see the dust with which I formed Adam.
You see an end. But
your God sees a new beginning.
Ezekiel, who I imagine weary and dispirited, drags his feet
back to the center of the boneyard.
And begins to speak the words he has been given.
A noise, a rattling, bone hitting bone, an eery chorus of
skeletons clicking together
Ezekiel experiences the whole valley erupting into a
reversal of decay.
What was dry and weathered and splintered and scattered,
Becomes collected, hemmed back together, resuscitated.
Indeed, resurrected.
But they stand there still like the terracotta army.
And so the Spirit says to Ezekiel “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and
say to the breath: …Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these
slain, that they may live.”
The dryness of exile, the bones of a culture, the weariness
of the prophets
Renewed. Reborn.
When we find ourselves crying out the words of Israel
“Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut
off completely.”
When we find ourselves like the defeated prophet, able only
to say with great weariness and resignation, “God only knows.”
Hear the word of God’s promise.
I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your
graves, O my people; and I will bring you back” home. “I will put my spirit within you, and you
shall live, and I will place you on your own soil.”
“I will never leave you or forsake you.”
Are you standing in the middle of a valley of dry bones?
The promise of God is that it is precisely in the midst of
dry bones that we can hear the prophetic word.
O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.”
“I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.”
Be Ezekiel to the dry bones in your own life, in your
community.
Don’t avoid the bones.
Don’t despair of them.
See the valley as God sees the valley.
Not an end but a beginning.
Not Sheol but Eden.
And our lives will never return to the past. And our communities will never be what they
once were.
And for some that feels like a death. It feels like exile.
And there’s a lot of worry that this next generation will
forget what was good and beautiful of the past.
But God has promised to be with us in our worried
unknowing. And God has promised God’s
spirit to renew us in our faith and hope and to renew our communities.
And whatever tomorrow brings, God will be there too. And God’s spirit will continually give new
life to our broken bones. There is no
future where God has not already been.
And by faith working through love, God will resurrect God’s people on earth even as God does in heaven.
And so I have hope for my life in the midst of
discouragement and dryness and defeat.
And so I have hope for my community, for this little church,
and for rural places across the globe.
Because God is not absent, God is even present in the valley of dry bones.
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