Can These Bones Live?

Scriptures:     Ezekiel 37:1-7;  Psalm 130, omans 8:6-11,   John 11:1-53

Any Monty Python fans in the house?  Those of you who are fans – and those who aren’t – may remember their dead parrot comedy sketch – you can easily find it on Youtube -  in which a man walks into a pet shop wishing to return a parrot – a Norwegian Blue parrot, we’re told – and to register a complaint.  The man’s complaint is that the parrot he had purchased not an hour prior was dead.  The pet shop owner started making excuses – it’s not dead, it’s resting, it’s pining for the fyords, it likes to lie on its back.  At one point the dead parrot’s owner opens the door of the birdcage and starts shouting “Hellooooo, hello polly parrot, helloooooo, polly parrot, wake up!”, eventually grabbing the stiff dead parrot and whapping it on the counter several times before tossing it on the floor.  The man complains that that the only reason the parrot had been sitting on its perch at the time of purchase is that it had been nailed there.  The pet shop owner keeps saying that the parrot is pining, and the dead parrot’s owner comes out with the words, “It’s not pining, it’s passed on.  This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker.  This is a late parrot.  It’s a stiff, bereft of life, it rests in peace; if you hadn’t nailed it to the perch it would be pushing up daisies …..it’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.”

Our reading from Ezekiel reminded me of this long-ago comedy routine.  Ezekiel, with the exiled Jews in Babylon, is granted a vision in which he is set down in a valley of dry bones – very many bones, we’re told, and very dry – and told to preach to the bones.  (Presumably he didn’t start shouting, “Helloooo, polly parrot….”)

I think any one of us would feel weirded out, skeeved out, at the thought of Ezekiel’s vision of being taken to a valley full of bones.  Not just any bones – dry bones.  As in, whoever these bones belonged to had been dead a long, long time, long enough that the vultures had long since pecked away the flesh, and whatever the vultures had left had dried up in the baking sun.   For Ezekiel, the situation would have seemed even skeevier perhaps than for us, because Ezekiel was not only a prophet, but a priest.  In that culture, priests were concerned, perhaps to the point of obsession, about the boundaries between ritual cleanness and uncleanness, taking care to avoid being made ritually unclean.  Being near anything dead – being near a bunch of corpses, or bones that had once been corpses – would have made Ezekiel about as ritually unclean as possible.  So this vision of Ezekiel’s would not have been a dream, but a nightmare, a nightmare of nightmares.  In the midst of a nightmare vision of death, Ezekiel hears the voice of God asking, “Can these bones lives?”

Now, if I had been there, I’d have said “no way” – that’s the cleaned up for Sunday morning version of what I might have said – and perhaps that would have been the end of the story.  Or perhaps God would have smited – smited? smote? smoted? - zapped me with a lightning bolt for mouthing off, and that would have been the end of the story, with smoke rising from my suddenly crispy corpse.  Again, fortunately for all of us, Ezekiel was there, not me, and though he likely felt the same as I would have, he allowed for just that glimmer of possibility:  “O Lord, you know.” 

God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones, to tell them that God will cause breath to come into them so that they may live.  So imagine this scene….here’s Ezekiel preaching to a pile of dry bones.  How goofy is this picture?  Imagine you’ve and your family have just gotten done with Thanksgiving turkey, and the carcass is stripped down to the bones, and you start talking to the turkey carcass:  “O turkey carcass, breath is going to come into you, and you will be a living turkey once again.”  Come to think of it, that wouldn’t be a bad way to stretch a Thanksgiving meal – eat the bird, preach it back to life, kill it and eat it again, rinse and repeat…. So God gives Ezekiel the utterly ridiculous task of preaching to dry bones.  And Ezekiel does it!  Sometimes, that’s what obedience to God looks like……preaching to dry bones.

And after Ezekiel preached to the bones, stuff started happening.  The bones connected themselves, sinews grew to keep them in place, and skin grew over them….but they just lay there, like a bunch of department store mannequins.  They didn’t move.  So God said to Ezekiel, “Prophesy to the breath, and tell the breath to come into these bodies.”  And so Ezekiel preached to the breath, and the breath came into the bodies, and they got on their feet, we’re told, “a great army”.

