A Chance To Live Again
Sermon
CALLED TO JERUSALEM: SENT TO THE WORLD
Sermons For Lent And Easter
I. An Ichabod World!
"Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off (Ezekiel 37:11b)." The words of Ezekiel's contemporaries say it all!
It was an Ichabod world. When the wife of Phinehas, the daughter-in-law of Eli, heard from the battlefront of the deaths of both Eli and her husband and that the Philistines had captured the Ark of the Covenant, the shock was so great that she went into labor. She would give her life for the birth of her son. By her last words she named her son Ichabod. That is to say, "The glory has departed from Israel (1 Samuel 4:20-21)."1 It was an Ichabod world then, and for Ezekiel and his people, it was an Ichabod world in their time, as well.
When the battering rams of Nebuchadnezzar's army breached the walls of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E., it was a day of infamy and terrifying destruction for Judah, the Southern Kingdom and the last remnant of the orginal 12 tribes of Israel. The Northern Kingdom had fallen 135 years earlier to the armies of the Assyrian king, Shalmaneser. Many of the people were deported to Media and Assyria, never to return or to be heard from again. Moreover, the Assyrians resettled foreigners who mingled with the surviving Israelite population, producing descendants who would be the Samaritans. They truly had become the lost tribes of Israel.
Now in 586 B.C.E., the destruction of the chosen people of God was nearly complete. The glory had departed from Israel. Things had been going down hill for a while. After the fall of Samaria in 722 B.C.E., subsequent incursions of the Assyrian armies had reduced Judah to a vassal state, but the Davidic monarchy2 had survived.
The collapse of the Assyrian empire at the hands of the Babylonians provided Judah with a new overlord. In time, Judah's rebellion in 597 B.C.E. brought the surrender of Jerusalem to the Babylonians without a fight. This began the first of three waves of deportation to Babylon, including the King of Judah, Jehoiakim and 10,000 civic leaders and skilled craftsmen.3 The prophet Ezekiel is thought to have been among them.4 At the same time, the Babylonians appointed Zedekiah as king.
The next 10 years were filled with international intrigue. Soon Nebuchadnezzar's army descended upon Jerusalem a second time. A collection of 18 pieces of earthenware (ostraca) discovered in the ruins of a guard room in the wall of the city of Lachish shed light on the overwhelming force of that Babylonian campaign. These ostraca contain the reports from a commander of a northern outpost to the military commander of Lachish. Their tone is deeply pessimistic, a mood modern excavations reveal to have been fully justified.5 Surprisingly, there was no surrender this time. The Babylonians laid seige to the city for two years.
When the Babylonians breached the walls of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E., they showed little mercy. Nothing was left. The walls were leveled and the city burned. The temple was plundered and destroyed. Leading citizens were executed and others were carried into exile in Babylon. Zedekiah was apprehended in flight6 and forced to witness the execution of his children. As if to fix forever that terrifying sight into his mind, Zedekiah was blinded and then carried to Babylon. There he died.
It was an Ichabod world. The glory had departed from Israel and Judah. Humiliated, defeated, broken, plundered and deported, the people cried out to Ezekiel: "Behold, our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off (Ezekiel 37:1 ib)." The psalmist paints for us an unforgettable scene: "By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion!' How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land (Psalm 137:1-4)?"
II. How Shall We Sing - Ever Again
It is impossible for us to overemphasize the trauma of those days in Hebrew history. Regardless of living conditions in the exiled communities in Babylon, it was a human tragedy of immense proportion.
As for the exile itself, there are indications that conditions, especially in the early waves of exiles, were not all that difficult. The Babylonians allowed the exiles every freedom within the bounds of their settlements. They had all the needs of life. They were able to pursue business, agriculture and education. They were free to make a living in any manner they were able and free to assemble for religious and community needs. By ancient standards, the conditions were generous. For the exiles, though, they were no more generous or satisfactory than the policies that in more recent times placed the American Indians into reservations.
Whatever may have been the lot of the Hebrews in Babylon, they were prisoners, exiles from their own land. They were not the masters of their own fate. Always they had to guard against offending a Babylonian. One could assume an upper hand for the Babylonian in any legal dispute. Babylonians had better jobs and better pay. They had better chances to build a good house, to provide for their children's future and to stay out of trouble with the authorities.7 All of these things should sound familiar to our ears as we hear of the sufferings of the Palestinians of the West Bank territories in our own day. Isn't it so!
