“Our bones are dried up and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” This is a cry of a desperate Israelite people. Maybe it’s your cry, too. There have been many deaths here at Wilshire in recent days. We heard just now in the pastoral prayer the names of people we’ve loved and lost, and perhaps our minds just stopped there. Or maybe it made us think of someone else. Did you hear this story this week? She was just driving under Woodall Rodgers as she had done many times before. 20 years old. Driving from home to work. Did she ever think she would never make it back home? An 18-wheeler plunged from above and crushed her car, and she was gone. A Dallas police sergeant said, “Just a 10th of a second from it not happening to her. She never knew what hit her.” As we stare at the coverage, we are mortified. We suck in—it takes our breath away. We look and see death all around us, and maybe we say with similar resound, “Our bones are dried up and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.”
Or maybe we don’t. We do a pretty good job of filtering that reality away. If we can help it, we try not to think about our own death. We have so much to live for; death would just get in the way. We avoid thinking about our mortality until it hits us square in the face when a loved one dies unexpectedly in a car accident or a friend of ours commits suicide. We can’t hide from it then. We get that really sick feeling inside of us that screams out, “This is not the way it was supposed to be.” And we would be right; this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.
It doesn’t help that we live in a death-denying culture. We can live longer thanks to better health care, modern science, and technology that can operate on hearts and brains. We can look younger with injections, face creams, and surgery. We live under the illusion that death will never come. We think we can control even this last frontier. But the more energy and time we spend pushing death out, the more shocking and painful it is when death comes.
Some of you have already read the title and heard the introduction and are already escaping. I know because I used to do this. As a girl, if the preacher started talking about death or heaven, I would freak out and start thinking about something else. Come along, and let’s face this together. This is still not easy for me. I resist the thought of it with every fiber of my being. My fight-or-flight response is still very active; my desire for life is at an all-time high as I think about getting married. What if I die? What will I miss out on? Or what if he doesn’t come home? Even as I was writing this sermon, I was paranoid, thinking that I was hastening my own death.
But I have to face this subject with faith and courage: faith that death is not truly the end and courage that God will take care of me, prepare me, and help me face whatever is in front of me.
Death is a scary place if we see it as the Israelites did facing exile—the end of the line—being cut off—no more hope of being the people of God. But the message of Ezekiel says that it is in the place of exile and death—the valley of dry bones—that life comes together anew.
It’s as if death has to happen to birth new life.
We see this happen in our day-to-day lives: how our lusts, cravings, pride, and other selfish habits must face a grueling death before life can spring forth. For new dreams to emerge, sometimes old ones must die. Again, death has to happen to birth new life. Jesus speaks this truth soberly, saying, “Very truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit
.”[1] There are green shoots and green buds under the ground waiting to bloom, but death must play its part in the organic process before this can happen.
It’s not surprising, then, that the birthing cycle and dying cycle have similarities. There’s a trusting in the unknown that happens in both. There’s a release to a new world. I don’t remember what it was like to be born, but I’m sure I was scared. It was warm and safe inside there. I didn’t want to leave. But I’m so glad I did.
When I was a hospital chaplain resident, I was around death every day. Before that I’d never seen a dead body. And don’t think that it got much easier. To some extent, I was scared every day. But I’ll never forget the story one of my chaplain friends, Bill, told me that helped me get through that time.
Bill said that on one particular day as he was visiting his patients, the nurse told him that Darla, one of his elderly patients, had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, though she didn’t know it yet. So he braced himself to go into the room, feeling completely deflated and scared to speak about this subject with Darla. But when Bill walked in, face heavy, disposition down, Darla said, “Come here, sweet chaplain. I know why you are here. I’m dying, aren’t I? Don’t be scared to tell me. I’m not afraid to die. I’ve lived a good life, and I’m ready when the good Lord takes me.” She breathed life into Bill that day. And his faith and courage were doubled.
Now, not all people give that same response when they hear that death is imminent. Ezekiel certainly didn’t. He has been doling out heavy prophecy through his tenure as spokesperson for God. And let me just tell you, there’s not a lot of life in it. The people have sinned for days without end, rejecting God’s laws, filling with pride, worshiping false idols, defiling the temple. They are unyielding and hardened; essentially they just don’t listen . . . and the LORD has had enough.
Hear the hammer drop: “I myself am against you, Jerusalem, and I will inflict punishment on you in the sight of the nations. Because of all your detestable idols, I will do to you what I have never done before and will never do again. Therefore in your midst fathers will eat their children, and children will eat their fathers.”
