Dry, Dry Bones
/
The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry.
-Ezekiel 37:1
The valley of the dry, dry bones. I once took a long road trip out west, and I crossed the desert in Texas, in Arizona, in New Mexico and also Death Valley in California. I grew up in a place full of rivers, lakes and green trees, so this terrain was all new to me. It did look like deserts I had imagined, but I had not been able to imagine the complete dryness of the air, the relentlessness of the sun, the crunchiness of the ground. I had therefore not been able to fully imagine this famous story in Ezekiel, until I experienced how dry and dangerous the desert can be.
In his vision, Ezekiel looked out at a dry, dry desert and it was full of dry, dry bones. It reminded him of his beloved nation, beaten down and bruised by their exile in Babylon. Their homeland had been conquered, the temple, their common well of nourishment, had been demolished. Defeated and diminished, they felt like a pile of dry bones in a desert - a country that had lost their ultimate battle. Would they ever go home and be together again? Can these bones live?
There are periods of history that are more like dry deserts than lush green forests. People live through times of plenty sometimes, but often endure times of war, famine, storms, political division and inequity. There are also times in each of our own lives that are like dry deserts - times of illness, betrayal, abuse, poverty and grief. In such times we might well ask the same question that Ezekiel did - can these bones live? That may seem as impossible as it did to him - nothing to see here but dry, dry bones, disjointed and lifeless.
But our readings this Sunday all assert that with God, new life is always possible, no matter how impossible as that may seem. God can make new people out of dry bones. God can bring us up from our graves. You man not have any way to do that yourself, but trust God to lead you there.
When our lives or communities seem to be falling apart, we wonder if things will ever ‘go back to normal.’ We often start looking backward with a sentimentality that blinds us to both the true joys and struggles that every day holds. We can believe we know how to recover, and recovery means doing what we remembered doing before. But God’s new life seems always to be yoked to God’s ever new thing. God’s imagined future is beyond our own ability to imagine. We don’t know what new life will look like, but we can be pretty sure it won’t look the way we expect it to.
The collect of the day says, “Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found.” May we turn our hearts toward God and seek the true joys of life, which are not always the same thing as the easy fun of life. May we listen for God’s call to us, which may ask of us things we don’t think we can do. May we trust in God’s power of healing and reconciliation, which may escape the bounds of logic. May we seek the gift of abundant life that is always offered to us, by giving ourselves to God as a living sacrifice.