Captives and exiles, the Hebrews were at the mercy and whim of someone else. Always they were in potential physical danger, captives and slaves to a foreign power, and subject to the taunts and insensitivities of their captors. "Sing us one of the songs of Zion." Such things as these would be enough to choke a Pollyanna into silence. But ...
III. The Day Hope Died
All of these things pale into insignificance when compared with the other loss suffered on the day the army breached the walls of Jerusalem and the trek to Babylon began. Like a dense fog quietly settling over a nation, this morass of hopelessness would descend like an evil dawn upon these exiles. That terrible day in 587 B.C.E. was the day that hope began to die.
The people of Judah - like Israel before them - lost their nation and their independence that day. What is more important, they lost their God!
At the very least, they were separated and cut off from Jerusalem, the seat of Yahweh, the place where Yahweh had caused his name to dwell (Deuteronomy 12:11; 2 Kings 21:4), the place where the tribes went up to give thanks to the Lord, (Psalm 122:4), and the cultic center of their religious practice and tradition. The temple, the priesthood, the liturgies and the sacrifices that atoned for sin were all gone. Plundered! Destroyed! They were clean cut off from all of these things, and, therefore, from Yahweh. Moreover, that was only the beginning. There was still more.
Even the pious had to wonder. Were not the Hebrews the chosen people of Yahweh? Was not the temple, the house of Yahweh, under his divine protection? After all, it was his house, and he was (supposedly!) the most powerful of all the Gods. Doubt and its questions now tumbled over one another. "Could not Yahweh protect his own house from plunder and destruction?" "Were the Babylonian gods, whose temples seemed far more imposing than the houses of Yahweh, the stronger gods after all?" Finally, what does it mean to be the chosen people of Yahweh if Yahweh is either unwilling or too weak to defend them - and his house - from this humiliation?
In the eyes of not a few, the God of Israel was either too weak to matter, or dead altogether. In that moment, all hope died. "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off." If God was dead, then so too were his people. They were clean cut off.
Against this background of crushed hopes, tragedy and death, we have Ezekiel's vision of the Valley of the Dry Bones.
IV. The Vision Of The Valley
"Is there any hope?" "Can these bones live (Ezekiel 37:3)?" It is one of the great mysteries of ancient history that so many of the beaten and exiled Jews did not lose faith, but developed a stronger loyalty.8 With the temple gone, the prophets became God's new instruments of nearness, addressing the real issues of disillusionment and of faith. This faithfulness could not likely have continued without the crucial work and witness of prophets like Ezekiel.
It takes a prophet to dream of destiny while living in the distant lands of defeat. Ezekiel was such a one. Dr. Hagen Staack once wrote: "The true prophet resembles lightning streaking to earth out of darkness, bringing light to a chaotic world ... He is the voice crying out in the wilderness, proclaiming a new destiny in which God may come to dwell with his people."9
Just so, Ezekiel, a priest and a prophet, comes streaking into Hebrew history at its lowest ebb, bringing a hopeless and helpless people to life again. The temple is still in shambles, the city is in ruins and the people are still in Babylon, but there is hope that God will act again.10
Not only did Ezekiel proclaim a new destiny, but he prepared for it as well, a steady sign of God's coming salvation for his people. He laid plans for a new temple, a new priesthood and a new city. He organized legal codes, histories, and prophecies to keep alive the people's sense of their God-given destiny.
In the vision of the dry bones, it is the Spirit of God who asks the people's most haunting question: "Can these bones live?" "Is there any hope?"
The vision of the valley spoke forcefully to the hopelessness of the people. There was no reasonable hope that the parched bones of the valley, perhaps the remains of an ancient battlefield with its unburied dead, could live again. It was, after all, the very image the people had used. "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut cff."
V. An Affirmation Of The Impossible
"Son of Man, can these bones live?" Ezekiel is guarded in his answer: "O God, thou knowest." The question would be absurd, and its answer obvious were it not that it was being asked in the first place. Many have been the school days when a class volunteered no answer to a question so simple as to be obvious, lest there be a trick to the question. How could this group of exiles ever expect to have hope again, to be a sovereign nation again, and to have a temple? Impossible.
