Dry Bones: Lent 5 lectionary meditation

Lent 5, Year A, RCL

Ezekiel 37:1-14

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." I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.

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.' 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. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. 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.

I love this reading, it's one of my favorites. First for its poetry; the sound of the words and the way they dance together, word building on word like the bones build upon one another. But I love it even more for what God promises within it.

Because this is a story about resurrection, rebirth, and new beginnings. This is a story for the church, and it is a story for each of us as all the best myths are; it imparts a deep and abiding truth that we desperately need to hear.

Yet, lest we misunderstand what God offers there is also the Gospel today.

When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." - John 11

My rector preached on the Gospel today and he hit on something that I missed, given my earlier meditation focusing on the beautiful promise of Ezekiel. And yet the two are really the same promise. Let me explain.

I have a dear friend who has been battling illness for a long time, and like Mary and Martha what I want is healing, for God to bring healing and wholeness like magic. Our rector this morning told us about a vibrant young woman who, suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease, slowly lost control of her body. She lost the ability to speak, to walk, even to smile. As each each of those things left her an empty place remained. After an hour, a day, or months of emptiness the hole was filled by something else. When she lost the ability to talk she taught herself to paint. And the rule at her home was, if you came to visit her you painted with her. Skill didn't matter, she handed you a brush and some paint and that was that. And she reveled in the creations of her guests, and they in hers until her home was filled with beautiful, love filled, artwork.

Those who sat with her as she died saw her fear of death fall away, and they said their own fear vanished as well. Her resurrection didn't begin at her death. It began long before. Lazarus was raised, but he would die again. Yet his miracle is what we still ask for: resuscitation, not resurrection. What Jesus offers, what the young painter found, what God offers in the valley of dry bones isn't the resuscitation of Lazarus, it is true resurrection.

I don't want to sit and watch a friend suffer. If we're honest, none of us want to see the resurrection experience in the midst of pain or illness, we want resuscitation! We want God to return us, or our loved ones to that mythical state of wholeness. If only God would heal us, how much could we do?

But God isn't offering the quick fix, the instant healing, God offers us something more. God takes the dry bones of our lives and gives them new life. Where we see only death and destruction God brings breath and strength and newness. It's not necessarily the message we wanted. We wanted the master to show up on time, to lay His hands on our broken bodies and make us feel better. We want God to perform on command. If only, if only.

Yet how much more powerful is resurrection? From the depths of our brokenness we find new gentleness, or new strength, or new wisdom, or new ways to love, or new ways to reach out. From the depths of our brokenness God offers the promise that He will take away our fear and use our resurrecting lives to bring resurrection to others.

It is Lent, and we are speaking of resurrection because here in Lent we can see what we must walk through to reach that resurrection. We must lay in the valley of dry bones, utterly spent, dry, scattered, broken. We must walk through the graveyard with the weeping Jesus. We must taste the bitterness of life before the sweet power of resurrection can break over us. Before we can be raised up from the dust and made to stand anew, before we can be loosed from death.

That is what I pray we may each find in our lives: true resurrection. The life that means we need not fear death.