[2] He goes on to say they will all die by one of three ways: plague, famine, or sword.
But, you see, God is always up to something, even when the end seems just that—the end. But let’s look at our own lives. How many times did we say and feel that life would not go on after his death or her death? How many times did we stay in bed, thinking we would never get out of if and be functional again? How many nights did we cry, thinking he or she would be the last one we thought of every night? But what we always come up against is this reality: the end is never the end that we perceive it to be initially. And if that’s the way we experience life why, then, would death be any different? Why do we see it as the ultimate end?
Look what God does to foreshadow resurrection, to encourage his people that they would not be in exile forever, that death was not the end. God takes Ezekiel into this strange valley. You can hear the minor-chord music in the background and see the lighting dim. His eyes scan the valley back and forth for anything that moves. But there’s nothing. Only those dead bones around him. And God asks a strange question to an already strange situation: “Mortal, can these bones live?” I think this was a question of faith. He probably wanted to say, “I don’t know why they would; you seemed to make it pretty clear that death was coming.” But out of nowhere, against all odds and expectations, God tells Ezekiel that he will cause breath to enter their bodies again.
Imagine his surprise as he hears the bones rattling and moving. This is not some horror movie, even though as he turns his head, he sees blood and tendons attaching to bones, and skin wrapping itself over these thin frames. But to his amazement, they are all like zombies in front of him. For none of them has breath or life or spirit within them. Perhaps this is a commentary on how some of us live, with bones and tendons but no breath.
But then the miracle occurs. The wind of God breathes in new life to these who were slain. For though God pursued them in death, he ultimately pursues them in life. He is the God of resurrection. Now, I know we are not celebrating Easter yet, but the message in this text still stands loud and clear today: “Out of the grave I will bring out my people. I will put my Spirit in them, and they will live. I will settle them in their own land.”
[3]What a promise—that when we are out of breath, literally, when we are facing our death, God will breathe the Spirit of life back into us. We won’t be uprooted any more. We won’t have several addresses, but one. We won’t live crazy and chaotic lives with multiple love affairs, but we will have one. God will settle us in our land, bringing us home.
So is it easy to swallow? I mean, look at this guy Ezekiel. Is he really a credible source? He’s a scroll-eating visionary who sees winged creatures with four faces of different animals and wheels with eyes on them, and he lies on his left side for 390 days. But then again, why wouldn’t he be trusted? Who tells a lie that famine and plague will lead to ultimate death? Even Hollywood knows this is not a good ending. Ezekiel speaks the truth of the Sovereign Lord—that there is life after death.
In the movie Stranger Than Fiction, death is an impending reality for the main character, Harold Crick, played by a not-so-funny Will Ferrell. This is a strange movie in that there’s a narrator who is an actual character played by Emma Thompson who has essentially created the character Harold and narrates his life for him. Everything he does, from brushing his teeth, crossing the street, and filing folders at work, is heard as an audible narrator’s voice. He becomes startled one day when the voice says that he will die soon. Because of a budding romantic interest, Harold doesn’t want to die and resists it with his whole being. He begins to try to track down this narrator, to change her mind. When Harold finally does catch up with her, she hands him the rough draft of the ending of his story, his ultimate death.
But as he reads the entire script on the bus, something changes within him. He returns the script to the writer and agrees that it must end this way with his death.
See, he reads that he is to step in front of a bus in order to save a boy who is about to be hit by it. When Harold realizes that his death is necessary to save another’s life, he trustingly yields.
It is true that our death does save another’s life—our own. We must die to live again. We see this in our daily struggles, where the crucible of pain and hardship creates new perspective and new life. And we see this in our ultimate death, where we are challenged to release fear in place of faith, to find eternal life.
Death does face us, though, and maybe we come to it, and it looks like a hollowed-out valley. All we see is stillness, bones, nothing moving, and we think it’s the end. That’s when we are reminded of this prophet’s story. The gift of the prophets was that they could see one thing and imagine something else. That is the gift of faith—to see beyond what something looks like at face value. It’s a gift of imagination. What looks like dry bones to one is a dancing multitude to another.
And this doesn’t happen on our own. The miracle of this message is that it is God who does the breathing of new life. And when we can’t breathe, the community of faith breathes for us.
Are you afraid of death or someone else’s? Are your bones dried up? Maybe you need to lean on or borrow faith and courage until you feel the breath of God breathe over you and settle you back into the promised land.
[2] Ezekiel 5:8-10 (NRSV)
[3] Ezekiel 37:13b and 14
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