Equally absurd is the command to prophesy to the bones. Preach to dry bones? Why? But then again, the Lord calls us to be faithful. It is not required that we understand. The Word will create hearers. Deutero Isaiah,11 a contemporary of Ezekiel, wrote: "For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return not thither but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it (Isaiah 55:10-11)."
So it does! Ezekiel spoke as he had been commanded, and suddenly "... there was a noise, and behold, a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And as I looked, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them (Ezekiel 37:7b-8a)."
In a moment, a hopeless dream had flesh. Yet, there was no life in it. Halfway from nowhere is still nowhere! How well we have learned this lesson. So again, Ezekiel is ordered to prophesy, this time to the breath, calling to the four winds to breathe upon the slain. The breath came, and with it life ... all by the command of God.
Well we remember an earlier sermon of this series, from the creation story: "... then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being (Genesis 2:7)." Scooped from the ground, mankind became a living being only when the breath of God was breathed into him. Until that moment, he had an inert body. To the writer of Genesis and "to Ezekiel, the difference between true life and actual death was possession of God's breath or spirit."12 How appropriately we sing in our day:
Breathe on me breath of God,
Fill me with life anew
That I may love all that you love
And do what you would do.13
God's promise to open the graves, raise up the people, and bring them back into the land of Israel does not and should not imply a belief in a general resurrection. This is not a story about human immortality. It addresses forthrightly our helplessness and our hopelessness without God. It is God's word and God's power that will do these things. Israel and all mankind (Isaiah 40:5) shall see these mighty acts of God.
Once spoken, God lost no time fulfilling this impossible promise. Except in the eyes of faith, the fortune of nations in the Middle East has seemed a fickle thing. For centuries it has been so, even into our own day. Assyria, after conquering the northern tribes in the eighth century B.C.E., had fallen to the Babylonians. The Babylonians had been dominating the area for just a few more than 50 years when an ambitious provincial leader of the Medes organized a campaign against the Babylonians. In a mere 10 years Cyrus had conquered more than Babylon had ever ruled.14
In 538 B.C.E. Cyrus issued an order in which he directed that the Jerusalem temple be rebuilt and the sacred vessels, taken by King Nebuchadnezzar, be returned. Though the work dragged a bit, the temple was completed in 515 B.C.E.15 This temple was a far cry from the splendor of Solomon's work. Nonetheless, it was clearly a miracle of God's power. The impossible had happened. In the faithfulness of God, even the dead have hope.
VI. Still More Good News
If it is true - and it is - that Ezekiel's powerful word about open graves and raised people is a story about national restoration and the faithfulness of God to his covenant, and not about personal resurrection at all, then today's gospel lesson16 brings the same good news to every believer.
The hopelessness of the people of Ezekiel's day is heard with stentorian clarity in Martha's argumentative hopelessness: "If you had been here my brother would not have died." And then later, at the tomb: "Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days!" It is as if Martha is standing in the valley of dried bones, clean cut off: "It's no use!" "In times of bereavement present sorrow dims the prospect of future bliss; and when the imagination is overwrought, death, not life, is apt to seem the ultimate reality."17
The lessons for the exiles in Babylon and for Mary and Martha six centuries later are the same. In neither lesson do we have the proclamation of human immortality, but rather of the power of God's word over all things, even death. Faced with our helplessness at the death of loved ones and at our own time of resting, we are to hear the steady and powerful word of God. In the midst of our hopelessness, in the valleys littered with the dry bones of lost hope, there God comes. "Son of man, can these bones live again?" Except that God asks it, this is an absurd question. With God, who breathes his life into our lives, it is both appropriate and renewing.
Yea, verily! "Breathe on us, breath of God, fill us with life anew!"
VII. To Begin Again
It's an Ichabod world. In our day and in so many ways, the glory has departed for us, too. Our enthusiasm is dried up and our spirits are weary. Always there is the temptation to give up and give in.
Loren Eiseley has written that the beaches of Costabel are littered with the debris of life, for "in the end the sea rejects its offspring."18 In the dawn of the morning, before sunrise, he was walking on the beach.
Ahead of me, over a projecting point, a gigantic rainbow of incredible perfection had sprung shimmering into existence. Somewhere, toward its foot I discerned a human figure standing as it seemed to me, within the rainbow.... He was gazing fixedly at something in the sand.
Eventually he stooped and flung the object beyond the breaking surf.... By the time I reached him ... he was starting to kneel again.
