Sermon 03/09/08 (Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45)

“Wanted: Dead yet Alive”
Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45
Rev. Désirée H. Gold
St. Mark’s United Church of Christ, Baltimore, MD
Sunday, 9 March, 2008
Fifth Sunday in Lent


 This is a rather spooky story to me. “The hand...came upon me, and he brought me out...and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, ‘Mortal, can these bones live?’”

...When you remove “the Lord” from this scripture, it sounds more like a scene from a horror flick or a science fiction movie. ...And it gets worse! As we well know, the bones come alive! Now, it’s a downright zombie tale! One biblical commentator even refers to the eventually flesh-covered bones as “an array of zombies.”

In my opinion, this is one of the weirdest scriptures in our Bible -- albeit, one of the most beautiful, but I’ll get to that later. I’m not saying that our Bible has to be filled with logic and rationality. It’s not. ...But dry bones suddenly coming to life in the middle of an otherwise empty valley?!

My sister-in-law, Melissa, has a master’s degree in forensic anthropology. That means that when she was in school she spent her days studying bones, most of which had come from crime scenes. Not all of the bones she studied were “very dry,” like the ones about which we have heard today. In fact, among her more gruesome tasks, Melissa sometimes had to remove the flesh from the bones before she studied them. Then came the meticulous work of looking at the bones themselves. And no, her job wasn’t quite like the breezy work you see on “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” Sure, there’s a lot of fancy technology available to help with some of the forensic work. But most of her time was spent very painstakingly looking at the bones, arranging them, trying to figure out what happened to them, and to the body to which they once belonged.

In short, Melissa knows a lot about bones. She dealt with the more macabre, and yes, sometimes gruesome, end of bone study. By the time the bones came to her, the breath had long since left them. But that is just the point. Melissa never saw the bones she studied suddenly grow sinews and flesh and then come to life! They were always the way Ezekiel first found them: very much dead. They were always Lazarus before Jesus arrived. Without breath.

So, how is it that the dry bones of the valley -- and the “sleeping” Lazarus did rise up, suddenly filled with new life? Clearly, this is not meant to be a story about logic. If my well-studied sister-in-law were to come upon a field of dry bones and see the bones suddenly grow flesh and become breathing beings again, she would have absolutely no scientific explanation for the occurrence. She would be just as baffled (and probably scared half to death) as the rest of us. So, science and logic are not the aims here. What is the prophet reaching for?

It is first important to note the explanation that God gives to the prophet: “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.’” So, the context is the people of the Exile, the Israelite tribes who had been exiled and dispersed, separated from their home in Israel. The raising up of their bones is a sign of hope from God, pointing to the eventual reunification of the tribes and an end to the Diaspora. The Israelites of Ezekiel’s time would have seen his prophesy as a sign that God/Yahweh was with them, even in their separation from one another.

Now we know the original context in which he wrote. This is always important when we are dealing with our scriptures, which were written in a time and place far from our own experience. But can these “weird” scriptures, written for a specific time many centuries ago, for a specific people, and in a specific place, continue to have meaning for more modern people? Can some “spooky” story about dry bones in a barren valley have meaning for us?

We know that this was a story of hope to the ancient Israelites, and perhaps we, too, can find hope in a story of new life springing forth “from the ashes,” as it were. It is perhaps easiest to draw a conclusion between the plight of Ezekiel’s time and the plight of modern Jews following the Holocaust. They themselves made this connection in their effort to create a modern Israel in the late 1940’s. Regardless of your political views on the current conflict in Israel/Palestine, the need many Jews felt to have a “homeland,” where they would be safe from centuries of persecution is understandable. Once we begin that modern analogy, it is possible to see many analogies between Ezekiel’s prophesy of renewal and our own contexts. I recall visiting a mass grave in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1992, left over from the death and destruction of WWII. I can imagine the family members of the numerous deceased picturing a scene like the one in Ezekiel’s prophesy: although the dead themselves would not be raised from their grave, the survivors could find hope in the new life that would spring forth in generations to come. Any people in the midst of war can live in the hope that the gruesomeness of death will eventually be followed by new breath, new life. Spring will follow the winter of dry bones. But for those of us who have not known, or do not currently know, the lifelessness of a war zone, the words of Ezekiel can have metaphorical meaning also.

We are now nearing the end of the season of Lent, a season which, to some, is seen as merely the dark season that leads to the Cross. I know several laypeople, and some ministers too, who have never liked Lent because it’s too “gloomy.” They see only the valley of dry bones. But remember something: behind the shadow of the Cross, there is always the light of the Resurrection. Yes, it is important to remember Jesus’ suffering on Good Friday. But it is also important to see this season as a time of special prayer and commitment...and as a time that leads not only to the Cross, but also to the Resurrection. Not only to those gloomy, spooky, “dry bones,” but also to the miracle of new life. So, during the remainder of this season of Lent, let God breathe some new life into those “dry bones” of yours. Let the Holy Spirit overtake you as you pray. See this “valley of the shadow of death” -- Jesus’ death, our own dark moments -- as Ezekiel would have seen it: just a temporary step along the way. Remember Jesus’ nonchalance about the death of Lazarus. This valley of dry bones will live.

Now let us pray.