You Shall Know

Sunday, May 31st, 2009
Pentecost B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton, VA
Ezekiel 37:1-14

1 The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. 3 He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” 4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. 5 Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. 6 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.” 7 So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. 8 I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. 9 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” 10 I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude. 11 Then he said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ 12 Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13 And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. 14 I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act,” says the Lord.

It is easily one of the most bizarre scenes in the Hebrew Scriptures. The prophet Ezekiel is transported in a vision to a valley that is representative of everything that the exiled people of Israel were feeling. It was full of the dry bones of a slain army -- and Ezekiel is called on by God to preach to them. The people of Israel -- and Ezekiel as on of them -- are struggling with the reality they have been forced to deal with. 

God’s promises have been impossible from the very start. There is the call of Abraham and Sarah, two impossibly old folks who were charged with giving birth to a nation as plentiful as the stars in the sky. The nation did grow up, but before too long it had been enslaved. When God liberated the people, they continually fell away – even when they had been given their own land, even when they had judges, kings, and prophets to try and keep them in line.

Ezekiel was faced with a situation in which a promise made thousands of years ago, a promise that seemed too good to be true, was turning out to be exactly that. The exile was one of the most traumatic events in Jewish history, and there’s a whole book of the Bible – Lamentations – dedicated to the words of despair and hopelessness God’s people felt at that time. The land was supposed to remind them of God’s promise; the king was supposed to remind them of God’s promise; the Temple was supposed to remind them of God’s promise. Now all those things were gone and the people were left despondent – utterly alone. We can hear their anguish in the words of Psalm 137.

By the rivers of Babylon - there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’ How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
how they said, ‘Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!’ O daughter Babylon, you devastator!  Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!

 

What we hear are the words of a people who are utterly lost, utterly without hope, utterly defeated. That terrible image in the last verse speaks more to the frame of mind of the Psalmist than to the enduring wish of the people of God. It is an honest expression of the bitterness and hatred that can so easily settle into the heart of one who no longer has hope, who sees no way out of their present circumstances, who is sure that God has -- at least for a little while -- abandoned them. 

Despite the 2,500 years that separate us from Ezekiel, I think each of us must have some idea how he felt, how his people felt. I suspect that there are things many of us treasure as reminders of God’s promise: a passage of scripture; words spoken by a dear friend at just the right moment; the memory of a particular star in the sky one night. They are meaningless to anyone else, but to us they are touchstones to which we cling when everything else falls away. Now imagine that you’ve lost even those, and I think you begin to grasp the magnitude of the exile.

So we return to that painful conversation between Ezekiel and God. Painful because Ezekiel knew. “Mortal, can these bones live?” -- the prophet knew the answer; he knew it was impossible.

And yet, that’s precisely what happens in the vision that follows. In essence, God says, “You think it’s impossible for me to restore my people from exile? I’m going to show you that I could do something infinitely more impossible than that. Not only am I going to restore the bones and sinew and flesh, but I am going to return my breath to these bodies, and they are going to live again.

“I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act.” God keeps promises, even though they have been impossible from the very start. 

(Thanks to Joshua T. Andrzejewski, Union PSCE, Richmond VA)

The people of Israel were dealing with very real, very present issues in their life as as a corporate entity - as a nation - they were hundreds of miles away from their home, bereft of their leaders, their temple, their sense of identity -- everything that for so long had helped them understand who they were in the world. 

But then, I guess that may have been part of the problem, don’t you think? They were sure of who they were in the eyes of the world, just not in the eyes of God. I’m not saying that they had NO idea of who they were in the eyes of God, they were just ALSO very aware of who they were in the world BECAUSE of who they were in the eyes of God ... and as so often happens in these cases, the ‘who’ they were in the world ended up taking precedence over the ‘who’ they were in the eyes of God, and when the ‘who’ they were in the eyes of the world got LOST, the initial response was to associate that loss with their PRIMARY identity -- who they were in the eyes of God. So they ended up digging a hole twice as deep as they WOULD have been in had they kept that sense of who they were in God‘s eyes. 

But the beauty of this passage is that it is a vivid reminder -- for them as well as for anyone who has lost that sense of identity -- of just what God is capable of doing in the face of the impossible. 

What seems the most unlikely, miraculous event that could happen in your life right now -- in your wildest imagination, that which you don’t even dare to hope for -- much less speak out loud? That the one you’ve lost - to distance, to estrangement, to a silly little argument - will be back with you? Or that the job you were so sure you had in the bag but which was pulled out from under you in a dizzying twist at the last minute is actually going to be offered to you? Can you picture God coming to you in your dreams tonight and telling you that exactly THAT is what is going to happen? What would that do for you? Would you look forward to whatever it was with relish, anticipating all the wonderful outcomes that would result from that one single event that was beyond hope for you until just a couple of minutes ago? 

Okay. Here comes the tough question: if that miracle were to take place, where would your energies then be directed? Would you be lost in the moment, drinking in the presence and ignoring everything else that is going on around you, or would you be focused on the one who made that seeming impossibility possible? There is a sense in playing the scenario out in our heads that we would CHOOSE to do the right thing -- that we would BEGIN to put things in proper perspective, in proper order, that we would regain a sense not only of balance between God being ultimate allegiance and the world - whatever laudable and praiseworthy event, person, or entity it might be -- being second ... but we have no guarantees that we would learn from our previous mistakes and missteps. In the best of all possible worlds, yes, we would learn and carry on with our lives in such a way as to never again let who we are in the eyes of the world overshadow who we are in the eyes of God, but the frailty of the human condition is such that it is never far from our minds -- even on Pentecost Sunday -- the day that commemorates that God can take ashes and bones and turn them into living, breathing human beings, even as Ash Wednesday at the BEGINNING of Lent reminds us that we ARE, in truth, dust and ashes, This day, Pentecost, reminds us that in SPITE of that truth, God is still more than capable of taking our dry bones and our scattered dust and souls and breathe life back into us -- that God can and DOES instill in us a sense of just WHO we are, regardless of our circumstances, regardless of our scattered-ness, our lostness, our confusion and questioning.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton? 

It means that if we are willing to hear the word of God -- that same word that calls us by name before we are even born, that knows us better than we know ourselves, that also calls us to be and to do and to LIVE Christ’s life in the world today, that if we are willing to hear that spirit breathed into our lives here today, we can, just as that army in that valley could, just as the apostles in first century palestine and the Roman Empire at the time DID, we can change the world, through this magnificent source of the same unquenchable fire that burned in Christ’s heart for us -- that same Holy Spirit can and WILL work through US -- frail children of dust though we be. 

Let’s pray.