“A RATTLING”

March 26, 2023 • Fifth Sunday in Lent
Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 37:1-14 (The Inclusive Bible)
Rev. Vicki Flippin, guest preacher

When I told my kid that I was preaching about a story called The Valley of Dry Bones today, She said, “Our dog’s going to love that story.”

Our dog would love this story in the most inappropriate way. I feel like adding a dog into this story would lead to 

a really gruesome alternate ending, 
and I’m sorry I even put that thought in your head.

But, hey, it’s not my fault or my kid’s fault or even the fault of dog-kind. 

This story on its own lends itself to gruesome thoughts. I mean it’s a story about a whole field of dead, dry bones coming together – and Ezekiel actually describes the sound of the bones rattling together.

I mean he really prolongs it all, goes into all these gory details. He tells the story like he’s sitting with us around a campfire shining a flashlight onto his face talking real slow with a deep, spooky voice.

And it’s not surprising. Ezekiel was all about the drama. Once he laid on his side for more than a year to dramatize the years that God’s people had been unfaithful. And, as a way of communicating that the people would go into exile and have to eat their food in unclean places,  Ezekiel cooked his food over poop. And at first, he says, God told him to cook the food over human poop, but Ezekiel negotiated God down to cow poop.

I’m telling you, if you’re not reading the Bible, you are missing out on some good stuff. So this weird, gory, spooky stuff–it’s just how Ezekiel rolls. All about the drama, all about making people feel uncomfortable. And this story about the valley of dry bones–it is peak Ezekiel.

If you were listening to Dwight’s reading of this story, It’s kind of gross. It’s basically a prophetic vision Ezekiel has of God bringing him to a huge field of bones. And you’ve gotta wonder, what is the story of these bones?
It can’t be a good story.
And it’s probably really bad.

It reminds me of a class I took in seminary on war trauma, and the class actually traveled to Srebrenica where, over the course of a few days, more than 7000 Bosniak men were taken by Bosnian Serb soldiers to killing fields and shot.

This valley of dry bones story makes me think of the pictures we saw of the painstaking work of investigators going into these mass graves and documenting the bones, the clothes, the bullet casings, trying to identify these victims and trying to piece together what happened in those days. 

In those valleys, football fields, meadows, dirt roads, warehouses of all these slain bodies.

Slain bodies.
In Ezekiel, God names the bones as belonging to “these slain”.
These are slain children of God. They have been harmed. They have been killed. This is a battlefield or a genocidal field, a place of harm, where life has been taken, breath has been stolen, the sin of Cain has been repeated over and over again.

What is the story of these bones?
I mean, these bones once belonged to bodies.

They had faces and smiles.
They laughed, enjoyed meals with family, held and cooed over babies.
They were formed in a womb. 
Their emergence into the world was celebrated.
They were nurtured by and valued by a community.
They were probably someone’s best friend, lover, parent.
They were someone’s everything.

And you can’t help think, whatever happened to them in that valley, there must have been hopelessness, despair, fear, pain. There was such horror, such harm done in this valley.

And then Ezekiel makes it even more explicit–this violence.
Because Dwight read that God made Ezekiel walk up and down among all the bones.
And Ezekiel says, “I saw that there was a vast number of bones lying there in the valley”- this was a huge massacre - and this part is hard to read. He says, “...and they were very dry.” The bones were very dry.

I mean this part feels almost like the most heartbreaking piece.
The bones were very dry. These weren’t newly dead bodies.
These weren’t bodies that were just waiting to be recovered by the survivors.

These slain were now dry bones.
Their flesh was gone, it’s been long ago devoured or consumed by the natural world, exposing the bones to the elements, to the desiccating power of the sun. All of that took time–so much time: months, years, maybe decades, generations. There was no one to recover these dead.

And you can only imagine why. Maybe there were no survivors. Or maybe the survivors, due to forces all too familiar to those in our world touched by war and genocidal forces, were somehow prevented from burying their dead.

The bones were very dry means it was not just these slain who have been harmed, but so many others have been harmed, a whole generation, a whole people who are lost or who are out there somewhere scattered in the world grieving without closure. The bones were very dry.

Now, we understand that this was not a literal valley of dry bones. I don’t know that anybody is out there searching for archaeological evidence of this valley.

This is a vision, a metaphorical, poetic valley.

In the vision itself, God reveals the metaphorical nature of the bones, “These bones,” God says, “These bones are the whole House of Israel.” God says, “The people keep saying, ‘Our bones are dry, our hope is gone, and we are doomed.’”

This whole vision represents the hopelessness, the harm that has been done to God’s people during the war with the Babylonians, the long and horrible sieges of the city of Jerusalem, the destruction of lives and families and culture, the eventual destruction of the entire city itself, including the sacred temple, the scattering and exile of the people. 

This most disruptive and death-dealing event in the history of this people. The dryness the deadness of these bones represents the grief and harm and despair of God’s people – And what does God say to Ezekiel in this moment of despair.

God says to the prophet, “The people keep saying, ‘Our bones are dry, our hope is gone, and we are doomed.’ And God says, “Prophesy, therefore.”

In the face of hopelessness, in the face of doom, God says, “Prophesy.”

I have to tell you, it’s been so good for me to be sitting with this passage in these weeks. Because, I don’t know about you, but there are some places in my life and there are some places in this world, where I feel a hopelessness, where I feel a doom. There are some situations in my world where harm has happened, where death has visited, where it has felt like a battle, where joy and life have been slain.

