Breath for Dry Bones

Breath for Dry Bones

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Sunday, April 6, 2014
St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church

Elizabeth Mangham Lott

(preached in tandem with Tim Moon)

Ezekiel 37:1-14 (p. 407 pew Bible)
The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. 3He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” 4Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. 5Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath[a] to enter you, and you shall live. 6I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath[b] in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

7So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. 8I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. 9Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath:[c] Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath,[d] and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” 10I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.

11Then he said to me, “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.’ 12Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. 14I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.”

TIM:We have before us today two resurrection texts: this very powerful oracle in the book of Ezekielwhich is paired today with the Raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John. As we move toward Palm Sunday and the events of Holy Week, we are invited to consider the significance of resurrection in our lives and in the life of this church.The Ezekiel passage is a vision and most likely spoke into the period of exile to those who had survived but witnessed great destruction of their homes, their friends and families, and their faith. Understandably, they had been changed by their time in Babylon.

Considering Ezekiel’s first audience is helpful for those of us listening today because hearing their story helps us to know our own. Margaret Odell writes, “If the dry bones represent living exiles, then, it turns out that the entire vision is concerned, not with the reality of death, but with despair. The exiles were the survivors, yet they have dug their graves with their fear of God’s absence. To this hopelessness, Ezekiel offers a startlingly simple metaphor of divine presence, the ready availability of breath.”

EML:We know what it is like to enter a season of life that is dry and spiritless. Some of us even know what it is like to stand before our lives, after a period of devastation, not knowing what move to make next. When God asks, “Can these bones live?” we have asked that question, too. At first that may seem comforting, but it is also a bit frustrating. “Only you know, God,” responds Ezekiel. Maybe he’s thinking, “What kind of question is that?! If you don’t know, O God, then I surely don’t.”

This is when God’s ruach begins to do its thing. The word “ruach” appears 10 times in these 14 verses; it means Spirit, Wind, and Breath. This is God’s hovering, creative presence in Genesis—the wind that stirs up all things from nothing, the spirit that creates order out of chaos, the breath that gives and sustains abundant life.

TIM:Margaret Odell, noting that ruach is translated differently throughout English versions of this text, writes: “Whether it appears in one instance as breath or in another as wind, it is all the same life giving force. And it is all from God.”

The spirit, the wind, the breath all has its origins in God’s being, but neither in John’s story of Lazarus or Ezekiel’s story of dry bones does God alone do the work. The community participates in resurrection in Ezekiel 37 and in John 11—God instructs Ezekiel: prophesy to the bones, breathe into the bones as Jesus tells the long dead Lazarus to rise and walk out and the dumbfounded onlookers to go unbind him.

Ezekiel’s text asks: What can God breathe into our dry bones?Life wears us down until sometimes we are left with nothing to give the world because nothing is giving energy to us. We can cry out to God, but God expects us to participate in the answering of our prayers.

EML:In Ronald Rolheiser’s book The Holy Longing, he writes about the Christian’s participation in prayer. “When we pray ‘through Christ’ more is involved than merely asking God in heaven to make some kind of intervention. The community too, and we ourselves, must be involved not just in the petition but also in trying to bring about what the petition pleads for…It is my voice and my compassion that is called for since I am part of the Body of Christ, am praying, precisely, through the Body of Christ…If I pray for world peace, but do not, inside of myself, forgive those who have hurt me, how can God bring about peace on this planet? Our prayer needs our flesh to back it up.”[1]

TIM:The rector of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Texas connects this idea of the work of the people, the stuff of our lives here as a community of faith, with the vision of Ezekiel. This story is not about raising the dead.This is a story about reviving the spirit when it has gone out of a community of faith.Ezekiel is not prophesying to the dead.He is preaching to a people who have lost their confidence in God to become a unified people again.This story is about the renewal of a people—the story of the Spirit of God being rebreathed into a community.It isn’t resurrection, where the body comes from the tomb.It is an image of people with the giftof the spirit given a sense of newness by working together, by becoming whole, by being revived by the loving center in God.

“The reason that we have the book of Ezekiel was because the [vision] that Ezekiel had was not just for the specific people who had returned from Persia; they were [visions] that were to be heard by the people for all time.The bones needed to be continually renewed.The faith needed to be constantly vigilant to be open to the Spirit moving within it.Stagnation is always a problem with communities of faith. It doesn’t matter what religion or what denomination.”[2]

For God, the response to stagnation is wind! We “know what the wind does:it is constantly changing the landscape, even if it is only the landscape of our sinuses.The Wind of faith, the Holy Spirit, changes the landscape of the Church too.”

