CAN THESE BONES LIVE?

Scripture Lesson: Ezekiel 37: 1-14

Dr. Matthew S. Brown

June 4, 2006

I live with constant embarrassment because of all the things I do not know. My wife Donna lives with constant embarrassment because of all the things I do know. I cannot proffer you copious quotes from the writings of Karl Barth, but I can recite the French guard scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail; I can talk intelligibly about the Kostanzas’ celebration of Festivus; and I do know the significance of BR549.

And one of the things I love about this congregation is that there are so many of you who share in the possession of this useless body of information. In fact, I would wager that, with the prompting of just two words, quite a few of those assembled here can join their voices in that great anthem of the culturally deprived but television savvy. Gloom, despair. Do you know it?

“Gloom, despair and agony on me! Deep dark depression, excessive misery! If it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all! Gloom, despair and agony on me!”

I wonder how many of you know where that comes from but are just too embarrassed to admit it. You’d have us think you grew up watching Masterpiece Theatre and Wall Street week, but in the days before ESPN and the Home and Garden channel, or at least when you weren’t reading Proust or Heidegger, there were more than a few moments spent in the company of the folks from Cornfield County. Hee Haw!

“Gloom, despair and agony on me...” All too rarely, when I’m in mid-rant, educating some innocent soul on the woes of my existence, I’ll remember that horrendous little song and realize how ridiculous my complaints must sound. “Gloom, despair and agony on me...?” The toughest of my days do not even begin to resemble the truly tragic landscape inhabited by friends and strangers next door or half-way around the world. The weight of their woes render my whines weightless and without substance.

And yet, you and I have experienced enough of life to understand the meaning of words like: discouraged, dismayed, distraught, and disheartened. Maybe your life has been touched with tragedy; maybe your body has experienced the shackles of illness or injury; maybe once or twice you’ve danced a little too close to that gaping chasm called depression; maybe the slow creep of cynicism has led you on occasion to utter such observations as: “It is hopeless;” “It’ll never work;” “There’s no use;” “I give up.” But careful we must be in drawing conclusions we are not equipped to verify.

That is one lesson that comes to us through Ezekiel’s bizarro world adventure in a valley of dry bones. “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones, don’t you hear the word of the Lord.” So sing the children of countless Vacation Bible Schools and so sing the enslaved voices who felt in Ezekiel’s vision stirrings of hope in southern cotton fields where hope would seem ridiculous.

Ezekiel, the scroll eating, wheel watching prophet was certainly no stranger to the strange. His life as a prophet was continually marked with surrealistic adventures. And, no doubt, our text today would fall in that category. In the vision Ezekiel is mysteriously transported to a valley brimming with dry bones, an unearthed mass grave, a sight all too common in the last 70 years - femurs, metatarsals, scapulas, skulls, and fibulas, stacked like cordwood before wintertime, testifying to human cruelty and our incomparable ability to treat life so cheaply.

There will be no mystery to what Ezekiel sees. Babylon, the superpower of that era had granted the people of Israel the experience of invasion, occupation, exile, death, and destruction. Surely, underneath the promised soil of the promised land the bones of the vanquished Israelites were to be found.

For many of the refugees who did survive Nebuchadnezzar’s onslaught, in addition to the violent loss of cousins, parents, aunts and neighbor’s, the pall of death would continue to hang heavy - death of country, destruction of temple, loss of home and identity.

It was not an optimistic time. The people cried, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” You know the language, “There is no use;” “There’s nothing I can do;” “We’re toast;” “This is hopeless;” “I give up.”

Have you ever crossed the tipping point from resistance to resignation? The leverage of the foe, whether it’s the disease, da boss, da threat, or da neighbor seems immense and your strength is gone. Willpower is not an option because the foe has all the power and your will has waned.

It is in this setting that the Lord gives Ezekiel this valley vision of dry bones, surreal to our eyes, but all too real to the Israelites. And the Lord asks Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these bones live?”

I’m intrigued by that question. Yet again, I find God putting me in my place, a place from which I’m always seeking escape. Mortal. Mere man. Anything but divine or without sin. Created, never to be confused with the Creator. The antonym of invulnerable. Limited in body, mind, and spirit. Near sighted. Wrong at least as often as right. Mortal.

We keep forgetting that God is God, and we are not. And as a result we keep drawing conclusions we are not qualified to make. “There is no use;” “There’s nothing I can do;” “We’re toast;” “This is hopeless.” How do you know? How do you know? When did you graduate from god college?

“Mortal, can these bones live?”

