Sermon 10/1/17
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Back
to (Bible) School: Prophecy
This
week is the last week in our series studying the kinds of literature we find in
the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. We’ve looked at the Law,
the history books of the Bible, and poetry or wisdom literature in the Bible.
And today, we turn our attention to large chunk of the Hebrew Scriptures that
make up the writings of the prophets. I think prophecy as a biblical genre is
probably the most misunderstood, because we use the word prophecy to mean many
different things.
What
first comes to mind when you hear the word “prophecy”? Often, people think
immediately of predicting the future, a kind of fortune-telling. We seem to
have a fascination with anything that suggests we could accurately predict the
future. I saw some posts going around on facebook in the aftermath of Hurricane
Harvey, I think, linking the dates of the storm and certain verses from the
gospel of Luke. Some folks might be avid readers of their daily horoscope,
astrology, the thought that the position of the planets and the time of our
birth shapes the events of our daily lives. I used to read mine pretty
regularly when I was a teenager, waiting for predictions of true love to come
my way! Taurus is my astrological sign, and here’s my horoscope from yesterday
(from one website at least!): “A couple, perhaps friends, could visit today.
Perhaps you've moved into a new home or redecorated and want to show them
around. They'll be impressed and you'll enjoy the company.”[1] I’m sorry to report I had
no visitors yesterday, and I haven’t moved or redecorated, unless you think of
cleaning diligently before the Trustees walk-though of the parsonage as
redecorating!
What’s
the appeal of trying to predict the future? Why are we fascinated by anything
that appears to be a prediction of future events? I can only imagine that it is
our general anxiety over things unknown, and our general dislike of things that
we can’t control that makes us want to believe that something, someone,
somewhere can predict the future with accuracy. Otherwise, we have to live with
the unsettling reality that things outside of our control, like disaster and
illness, can just come on by and bring upheaval to our lives with there being
nothing we can do to stop it. The idea of predicting the future, I think, is
about control and security.
That’s
not, however, what the prophets in
the Bible were all about. Prophets are truth-tellers. Prophets are
truth-tellers, particularly when no one else wants to say how things really are.
You know what I mean: Everyone knows what’s really going on, but no one wants
to speak unwelcome truths out loud. A prophet is the child who tells the
emperor he has no clothes, when no one else is brave enough to say so. A prophet
tells it like it is, says how bad things really are, talks about where the path
we are on will lead if things don’t change. But a prophet doesn’t necessarily want what he or she speculates about to
come true. Instead, a prophet wants people to stop and repent, wants them to
get back on God’s path before things go too far the wrong way. In its simplest
version, you might think of prophecy like this: a parent tells a child that if
they don’t get their grades up, they will flunk out of college, live at home
for all of their days, and never get a real job. The parent isn’t predicting
the future, even though this might be exactly what happens. Instead, they’re
truth-telling. If you don’t change, this is the probable future consequences of
your current actions. Prophets are visionaries too – they don’t only tell the
bad things that might happen if we don’t get our acts together, they also try
to hold before us the truth of the potential good that might come if we do change our ways. Think of Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech: “I have a dream that my four
little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by
the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”[2] King was a prophet: a
truth-teller, calling us to account for our racism, and holding before us a
vision of what could be, a world
where his children no longer faced discrimination and prejudice. He certainly
was not predicting the future. He was offering up a vision of the possible
paths we might take as a nation. A prophet.
In
the Bible, there are what we call “major” prophets and “minor” prophets. These
aren’t more or less important prophets. Rather, the designation refers to the
length of the book in the Bible. We have long writings from prophets like
Isaiah and Ezekiel, and just tiny entries from those like Obadiah and Nahum,
books you might not even have heard of! The books of prophecy in our Bibles are
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah,
Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.
Today we’re
looking at a passage from the prophet Ezekiel, a passage known as The Valley of
Dry bones. Ezekiel was a priest living in exile in Babylon, with other
Israelites. I think it is hard for most of us to imagine our whole community
being conquered and living in exile in a foreign land, but the time of exile,
in the sixth century BC, was Israel’s most devastating experience since their
slavery under Egyptian rule. They were a people whose religious roots were
deeply tied to their land – the Promised Land – and living in exile represented
a great turning away from faithfulness to God.