EML:It is, perhaps, a frightening reality to consider that in our public and private seasons of drought and despair, God is present to guide us back to fullness of life—but God expects our hand in doing the work. What kind of work will it take and who will we be when we finish the job? When we are already weary, how do we move forward? Will the new life look like the old life? And where is God ultimately asking us to go with this new life? It would be nice to know these answers before we roll up our sleeves and do any hard work.

Whatever the answers are, we know we cannot go back to the church of our best memories any sooner than we can go back to the healthiest, youngest versions of ourselves. The reality of dry bones is that we are called to examine the life before us; that is a calling as individuals and as a congregation. We must be willing to breathe into the creaky, dry places in our lives as followers of Jesus and in the life of what this Church is becoming as the body of Christ.

In her book The Gifts of Imperfection, Brene` Brown tells of preparing to give a speech at a country club lunch for a group of business people. Brown’s work is in psychological research, and she is a specialist in shame and vulnerability. The woman who greeted her before the lunch asked to see Brown’s bio in order to introduce her. She was horrified to see the kind of work Brown did and said, “I thought you talk about how to make people joyful.” She proceeded to hand Brown a list of things she wasn’t allowed to discuss in her talk that was beginning in 30 minutes; no talk of shame, no talk of vulnerability “because they’re eating”—just happy and joy.

Awkwardly and with shame, Brown complied, but she later reflected, “Her list was symptomatic of our cultural fears. We don’t want to be uncomfortable. We want a quick and dirty ‘how-to’list for happiness.”[3]

TIM:We want God to breathe life into these dry bones but don’t want to work for it. We want a magic wand or an I Dream of Jeannie eye blink. In Ezekiel and in John, the model is that God wants for us to participate in the work of breathing in life, unbinding the wounds. And we have plenty of wounds that need to be unbound.

Shame and perfectionism infiltrate the church just like they do our private lives, and they prevent us from living into our fullness as communities that reflect the kingdom of God. When we mask our true selves, we slowly create communities of deception where perfect people gather in perfect clothes to hear pleasant stories about a pleasant deity who has little interaction with our real lives. Then we wonder why the churches we have created are bone dry.

As Brown talks with research participants who have dealt honestly with their shame and vulnerability (their dry bones and bandaged bodies, so to speak) she notes a pattern of people cultivating calm and stillness. Cultivating our interior life is the path that leads us out of anxiety as a lifestyle. Brown understands stillness “from the data: Stillness is not about focusing on nothingness; it’s about creating a clearing. It’s opening up an emotionally clutter-free space and allowing ourselves to feel and think and dream and question.”[4]

“If we stop long enough to create a quiet emotional clearing, the truth of our lives will invariably catch up with us. We convince ourselves that if we stay busy enough and keep moving, reality won’t be able to keep up. So we stay in front of the truth about how tired and scared and confused and overwhelmed we sometimes feel. Of course, the irony is that the thing that’s wearing us down is trying to stay out in front of feeling worn down. This is the self-perpetuating quality of anxiety. It feeds on itself.”

EML:It’s in stilling ourselves and cultivating a way of intentional calm that we begin to breathe life back into the dry bones. We slow down and let that slowness be okay. Then we gather together without masks, without pretense, without excuses, and let that vulnerability be okay. Then we ask God’s question back to God, “Can there be life in these bones again?” And God’s answer is to breathe…breathe to the bones.

Pastor Edward Markquart writes, “You pray to the Breath of God, the Spirit, that the Breath of God will come from the four winds and will come into your spirit…God’s Spirit in your spirit affects the way you think about yourself, the way you feel about yourself as a human being, the kind of physical energy that you have inside you. Everything is changed and becomes alive when the Spirit of God, the Breath of God, comes and [ministers to] you.”

We gather here to practice this way together. We commit to cultivating a way of stillness, of truth, of breathing in God’s spirit, of working for wholness. We confess that we are weary and our bones are dry. We surround one another as community when the work of resurrection seems too daunting, and we breathe spirit back into each other with great affection and deep commitment to the ways of prayer.

TIM:We welcome God’s presence, and we hold that sacred space where shame and anxiety and perfectionism don’t define who we are. We hold sacred space to breathe life into us again and to remind us of who we truly are.

EML:We speak word’s of God’s peace over each other, we break bread together, and we share a common cup. And every time we give ourselves to the practice, God’s Spirit surprises us and moves in us again.

[1]Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing, p. 84

[2]

[3]Brene` Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, pp. 34-35

[4]Brown, p. 108