CAN THESE BONES LIVE?

(Preached Sunday, March 13, 2005)

He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?”  I answered, “O Lord God, you know.”                                                          -Ezekiel 37:3

 

It begins like a terrible nightmare.

Imagine the horrid sight: a valley filled with dry, scattered, disconnected bones.

Every syllable of that description connotes death, doesn’t it?

We already figuratively associate death with a valley.

The bones are certainly a symbol of death, and the fact that they are scattered bones, not assembled skeletons, makes them seem still further removed from life.

Finally, they are dry.

Whenever they were alive, it was a long time ago.

It calls to mind countless images from films always intended to convey extravagances of death; the muddy fields filled with skulls in the Cambodian killing fields or the caches of human bones in the science fiction bad-alien movies.

Besides death, it is a vision of complete and utter hopelessness.

 

Ezekiel is describing the mood of the people of Israel sometime between 586 - 562 BCE.

The land of Israel and the city of Jerusalem have been destroyed, laid to waste by the superpower of the day, Babylonia.

In 597 the Babylonians conquered the nation of Israel and carried off into captivity all the elite; the ruling class, the priests, the prophets, the rabbis, etc.

In their place they set up a puppet government to run things for them and be sure the land produced money to fatten their treasury.

Very quickly though the puppet regime tried to snip the strings and exert their independence, which brought the Babylonians right back to straighten things out.

This time they completed the job, totally destroying the city and carrying off to exile almost everyone else.

They left this time only the poorest of the poor, those not even worth taking back as slaves.

Thus the people of Israel felt like disconnected, dry bones.

They no longer had homes to return to; no longer had a nation or a city to return to; no longer had a king to lead them; no longer had a temple to worship in; they no longer seem to have a God who cares about them.

They seem totally cut off — from their past, from their future, from their lives, from their God.

They feel disconnected and dried up.

They seem to have no hope.

They must have been like the children of Africa whom author Diana Hayes describes: “Some, still children, dream of bright futures, loving parents, fancy jobs and all that goes with them; others, old before their time, make meticulous plans for their funerals, for they know that they don’t have a future, that their lives will soon be ended by an act of senseless violence and rage.  They are children of all skin colors, of every race and ethnicity, who have no past to remember, no future to look forward to, and a present without promise.”

And sadly their stories are repeated on the streets of Calcutta, the camps in Gaza, the island of Haiti, and the inner city of Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, to name just a few of the places.

 

But it is not just those “far off, nameless, faceless” people who have that experience of “no past to remember, no future to look forward to, and a present without promise.”

It also happens close to home, to those we know intimately.

It hits you sitting in the divorce attorney’s office getting ready to sign the papers and you wonder what happened to your marriage, where did the love go, where did the relationship disappear, will anyone ever love you again, what will you do with yourself now?

Or in the hospital room as the doctor informs you that the chemo is just not doing what they had hoped, the cancer is still spreading, and there is really not anything else they can do for you but keep you comfortable.

 

Nor is it just such times when life seems to fall apart that we experience despair and a sense of hopelessness.

That feeling also creeps in on us when we become lifeless in the midst of our busy, well-ordered lives.

When our lives lose their vitality and any zest for living.

When we move through our deadly days of just one more thing after another and we slowly realize we are leading Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation.”

When the words of the Psalmist ring in our hearts, “Out of depths I cry to you, O Lord.  Lord, hear my voice!”

 

That is the mood of Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones.  But in the midst of that vision, Ezekiel is suddenly jolted by this strange question: “O Mortal, can these bones live?”

What a question!?!  If it came from anyone else, it would be an insult, an offense, salt in the wound.

Walk into the lawyer’s office where the divorce papers are being signed and ask “Can this marriage be saved?”

Stand in the hospital room beside what remains of a disease-riddled body, struggling through its final breaths, and ask, “Can this person be healed?” Preposterous questions.

Can these bones live?

 

Ezekiel answers with the only faithful response: God knows!

This is not just saying that only God knows for sure, although it does acknowledge that truth.

But it is also a way of saying “Yes!”

Yes, they can live, for You are a God of optimism and confidence and hope!

Yes, they can live, for You are a God of possibilities!

Even in the face of unbelievable obstacles, God, with you all things are possible.

 

In response to that statement of faith, God proceeds to affirm Ezekiel’s faith by demonstrating that yes, the bones can indeed live again.

God instructs the prophet to prophesy to the bones, speak to them on God’s behalf, and see the Word of God in action.

God demonstrates the power of God’s Word to Ezekiel.

God is still speaking and the result is new life.

God instructs Ezekiel to tell the bones what God is going to do for them, with them.

As he does that, almost as the words are spoken, they bear fruit and the bones reconnect and sinews and muscles and flesh appear on them and then the breath of life returns to them and they stand up, ready to serve God.

 

What a demonstration of how to hold onto hope in the midst of the most hopeless of times.

Like the Psalmist who declares in faith that the way to get through the dark nights of the soul is very simply to wait on God.

Not aimlessly, passively, passing time without purpose, but attentively, with sharpened senses, attending to the things God is doing as we wait.

For Ezekiel and the Psalmist both demonstrate that God is still speaking, God is still acting, and the question then becomes, do we have the ears and the eyes to notice?

 

In his autobiographical book, Telling Secrets, Frederick Buechner frankly relates a family secret: how his teenage daughter struggled with anorexia.  There came a day when Buechner was in the pits of despair, worried sick that his daughter would never be well again.  Listen for the odd way God chose to speak to him in that dark night: “I remember sitting parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter’s illness and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary I needed most to see exactly then.  The word was trust.  What do you call a moment like that?  Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while?  The word of God?  I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both, but for me it was an epiphany.  The owner of the car turned out to be, as I suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my home to this day.  It is rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen.”

 

It is not just a slogan.

We really do believe that God is still speaking.

And the evidence is all around us.

For decades the situation in Israel-Palestine has felt like a valley of dry bones, but recently there have been signs of hope that God is still at work in that region.

The verdict is still out on the ultimate impact of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but again, there are signs in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Lebanon that God is still at work and that transformation is still a possibility.

 

We are a people of hope and there are people in the world around us for whom we can be that beacon of hope, that word in the darkness through which God still speaks.

Yes, our lives are lived in the quiet corners of the ordinary and we don’t feel like saints or heroes.

We build tiny hearth fires, sometimes barely strong enough to give off warmth.

But to the person lost in the darkness, our tiny flame may be the road to safety, the path to salvation.

It is not give us to know who is lost in the darkness that surrounds us or even if our light is seen.

We can only know that against even the smallest of lights, darkness cannot stand.

A sailor lost at sea can be guided home by a single candle.

A person lost in a wood can be led to safety by a flickering flame.

It is not an issue of quality or intensity or purity.

It is simply an issue of the presence of light.

 

Sometimes we can best be that light for others by asking the preposterous questions, outlandish questions, questions that raise faith.