Can these Dry Bones Live? —Lectionary Reflection for Lent 5A (Ezekiel 37)


Ezekiel 37:1-14 New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

37 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. 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?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them: 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. I will lay sinews on you and will cause flesh to come upon you and cover you with skin and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

So 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. I 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. Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” 10 I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.

11 Then 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.’ 12 Therefore 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. 13 And you shall know that I am the Lord when I open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people. 14 I 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.”

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                We began our Lenten journey in the Garden, where the first humans chose the forbidden fruit leading to exile from the Garden. From there we moved forward to the call of Abram, the one through whom God would bless the nations, essentially beginning the effort to undo the problem that emerged in the Garden. Then we encountered Moses and the people of Israel as they traversed the desert and found themselves in the need of water. Many complained and even contemplated returning to slavery in Egypt. From there we saw how God called David to serve as king to get the people back on track. Now, we come to the next stage of the story of Israel. The people God began to create with Abraham now find themselves experiencing another exile, this time in Babylon. The people wonder if they will ever return home to the promised homeland, the promised land that Moses had led them toward. The question raised here in Ezekiel 37 is whether the people of Israel have a future.

                The Babylonian exile was a tragic moment in the history of Israel. Yet it also proved to be a fruitful season. That is because, while the nation did suffer greatly after the fall of Jerusalem, along with the monarchy and the destruction of the beloved Temple, exile gave the people the opportunity to redefine their identity as the people of God. Much of what we know to be the Old Testament emerged in and around the exile. In many ways, the exile served both as a time of judgment and renewal which is the message present in Ezekiel, whose voice we hear in this final Lenten reading before we head into Jerusalem for Jesus’ triumphant entry.

                Something needs to be said about the sometimes bizarre language present in Ezekiel. It has an apocalyptic feel even if apocalyptic literature as a genre has yet to emerge. It can be a confusing read and yet taken together it offers a word of hope to bewildered people. As Charles Aaron writes of Ezekiel’s theological message, it “moves from judgment to restoration, rooted in the prophet’s experience of the Babylonian exile, in the first wave of deportees, when he began his ministry around 593 BCE” [The Preacher’s Bible Handbook, p. 149]. While the opening chapters offer a message of judgment against both Israel and the nations because they have been unfaithful, by the time we get to Ezekiel 37, the prophet has moved to a message of renewal. That word comes after Ezekiel learns that Jerusalem had fallen in the twelfth year of their exile (Ezek. 33:21-22). Now, it is time for a word of hope. That is what we hear in the reading from chapter 37.

                The question that drives the message of chapter 37 is: can dry bones live? This question gets asked of Ezekiel by Yahweh after Yahweh took him by the spirit into the middle of a valley full of bones. There was a multitude of bones covering the floor of the valley and they were dry and lifeless. Yahweh asked the prophet whether these bones could live. Ezekiel answered: “O Lord God, you know.” That would seem to be an appropriate answer. After all, while Ezekiel might not know what is possible, surely God knows. While Ezekiel put the ball into God’s court, I expect he had his doubts. Nevertheless, God has a purpose for this encounter with the dry bones. God wants Ezekiel to understand his prophetic calling. Earlier in Ezekiel, God had pronounced judgment on Israel’s false shepherds who had failed to feed the sheep. Since this was true, Ezekiel prophesied that God was the true shepherd (Ezek. 34).

                If Ezekiel has doubts, God has a plan. There’s a reason why God brought Ezekiel out to this plain covered with dry bones. God wanted Ezekiel to better understand his prophetic calling. God wanted him to deliver a word from God to Israel so that Israel might live again. Therefore, Yahweh tells Ezekiel to “say to the bones: “hear the word of the LORD.” As we hear this call to proclaim the word of the LORD, we might think back to Genesis 1, where God speaks the created order into existence, and then move forward in time to the prologue of John, where we hear that the Word (Logos) is in the beginning with God and was God, such that all things came into being through him. The Word of the LORD is powerful, and as John reminds us, in this Word is life (Jn. 1:1-4). But the Word doesn’t act alone. God calls on Ezekiel to preach to the bones, but God also promises to breathe life into the bones so that they will know who the LORD is. That is the Word Ezekiel is to deliver to the dry bones. As this word is pronounced, God will begin knitting the bones together, adding sinews and flesh and skin, and finally breath (as in the creation story). Then the bones will live and know that God is “the LORD.” All of this takes place in verses 1-6.

                When we turn to verse 7, the action begins. Instruction time is over. Now it’s time to put the instruction to work. Ezekiel tells us that he did as God commanded. Then as he prophesied (spoke the Word of the LORD) to the bones, stuff began to happen. Bones begin to rattle and come together to form skeletons (this is where CGI comes in handy to augment our imagination). As the bones come together to form skeletons (frames), the flesh begins to appear. Things are going well. We have flesh-covered skeletons, but this body is not yet complete. It lacks the breath of life.

                At this point, we might want to look back to Genesis 2. There we read that after God formed the first human from the dust of the earth, God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being” (Gen. 2:7). Here in Ezekiel 37, God continues to use the prophet to bring the bones to life. Therefore, God tells the prophet to “prophesy to the breath, saying: ‘Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live’” (Ez. 37:9). That is what Ezekiel did. When he spoke to the four winds, inviting them to breathe upon these as yet lifeless bodies, the breath of life come into them. Here it is worth noting that the Hebrew ruach and Greek pneuma can be translated as Spirit and Breath also can be translated as Wind. The three dimensions of these words, Spirit, Breath, and Wind, are present in moments like this, as seen in Acts 2 where the Spirit comes as a Mighty Wind.  Here in Ezekiel 37, the prophet does as God directs and the winds come and fill the lifeless bodies with breath. What this means for us is that the Breath of Life is the gift of God’s Spirit.

