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Sermon - Seeing Through God's Eyes - 9th March 2008
St Aidan's West Epping 8:30am
Readings: Ezekiel 37:1-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:6-11, John 11:1-45
Ezekiel has singled out seemingly impossible events in order to strengthen his claims that other highly improbable, but not as preposterous, feats are indeed possible to revive the Jews in excile. If Yahweh can restore desiccated bones and buried bodies to life, then there are absolutely no limits to God’s power.
This reading is the third of four visionary accounts in Ezekiel. In the first, 1:1-3:15, Ezekiel begins
“In the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as I was among the exiles by the river Chebar, the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God”
The words “visions of God” do not appear in the text but are appropriate, according to Katherine Pfisterer Darr, in her comments in the New Interpreter’s Bible. Critics sometime translate those words as “divine visions,” and she says that is not a bad rendering of the Hebrew words. For the purposes of reflection, she says that she should like not only to retain the translation appearing in both the NIV and the NRSV, but also to change it slightly and, in so doing, to alter its meaning. That is, she says she wishes to consider not “visions of God,” but “God’s vision”. In other words she proposes to ask the question, “What does it mean to look at our world, and at ourselves, through God’s eyes?”
Ezekiel’s fellow exciles lament that they are as good as dead. Their hope has perished. Without hope, they might as well be dead. The future, if one can even speak of such, seems as barren as the past years and present experience of exile. Moreover Ezekiel himself has repeatedly insisted, in his oracles of condemnation and judgment, that their suffering is Yahweh’s just punishment for a history of unrelenting rebelliousness and sin. Surely in the light ofJudah’s collapse, Jerusalem’s destruction, the exiles’ own situation and Ezekiel’s past denunciations, good news was, for many, hard to hear, well-nigh impossible to compehend.
When, in a vision, Yahweh brought the prophet out to a broad valley and showed him the mounds, all around, of dessicated and dismembered bones, Ezekiel saw them through his own eyes. His answer to God’s question, “Mortal, can these bones live?”, can be interpreted in at least two ways. If it is interpreted as an uncertain throwing of the ball back into Yahweh’s court. If that is so, then God’s ensuing command, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.’“ required of Ezekiel a leap of faith. But then, the bones began rattling, coming together to form skeletons and suddenly, Ezekiel was no longer looking at them through his own eyes. His vision was lifted to a higher plane. Now he was viewing them through God’s eyes. The skeletons were clothed with flesh and skin and animated by breath and they stood up on their feet!
In recounting his vision, Ezekiel challenges his fellow exiles and generations of his readers to view their circumstances not through their own, limited vision, but through God’s eyes. Can these bones live? Of course not. But look at them through God’s eyes and watch bones rushing to their appropriate partners. Watch as ligaments bind them together, flesh blankets them and skin seals them tightly. Watch as God’s spirit, which heals hopelessness, infuses them, so that they rise up a great army testifying to the transforming power of Yahweh . Can corpses be brought forth from graves and become living beings again? Absurd! But look through God’s eyes and watch them come up, receive God’s spirit and return home.
When we raise our vision to look beyond what our mundane eyes can see, we watch the impossible happen through God’s eyes. “I can’t believe my eyes,” we say when we have witnessed an utterly unanticipated and/or seemingly impossible event take place. But we can believe God’s eyes and looking through them, glimpse unimagined reasons to keep on hoping, though our desert be dry and dark and the promised land far, far away.
Ezekiel urges his audience, which includes us, to view our situation through the eyes of a God for whom all things are possible.
Darr quotes a poem by the American poet/theologian, Amos Wilder, “A Hard Death”.
“Accept no mitigation, But be instructed at the null point. The zero breeds new algebras.”
Ezekiel’s fellow exiles were at the null point, as good as dead and without hope. Easy words of reassurance could not cut through their despair. None-the-less, Ezekiel invited them to view reality through God’s eyes by means of a divine vision wherein the zero breeds new and unanticipated algebras.
The Christian tradition brims with accounts of the zero breeding new algebras . Consider, for example, the raising of Lazarus and more importantly, the crucifixion and death of Jesus. Surely, for Jesus’ friends and family, those who had pinned their hopes and dreams on him, the cross must have seemed the starkest of“zeros,”the hardest of deaths not only for Jesus, but also for their hopes. However, that instrument of scandalous, disgraceful death becomes for Christians of every age a powerful symbol of hope, of life beyond death, of salvation.
Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has observed that Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dried bones bears no date because every generation, every person, needs to hear in their own time that these bones can live again . Like the exiles of old, we too can at times feel as good as dead. We are null and void inside. But, if we look through God’s eyes, we can see broader realities, bases for hope. God can sustain us and fill our barren experiences with lively hope. Is it possible? Absolutely not, non-believers claim. But look with God’s vision and watch it happen!
Remember Easter! If we have faith God can give us new sight.
“Lazarus, come out! The dead man came out. … Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.”
“When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’
The Book of Ezekiel, NIB Vol VI, Abbingdon Press, Nashville 2001