Bringing bones to life

March 18, 2018, Edgerton Congregational UCC

Today's texts: Ezekiel37: 1-14 and John 12: 20-24

I suspect for many folks, the most vivid connection they have to the story we heard from the Prophet Ezekiel this morning about the dry bones in the valley is the old spiritual –

“Them bones,  them bones, them dry bones,

“Them bones,  them bones, them dry bones,
“Them bones, them bones, them dry bones,

“Now hear the word of the Lord.”

But there is so much more to this story than a lively song. And as we will see, it even connects to that reading we also heard today from the Gospel according to John.

Have you ever felt like you were wandering in a valley filled with dry bones? It’s a pretty stark image. It’s not a place where I’d like to linger. I can’t imagine how I could bring those bones back to life.

Yes, I know Jesus talked about a grain of wheat falling into the ground and dying before it could come to life, but these bones seem really dead. Where is there any sign of life in this scene?

Let’s take just a moment to get some context for this reading from Ezekiel.

He was a Jewish prophet who lived about 600 years before Jesus. He was part of the staff of the Temple in Jerusalem. And then the army of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, swarmed into Jerusalem, captured the city, destroyed the Temple and sent the leaders like Ezekiel into exile in Babylon – the place we know today as Iraq.

Now Ezekiel was a bit of an eccentric. Maybe the whole experience of exile spun him out of what we might consider normal.

In the writings attributed to him in the Hebrew Bible, he talks about eating manure – not exactly a tasty meal – and about lying on one side for years before switching to the other side for many more years. He did not speak at all for a long time after the destruction of Jerusalem and when his wife died, he writes that he did not take time to mourn her because he was so focused on the loss of his people.

Out of all that, though, he began to create these vibrant images rooted in the destruction of the past and his hope for the future. If you read them, you might think he was hallucinating, maybe on a psychedelic trip. But keep in mind some of the vivid imagery that has shaped literature in our own time – the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, A Wrinkle in Time or The Black Panther.  He will end his book with a vision of a glorious new temple in Jerusalem.

That’s because what Ezekiel was writing about was not only the devastation of the past – the dry bones scattered about the valley – but his trust that God would bring the people back home, that the dead bones would live again.

Even thought that famous spiritual makes it sound as if all the bones will be reconnected and an individual will live again, even if we think of this story in the context of Jesus’ promise of resurrection, that’s not what this story is about. It’s not about an individual returning to life. The Jewish people in that time had no concept of a life after death. It is about a society being restored to the way God had envisioned it to be.

In the chapter just before the passage we heard today, Ezekiel channels these words from God:

“I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land…A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you…I will put my spirit within you, and make you … careful to observe my laws. Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.”

It’s a call away from desolation and into life. It’s God’s breath, God’s spirit bringing life out of what seemed hopeless.

As I was thinking about the story of the dry bones, I spent some time with an illustration in what is known as the St. John’s Bible.  This is an amazing 21^st century version of the Bible with the words written in calligraphy and the highly artistic illustrations giving a new depth of understanding to some of the passages in the Bible.

There is a two-page illumination by artist Donald Jackson of the story of the dry bones. Let me describe it and in the process, I hope as it did for me, this will help widen your view of this classic story and give it life in our time.

Across the bottom of the two pages, Donald Jackson has created what seems like a long junk pile. What is in that junk pile, however, tells a good part of the story.

At the far left are stacked skulls, images from the killing fields of Cambodia in the 1970s when the regime of Pol Pot killed about 25 percent of his country’s population.

On the far right are starved corpses, representing the Armenian genocide in Turkey that killed some 1 million people between 1914 and 1918.

Across the whole bottom of the picture are piles of dry bones, representing more current wars in Rwanda and Iraq, Bosnia and Afghanistan.

Heaped up near the center is a pile of eyeglasses, a symbol of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

There is broken glass from windows shattered in buildings during suicide bombings and terrorist attacks.

There are the empty buildings of a desolate urban landscape and a junked car symbolic of the environmental disaster that has become part of our valley of dry bones.

Along the same lines, there is an oil slick in the lower right part of this scene.

Friends, we know well what it is like to live in the valley of dry bones. It is part of our world today. And it can feel overwhelming, hopeless.

These bones seem really dead. Where is there any sign of life in this scene?

If you look a little closer at the oil slick, though, you can see something common to oil slicks. There is a rainbow of colors reflected on its surface.

Wait. Is there a glimmer of hope in the midst of all this?

And then as you look across the grayness of the skulls and bones, the shattered glass and piled eyeglasses, you see seven gold squares.  In the St. John’s Bible, a gold square is how the artists portray the divine. God is here even in the midst of all this suffering. The words across the bottom come straight from our Ezekiel reading: “I will put my spirit within you and you shall live.”

