Dry Bones and The Breath of God – Pentecost Sunday (Ezekiel 37: 1-14)
Today is Pentecost. The day that some refer to as the church’s birthday. We remember and we celebrate the story from Acts 2 in which the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples, in the form of flames above their head, and the spirit moved the assembled people there to repent and be baptized. They would form the community that is recognized as the earliest Christian congregation. So, Acts 2 is the traditional reading for this Sunday each year. However, the lectionary provided us with an alternate reading for this week, as well. It is a well-known passage from the book of Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible. It is known as the story of the Valley of the Dry Bones. I chose to preach on this passage over a month ago, at least, because it is one of my favorites. It’s a reading full of very vivid imagery, and kind of “out there” unbelievable events. Yet the themes are relevant and relatable. All that remains true, but as I returned to the text the last couple weeks, in preparation for this sermon, I began to feel the spirit move, and this text became relevant and relatable in unexpected ways.
Last week at a visioning retreat here at the church, a large group of us came together and discussed the big questions, like who we are as a congregation, and what our mission is as a church. In other words, what do we feel that God is calling us to do and be in the world. After a day full of discussion and fellowship, the identity statement we identified was that who we are is a church that embraces the teachings of Jesus Christ, and we do this by living them as best as we can. As for our mission statement, we identified the words “embody” and “celebrate” and “love”. As in, we feel called to embody Christ’s love by celebrating God’s beloved creation, in all its diverse manifestations. I’d say that’s a pretty powerful mission, to embody and celebrate God’s love that is present and active in the world. Now, hear Ezekiel’s vision once again with these mission statements in mind.
The prophet Ezekiel is having a vision. Visioning in this way is a big part of his ministry, and it often occurs in what seems like dreams. In this dream the hand of the Lord has come and transported Ezekiel to a valley full of bones that are dead and dry. It is God who has brought Ezekiel here to see this vision. Ezekial walks through this valley with God, seeing these remains laying at his feet. Ezekial is overwhelmed by this experience already, but that doesn’t stop God from asking the tough questions, “Mortal, can these bones live?” Now, depending on you read these words, where you put the emphasis, Ezekial’s reply could be understood as emphatic and assured -“O Lord God, you know.” Or it could be interpreted as uncertain, showing deference to God – “O Lord God…you know.” Either way, whether Ezekial understands or not, God asks him to prophesy to the bones, to speak to them the words of God. By doing so, God tells Ezekiel that this will bring these dry, dead bones back to life. It will breathe life into them, it will wrap them again in muscles and tendons and sinews, as the bible says. Flesh will return to these bones, and they will once again be covered in skin. The body will once again have breath. God assures Ezekiel that he can, and should, speak the word of the Lord to these dry bones, and do it on the Lord’s behalf.
The prophet Ezekiel is a unique voice in the Hebrew Bible. Ezekiel is the third of the so called, Major Prophets, coming after Isaiah and Jerimiah. Ezekial writes during the time of the Israelite exile to Babylon. Ezekial writes and delivers his prophecies from the kingdom of Babylon, as he was forced to relocate very early on in Babylon’s conquest. Ezekial writes in a unique style. He reports having visions, and he describes them vividly and at great length, and he writes them from a first-person perspective, which is another unique part of this book of the Bible. He also speaks in metaphor, or what seems to be metaphor, a great deal of the time.
The metaphor here, as we learn, is that the dry bones are like the people of Israel. The people are not dead, not all of them. However, they are in exile, and by the time of this vision, Jerusalem has fallen, and the temple has been destroyed. So, Ezekiel is speaking to Jews in exile and back home. They have seen destruction, they have experienced separation, but the dry bones don’t represent dead bodies. Instead, they represent dry, depressed spirits. The people are losing faith and losing hope that things can get better. God is calling Ezekiel to let the people know that hope is not lost. To let them know that through God’s faithfulness the people can be restored. In this room, we may not have experienced exile in the way these Israelites did – not political exile. However, I’m sure we have all had times of feeling disconnected or separated. I’m sure we have had times when we felt hopeless and alone. When were the times in your life, when deep in your bones, you felt dry, lifeless? Was there something that brought you out of it?
To help the people of Israel, Ezekiel is given a vision, and the words of God. He speaks the words the Lord has given him and, much to his surprise, he hears the sound of bones rattling. Ezekiel looks to see what is making this noise, and then he sees it – the bones beginning to reassemble themselves. Imagine it, if you can, each bone reattaching to the neighbor that supports it and connects with it, coming together and sliding back in to place as if magnetized. Then the sinews begin to appear, wrapping themselves onto the bone. Giving these skeletons movement. Before long the flesh and the skin appear draping itself over the skeleton and the ligaments. What was once dry and dead and buried had reassembled itself back into a human body. It is a vivid and incredible image. However, bones and ligaments and flesh, and even movement, does not equal life. They make a body, but do not equal life.
