Ezekiel 37:1-14
March 29, 2020
Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS
If you go way back into the old school Disney vault, you will find a five-minute-long black and white animated piece from 1929 called The Skeleton Dance. Maybe you’ve seen it? If not, you can YouTube it later. [1]
I remember watching it as a child and being morbidly fascinated with it. There are skeletons leaping and dancing, skeletons partially disassembled, rolling around in a graveyard, skeletons playing each other like xylophones. It’s creative, clever, and I’m sure it was cutting-edge technology almost a hundred years ago.
When I was a kid, I found it entertaining, but also scary. Something about all those skeletons dancing around gave me the creeps.
I don’t remember if I told my parents I was scared of it or not. Probably not. I had a lot of worries about death when I was a young child.
It seems most children - like all humans - have rich interior lives and worries and hopes and dreams that they don’t share aloud with others. And death, in particular, is something many cultures struggle to talk about or deal with. It seems we’d rather tuck it away, out of sight….as if, by ignoring it, we might be exempt from it.
But then - there they are! - those pesky dancing skeletons, reminding us that death is one of the only certain things in life.
We can’t will it out of existence. It is as much a part of being human as love and laughter and dancing and tears. As we said back at the beginning of Lent: “from dust you came, and to dust you will return.” [2]
When I got a little older and heard the text from Ezekiel that Sophie shared with us today, I couldn’t help but think of those dancing skeletons.
The prophet Ezekiel has a vision and, in it, stands in the midst of a vast field of death and destruction. In this valley, Ezekiel sees bones. Many bones. The bones are dry, long dead. There is no way these bones could live again. Hope is lost.
Ezekiel lived and ministered to the people of Israel during the period of Exile to Babylon in the 6th century BCE. An entire people - a whole civilization - had been destroyed in Jerusalem and the people were scattered to foreign lands.
The people struggled to keep the faith because the future was so uncertain. They had no way of knowing how long the Exile would last. They didn’t know whether they would ever return home or if things would ever go back to normal for themselves, their children, their grandchildren.
And so this valley of dry bones makes perfect sense. The people have lived through great trauma and ghosts are with them everywhichway they turn. Hope is sparse. Spirits are dry.
In the midst of this great pain and despair, the Spirit breathes a vision of hope through Ezekiel.
Working together, God’s Spirit and Ezekiel bring those dry bones back together. This vision is of flesh and muscles and sinews coming back to the bones. And the breath - the spirit - moves within them and they live and stand on their feet.
Ezekiel’s vision comes to us in the lectionary near the end of the season of Lent. It’s like a little foretaste of the Resurrection this Sunday, as we have not only this passage from Ezekiel but also the Raising of Lazarus in John 11. Both of these stories smush together the harsh reality of our mortality alongside the hope of new life that is the cornerstone of our faith.
In the John passage, Jesus weeps when he learns one of his dearest friends has died.
Our God is no stranger to human pain and suffering. There are parts of being human that are so very, very painful. Many of us are living through those moments of pain right now as people are worried about jobs, loved ones. We see the pain of the entire globe on the news. We worry and wonder: when and how will things ever feel okay again?
Friends, the grief of this moment we are living through is immense. I hope and pray that you are making time to sit and share your worries and sorrow with God. There will be many tears...and God is big enough to sit with all our fears and grief.
Jesus wept and it is right and good that we weep, too. [3]
Even though Lazarus has been dead for several days and his body smells, the Gospel of John tells us that somehow, someway we sure don’t understand, Jesus restored his friend to life. Lazarus comes walking - still wrapped up in the shroud used for his burial - and, at Jesus’s command, is unbound, set free, restored.
The dry bones come together. The skeletons dance. The bodies live again.
Can we understand it? Probably not.
Is it still good to hear and tell these stories? Absolutely, yes.
Because these stories are about the nitty gritty of what it means to be flesh-and-blood humans. To take an honest look at the limitations of our bodies. To boldly stare death in the face - know that it’s a reality AND proclaim that God’s love is still bigger.
These stories are about the intimate partnership and dance between humanity and the Holy.
Again and again in Ezekiel’s vision, God and the human prophet work in tandem.
Again and again the text uses the Hebrew word ruach. Breath, spirit. That’s the same ruach-breath-spirit that moved over the face of the waters in the Book of Genesis when God created the Earth. With God’s breath, comes life. In the beginning AND in Ezekie’s vision.
That breath - God’s breath - is so intimately a part of us that it is sometimes difficult to tell where it stops and we begin.
Some theologians have even said that the unutterable name given to God in the Hebrew Bible - the one we spell in English as Y-H-W-H and pronounce as “Yahweh” - some theologians believe that name is actually simply the sound of breath.
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner writes:
The letters of the Name of God in Hebrew are YOD, HAY, VAV, and HAY. They are frequently mispronounced as “Yahveh.” But in truth they are unutterable.
Not because of the holiness they evoke, but because they are all vowels and you cannot pronounce all the vowels at once without risking respiratory injury.
This word is the sound of breathing.
The holiest Name in the world, the Name of the Creator, is the sound of your own breathing. [4]
That ruach-breath-spirit that Ezekiel and God breathe together into the bones….
…..that ruach-breath-spirit that Jesus exhales as he cries for his friends....
….that ruach-breath-spirit that we used last week when we worshiped together and practiced a breath-mantra….
….that ruach is God’s name, God’s love, God’s life, God’s self flowing through our own frail, mortal, human bodies.
Rob Bell says that when we are born, then, the first sound on our lips - our very first breath - is God’s name. And when we die - that last breath that leaves our bodies is God’s name again. [5]
Day after day after day, as long as we are lucky enough to be alive, we inhale and exhale God’s name, God’s love, God’s life, God’s self.
So, friends: take comfort, take strength, seek hope, do love.
And when those things feel impossible, know that you are not expected to do any of them on your own. God’s name, God’s love, God’s life, God’s self is moving in and through you with each and every breath.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
NOTES:
[2] Genesis 3
[3] If you haven’t already read it, this article from Harvard Business Review on the grief of living through this moment in history is profound and helpful: https://hbr.org/2020/03/that-discomfort-youre-feeling-is-grief
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EFLRDNAx-Y
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