All is not lost, even in a world where far too often, death and destruction seem to be dominating our consciousness.

Consider this story. Corrie Ten Boom was a Dutch citizen who helped Jews escape from the Nazi Holocaust until she herself was imprisoned. She was in a very real valley of dry bones. She made famous the last words of her sister who died while with her in prison: “There is no pit so deep that God is not deeper still.”

Across the top of the pages are the brilliant colors of a rainbow, many gold squares, and five Jewish menorahs, symbolizing God’s covenant with God’s people.

“I will put my spirit within you and you shall live.”

Out of the valley of dry bones, there is indeed the promise of life.

But here’s something else to note in this story. God brought life through the words and work of Ezekiel. So that suggests to me that we have something to do with bringing life and hope to the gray places in our world.

Within the wider church that we are part of – the United Church of Christ – people are using a something called the Three GreatLoves as a way to do some of the work that God has for us as we try to transform the world so it comes closer to God’s vision, as we help those dry bones to live.

They are simple phrases – Love of Neighbor, Love of Children, Love of Creation. Living out those loves is not always easy and it can be controversial.

How do we love our neighbor when there seem to barriers between us? Maybe it’s politics or maybe it’s race. Maybe it’s gender or maybe it’s immigration status.

How do we do that as individuals? How do we do that as a congregation of people who gather together to follow Jesus? How do we do that when I’ll bet there are some widely differing ideas about how best to live out the love of neighbor.

Let me suggest that whatever our differences, we ought to able to start from the notion that Jesus calls on us to love our neighbors in the broadest sense of that word.

And what about loving our children? The focus on school shootings over the past month, indeed over the past years, is one place that demands a response as we try to bring life to the valley.

So too does the extent of child poverty in our state and nation. The Wisconsin Council of Churches along with several other groups has launched a campaign to cut child poverty in half in Wisconsin in the next decade. Right now, 250,000 of Wisconsin children live in poverty.

Again, there are lots of ways to tackle those issues. But can we come together around the central call to love children?

Then there is loving creation. We in this state know well the beauty of God’s creation and the many ways it enriches our lives. We also have become more and more aware of the many ways we put  God’s creation at risk.

When the Southwest Association of the United Church of Christ gathers for its annual meeting on April 14 in Verona, the theme will be “Ask the Earth and It Will Teach You: Your Congregation’s Part in Creation.”

That’s a place where you may hear about seeds dying in the ground before they create the beginning of new life.  That’s an appropriate image for all of this, because the work of bringing dry bones back to life, the work of bringing life to a world that struggles with death and desolation is hard work. It’s work where we often have to give up a little bit of ourselves, to die to ourselves in effect, to bring life to the valley.

Remember those words from Jesus that we heard today?

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

 Jesus is not talking about self-hatred here. He’s not trying to encourage us to have a bad self-image. He’s encouraging us to not be quite so self-centered, so we can be focused on those in our world who need to experience God’s love through our actions.

One last thought from the story in the Gospel according to John.

The passage we heard today opened with two of Jesus’ closest followers – Philip and Andrew.  When Jesus first met them early in the Gospel according to John, they led others to Jesus. Andrew told his brother Simon, who we know as Peter, “We have found the Messiah.”

Philip told his friend Nathaniel about Jesus and when Nathaniel doubted that anything good could come out of Nazareth, Philip issued a simple invitation – “Come and see.”

So in John’s telling of the story, Philip and Andrew brought the first of their fellow Jews to Jesus to become his disciples. In today’s story, Philip and Andrew are the ones who bring the first Greek or Gentile – non-Jewish – disciples to Jesus. They are the bridge between the Jews and the Gentiles who follow Jesus.

The arrival of the Greeks symbolizes the drawing of all people to Jesus, the winds carrying them from the north and the south, from the east and the west. When Jesus saw that his band of followers has grown in its diversity, he says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

That expansion of Jesus’ followers would continue with story of Pentecost when peoples from many lands felt God’s Spirit in their midst, when Peter welcomed a Roman centurion into the community, when Paul carried Jesus’ message to Gentiles throughout the Mediterranean region.

Jesus and his followers crossed the religious and ethnic and gender boundaries of their time and in the process, brought new life to the world.

I’m left, then, with this question: If these bones are to live, how do we build bridges in our time? How do we make the three great loves of neighbor, children and creation infuse our world – and our lives – with hope?

Let’s keep our ears – and our minds - open as we hear the word of the Lord.

Amen.