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CAN THESE BONES LIVE?
Fifth Sunday in Lent
March 9, 2008
Pastor William S. Waxenberg
Imagine being in a living room. A living room of average size with average appointments. There are paintings and photographs on the walls, there’s a couch, several chairs, tables, table lamps, an entertainment center with a stereo and a large, flat-screen TV. There are lots people milling around the living room too, both family members and guests. People are chattering and with drinks in hand when suddenly one of the kids accidentally drops her glass of Coke which spills all over the carpet. Ice and cola everywhere. She shrieks and puts her hands to her mouth. Everyone stops, turns, looks, and stares. She’s sharply rebuked by her father while her mother scurries to the kitchen for a roll of paper towels.
Imagine that little girl. Imagine how she’s feeling. Suddenly the unwanted center of attention.
Or imagine the teenager who’s no longer wanted at home. Where to go? What to do? Not far from here, along Central Expressway, there’s a billboard about “couch surfing.” It’s a newphrase, one I’ve never heard before. Couch surfing. It has to do with kids who have no place to stay, so each night they’re sleeping on someone else’s couch. Couch surfing.
Or the victim of sexual abuse, the child who’s being violated by a father or mother, an uncle, a grandparent, a family friend. They’ve been told to keep this horrific act a secret. “Don’t tell,” they’re told. “If you do, no one will ever believe you.”
The child who’s being glared at, the teenager without a home, the child who’s being victimized. These are all kids who know the reality of isolation. Or, to put it in biblical terms, these kids know the reality of exile. Just like adults who know the sudden loss of a spouse through death or divorce. Just like the man who’s been fired from his job or the woman cut off from her fellow soldiers in a war zone. Isolated. Exiled from everything near, dear, safe.
Exile is the context of our Old Testament reading for this morning, from the 37th chapter of Ezekiel. This man of God, prophet and priest, knew all about it because he too was exiled, along with hundreds of others when the southern kingdom of Judah was attacked by the mighty Babylonian army almost 600 years before Jesus. King Nebuchadnezzar decreed that the brightest and best should be rounded up and marched some 500 miles to the east into the land of Babylon. Exiled away from everything with meaning. The city of Jerusalem, once glorious, sitting high upon Mount Zion, surrounded by a giant wall for protection, city and wall alike now lay in rubble. The Temple, chief symbol of the faith of Abraham, dreamed about by David, and built by King Solomon, now violated by the entranceof gentiles into its courts. The Ark of the Covenant, believed to contain the tablets on which were written the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mt. Sinai, pulverized into grains of sand.
And, were that not enough, the questions, the haunting questions, that plagued priest and prophet, scholar and artisan, parent and child: What did we do? Why are we being punished so? Where is our God? Why didn’t God defend us from these heathen? Has our God lost his power? And the most daunting question of all: with the destruction of the city and the Temple and the Ark, is our God dead?
Cut off. Isolated. Exiled. What’s it like? How best to describe the experience of being exiled? Why, it’s like death! And God gives to Ezekiel an incredible vision—a valley, a huge valley, a valley filled with thousands and thousands of dry bones. Bleached bones, bleached by the sun. To be exiled is to die.
Let’s step away for a moment from the idea that death is natural or that death is a friend. We say that, you know. In an effort to bring a word of comfort to a loved one, we say, “Well, death is just a part of life.” And there is truth here, but not the whole truth. Or, when someone has been ill for a long time with no hope of recovery—as when my mother was dying of cancer and there was no more that could be done—we may even, and rightly so, pray for death to come and come quickly. And there’s truth here too, but not the whole truth.
For the writer of Genesis reminds us that death is God’s judgment upon all creation for the sin of Adam and Eve. “Eat of that tree, the one I have forbidden you to eat from,” God said, “and you will die” (2:15-17). And the Apostle Paul, in I Corinthians, proclaims that the last enemy to be destroyed by God—the last enemy—will be death itself (15:26).
For Ezekiel and for his community, death is neither natural nor a friend, which is why it’s such a powerful image to describe their experience of exile. The experience of exile is a terrifying horror to be overcome, to be defeated. But how? That’s the question.
“Can these bones live, Ezekiel?” Can those in exile be redeemed? Can your exile, which is like death itself, be overcome? Ezekiel shakes his head. “Only God knows.”
And God does know! God will speak his word into the realm of death. So that in Ezekiel’s vision, an amazing thing begins to happen. These bones begin to come together—a great rattling of bones! Bone to bone! Hundreds, thousands of bones coming together. Great skeletons beginning to rise!
Remember the old African-American spiritual, Dem bones. Dem bones? Turn to the last page of your bulletin and let’s sing it together:
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones,
Now hear the word of the Lord!
The foot bone’s connected to the ankle bone,
The ankle bone’s connected to the leg bone,
The leg bone’s connected to the knee bone.
Now hear the word of the Lord!
The knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone,
The thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone,
The hip bone’s connected to the back bone,
Now hear the word of the Lord!
The back bone’s connected to the shoulder bone,
The shoulder bone’s connected to the neck bone,
The neck bone’s connected to the head bone,
Now hear the word of the Lord!
“Hear the word of the Lord!” And what is that word? When the exiles cry out that their bones are dried up and their hope is lost and that they are completely cut off from the land of their ancestors and from God, Ezekiel proclaims a word of incredible hope:these bones will live! Tendons and muscles and blood vessels and arteries and skin over these bones! And God will blow into these re-fashioned corpses the very breath of life! Whoosh!
There is life after exile! There is life after death—regardless of the form death takes—from exile and isolation to the grave itself. Why, there’s even a new image: God will open their graves and raise them up! God has not forsaken them. Rather God comes into the midst of their exile to proclaim hope! God comes into the midst of their death to proclaim life.
It all sounds very much like a prelude of things to come, doesn’t it. A prelude to the One who comes among us, who stands at the tomb of Lazarus, commanding that the stone be rolled away, and speaks the word into the darkness of his grave. “Lazarus, come out!” And out he comes. “Unbind him,” Jesus says,“and let him go!” A prelude to the One who will one day stand at our graves and call us forth into life eternal.
Exile—death—comes to all of us in some form. Whether by disease or by divorce, whether by abuse or by rejection, whether by embarrassment or our own sin, when it comes, wemay well feel cut off completely.
But the word goes forth. God speaks and God acts, we are told. He speaks the word and gives us hope. So that “you shall know that I am the Lord.” Yes, “I am the resurrection and the life. All who believe in me, though they die, yet shall they live. And whoever lives and believes me will never die”
So there’s that little girl, standing in her living room with all eyes upon her. Hand at her mouth, tears in her eyes, her cheeks flushed red with total embarrassment, her father’s stinging words ringing in her ears, her mother’s frantic run to the kitchen. Oh, if only the floor would open up and swallow her now! But then one of the older women there—a maiden aunt, an old family friend, a neighbor, a grandma, it doesn’t matter—but this old woman who remembers that long, long ago she once stood in a similar living room and spilled her cranberry punch all over her neighbor’s brand new carpet, she places her coffee cup on one of the end tables and walks over to this child, takes her into her arms, hugging her close, and whispers in her ear, “It’s all right, my child. It’s all right.”
And it is all right. Because that child is a metaphor for us all, isn’t she, when in those moments of pain which feel so much like we’re in exile, and which does indeed stink like death,when we need to be embraced and spoken to by the One who alone can bring life out of death, any kind of death, and make us whole and alive again.
Amen.