I don’t know. Maybe that’s just me. But I needed to read this passage over and over and over again in these last weeks. I needed God to remind me that there has been harm and despair before. And I needed God to wander with me among the ruins, among the devastation.

And I needed to sit with that question that God asks Ezekiel at the beginning of this vision. God asks, “Mortal, can these bones live?” Mortal, can these situations of grief and conflict and brokenness and death–can these bones live?

And I love Ezekiel’s answer to this question. It is my answer too. Ezekiel looks around and says, “God, only you know. I don’t know if life can return to this relationship. I don’t know if justice and reconciliation can ever find breath here. I don’t know if I ever can forgive myself. I don’t know if I can make meaning from this loss, if I can get beat this depression, if I can ever feel safe again, if we can move past this impasse. 
God, only you know. Because all that this mortal can see is a battlefield, a massacre, a valley of the reality of death.”

And God says to the prophet, and I felt God saying to me this week, and maybe God is saying this to someone in this worship service, maybe God is speaking to you right now in whatever your valley is, whatever your place of despair and pain is today, maybe God is saying this to you, prophet:

“Prophesy. Prophesy to these bones, and say to them:
 ‘Dry bones, hear the word of God! God says to these bones: I am going to breathe life into you.”

You know, the amazing thing about prophecy is the ability to imagine a different future. To look at a valley of dry bones and to proclaim, “Something is going to happen here.”

To have the imagination of the divine herself that says, 

“Life will emerge from death.” 
“Good and love and justice will have the last word here.” 
“The descendants of enslavers and enslaved people will one day become beloved community.” 
“The church will celebrate queer lives that it once persecuted.” 
“A country will welcome and nurture refugees and migrant people who seek sanctuary.” 
“This place of conflict and harm will become a peace-able kin-dom where wolves and lambs live together, predator and prey become family, and they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.”

“God will breathe life into these dry dry bones.”

Sometimes, just the imagining of something different, of something meaningful coming out of something horrible – sometimes just that can be that little bit of hope we need to get to the next step.

Can you imagine it? In your life? In your community? In our world? Whatever it is that leaves you in despair? Wherever there are dry bones? Can you call upon God to give you a prophetic imagining, a prophetic vision, maybe nothing specific, but just the certainty that God can do something life-giving, love-inducing in, even this situation? To give you enough hope for a next step.

And what is the next step?
I love this.
I love that it takes all the steps.

Ezekiel creepily, spookily takes us through all the steps.
“I will fasten sinews on you, clothe you with flesh, cover you with skin, and give you breath. And you will live; and you will know that I am the Sovereign God.”

And then Ezekiel takes you through the whole long, gory process of all the steps.
“So I prophesied as I was commanded, and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and all the bones came together, bone to matching bone. As I watched, sinews appeared on them, flesh clothed them, and skin covered them. But there was no breath in them.”
Oh the drama, Ezekiel. I love it.

Here’s why I love how long Ezekiel takes to tell us about this step by step process of dry bones slowly coming to life. Because sometimes, when God does something with your hard thing, It takes time.
I’m teaching a class at Union Theological Seminary this semester, and this week, we’re reading a book called The Book of Forgiving by the late Bishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter Mpho Tutu. If anyone knows about how hard and long and difficult it can be to forgive and to be forgiven, it is the spiritual leadership of post-apartheid South Africa.

I have read this book many times, and what I appreciate about it is that they recognize that some people may have a really good muscle for forgiveness. Some people can do it more quickly than others. But, for many of us, it takes a lot of heart wrenching, hard steps to get from harm to healing. Some of us may never get there. For some of us, it may take a lifetime. But it is worth the journey.

You know, I often get stuck in a place. I try. I hear the bones rattling, I see them coming together. I feel that hope. But then, you know, after all that freaky bone stuff, all you really have is some skeletons lying around. Because that miracle was only the first step in a much longer process.

And sometimes I get impatient. And I want to look at those skeletons or maybe even the flesh has come back to those bodies, and all I see is dead bodies lying around! And, you see, when you see the skeletons, when you see the flesh on the bodies, you can choose in that moment whether that is a sign for you of hopelessness or of hope, of failure or of progress.

Ezekiel himself says, “All these things happened, the bones came together, the sinews connected them, the flesh and the skin covered them. But there was no breath in them.” I wonder if anyone else is in this place right now?

Where maybe some progress has been made in your despair situation, but it’s not complete. Life has not returned. But if, even in our impatience, even in our doubt, if we can just keep an ear, a heart open to God,

Listen to this: Ezekiel says, with all the dead bodies lying on the ground, “Then God said to me,” “God said to me, ‘Prophesy to the wind; “and say to it:

‘Thus says the Sovereign God: Come from the four winds, Breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live’.” And he says, “I prophesied as I was commanded, and breath came into them.” Remember where these slain have been–the massacre, no one able to come retrieve their bodies, laying there for years, flesh rotted away, bones laying in the sun, desiccated, harm, war, violence laying there in the valley, a killing field of dry bones–remember where these bones have been. 

Ezekiel says, “I prophesied and breath came into them; they came alive, and stood up on their feet – a vast multitude.” Alive. Redeemed. Breathing again. A community again. With a whole new potential for life and joy and laughter and family and dancing. 

It took time.
The process wasn’t pretty. It seemed impossible many times over.
But life, meaning, justice, joy–it returns.

Can you imagine it?
Can you, prophet, speak it to your bones?

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