Ezekiel
describes in this passage an image God brings to him that represents what the exiled
people of Israel look like emotionally – like a valley dry bones – skeletons.
“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. [The
Lord] led me all round them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they
were very dry,” we read. Then God asks Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these bones live?”
Ezekiel is smart, and says, “You
know, God.” God tells Ezekiel to prophesy that God will breathe into the bones
and cause them to be covered with flesh and come to life again. Ezekiel does as
he’s told, and it happens just as God describes, and the bones live again,
given flesh and breath. These newly living beings say that their bones are
dried up and their hope is lost. But God responds to them: “I will bring you
back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord … I will put
my spirit within you and you shall live, and I will place you on your own
soil.” Ezekiel knows that God is faithful, even when we are not, and so Ezekiel
knows that Israelites are not abandoned. Eventually, Israel does come home from exile, and slowly,
they come back to life, and reclaim their identity.
Some of you
may have seen that I asked some questions on facebook in a couple places; I
asked three questions about this text. First, I asked 1) When have you felt
like "dry bones?" 2) When/how/did you experience some way of God
breathing new life into you? And 3) What does that phrase “in your own soil”
bring to mind - what's your soil?
People seemed to know exactly what it
means to feel like dry bones – not in body, but in spirit. Folks shared that
there were “too many” dry bones times in life “to count,” or talked about years
of struggle trying to have a baby, or how it felt like dry bones to be
inundated with hateful words and messages online. One pastor, retired in the
last few years, said trying to find a new identity after years of ministry
sometimes felt like dry bones. Some felt like they were “dry bones” right now,
and it was hard to imagine an end to it. What about you? When have you felt
like you could fit right in to that Valley of the Dry Bones? Have we ever been
“dry bones” as a congregation? Community? Nation? World?
Many
folks have experienced new life, finding direction, finding a calling, a
purpose. I asked Dede Scozzafava if I could share her response in particular.
She wrote, “Sometimes I feel like "dry bones" when I am just going
through the daily motions of living. Almost like functioning on auto pilot...going
from point A to point B and not really taking the time to think about the what
and the why of the action. But sometimes God reminds me that I need to take a
deeper dive than wading through the superficial surface waters. God directs me
to see through different eyes and listen through different ears ... sometimes
that interface changes my course and makes me evaluate the purpose of my
actions. My soil is my faith ... sometimes growing...sometimes
thirsting...sometimes looking to be nourished...sometimes nourishing
others...sometimes balanced...other times unsteady...” We know what it is like to be dry bones, don’t we? I hope, too, that
we also know what it is like to have God put flesh on our dry bones and breath
into us God’s Holy Breath, Holy Spirit, Holy Wind. But I hope for us it is more
than just a passive thing. I hope we aren’t just dry bones laying around,
waiting for a breath from God, a word of hope from a prophet, when we already
know that we serve the God of Resurrection and Life.
What
do we do when we’re feeling like dry
bones – as an individual, a community, a people? This is a question we can we
can work on answering together. But here’s what struck me. Ezekiel kept his
trust in God, listened for God’s voice, and did whatever God asked, even though
he, too, was in exile, just like all those souls in the valley. Ezekiel seemed
to have no doubt in the power of God to make dry bones live again. In The
United Methodist Church, we still have in our Book of Discipline something called “The General Rules.” They were
the rules that guided the early Methodists, when they met together with John
Wesley, founder of the movement. Look them up this week, and read them in full.
But here’s the gist: First, do no harm. Second, do good. And third, “attend
upon the ordinances of God.”[3] These ordinances are
practices or disciplines that help us stay connected to God. Wesley lists being
part of the worshiping community, sharing in communion, praying alone and
together, studying the Bible, and fasting as ordinance we ought to practice to
ground ourselves in life with God. Even when we feel like dry bones, these
practices help us stay ready, stay faithful, stay listening for God’s voice,
ready to let new life and God’s breath fill our hearts again. It’s watering and
tending the soil in which God seeks to plant us, digging deep. And eventually,
in God’s right time, they’re the practices that make us ready for new life. Can
these bones live? God knows. And with God, the answer to the question of new
life is always yes. Amen.
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