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Sermon - The Day of Pentecost (B) - 31st May 2009
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping - 7, 8, 10am
Reading: Ezekiel 37:1-14, Psalm 104:26-36, Acts 2:1-21, John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15
The reading from Ezekiel, often referred to as the vision of the valley of dry bones, is arguably the most famous passage in all the book of Ezekiel. Its importance for Jews and Christians is indicated by the important times when it is read liturgically. In Jewish tradition it accompanies the Torah reading, Exodus 33:12-34:26, which contains the renewal of the Mosaic Covenant on the Sabbath of Passover week. In our tradition our lectionary associates it with the fifth Sunday in Lent, the Easter vigil and today the Day of Pentecost.
This is the third of Ezekiel’s four visionary reports and in this one Ezekiel states, “the hand of the lord came upon me”. Transported by the spirit of the Lord to “the valley”, Ezekiel is astonished to see that it is filled with a multitude of disconnected and thoroughly desiccated bones. The image is of a battlefield whose slain never received proper burial, but were left to decay and be ravaged by birds and beasts where they fell. Having led Ezekiel around these piles of bones, Yahweh asks him a question: “Mortal, can these bones live?” The prophet’s response is enigmatic “O Lord God, you know”. Yahweh then orders Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones as if they had ears to hear! In response to the prophet’s words, the bones come together, bound by sinews, made of flesh, covered with skin and animated by the spirit.
The vision proper is followed by a modified disputation speech that, the reader comes to realize, is actually a salvation oracle directed to Ezekiel’s fellow deportees languishing in Babylon. The bones, Yahweh informs Ezekiel, are “the whole house of Israel”. The exiles are lamenting that their bones are dried up, their hope has perished and they are utterly cut off. Yahweh instructs the prophet to inform his audience that their present situation and consequent despair will be transformed. God will open their graves, bring them forth from those graves and return them to their homeland. Israel should know and acknowledge who its unrivalled God is, in all of God’s power and sovereignty. The reading affirms that the Lord will place “my spirit” within the people and they shall live, re-established on their own soil.
When we study the reading we can see that the prophet has singled out seemingly impossible events in order to buttress his claims that other highly improbable, but not as preposterous, feats are indeed possible. If Yahweh can restore desiccated bones and buried bodies to life, then there are absolutely no limits to God’s power. Ezekiel’s fellow exiles do not view the vision directly, as he says that he has done, but they “see” it through his astonished eyes. I also think that the reading is asking us “What does it mean to look at our world, and at ourselves, through God’s eyes”?
Ezekiel’s fellow deportees lament that they are as good as dead or perhaps the expression should be “bad as dead”! Their hope has perished and 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 throughout the book that their suffering is Yahweh’s just punishment for a history of unrelenting rebelliousness and sin. Surely in the light of Judah’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 hope for and to picture in their minds.
When, in a vision, Yahweh brought the prophet out to a broad valley and showed him the mounds, all around, of desiccated 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, either as an absolute affirmative, or as an uncertain throwing of the ball back into Yahweh’s court. If the latter, 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. Then, when he did as required, 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 such as us, 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 as a great army testifying to the power of Yahweh. Can corpses be brought forth from graves and become living beings again? Absurd! That may be so 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, seemingly impossible event take place. We can believe God’s eyes and, looking through them, glimpse unimagined reasons to keep on hoping, though our deserts be dry and dark and the promised land far, far away. Ezekiel’s fellow exiles were at the end point, as good as dead and without hope. Easy words of reassurance could not cut through their despair. Ezekiel however invited them to view reality through God’s eyes by means of a divine vision wherein the impossible leads to exciting and unbelievably positive results. Ezekiel urges us to view our situation through the eyes of a God for whom all things are possible.
The Judeo-Christian tradition brims with accounts of the hopeless breeding new possibilities, consider, for example, the crucifixion and death of Jesus. Surely, for Jesus’ friends and family, his disciples, those who had pinned their hopes on him, the cross must have seemed the starkest of “devastations” the hardest of deaths not only for Jesus, but also for their hopes. Yet, 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 needs to hear in its own time that these bones can live again. Like the exiles of old, we too can at times feel as good as dead. We may be null and void inside, however, if we look through God’s eyes, we can see broader realities, a basis for hope. God can sustain us and fill our barren experiences with lively hope. Is it possible? Absolutely not, disbelievers aver, but look with God’s vision and watch it happen!
“All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’ …
“In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” (Act 2)
This sermon produced using The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volt VI, Abingdon, Nashville. 2001