Then God gives Ezekiel the meaning of the vision:  “These bones are the whole house of Israel” – Ezekiel’s own country, I’d add.  “They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost, we’re cut off completely.’”  Now, they had perfectly good reason to feel this way.  It wasn’t like they were just having a collective bad hair day.  Five or more years ago, the Babylonians had taken over Judah and exiled the people – including Ezekiel – to Babylon.  At that point, Judah as an independent country had ceased to exist. Their community life had centered around worshiping at the Temple in Jerusalem, and the Babylonians had destroyed it, turned in into smoldering rubble.   Like the dead parrot in the Monty Python sketch, Judah as a country was at that moment a stiff, bereft of life, pushing up daisies – it was an ex-country, and unlike the Monty Python skit, there was nothing even slightly funny about their situation.  There was nothing but profound sadness, grief, and perhaps regret that they had been so disobedient to God that their situation had come to this.  But even with the people in that hopeless state, God promises to raise them out of their grave of despair.  Now, God’s promises did not come quickly.  By tradition, the Jews were in exile for seventy years, and so even after Ezekiel’s vision, likely most who were adults at the time of the exile died in captivity.  But their children, and their children’s children, lived to see the promise become reality.

“Can these bones live?”  We’ve all been there, in one way or another, in moments of despair, when seemingly all hope has died, when the future looks like one long tunnel of hopelessness.  Illness, unemployment, addiction, the loss of a loved one who was our anchor, our rock….all can leave us feeling like our hopes for the future are nothing but a pile of dry bones.  There may be times in our marriage or family life when we feel like the relationship is going nowhere, like our hopes for our children are going nowhere, like whatever brought us together and held us together at one time has died.   If we’re inclined to involvement in organizations to benefit the community – and all of us here are involved in the church, even if just showing up on Sunday –  in those times when nobody shows up and money is low, we likely know what it is to feel in our lowest moments like all our work is for nothing, like we’re propping up a club or a community organization or church that’s as dead as the parrot in the Monty Python sketch, like we’ve just nailed it to a perch to make it pass for something that’s drawing breath – or, to use another metaphor, we may feel like we’re putting rouge and lipstick on a corpse.  In one way or another – as individuals, as spouses or parents, in community – we’ve all stood beside that pile of dry bones, with a still, small voice whispering in our ear – “Can these bones live?”.  Perhaps we can’t tell whether the words are encouraging us or mocking us.  And yet – we worship a God of hope, a God of hope beyond hope, a God of life.  We worship a God who told the childless couple Abram and Sarah, when Abram was 100 years old and his wife not much younger, not only that they would have a son, but that the descendants of that son would live and be a blessing to the earth.  We worship a God who took Moses, a fugitive wanted for the murder of an Egyptian overseer, to lead the Israelites to the land of promise. 

In our New Testament reading, we have the raising of Lazarus, who with his sisters Mary and Martha were close friends of Jesus.  Jesus had gotten word that Lazarus was ill, but was delayed in his travels, so that by the time he and his disciples reached Lazarus, he’d been dead four days.   Martha went out to meet Jesus, saying, “Lord, if  you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Jesus, if only you’d gotten here sooner.  But, like Ezekiel, Martha held on to a sliver of hope: “But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.”  Even now, Martha was telling Jesus, devastated as I am, I haven’t completely given up hope.  I’m holding on by a thread, but I’m holding on.

We worship a God of hope, a God of healing, a God of  miracles.  But there’s a role for us as well.  In Ezekiel’s vision, the bones came to life, but Ezekiel first had to preach to them.  In our Gospel reading, Lazarus was brought back to life, but first those who were there had to roll away the stone.  It may be that when we are at our lowest point, other members of the church may have to preach to dry bones and roll away the stones that block the sunlight.  And we can do the same for them.  We will no doubt look ridiculous at times – like Ezekiel preaching to a pile of bones.  But, as Paul put it, the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God stronger than human strength.  We worship a God of resurrection, and we in the church are in the resurrection business.

“Can these bones live?”  We worship the Lord of life, the one who was dead, and lives again.  May we hear that still small voice of hope from God, and may God use our voices to preach life into situations of death, and our hands to roll away the stones that block out the sunlight of hope from others. Amen.