In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud. "It's still alive," I ventured. "Yes," he said, and with a quick yet gentle movement he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea. It sank in a burst of spume, and the waters roared once more. "It may live if the offshore pull is strong enough ... The stars throw well. One can help them."19
Loren Eiseley writes: "Somewhere, my thoughts persisted, there is a hurler of stars, and he walks, because he chooses, always in desolation, but not in defeat."20
So he does!
In a valley of a battlefield, among the parched bones of the dead, God's Spirit asks: "Son of Man, can these bones live?"
At the doorway to Lazarus' tomb, Christ asks: "Martha, did I not tell you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?"
In the broken pieces of our lives, when hope is lost and courage falters, just at the moment when the horizon is shrouded with the fog of our self-doubt, even with doubt about God; in that moment God comes to those who will listen. Always he meets us in our desolation, offering us an alternative to our defeat.
End Notes
1. A more literal translation, aided by contemporary studies of the Ugaritic suggests that Ichabod should be translated "Where is (the) glory?" or "Alas (for the) Glory." The loss of the Ark of the Covenant meant that the presence of God had departed Israel, since the Ark was the seat of God's presence. "Glory" deals with the presence of God. The traditional translation is not, therefore, too far afield, even if it is not "literal." See: P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., 1 Samuel, The Anchor Bible Series, Vol. 8, William Fox-well Albright and David Noel Freedman, Editors, (Garden City, New York, Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1980), pp. 115-116.
2. Throughout this sermon, "Judah" is the proper name of the Southern Kingdom and "Israel" the proper name of the Northern Kingdom. With the nation of Israel referring to the whole of that nation today, and presently including the West Bank occupied territories as well, this can be confusing to contemporary readers.
3. George W. E. Nickelsburg, Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah, (Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1981), pp. 9-10.
4. Robert J. Marshall and Craig E. Johnson, The Mighty Acts of God, Revised and updated version of 1964 work by the same name, (Minneapolis, Augsburg Fortress, 1990), p. 141.
5. Michael Grant, The History of Ancient Israel, (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1984), p. 142.
6. Tradition says that Zedekiah attempted to escape through a labyrinth of caves and an underground quarry that exits just outside of the present Northern Wall of the Old City, near the Damascus Gate. This cave and quarry, called by some "Solomon's Quarry" (probably misnamed) is called by others "Zedekiah's Cave." It is open to visitors.
7. Robert J. Marshall and Craig E. Johnson, op. cit., p. 136.
8. Robert J. Marshall and Craig E. Johnson, op. cit., p. 137.
9. Hagen Staack, Prophetic Voices of The Bible, (Cleveland, The World Publishing Company, 1965), p. 124.
10. In the assemblies of the people "along the rivers of Babylon," we have the early beginnings of the synagogue, the learning of new ways to keep the faith and live in faithfulness, apart from the holy lands, the temple, and the cultic traditions. In the prophets, God was seen to draw near to his people, even in a foreign land.
11. Clearly there were at least two prophets who worked on the book of Isaiah as we now have it. "Deutero Isaiah" is the name given to one known otherwise as "Second Isaiah." One can easily see the time span requires more than one hand at this book. Chapter 39 closes with King Hezekiah overlooking the eighth century B.C.E. seige of Jerusalem by the Assyrians. Chapter 40 begins with the good news that the exiles are going home from Babylon in the mid-sixth century B.C.E.
12. Carl G. Howie, The Book of Ezekiel, The Book of Daniel, The Layman's Bible Commentary, Vol. 13, Balmer H. Kelley, Editor, (Richmond, John Knox Press, 1961), p. 73.
13. Edwin Hatch, "Breathe On Me, Breath Of God," The Lutheran Book of Worship, Hymn No. 488, Stanza 1 (Minneapolis, Augsburg Publishing House, 1978).
14. Robert J. Marshall and Craig E. Johnson, op. cit., p. 137.
15. George W. E. Nickelsburg, op. cit., pp. 13-14.
16. John 11:1-53. This powerful story about the raising of Lazarus is the appointed gospel in all lectionaries on the Fifth Sunday in Lent, Series A.
17. P. V. G. Tasker, The Gospel According to Saint John, (Leicester, England, Inter-Varsity Press, 1986), p. 139.
18. Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe, (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1969), p. 69.