                When God shows Ezekiel these bones that he is supposed to prophesy to, it’s important to remember that contextually this word speaks to a people, specifically the people of Israel, and not individuals. This is meant to be a word of hope to a people who have experienced the devastation of conquest and the humiliation of exile. While this word is given to exiles not everyone in Judah lived in exile in Babylon. The majority of the people remained in the region but as an occupied people. Therefore, whether gathered in Babylon or living back in the former kingdom of Judah, this is a people that had lost their sense of identity. In other words, the nation was dead. Though this nation had been called together by Yahweh, the Spirit of God appeared to be absent from the people. Not everyone in the nation of Judah found themselves in Babylon, but whether in Babylon or the land of Israel, the people of Judah had lost their sense of identity. It was as if they had died.  The Spirit of God seemed absent from the people. What we hear in this word from Ezekiel is that the Spirit was on the move, renewing a broken people.

               This vision of the valley of dry bones that comes back to life is a powerful image. It requires us to make use of our imagination to make sense of it. But the message seems clear. The Spirit of God is what gives life to the people of God. So, what is the message of Ezekiel 37 for a church experiencing exile here in the twenty-first century? When we look around our churches, it can feel as if we’re numbered among the dry bones scattered across the valley. It seems to many that the best days for the church are behind us. Congregations are closing or cutting back on staff. Congregations are aging and wondering where they will be a decade from now. COVID only made this reality more difficult. The promise here, of course, is that the exiles will return to the Land, to the soil, upon which the people had once been a nation of some importance. It’s not likely that our congregations will return to their original glory, but the spirit of exile can give way to a new spirit of hope and service. We can take root in our new realities and be witnesses to God’s gracious presence. The dry bones can hear the Word of God and come to life, filled with the Spirit, to become signs of God’s presence in the world.

                It would appear that the answer, to borrow from Bob Dylan is “blowing in the wind.” That wind is the Spirit of God whose presence results from the proclamation of the Word of God. That Word might come in the form of listening anew to the voice of Scripture, but more specifically for the Christian Community, that word is Jesus himself. As we ponder how this works we might draw on Karl Barth’s vision of the three-fold Word of God. That Word comes in the form of Scripture, which forms the foundation for the proclamation of the Good News (preaching), that in turn points us to Jesus, who is the one who reveals to us the reality that is God (see John 1:1-14).

                Central to this work of renewal is the role Scripture plays in pointing us in the direction of Jesus, so we might experience Jesus’ saving presence. The challenge for those of us who have embraced a historical-critical form of biblical study is that we can get lost in the weeds and fail to hear a word from God. Walter Brueggemann suggests that we would be better served if we focused on the overarching biblical narrative. He writes that we might see the biblical narrative as “a script that is waiting to be performed; it is always being given new performance, even in our own time . . .” [Rebuilding the Foundations, p. 193]. As Kelton Cobb notes, “at the core of the biblical narrative is the story of displacement—of having wandered a long way from home and longing to return. This is the underlying plot of being cast out of Eden, of being foreigners in Egypt, of the journey to the promised land, of the long of exiles in Babylon to return to the land of their fathers” [Feasting on the Word, 126].

                COVID felt like a season of exile. In the congregation I served before my retirement in 2021, we essentially shut down for three months, at least in terms of the use of the building. We provided a somewhat truncated worship service online using a camera phone and Facebook Live. Three of us gathered to put that service together. I also taught a Bible study on Zoom, which is also the way we did our committees and boards. While we continued on, we had to let go of the in-person community. While we eventually opened back up, it wasn’t the same as before. So, even here, with the return of the Spirit, Israel might exit exile but it didn’t exit the same as it was before it experienced exile. Nevertheless, like those exiles we all long to return home, even home isn’t quite the same. As St. Augustine reminds us in his The Confessions, our hearts are restless and they won’t find rest until they find their rest in God.

                So we hear a call to proclaim the Word from God that invites the Spirit to move in our midst. It is a word of hope and renewal. As Ron Allen and Clark Williamson remind us, “preaching here is the means of restoration. Through preaching the breath of God enters the bones. An implication is that pastorally sensitive prophetic preaching can play a key role in revitalizing community” [Preaching the Old Testament, p. 37]. For preachers, this is a reminder that the work we do when we enter the pulpit is sacred. If we listen closely to Ezekiel we’ll discern that preaching is not only sacred but is a sacrament. That is, it is a means by which God’s grace is shared with a congregation and beyond.

                This word given through Ezekiel was spoken first and foremost to Israel. It offered a promise of renewal, letting those who word know that the exile would not have the last word. This was but a season, but in time restoration would come. The church receives this word today secondarily. While not first spoken to us, it still offers a word of hope. I don’t know what the future holds for the church in North America, but it’s clear the Spirit is moving across the globe and we can be recipients of that breath of life as well. That might not cause our churches to overflow with new members, but we might see and experience renewed energy and a renewed vision of God’s work in our world.

                The final word in our reading is this: “I 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” (Ezek. 37:14). The church in the West, including the United States, is experiencing a post-establishment era. We live amid an increasingly secular context. There is a cacophony of voices out there claiming to speak for God, but is anyone listening? Besides that, is the message reflective of the Spirit of God? The bones are very dry. The question is: Can these bones live? The message of Ezekiel 37 is clear. The Spirit is blowing like a mighty wind, breathing life into the dry bones. What comes out of exile likely will be different from what existed before the exile, but it lives! 

 

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