DEM BONES
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Text: Ezekiel 37:1-14
“Good Lord! Bones everywhere – piled in mounds, picked clean, bleached and dried in the blazing sun. Some horrific, cataclysmic battle must have been fought here. Were there any winners? Such destruction! Such an overwhelming picture of death! Why have you brought me here, O Lord?” Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones must have started something like this.
Ezekiel, along with the brightest and best of Judean culture, had been carried into exile in Babylon. They had been taken from their homeland and found themselves a captive people in a strange land. In the midst of this, God called Ezekiel to prophesy.
For many years his people had naively assumed that, because they were God’s chosen people and heirs to a sacred covenant with Yahweh, they were immune to the titanic clashes of empire as Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians and Babylonians battled back and forth for control of the Middle East. They had the legacy of Abraham and Moses and David on which to rely; their capital in Jerusalem, crowned by Solomon’s magnificent temple, the very seat of God on earth, would never be conquered. After all, God was on their side.
So they engaged freely in the politics of the time with a false sense of security. Their kings made alliances with one emperor or another in order to secure the king’s power along with the wealth and influence of the Judean elite. Sometimes they picked the winning side; sometimes they didn’t, but, then, every few years the tide was sure to change anyway. A new king would sit on Judah’s throne, perhaps a strong, able reformer like Josiah; perhaps a fool like Jehoiakim, who tried to take on the mighty Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, or his weak, vacillating successor, Zedekiah, placed on the throne by Nebuchadnezzar, but always flirting with the Egyptians.
Babylon quashed one rebellion but Zedekiah did not learn his lesson. Encouraged by pro-Egyptian advisors, by offers of assistance from Egypt’s new pharaoh, Hophra, and the soothing words of certain court prophets, he rebelled openly against Babylonian rule. The rebellion was ill-timed, ill-planned, and doomed to failure. Nebuchadnezzar reacted almost immediately by besieging the city of Jerusalem. The land of Judah was devastated, and many of its cities were destroyed. Jerusalem itself withstood the siege for a while, but finally fell. After Zedekiah was forced to watch the execution of his sons, he was blinded, bound and taken to Babylon. The Babylonian forces then engaged in the systematic destruction of Jerusalem. Its significant structures, including the royal palace, were burned, its walls were torn down, and the Temple was first looted and then torched. Except for the very poorest people, the Judeans were taken into exile in Babylon.
Walter Wink writes of the Judeans’ situation to which Ezekiel was called to prophesy, “Captivity had sapped their hope. They regarded their political and military defeat as an irrevocable historical judgment. Nothing would dislodge the Babylonian colossus from its hegemony over their world. Yahweh had been proven impotent. Marduk had prevailed. Why not assimilate? The ancient faith had proved inadequate; it was nothing but the tribal faith of a tiny population on the fringe of a great empire. Now the exiles were bereft of their land, their temple, their sacrifices--everything that made them a people with a unique identity and vocation. They were removed to the heart of empire. Here were gods of real power, gods of universal sovereignty, gods of irresistible might. There was no end in sight for the empire, no conceivable vindication of Yahweh, no grounds for hope” (Walter Wink, “These Bones Shall Live,” The Christian Century, March 11, 1994.)
So perhaps Ezekiel’s vision of death and destruction was not so alien to what he had seen and experienced among his people. Perhaps it coincided with what he had been told of the fall and destruction of his homeland. In midst of their disbelief and despair, Ezekiel carries the word of the Lord to his people. He insists that this is the word of a living God, the great God of the universe. It is they who have abandoned God and not vice versa. He spends the first 36 chapters of his prophecy rudely and harshly trying to awaken his people to the foolishness of their assumption that their land and its capital were unconquerable. What he tells them over and over again is that they rendered the covenant null and void by their blatant disregard for it. In order for God to be their God, they must be God’s people, keeping faith, obeying the law, following God’s way. They had failed on all accounts; destruction and exile were the inevitable result.
In the end, though, God does not leave God’s people without hope. God gives Ezekiel this dramatic vision of the valley filled with dry bones. One wonders if Ezekiel himself was prepared for such a word of hope, such an image of possibility, such a vision of resurrection, standing before such a bleak reminder of the power of death and destruction. Perhaps sensing the prophet’s wavering faith in the face of the incalcitrance of his people and the grim harvest of the battlefield, God asks a pointed question, “Mortal, can these bones live?” We can’t quite capture the tone of Ezekiel’s response – affirmative, ambivalent, courageous, resigned? “O Lord God, you know.”
