The Valley of Dry Bones

For me, one of the most profound consequences of this pandemic and quarantine has been the sensation that my world is very small. Not only have I only interacted with about a dozen people in the last 17 days, I have found myself isolated in time, as well. Perhaps you’ve felt something similar. The time before this new world order feels distant, and the future is so unclear it’s hard to focus on for very long. My whole world, all I really have, is today.

In some ways, this is quite a liberating sensation. Being free to give my full attention to what’s right in front of me has been a gift over the past couple of weeks. My relationships feel more intentional, my work feels more purposeful, I feel in tune with my body. But in other ways, having my world so limited is humbling. Without constant distraction, there are fewer places to hide from the state of the world.

We have been stripped of so many of the things that bring us comfort and security. As Ragan said last week, we’ve been stripped of the illusion that comfort and security are ours to achieve and control. I miss that illusion! Because what we’re left with, what has been unveiled, is the raw, crude truth of our humanity: We are imperfect. We are sinners. We are mortal.

If anyone in our faith tradition has ever understood this as we do today, it’s Ezekiel. Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones is one of the the most creative and provocative stories in all of scripture, and one of my personal favorites. The visual images that it conjures are at once whimsical and harrowing - not unlike the images on social media these days. Ezekiel, who is by now quite used to fantastic visions, as this is his third, is whisked away and placed down in a valley full of human bones.

Like ours, Ezekiel’s whole world has been reduced down to its very core. All he can fathom is this pile of dried up bones. God asks him, how can these bones live? But with nothing to mask the vulnerability that those bones represent, Ezekiel is left without an answer to God’s query, and when we’re at our lowest, which many of us have experienced in recent days, we don’t have an answer either. How could these bones possibly have life? How could anything possibly rise from these ashes?

The last time the dry bones came up in the lectionary, I was preaching in a very different world. In the home stretch of Lent three years ago, I preached about our spiritual bones, and how, after weeks of examining our sins under a magnifying glass, it was hard to imagine being forgiven and made whole again. But this year, a physical valley of dry bones feels much closer at hand. We are living side by side with fear, isolation, and death in a way we haven’t before. It seems like it really would take a miracle for this valley we’re quarantined in to ever teem with life again.

Of course, God does something spectacular then. God commands Ezekiel to prophesy and as he does, the bones come together to form skeletons, and eventually a mighty wind breathes life back into them. The valley that was so recently a graveyard becomes a buzzing hub of human existence.

But the miracle in this story is not God’s power to make the dry bones live again, but God’s capacity to love the dry bones to begin with. Where Ezekiel saw only empty, ugly, dry bones, God saw the fundamentals of human life. This is a basic fact about our God: where we see only death, God always offers life.

We tend to think of death losing it’s sting as a strictly New Testament concept. But I believe it has been part of God’s mission from the beginning of creation. God breathed life into those bones not because they were repulsive and needed saving, but to set Ezekiel free from his fear of them. When we rise from the ashes of this pandemic, which we most surely will, the miracle will not be that we escaped death, but that we learned to live with it, praising God all the same.

When I reread my last sermon on this passage, I noted the line, “sometimes Lent can drag on.” Well, little did I know that a quarantine can truly drag on. But perhaps in this time in the valley we will witness God’s miraculous capacity to breathe life into places we thought were hopelessly empty and dry. Perhaps we will begin to let go of our fear, and begin to see the world as God sees it: beautiful in it’s brokenness. Perhaps, when we’ve been stripped to our very core, we will finally be able to see resurrection clearly. Amen.