19. Ibid., pp. 71-72.
20. Ibid., p. 91.
"Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off (Ezekiel 37:11b)." The words of Ezekiel's contemporaries say it all!
It was an Ichabod world. When the wife of Phinehas, the daughter-in-law of Eli, heard from the battlefront of the deaths of both Eli and her husband and that the Philistines had captured the Ark of the Covenant, the shock was so great that she went into labor. She would give her life for the birth of her son. By her last words she named her son Ichabod. That is to say, "The glory has departed from Israel (1 Samuel 4:20-21)."1 It was an Ichabod world then, and for Ezekiel and his people, it was an Ichabod world in their time, as well.
When the battering rams of Nebuchadnezzar's army breached the walls of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E., it was a day of infamy and terrifying destruction for Judah, the Southern Kingdom and the last remnant of the orginal 12 tribes of Israel. The Northern Kingdom had fallen 135 years earlier to the armies of the Assyrian king, Shalmaneser. Many of the people were deported to Media and Assyria, never to return or to be heard from again. Moreover, the Assyrians resettled foreigners who mingled with the surviving Israelite population, producing descendants who would be the Samaritans. They truly had become the lost tribes of Israel.
Now in 586 B.C.E., the destruction of the chosen people of God was nearly complete. The glory had departed from Israel. Things had been going down hill for a while. After the fall of Samaria in 722 B.C.E., subsequent incursions of the Assyrian armies had reduced Judah to a vassal state, but the Davidic monarchy2 had survived.
The collapse of the Assyrian empire at the hands of the Babylonians provided Judah with a new overlord. In time, Judah's rebellion in 597 B.C.E. brought the surrender of Jerusalem to the Babylonians without a fight. This began the first of three waves of deportation to Babylon, including the King of Judah, Jehoiakim and 10,000 civic leaders and skilled craftsmen.3 The prophet Ezekiel is thought to have been among them.4 At the same time, the Babylonians appointed Zedekiah as king.
The next 10 years were filled with international intrigue. Soon Nebuchadnezzar's army descended upon Jerusalem a second time. A collection of 18 pieces of earthenware (ostraca) discovered in the ruins of a guard room in the wall of the city of Lachish shed light on the overwhelming force of that Babylonian campaign. These ostraca contain the reports from a commander of a northern outpost to the military commander of Lachish. Their tone is deeply pessimistic, a mood modern excavations reveal to have been fully justified.5 Surprisingly, there was no surrender this time. The Babylonians laid seige to the city for two years.
When the Babylonians breached the walls of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E., they showed little mercy. Nothing was left. The walls were leveled and the city burned. The temple was plundered and destroyed. Leading citizens were executed and others were carried into exile in Babylon. Zedekiah was apprehended in flight6 and forced to witness the execution of his children. As if to fix forever that terrifying sight into his mind, Zedekiah was blinded and then carried to Babylon. There he died.
It was an Ichabod world. The glory had departed from Israel and Judah. Humiliated, defeated, broken, plundered and deported, the people cried out to Ezekiel: "Behold, our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off (Ezekiel 37:1 ib)." The psalmist paints for us an unforgettable scene: "By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion!' How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land (Psalm 137:1-4)?"
II. How Shall We Sing - Ever Again
It is impossible for us to overemphasize the trauma of those days in Hebrew history. Regardless of living conditions in the exiled communities in Babylon, it was a human tragedy of immense proportion.
As for the exile itself, there are indications that conditions, especially in the early waves of exiles, were not all that difficult. The Babylonians allowed the exiles every freedom within the bounds of their settlements. They had all the needs of life. They were able to pursue business, agriculture and education. They were free to make a living in any manner they were able and free to assemble for religious and community needs. By ancient standards, the conditions were generous. For the exiles, though, they were no more generous or satisfactory than the policies that in more recent times placed the American Indians into reservations.
Whatever may have been the lot of the Hebrews in Babylon, they were prisoners, exiles from their own land. They were not the masters of their own fate. Always they had to guard against offending a Babylonian. One could assume an upper hand for the Babylonian in any legal dispute. Babylonians had better jobs and better pay. They had better chances to build a good house, to provide for their children's future and to stay out of trouble with the authorities.7 All of these things should sound familiar to our ears as we hear of the sufferings of the Palestinians of the West Bank territories in our own day. Isn't it so!