Whatever his thoughts and feelings, his reservations or skepticism, he once more takes the risk to prophesy what God has given him to say. “Oh dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: 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.” Wink again tells us that “It is the prophetic task, in a time of unraveling hopes, to declare the unimaginable, to assert the rationality of the unthinkable, to call the people to new hope, grounded not on the past but on sheer faith that God is about to do the impossible” (Walter Wink, “These Bones Shall Live,” The Christian Century, March 11, 1994.) From Ezekiel’s position of faithfulness, he witnesses a miracle of resurrection as the bones begin to reconnect, sinews and flesh coming on the bones, and he sees a valley full of dead folk standing. Ah, but something is missing, the all-important breath of life. God completes the vision, as only God can, by following through on the promise to give generously and graciously once again of the breath of life. The bones live.
Ezekiel’s message to the folk in exile and to us today is that, if we turn to the God who made us and is the source of our life, we, too, can be transformed. Pain, suffering, economic hardship, confusion, terrorism, aging, death, destruction, none these can separate us from the love of God. Only our inaction or our wandering off, our false sense of security or our unfaithfulness can cost us our sacred relationship to the God who made us to be in communion with Godself.
Ezekiel invites his people, and us, to open our eyes to a new vision. Dry bones cannot live again – at least not from any modern scientific perspective. “Can these bones live?” “Of course not,” we may be quick to respond. But what if we try to see things with God’s eyes? Look through God’s eyes, and see the bones rushing to their appropriate partners. Watch as ligaments bind them together, flesh blankets them, and skin seals them tightly. Watch as God’s spirit, which heals hopelessness, infuses them, so that they rise up – a great multitude testifying to the power of Yahweh. “Can corpses be brought forth from graves and become living beings again? Absurd!” But look through God’s eyes, and watch them come up, receive God’s spirit, and return home. When we raise our vision to look beyond what little our downcast eyes can see, – a relatively small group of aging people gathered here together, uncertainty, suffering, even terror, in the world all around us – we watch the impossible happen through God’s eyes. Katheryn Darr says of this passage, “‘I can’t believe my eyes,’ we say when we have witnessed an utterly unanticipated or seemingly impossible event take place. But we can believe God’s eyes and, looking through them, glimpse unimagined reasons to keep on hoping, though the desert be dark and dry, and the promised land far, far away” (Katheryn Pfisterer Darr, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume VI: Ezekiel, p. 1503-4.)
Valleys of dry bones…battlefields really…final resting places for those who will not hear the word of the Lord. Bones of those sacrificed on altars of greed, violence, power, enmity, sacrificed to the gods of materialism, war, domination, hatred. Where do we find valleys of dry bones today…Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Darfur, Guantanamo Bay, East Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, our own strained and broken relationships? Where are people lost and in despair? Where are people experiencing death and destruction? Where is the word of Lord most needed and how might we proclaim it? In spite of the grim picture before him and the failure of the people to listen, Ezekiel had the courage to stand and prophesy. Do we?
Craig Barnes says that “The church has always found its life not in what it sees today but in the Spirit of the God who raises dead hopes. The day we lose our ability to envision a better tomorrow is the day we deny that we really believe in the resurrection.” He asks, “Why does the church keep pouring out its little cup of water into the West Bank, Sudan and other desperate places of the world where hope has run dry? Why do we keep visiting the shut-ins and those in hospitals when we have no miracle drug to take away their pain? Why do we commit ourselves to the political process when there is so much cynicism and a malaise of despair in politics today? Why? Because God is not done” (Craig Barnes, “Resurrected Hopes,” The Christian Century, February 27, 2002.)
As Pentecost people, who have felt the Spirit move in our midst, we stand with Ezekiel and Peter to proclaim God’s word of hope and possibility. Through the power of the Spirit we speak in all the languages necessary and sometimes we even use words. To those who have given up, to those who think they’re too limited, too old, too young, too uneducated, too poor, too rich we say, “Don’t give up. God has not forgotten. God is not done. See with God’s eyes what is yet to be.” In the words of the old spiritual, “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones…will live again. Oh hear the word of the Lord.” May we keep our eyes and minds and hearts open to see what God has in store for us as we hope for tomorrow and envision our future. Amen.