O Breath

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 04.06.14

Scripture Lesson:  Ezekiel 37:1-14

Every once in a while, we get stuck.  We reach that point where we feel we’ve run out of ideas.

Generally, we bop along, repeating the patterns of our days, and things work, more or less.  You wake up early, you have a cup of coffee, you go tell your teens to wake up already, then you go straighten up a bit, and then you pour another half-cup of coffee, which steels you for having to go tell your teens that really, c’mon, it seriously is time already.

Those comfortable patterns work for us, cycling day in and day out.  You get to work, you check your messages, you check your email, you review your to-do list and your quarterly task list, you play just a tiny bit of Candy Crush, and then you get to it.  You keep getting to it until the day is over, and then you go home, eat, sleep, and repeat.  Nothing anomalous.  Every day a little bit different, and a whole lot the same.

But then there come times when you suddenly realize that none of it is working.  So you double down on what you know should work.  Oooh, I know, I know, we Presbyterians think.  Let’s have a meeting! Gather a committee! Or maybe, maybe, we’ll have to bring out the big guns.  A task force. Task forces always work. But then it doesn’t.

You get creative, you try new things.  You try crazy new things.  You try anything that pops into your head.  Admittedly, the one that involved wearing everyone hand-made paper-mache heads wasn’t well thought through, but hey, you were spitballing.  And still, none of it is working.

You’re at that place where, if you are hard and honest with yourself, there seems to be no way out. 

You are becalmed.  You’re dead in the water. You feel locked in place, paralyzed with a fundamental uncertainty about what to do next, or how to even begin to move on from the place you find yourself.

I’ve been in those times, and they’re rough on a soul.  You feel trapped, locked into a certain way of being.  They can happen in our vocations, or in our schooling, when we find ourselves suddenly at an impasse.  We’re unable to move forward, stalled out as we realize we’re doing something that we’d really never planned on doing with our lives, and we can’t see how we could do anything else.

It’s harder still when you reach that point in a relationship, when that whole arc of a friendship or a marriage suddenly seems to have changed.  It’s not the thing you were sure it was going to be, and it has reached the point where you can no longer really even imagine it becoming anything different.

For most of us, for normal human beings, this is a difficult place. It is the place where we become anxious, and angry.  It is a place of quiet desperation, one that normal human beings hope not to encounter.

Ezekiel, though, was not a normal human being.  Ezekiel was a weird, weird dude.

He needed to be weird, because he lived in weird times. Ol’ Zeke was a member of the priesthood, with a clear career track as a priest in the temple in Jerusalem.  That was his whole life.  He was a Zadokite, meaning the priesthood was in his blood.  His daddy’d been a priest, and so had his grandpappy.  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. It was his whole life, his whole understanding of himself.

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 its sacred and holy objects looted or scattered to the four winds.

His people were lost. Their hopes were dead. Their future was a dead thing, shattered by the military might of Babylon and blowing like 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.  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.  More often that not, he chooses to express himself in extraordinary ways.  He digs holes in things.  He lies on one side for a month.  He makes Ezekiel bread. Anyone ever buy Ezekiel bread?  That Whole Foods kinda product is notable not so much for the healthy ancient grains that comprise it, but for the fact that he’s supposed to cook it over a burning mound of excrement.  Like I said, Ezekiel was a weird, weird dude.

And his 

This vision is one of a great valley, one that could be accurately called the “Valley of the Shadow of Death.”  It’s filled with bones and lifelessness, the remains of a people.  There’s nothing there any more, nothing at all.  They are not just bones, but dry bones.

It’s a stark and desolate image, in which no hope remains.  It is the most primal form of ruin.

In the midst of this bleakness, Ezekiel finds himself set down by his Creator’s hand and spirit.  He surveys the death around him, shown them all by his Creator.  He gets asked a question.  “Can these bones live?”   And he says, wisely, “Um, I think you have the answer to that.”  The answer rested in God’s creative power, so far beyond Ezekiel’s grasp that in this vision he wisely chose not to even hazard a guess.

In this vision, that which seems totally lost, irrevokably broken?  It gets remade.  And then it is not just remade, but given life again.  “Come from the four winds, O breath,” Ezekiel is told to say, and he does, and what seemed broken beyond repair is made whole again.

That was the message that the shattered people of Israel needed to hear in their lostness and despair.  It is also the message we need to hear, when we find our lives are empty, broken, or lifeless.

In those places, what allows us to endure is trust and patience.  

Trust, that even though we may not ourselves be able to find an answer, that does not mean that there is not an answer out there.  

Patience, because as we are pushing our way out of those times of seeming hopelessness, it doesn’t happen on our schedule.

Let that breath be in you, and in me, AMEN.