Captives and exiles, the Hebrews were at the mercy and whim of someone else. Always they were in potential physical danger, captives and slaves to a foreign power, and subject to the taunts and insensitivities of their captors. "Sing us one of the songs of Zion." Such things as these would be enough to choke a Pollyanna into silence. But ...
III. The Day Hope Died
All of these things pale into insignificance when compared with the other loss suffered on the day the army breached the walls of Jerusalem and the trek to Babylon began. Like a dense fog quietly settling over a nation, this morass of hopelessness would descend like an evil dawn upon these exiles. That terrible day in 587 B.C.E. was the day that hope began to die.
The people of Judah - like Israel before them - lost their nation and their independence that day. What is more important, they lost their God!
At the very least, they were separated and cut off from Jerusalem, the seat of Yahweh, the place where Yahweh had caused his name to dwell (Deuteronomy 12:11; 2 Kings 21:4), the place where the tribes went up to give thanks to the Lord, (Psalm 122:4), and the cultic center of their religious practice and tradition. The temple, the priesthood, the liturgies and the sacrifices that atoned for sin were all gone. Plundered! Destroyed! They were clean cut off from all of these things, and, therefore, from Yahweh. Moreover, that was only the beginning. There was still more.
Even the pious had to wonder. Were not the Hebrews the chosen people of Yahweh? Was not the temple, the house of Yahweh, under his divine protection? After all, it was his house, and he was (supposedly!) the most powerful of all the Gods. Doubt and its questions now tumbled over one another. "Could not Yahweh protect his own house from plunder and destruction?" "Were the Babylonian gods, whose temples seemed far more imposing than the houses of Yahweh, the stronger gods after all?" Finally, what does it mean to be the chosen people of Yahweh if Yahweh is either unwilling or too weak to defend them - and his house - from this humiliation?
In the eyes of not a few, the God of Israel was either too weak to matter, or dead altogether. In that moment, all hope died. "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off." If God was dead, then so too were his people. They were clean cut off.
Against this background of crushed hopes, tragedy and death, we have Ezekiel's vision of the Valley of the Dry Bones.
IV. The Vision Of The Valley
"Is there any hope?" "Can these bones live (Ezekiel 37:3)?" It is one of the great mysteries of ancient history that so many of the beaten and exiled Jews did not lose faith, but developed a stronger loyalty.8 With the temple gone, the prophets became God's new instruments of nearness, addressing the real issues of disillusionment and of faith. This faithfulness could not likely have continued without the crucial work and witness of prophets like Ezekiel.
It takes a prophet to dream of destiny while living in the distant lands of defeat. Ezekiel was such a one. Dr. Hagen Staack once wrote: "The true prophet resembles lightning streaking to earth out of darkness, bringing light to a chaotic world ... He is the voice crying out in the wilderness, proclaiming a new destiny in which God may come to dwell with his people."9
Just so, Ezekiel, a priest and a prophet, comes streaking into Hebrew history at its lowest ebb, bringing a hopeless and helpless people to life again. The temple is still in shambles, the city is in ruins and the people are still in Babylon, but there is hope that God will act again.10
Not only did Ezekiel proclaim a new destiny, but he prepared for it as well, a steady sign of God's coming salvation for his people. He laid plans for a new temple, a new priesthood and a new city. He organized legal codes, histories, and prophecies to keep alive the people's sense of their God-given destiny.
In the vision of the dry bones, it is the Spirit of God who asks the people's most haunting question: "Can these bones live?" "Is there any hope?"
The vision of the valley spoke forcefully to the hopelessness of the people. There was no reasonable hope that the parched bones of the valley, perhaps the remains of an ancient battlefield with its unburied dead, could live again. It was, after all, the very image the people had used. "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut cff."
V. An Affirmation Of The Impossible
"Son of Man, can these bones live?" Ezekiel is guarded in his answer: "O God, thou knowest." The question would be absurd, and its answer obvious were it not that it was being asked in the first place. Many have been the school days when a class volunteered no answer to a question so simple as to be obvious, lest there be a trick to the question. How could this group of exiles ever expect to have hope again, to be a sovereign nation again, and to have a temple? Impossible.
