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March 9, 2008 5th Sunday in Lent Ezekiel 37:1-14
Can These Bones Live?
Rev. Kyle Segars
While I was back home in January, I drove around in the mountains there that seem to speak to me like no other place does - or ever has in my wanderings across the country. There is just a deep sense of peace whenever I sit on the rock-covered face of Blood Mountain looking out across the sea of blue-shrouded peaks across Neels Gap into the Chattahoochee National Forest or hike along the Appalachian Trail up above Amicalola Falls feeling the breeze of God’s breath blowing upon me. I used to carry in my hiking bag a book of poems by a north Georgia poet named Byron Herbert Reece who I really felt connected to (and still do) and would read it while I was surrounded by all the beauty that he talks about in a lot of his works. Reece was in that group of poets who did not think one needed to have a dictionary or cheat-sheet in front of you to understand what he was writing about. Not like the modernists (Williams, Pound) but I would group him in with poets such as Sandburg and Frost with whom he shared an affinity – that normal, ordinary words we speak have a power and life of their own. He was heavily influenced by the King James Version of the Bible that his mother would read to him in their cabin on Wolf Creek and he wrote many poems about those scriptural stories. One is about this Ezekiel passage, entitled the ‘Ballad of the Bones’, where he points out how the silence in the valley is broken by the voice of God demanding of Ezekiel, his servant – “Mortal, can these bones live?”
The silence is there first because the children of Israel have been dragged off into captivity where they sit in despair over their future for they have been cut off from the life-giving Spirit of God that was embodied for them in the land itself that they had been given and specifically in the Temple where God resides. All of that is gone – houses destroyed, family scattered, living in prison camps. Their hearts dried up with too much grief, brittle minds staring across the devastation that has been wrought in their lives. What do they have to live for? They might as well lay their heads down and die in exile. So, it is the silence of overwhelming grief, numbness, and despair that lies over this desert valley – and into that silence God speaks. Like water to a dry land, like sweet manna from heaven to hungry hearts, God speaks a word of powerful love and spirit, God’s own Spirit. “Prophesy, prophesy to the breath!” This Word has power to call his people out of exile, to give life to lifeless bodies. “Thus says the Lord, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people.” This Word speaks of life that endures death, or life that resumes in the midst of the reality of death. “And you shall know I am the Lord when I open your graves.” The people thought they had been ripped from God’s hand, that they were living their lives without God in a foreign land, that they would not see God’s justice in their own lifetimes, but God’s powerful Word speaks new life to this despairing people. “And I will bring you back to the land of Israel….I will put my spirit within you and you shall live.” God speaks restoration to those who have died in the service of his justice, those who have died in working with his Spirit to live out the new Kingdom, calling all back from the exile where we have been placed by the circumstances of life and, in many cases, where we have placed ourselves.
So, God asks Ezekiel – “Can these bones live?” and he says, “God, you know” - and God does know as the breath of God’s Spirit infuses his people. God’s Word is powerful and full of grace to us. But I want you to notice the other part of this scripture. God is the healer (Yes!) and the One who acts, but Ezekiel also has a job to do. God says, “Prophesy to these bones. Say to them, Hear the Word of the Lord!” God called Ezekiel as his servant to speak the words of the Kingdom. God would make manifest his powerful Word in their lives but that Word of return from exile would be spoken through his servant.
And we know one like Ezekiel and all the prophets came later, and yet greater than they – and that is who Paul speaks of in the Romans text. God’s Spirit was upon Jesus and he lived out his entire life, in word and in deed, making known the powerful life-giving Spirit of God’s good news. He embodied the loving Word of return from exile to his people. He gave them new life.
And because Jesus was true to his servant calling, God vindicated him by raising him up on the third day. Into that tomb of silence and death, God spoke a word. “Can these bones live?” God asks his trusted disciples and they said (“I don’t know, maybe, no,”) all sorts of answers but God says yes. Yes! Into the disciples’ confusion, dread, fear, and despair, God spoke a word. We are no longer dead in our abandonment of God, in our self-exile, but alive because God has placed his Spirit within our hearts, the very Spirit of Christ, the first fruits of many brothers and sisters. Paul goes on to say that we no longer live in or for ourselves, placing our lives in exile in a dry, dusty, desert valley, but that Christ lives in us by the power of the Holy Spirit of God. And just like Ezekiel was called, we are called now to be Christ’s body in this world, to speak the good words of God’s grace. We are called to prophesy to the dead bones of the world we see around us so that the world might return to God. And we speak God’s Kingdom justice not only in words, but we speak it with our very lives, as Ezekiel and Jesus did.
We have all known saints of the church who have been transformed by the very breath of God to enable them to walk by the Spirit in the world’s midst. And one was our beloved Charlotte, who I am glad I got to know a little bit before she was fully embraced by our Lord Jesus Christ. She prophesied to the world of God’s goodness and powerful word of life through how she lived her own life. Her impact on us and many others is a living legacy of her calling as a disciple of the Lord. But she is not alone. We have all been called; young, old, male, female; we have all been called and equipped by the Spirit of Christ to be a witness to God’s Word of new life. May it be said of all of us who call Jesus Lord – that we have answered God’s word of promise of return from exile with the shouted yes of our lives of service to Him. Amen.
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