March 29, 2020
/5 Lent
Ezekiel 37: 1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8:6-11; John 11: 1-45
The Rev. James M.L. Grace
In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. AMEN.
Good morning. I want to begin this morning just by saying I miss you. I miss seeing you all here in this building. I miss our conversations at coffee hour. I miss hearing a choir sing. As I gaze out at row after row of empty pews, I feel a vacancy, a kind of emptiness that maybe you all feel too. I miss you. This has been a hard week for all of us. We have members of our church who have lost employment, some who have lost hope, some who have lost faith.
To that point I want to share a story with you. A person once asked the buddha, “if Buddhism is so simple can you explain it in one sentence?” And the Buddha said, “I can’t, but I can explain it in three.” And so the person said, “okay, three, go ahead give me the answer.” And the Buddha said “1. Everything changes. 2. Anything can happen at anytime. And 3 I am not exempt.” In other words, this is all temporary, nothing is certain, we are not excused. That’s heavy. That’s a lot of reality. Some of us choose not to accept that much reality, because it can be painful, so we find ways to avoid it. A pandemic is a form of reality that evokes a spiritual response, because a pandemic forces us to live with the knowledge that we will one day die.
We are like Jesus, wandering through a desolate wilderness alone, facing temptation, and wondering exactly where God is in all of this. At least that’s what people have asked me. “Where is God now?” they ask. I have no easy answers, no platitudes to offer, except to say that God is exactly where God needs to be: God is with us in all of this. We are not alone. We are not being punished.
But it does kind of feel that God has put the whole world in a cosmic “time out,” doesn’t it? I do not believe that it is a coincidence that one of our readings this morning comes from the 37th chapter of Ezekiel. I really don’t. In the reading, we meet Ezekiel, who is placed by God in a valley of dry bones. Actually, the reading says they are very dry, indicating that all of these bones were from bodies of soldiers who long had been dead. Ezekiel sees nothing but death, nothing but despair, nothing but hopelessness. And then God asks Ezekiel a very strange question, God says “Ezekiel, do you think these bones can live?” And Ezekiel says, “God I have no idea – only you would know” (this is a very smart answer). And their conversation goes on, and we know the rest of the story: the bones are animated, they join together, muscle and tendon and skin grow upon them and the bones become people again.
What does this mean? Ezekiel was written during a tragic period of time in Israel’s history. An invading Babylonian army had destroyed the city of Jerusalem. The temple in Jerusalem, which was considered the hub of religious activity and piety, was razed to the ground. The Hebrews, God’s chosen people, were forced into exile and lived far away in Babylon. It is believed that the book of Ezekiel was written in Babylon, during this time of exile.
Their cities destroyed, their temple lost, the Hebrews looked around and asked the question many are asking today: “what is God doing?” Imagine how scared they were. In response to the anxiety of his day, Ezekiel proclaimed in a story we hear today, that God was rebuilding. Bones long since dead were being reclaimed once again by God to rebuild new bodies and create new life. It was Ezekiel’s message of hope, ultimately that as God rejoined these old bones, so to, would God rejoin Israel, now nearly dead, and make it live once again. Ezekiel’s vision gave people hope.
Many of us here today might feel that we are walking through a similar valley as Ezekiel. You might feel just like Ezekiel – that your life has been overturned, and that like him, you’ve also been plopped into a valley of old very dry bones. I certainly felt that way this week. If that’s where you are, know there is nothing wrong with feeling grief, sadness, depression, or anxiety. I felt all those feelings this week.
But here’s the thing, and I learned this from a person who I once confided many of my personal troubles in. After running through a list of whatever my grievances and frustrations were at the time to this person, he only had one question for me. He said, “Jimmy I hear you saying all that. So where is the good?” I didn’t like that he asked me that question, because it meant not only that I needed to see a positive, and at the time I was much more interested in just focusing on all the negative around me. His question also meant also that I no longer could keep playing a victim (which felt so good!) once I started identifying where the good was.
So where is the good in all this? Those of you with in church now, go ahead and write on this livestream where you are seeing good. Write where you are seeing God. Write how you are seeing God put things back together in your life as God once brought together old bones. Because the good is that God is present, now, in all of this. The good is that when we rebuild, perhaps we might rebuild things in a better way. The good is that as our officials tell us to shelter in place, some of us are learning to shelter in peace. The good is that we are pulling together. The good is that even though we look around and see only dry bones around us now, things are growing and emerging and there is resurrection even now. It would be easy to give up right now. I hope to God you don’t. I hope to God you don’t give up before the miracle happens. Because it will. It’s already happening now.
Two weeks from today – we celebrate Easter. We will join with many other people who affirm a simple belief that dry bones are not an end, but a prerequisite to something greater, something eternal, something miraculous. Yes, it is Lent. Yes, we are in a valley, and all I see, at least, are dry bones. And yes, God will create something beautiful out of everyone. AMEN.