Equally absurd is the command to prophesy to the bones. Preach to dry bones? Why? But then again, the Lord calls us to be faithful. It is not required that we understand. The Word will create hearers. Deutero Isaiah,11 a contemporary of Ezekiel, wrote: "For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return not thither but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it (Isaiah 55:10-11)."
So it does! Ezekiel spoke as he had been commanded, and suddenly "... there was a noise, and behold, a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And as I looked, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them (Ezekiel 37:7b-8a)."
In a moment, a hopeless dream had flesh. Yet, there was no life in it. Halfway from nowhere is still nowhere! How well we have learned this lesson. So again, Ezekiel is ordered to prophesy, this time to the breath, calling to the four winds to breathe upon the slain. The breath came, and with it life ... all by the command of God.
Well we remember an earlier sermon of this series, from the creation story: "... then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being (Genesis 2:7)." Scooped from the ground, mankind became a living being only when the breath of God was breathed into him. Until that moment, he had an inert body. To the writer of Genesis and "to Ezekiel, the difference between true life and actual death was possession of God's breath or spirit."12 How appropriately we sing in our day:
Breathe on me breath of God,
Fill me with life anew
That I may love all that you love
And do what you would do.13
God's promise to open the graves, raise up the people, and bring them back into the land of Israel does not and should not imply a belief in a general resurrection. This is not a story about human immortality. It addresses forthrightly our helplessness and our hopelessness without God. It is God's word and God's power that will do these things. Israel and all mankind (Isaiah 40:5) shall see these mighty acts of God.
Once spoken, God lost no time fulfilling this impossible promise. Except in the eyes of faith, the fortune of nations in the Middle East has seemed a fickle thing. For centuries it has been so, even into our own day. Assyria, after conquering the northern tribes in the eighth century B.C.E., had fallen to the Babylonians. The Babylonians had been dominating the area for just a few more than 50 years when an ambitious provincial leader of the Medes organized a campaign against the Babylonians. In a mere 10 years Cyrus had conquered more than Babylon had ever ruled.14
In 538 B.C.E. Cyrus issued an order in which he directed that the Jerusalem temple be rebuilt and the sacred vessels, taken by King Nebuchadnezzar, be returned. Though the work dragged a bit, the temple was completed in 515 B.C.E.15 This temple was a far cry from the splendor of Solomon's work. Nonetheless, it was clearly a miracle of God's power. The impossible had happened. In the faithfulness of God, even the dead have hope.
VI. Still More Good News
If it is true - and it is - that Ezekiel's powerful word about open graves and raised people is a story about national restoration and the faithfulness of God to his covenant, and not about personal resurrection at all, then today's gospel lesson16 brings the same good news to every believer.
The hopelessness of the people of Ezekiel's day is heard with stentorian clarity in Martha's argumentative hopelessness: "If you had been here my brother would not have died." And then later, at the tomb: "Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days!" It is as if Martha is standing in the valley of dried bones, clean cut off: "It's no use!" "In times of bereavement present sorrow dims the prospect of future bliss; and when the imagination is overwrought, death, not life, is apt to seem the ultimate reality."17
The lessons for the exiles in Babylon and for Mary and Martha six centuries later are the same. In neither lesson do we have the proclamation of human immortality, but rather of the power of God's word over all things, even death. Faced with our helplessness at the death of loved ones and at our own time of resting, we are to hear the steady and powerful word of God. In the midst of our hopelessness, in the valleys littered with the dry bones of lost hope, there God comes. "Son of man, can these bones live again?" Except that God asks it, this is an absurd question. With God, who breathes his life into our lives, it is both appropriate and renewing.
Yea, verily! "Breathe on us, breath of God, fill us with life anew!"
VII. To Begin Again
It's an Ichabod world. In our day and in so many ways, the glory has departed for us, too. Our enthusiasm is dried up and our spirits are weary. Always there is the temptation to give up and give in.
Loren Eiseley has written that the beaches of Costabel are littered with the debris of life, for "in the end the sea rejects its offspring."18 In the dawn of the morning, before sunrise, he was walking on the beach.
Ahead of me, over a projecting point, a gigantic rainbow of incredible perfection had sprung shimmering into existence. Somewhere, toward its foot I discerned a human figure standing as it seemed to me, within the rainbow.... He was gazing fixedly at something in the sand.
Eventually he stooped and flung the object beyond the breaking surf.... By the time I reached him ... he was starting to kneel again.