Why is it we are ever so vigilant in trying to put God in a box by waging war with the word “possibility”? We are too quick to draw conclusions about what God has done, what God is doing, what God will or will not do, as though, unlike Job, we think we were there when God created the heavens and the earth. “There is no use;” “There’s nothing I can do;” “We’re toast;” “This is hopeless.” How do you know? How do you know?

“Mortal, can these bones live?” Ezekiel shows us the only legitimate answer to the question. “O Lord God, you know.” The Psalmist humbly contrasts the sovereignty of God with his own humanity: “O LORD, thou hast searched me and known me!  Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise up; thou discernest my thoughts from afar. Thou searchest out my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether. Thou dost beset me behind and before, and layest thy hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it.” (from: Psalm 139)

God’s knowledge is high. We cannot attain it. So what makes us such experts on what God can not or will not do? What gives us the right to disparage notions of possibility when our wills and ways are anything but divine?

“Mortal, can these bones live?” Any reasoned, practical, sensible person reviewing any number of circumstances would be quick to say “no.” Let’s say you’re an Israelite. As a result of Babylon’s invasion, you have lost your home and any memento to remind you that you had one. A cousin, brother, niece, and aunt were included in the statistics of the war dead. The temple where you worshiped has been destroyed. You’re living in a refugee camp somewhere in Babylon and your teenage children have never set foot in Israel and have grown up viewing your faith as foreign and the customs of Babylonian society as the norm.

Memories of Jerusalem nights have faded, but the power of the Babylonians has not and it does not appear as if it ever will. If you’re standing with Ezekiel, and you see that valley of dry bones, and your life feels like that valley of dry bones, God’s query seems to have an easy answer. “Mortal, can these bones live?” Of course not. No way. Won’t happen. It’d be nice but don’t hold your breath.

But Ezekiel remembers what we forget. God is God and we are not. “O Lord, you know.” To quote eighties game show theologians, “Good answer, Ezekiel. Good answer!” What is it Jesus would later remind us? “With men it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God.” Never presume what

God cannot do.

And so it is that Ezekiel is given a preview of God’s pentecostal power. Muscles, tissues, joints, vessels, lungs, kidneys, and hearts bring sudden form and definition to that pile of bones and God’s own breathe (ruach) offers life and hope to where before there was only death and despair. And with this vision God adds a message of promise for the people of Israel and anyone who would begin to see their life as a lost cause: “I will bring you back... I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”

Do you have any idea what God can do? If not, maybe you would if you stopped drawing conclusions about what God can’t do.

I lost a dear friend this week. We usually don’t raise an eyebrow when obituaries inform us that the deceased’s age was eighty. But let me tell you, D. A.’s community was shocked. I’d say this woman was a rock, but rocks are immobile, and D. A. and her Oldsmobile were the essence of mobility. Giving Lil’ a ride to the doctor in Charlotte. Taking Joy every week to the hairdresser. Delivering yet another gift of grace to the minister’s wife. Buying groceries for Duke (everything but cigarettes. “Duke, I’m not buying you any cigarettes! You’ll have to get the Nurse’s Assistant to get them for you.”). Picking up the chicken for another funeral.

We did a lot of funerals in that church. In fact, as I walked into the Sanctuary for the memorial service, I thought maybe we were in the wrong place. I don’t know that D. A. ever attended a funeral in that church because she was always in the church kitchen organizing the lunch for the family of the deceased. Maybe they should have held her memorial service there in the kitchen between the Hobart and the Steamer.

If it needed to be done, D. A. did it. If it needed to be said, D. A. said it. No, rocks are immobile. D. A. was not. D. A. was the hands of Christ for that church.

And I’ll admit it. Thinking about her passing, the thought crossed my mind. What a loss for that church. What are they going to do. You know the language: “There is no use;” “There’s nothing they can do;” “They’re toast;” “It’s hopeless.”

But as I was meditating on the wonderful prelude of the organist, a young woman slipped into the pew in front of us. I didn’t realize that Kelley knew D. A.. Kelley joined the church not long before we moved. She’s young, strong, extremely bright (an Ivy leaguer I think). She’s thoughtful, forthright, energetic, sensitive, a passionate advocate for people in peril. Her life situation has given her the freedom to be involved and involving. I wonder if she drives an Oldsmobile.

Mortal, can these bones live? Through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the bones of saints like D. A. shall live. Through the enlivening and awakening power of God’s Holy Spirit at work in people like Kelley Hawkins, that church will live on also.

Stop underestimating the power of God! Amen.