Lent 5A
Text: Ezekiel 37:1-14
Sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
March 29, 2020
Prophesy to the Bones
In the year 587 the nation Israel was conquered by the Babylonian empire. The city of Jerusalem fell to the invaders, its walls were torn down so it could never again stand on its own. The temple, the center of Israel’s Godly worship, was destroyed, its treasures looted. And Israel’s leaders, the best and the brightest, artisans, talented financiers, musicians, political leaders, were led off into captivity in Babylon. God’s people despaired: in the words of Psalm 137 they said, How can we ever sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? How can we sing the Lord’s song, at a time like this? It was the beginning of the Babylonian Exile.
But you know, as terrible as all that was, a funny thing happened to God’s people, the Hebrews in exile in Babylon. Turned out, they said to one another, that Babylon?, Babylon was not so bad. It’s not like they were kept in prisons or even camps there. They’d been brought there to work, for Babylon, so they had jobs, and they were free to marry, build homes, plant crops and do business. Some of them became quite wealthy, we know, in the employ of the Babylonians.
So they began to trust the good life, instead of trusting God. Babylon will do that to you; the good life will get you thinking that Babylon?, Babylon is not so bad. Once they had wondered how they could ever sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land. Now they thought, do we really need to sing that old Lord’s song anymore? After all, we kinda got it all here, don’t we? So it was that fifty years later, when the Babylonians themselves were conquered by the empire of Cyrus the Persian and the Hebrews were permitted to return home, they had become so cozy in Babylon that most of them didn’t want to go back. The old dream of living in the Lord’s presence again, singing the Lord’s song, had died under a pile of status, wealth, going along to get along; life without God.
So one day the Spirit of the Lord grabbed the prophet Ezekiel by the collar and dragged him over to a valley filled with dry bones. The Lord asked Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these bones live?” Ezekiel looked around and what he saw was a whole lotta dead skeletons He thought hard for a minute about how he should handle this delicate little situation, and he replied, “Ah, Lord, I’m thinking that only you know the answer to that one.” Then the Lord commanded him to start preaching to the bones. The Lord even gave him the words of the sermon: “O 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! …. And you shall know that I am the Lord.”
Now, I am a preacher myself, so I can’t hear this story without putting myself in Ezekiel’s shoes. If it’s me, I turn to the Lord at that point and make a different suggestion. “Lord, you’re gonna be bringing these bones back to life in the end anyway, right? Well, why don’t you go ahead and do that first, and *then* I’ll do a little preaching. Wouldn’t that be a great sermon!: “See! See what the Lord our God can do!!”
But the Lord replies to me just as the Lord spoke to Ezekiel: “No,” says the Lord. “Preach to the bones, I said. Preach to the bones. Preach to the empty pews today, to a barren church building. Preach to a people living under threat, bones that have been stripped of the security they have known, some of them stripped of their livelihoods, their trust, bones that have been stripped of their flesh.”
Preach to the bones, because it’s only when you preach to the bones that you can at all bring a word of hope. Oh, yeah! Not only is there hope in the valley of the dry bones, but that dry valley, that’s the only place in which you’re gonna come to know hope. For faith is what?, according the letter to the Hebrews? “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Not yet! Not yet seen. And what do we hope for, according to St. Paul in Romans? “We hope for what we do not see.” Now, I say that like the ancient Hebrews comfy and snug in Babylon, we’ve been trusting things we can see and know, things we can domesticate and control, things that seem so sure, and solid to the touch. But at a time when our trust in such things has turned out to be, well, not as solid as all that, nevertheless we can come to live in hope. It is hope that can bring us back to life. Hope rises up from our bones, and chooses to believe in spite of how it is.
Hope is not what some of our political leaders say it is, that everything’s going to be just fine and the economy will bounce back stronger than ever and it’s going to be just tremendous. That’s not hope, because hope is real. The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes of the Hebrew prophets that they proclaimed hope in such a way that “the way things appear is precarious.” Precarious; now that’s real. And that’s preaching to dry bones. That is also, it seems to me, why the poor are great at hoping, and why we in the middle and upper classes who are used to coping so well in Babylon, entitled to life without threat to us, have such a hard time with true hope. We think we’re doing well enough. A couple of weeks ago our only worry was whether we would lose ground tomorrow. Now our tomorrow is precarious, uncertain and wide open, but we do not turn our back on tomorrow. If we turn against tomorrow, we turn our back on hope.
Hope, for dry bones. Why are our young, school-age people and their parents faithfully going online every day, defiantly committed to continue to learn? Why are our medical people fighting so boldly and so hard to provide care, when we have no miracle cures, and the prospect of the wave to hit us is so overwhelming? Why do we continue so committed, with social distance and phone calls and all the other ways we care, to shamelessly and confidently remain community, remain committed to one another? Why? Because God is not done here. That is our hope. Because God is not done with us here, down in this valley. That’s hope, for dry bones.
So we take our stand next to our brother Ezekiel and proclaim God’s hope to the dry bones. “Thus says the Lord: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live!” You, who gave up hope, who gave up looking for ultimate meaning – you who had settled for trust in Babylon in your routine life. You, who think your best years are behind you. You, who think the Lord has forgotten all about your little life.
To you we say, “Arise now!” Arise from that all-too-comfortable pile of discarded dreams; those are only dry bones to you, now. Arise to discover that the Holy Spirit is breathing life back into you. Arise to live with magnificent hope! Because, people of God, these dry bones of ours, these bones will live. Amen.