In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud. "It's still alive," I ventured. "Yes," he said, and with a quick yet gentle movement he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea. It sank in a burst of spume, and the waters roared once more. "It may live if the offshore pull is strong enough ... The stars throw well. One can help them."19
Loren Eiseley writes: "Somewhere, my thoughts persisted, there is a hurler of stars, and he walks, because he chooses, always in desolation, but not in defeat."20
So he does!
In a valley of a battlefield, among the parched bones of the dead, God's Spirit asks: "Son of Man, can these bones live?"
At the doorway to Lazarus' tomb, Christ asks: "Martha, did I not tell you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?"
In the broken pieces of our lives, when hope is lost and courage falters, just at the moment when the horizon is shrouded with the fog of our self-doubt, even with doubt about God; in that moment God comes to those who will listen. Always he meets us in our desolation, offering us an alternative to our defeat.
End Notes
1. A more literal translation, aided by contemporary studies of the Ugaritic suggests that Ichabod should be translated "Where is (the) glory?" or "Alas (for the) Glory." The loss of the Ark of the Covenant meant that the presence of God had departed Israel, since the Ark was the seat of God's presence. "Glory" deals with the presence of God. The traditional translation is not, therefore, too far afield, even if it is not "literal." See: P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., 1 Samuel, The Anchor Bible Series, Vol. 8, William Fox-well Albright and David Noel Freedman, Editors, (Garden City, New York, Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1980), pp. 115-116.
2. Throughout this sermon, "Judah" is the proper name of the Southern Kingdom and "Israel" the proper name of the Northern Kingdom. With the nation of Israel referring to the whole of that nation today, and presently including the West Bank occupied territories as well, this can be confusing to contemporary readers.
3. George W. E. Nickelsburg, Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah, (Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1981), pp. 9-10.
4. Robert J. Marshall and Craig E. Johnson, The Mighty Acts of God, Revised and updated version of 1964 work by the same name, (Minneapolis, Augsburg Fortress, 1990), p. 141.
5. Michael Grant, The History of Ancient Israel, (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1984), p. 142.
6. Tradition says that Zedekiah attempted to escape through a labyrinth of caves and an underground quarry that exits just outside of the present Northern Wall of the Old City, near the Damascus Gate. This cave and quarry, called by some "Solomon's Quarry" (probably misnamed) is called by others "Zedekiah's Cave." It is open to visitors.
7. Robert J. Marshall and Craig E. Johnson, op. cit., p. 136.
8. Robert J. Marshall and Craig E. Johnson, op. cit., p. 137.
9. Hagen Staack, Prophetic Voices of The Bible, (Cleveland, The World Publishing Company, 1965), p. 124.
10. In the assemblies of the people "along the rivers of Babylon," we have the early beginnings of the synagogue, the learning of new ways to keep the faith and live in faithfulness, apart from the holy lands, the temple, and the cultic traditions. In the prophets, God was seen to draw near to his people, even in a foreign land.
11. Clearly there were at least two prophets who worked on the book of Isaiah as we now have it. "Deutero Isaiah" is the name given to one known otherwise as "Second Isaiah." One can easily see the time span requires more than one hand at this book. Chapter 39 closes with King Hezekiah overlooking the eighth century B.C.E. seige of Jerusalem by the Assyrians. Chapter 40 begins with the good news that the exiles are going home from Babylon in the mid-sixth century B.C.E.
12. Carl G. Howie, The Book of Ezekiel, The Book of Daniel, The Layman's Bible Commentary, Vol. 13, Balmer H. Kelley, Editor, (Richmond, John Knox Press, 1961), p. 73.
13. Edwin Hatch, "Breathe On Me, Breath Of God," The Lutheran Book of Worship, Hymn No. 488, Stanza 1 (Minneapolis, Augsburg Publishing House, 1978).
14. Robert J. Marshall and Craig E. Johnson, op. cit., p. 137.
15. George W. E. Nickelsburg, op. cit., pp. 13-14.
16. John 11:1-53. This powerful story about the raising of Lazarus is the appointed gospel in all lectionaries on the Fifth Sunday in Lent, Series A.
17. P. V. G. Tasker, The Gospel According to Saint John, (Leicester, England, Inter-Varsity Press, 1986), p. 139.
18. Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe, (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1969), p. 69.
19. Ibid., pp. 71-72.
20. Ibid., p. 91.
