Bones and Breath

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
03.09.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Ezekiel 37:1-14; Romans 8:6 -11

Of all the Hebrew prophets, Ezekiel is the most unusual.

He needed to be, because he lived in strange times. He was a member of the priesthood, trained from his youth to be a leader in the temple in Jerusalem. As he’d grown up, he would have learned all of the rituals, all of the complicated prayers and songs and sacrificial techniques. He would have learned how to dress, how to eat, and how to follow the law to keep himself pure for the temple. His whole life, he prepared himself for one thing: the Temple.

And then that thing was destroyed. Ezekiel shared his visions with a people who had watched Jerusalem burn. They had seen their leaders butchered. They had been driven from the land that had belonged to their ancestors for generation that stretched back into legend. The temple, the Holy of Holies, the footstool of the God of Israel, that temple lay as a ruin, battered and burned, all of it’s sacred and holy objects looted or scattered to the four winds.

His people were lost. Their hopes were dead. Their future was dead, shattered by the military might of Babylon and blowing like aimless and lifeless ashes throughout the empire. Ezekiel himself had been taken with them, and he found suddenly that all of the tools of his trade, all of the rituals that made him a priest over the people, were now meaningless. What does it matter if you know how to do a perfect temple worship if the temple has been crushed to rubble? How do you speak to a people who have given up, who declare that they might as well be dead...no, more than that....they say they ARE dead. As they sat and wept by the rivers of Babylon, the people of Israel were dead to hope, dead to a future, and worst of all, convinced that they were dead to God.

How does a priest talk to a people when he has no temple and no sacrifice? Every tool in his priestly toolbox was gone. He had nothing. But Ezekiel wasn’t just a priest. He wasn’t just a temple functionary. Having been torn from the foundations of the past, he suddenly found himself connecting to God in ways that he hadn’t planned for and hadn’t trained for and didn’t expect.

Ezekiel suddenly finds himself connecting to God in ways that go beyond rites and sacrifices. Throughout this book, we see him moved by visions and impulses that stem from God himself. Those passages always begin “The hand of the Lord came upon me,” or, if you’re using the New International Version, “The hand of the Lord was upon me.” That doesn’t mean that a great big hand came out of a cloud and grabbed him. It means he was caught up in a vision, swept up into a different kind of awareness, into an awareness of what God needed to share with his people. Those same words begin his life as a prophet, in Ezekiel 1:3. They occur again in 3:14, and again in 8:1, and will come again in verse 40:1. Each time, it’s a vision. Each time, he is being grasped by God’s Spirit, and shown something that an ordinary way of understanding can’t express.

Whenever I read and study this passage, I always think back to the beginning of my ministry here at Trinity. Four years ago, I was looking at a church that had been written off. It had been declared a hopeless case, not even worth trying to revive. “This is a church that crushes the life out of it’s pastors,” I was told. “This is a church that is dead,” I was told. “We don’t want you to go there,” they said. “It’s for your own good.” Who’d want to do ministry in a valley of dry bones?

I heard what they were saying, and saw how hard the whole thing was going to be, and I honestly struggled with it. Was I called to a ministry that would require me to set myself...a newly minted, wet-behind-the-ears, first church I’ve ever had pastor...into a church that was dead? Not only that, was I called to gently refuse to obey the Presbytery, and to stand firm even though it might cost me the ministry I’d worked for seven years to enter? Honestly, I struggled. I prayed for guidance, anything that would show me what God wanted me to do.

And then I had a dream. Now, we Presbyterians aren’t supposed to listen to our dreams, mostly because they’re not process-oriented enough. I heard somewhere that the Book of Order does make an exception for the dreams we have while falling asleep in meetings, but I’ve never been able to find the citation. It was an unusually vivid and intense dream, and not at all like one of those confused messes of imagery that fill our R.E.M. sleep. It wasn’t like my usual pastor-stress dreams, when the church is filled with new visitors and I can’t find my sermon and suddenly I have to play lead guitar for the praise team and I’m not wearing any pants. This was different.

I was flying, high up, soaring through a clear perfect late spring day. I love the dreams when I can fly, that sense of joyful, effortless lightness that fills you, unlike any feeling you ever have in your waking life. Down below me was the Beltway, clear as could be. I passed Tysons, passed the toll road, gliding through the warm air over trees and traffic. As I saw the American Legion Bridge ahead, a shadow fell over me, and a great hand rested on my shoulder. I turned, and saw what could only be described as an image of the angel of death, right out of some medieval woodblock print. The hand on my shoulder was bones and ribbons of rotting flesh, the great black robes worn and flying tattered in the wind, the face nothing more than a skull. It turned it’s head and faced me, and the great dark hollows of it’s eyes were gentle. Then it silently extended a great arm, and pointed with a long finger of bone to where I knew Trinity lay, just beyond the trees on the other side of the Potomac, and in the dream I began to weep, and I woke.

Now you can take that as you wish. It could very well just have been the symbolic stirrings of a struggling subconscious or some Jungian manifestation. At the time, I chose not to share it with the folks on the session. Why? Well, let’s just say that when you’re interviewing for a job, when your interviewer asks you “So...why do you want this job,” answering “The Angel of Death sent me” is usually not the best answer. But however you interpret it, I took it as marching orders. Four years ago, the death of this church was already here. Hope..to a rational person...seemed little more than a delusion. To an objective observer, looking at demographics and statistics and probabilities, this church was already dead.

But in the passage we heard today, God showed Ezekiel something important about death. He knew, and I know, and you should know that death means very little to God. Death in any of its forms is just change, and no barrier to the one who offers breath and eternal life to all.

Right now, this church is in a very different place than it was four years ago. The bones have come together. The sinews and flesh have gathered. But has the breath come? As we heard from the Apostle Paul’s message from the Book of Romans today, we fail only when we look at the flesh, at what is, and not at the change that God’s Spirit seeks to work in each us.

If we look at the church...our church...and say, like the Jews in Babylon, that the church is finished and nothing can change for the better, then we need to hear Ezekiel’s call. If we look at ourselves, at how we stumble and struggle and squabble, and imagine that the deadness we feel inside means things are over for us forever, then we need to hear God as he speaks through Ezekiel.

Two weeks shy of Easter, two weeks before we remember that death brings resurrection and triumph, we need to hear him say, “I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live.”