Life to Dry Bones

Ezekiel 37:1-14

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?”

Joseph

Matthew 1:18-25

Joseph is the main character in Matthew’s telling of the birth of Jesus.

In Luke, it’s Mary; but in Matthew, it’s Joseph.

Here Joseph lives up to the name later given to him by the church, nutritor Domini – the guardian of the Lord.

Joseph has been a very popular figure for obvious reasons.  And has been called the patron saint of families, fathers and orphans, pregnant woman, married couples, carpenters, teachers, lawyers, laborers and working people, and most recently the patron saint of a happy death, and of fighting communism.

Much has been made of Joseph over the two millennia,

Much has been made of him though not nearly as much as has been made of Mary.

Year after year we get a very mythologized picture of Joseph

We get this through Christmas decorations, through television, through the internet.  Sometimes we need to peal away some of these accretions to see what we might see of the real Joseph.

When I opened up the Bible to read the text for this week and saw Joseph sitting there on the page, to be honest I began to feel a little bored. 

And I think it’s because the Joseph that lives in my imagination is so divorced from reality – he’s the wooden Joseph of the manger scenes, the cartoon Joseph of the children’s television shows, the stuffed Joseph – is there a stuffed Joseph? I’m sure there is.

The Joseph of our million consumer-driven sometimes good and often times awful “art”

How do we delete that Joseph in order to see him again for the first time, to borrow a phrase that Marcus Borg uses in his books.

We need to see Joseph again for the first time.

Freedom of Faith

Galatians 4:21-5:1

Law and faith have two different ears.  They hear and perceive reality very differently.  And so they hear and perceive truth in stories very differently.

And we get a glimpse in today’s reading into the two different ways that Paul and the teachers heard the story of Ishmael and Isaac.

For the teachers the main point to take away from the story
was that Isaac, not Ishmael was the rightful heir,
Isaac was born of Sarah,
Isaac was the son promised of God.
And the teachers probably taught that the Galatians are like the descendants of Ishmael,
Ishmael was born of Hagar, Sarah’s slave,
Ishmael did not inherit the promise of Abraham.
But, the Galatian community can become part of that promise by becoming like Isaac in being circumcised, in following the law.  
This is how the teachers probably heard and communicated the story.  
And so the Galatians are being told that they can become right with God, 
they can make themselves acceptable, if only they will do x, y, and z.