So, it is at this point that Ezekiel realizes something is missing. This incredible, reanimated being is not breathing. So, God gives Ezekiel more words to speak. This time, God has Ezekiel speak, not to the reanimated bodies, even though they have ears now, but instead he speaks to breath itself. He is to call on the breath to come and enter these bodies. To enter them as the breath of God entered Adam’s body and gave the first human life in Genesis 2. God tells him to call this breath from the “Four Winds,” call it from all directions. We might understand this to mean that the breath and presence of God is everywhere and can come from anywhere. Just as it does in the Pentecost story from Acts 2, when the Disciples and their followers were together in a room, and that room was soon filled with a rush of wind, bringing with it the Holy Spirit, represented by flames above each one’s head, and the ability for each person to now speak a new language. This is the wind of the Spirit we celebrate at Pentecost. This is the wind that gave life to the church, just as the breath of God entered those dry bones and gave them new life in their reanimated, reconstructed, renewed bodies.
This is where the Holy Spirit led me this week as I revisited Ezekiel in the days after our church retreat. This retreat at which we discussed living as Christ taught us. Where we discussed embodying Christ and the love of God. What does it mean to embody something? Well, this story shows us that to live out the love of God embodiment must be accompanied by the spirit. These bodies that seek to live out our beliefs must also be filled with the breath of God. They must be moved by the spirit.
In fact, even one of the dictionary definitions of the word embody includes the role of spirit in the act of embodiment. The first listed definition of ‘embody’ in the New Oxford English Dictionary (and on Google) is to “be an expression of or give a tangible or visible form to (an idea, quality, or feeling.) Such as love for God’s creation. Below that, though, is an additional definition, which is to “provide (a spirit) with a physical form.” As in the sentence example it provides, “nothing of the personality of the Spirit as embodied in Jesus will be lost.” So, if you believe that Christ was filled with the Holy Spirit or came to Earth as a manifestation of the Spirit, or if you are a trinitarian and you believe that Christ and the Holy Spirit are, along with God, three parts of one divine being, however you see it, we believe that Christ is an embodiment of the Spirit. So, if we set ourselves the mission of embodying Christ in the world, then we are, almost by definition, setting ourselves the task of providing a physical form to the Holy Spirit at work in the world. Then part of embodying Christ is taking a breath and filling our lungs with the breath of God, with that Spirit that will take these bodies that were formed for us by God, with the Spirit. The Spirit – that still small voice inside us that is always calling to us to be more than simply bodies moving through life, but to be embodiment of new life, as revealed to us in Jesus Christ.
And that’s a big deal. That can be scary. So, it is with this in mind that God calls on Ezekiel to speak once more to these bones-become-people. God speaks to Ezekiel again and declares that these bones represent the people of Israel, who at this time are scattered and in exile from their homeland. Those hearing the words of Ezekiel for the first time may have found themselves feeling lost and disconnected. Not just far from home but disconnected from their God, their faith. This vision is a reassurance that God can still bring the breath of life to even dead and dry corpses. It declares that death does not have the final word and that what is dead can experience new life. This vision is a metaphor of hope for the people of Israel that one day soon they might return home. Ezekiel has spoken the words of the Spirit and words of life to the dry bones. Once that has happened, God instructs Ezekiel to speak to them words of hope. Hope in the face of the impossible.
Of course, where the Jewish readers of this text may have seen a metaphor for a renewed Israel, as Christians we can’t help but read this story of reanimated corpses, the dead coming back to life, without connecting it to the story of the resurrection of Jesus. However, the metaphor of the dead rising was used in this instance to highlight the radical nature of Ezekiel’s prophecy. Resurrection of the dead was not a common notion at the time. Ezekiel’s audience, unlike a Christian audience familiar with the story of Christ’s resurrection, would not have automatically connected with the idea of the dead returning to life. It is used as an illustration of something that seems impossible. Something that could only happen in a dream, or a vison, shown to us by God. Something that could only be possible through God.
This is when we come to the part of the mission statement that speaks to celebrating the vast, diverse nature of God and God’s creation. This is what we celebrate on the birthday of the Church. We celebrate the impossible being made possible. And we remember that we are called to embody the impossible, Spirit-filled reality God has in store for us. That is how the church was born, after all. It was created when the Spirit came into a room full of dry bones – people who were scared and confused and uncertain about what to do without Jesus, and moved those dry bones to form the church. The body of Christ here on Earth. So, we celebrate on Pentecost. We celebrate that that body of Christ is still alive today, and we celebrate that the Spirit continues, against all odds, to give life and God’s purpose to this body, and others like it. Amen.