Open the Graves (Pictures of Hope)

Ezekiel 37:1-14 ( A sermon shared with Christ Church United Methodist, March 29, 2019)

S.D.G.

Open the Graves!

The poet Wendell Berry once wrote:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come to the peace of wild things 

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light.  For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

(The Peace of Wild Things, by Wendell Berry)

This poem points us to sign posts of hope when all feels lost.  For the poet, it is nature, God’s good creation, that reminds of a hope waiting to spring forth…and I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light…the light unseen, just waiting to spring forth.

In these strange times of COVID-19, I have been asked by numerous persons, Where is God midst of all this?  I have heard some on news and social media wonder if this has been caused by God as a way of punishment for some wrongs we have committed as a people.  Others have wondered if this is the end of all things and God is just finished with us humans.   In our great search for answers, there is an underlying fear that God has abandoned us, rejected us, forsaken us for one reason or another.  

The prophet Ezekiel felt that way, too.  He was a priest in the Temple in Jerusalem around the year 600 B.C. when the Babylonians invaded Palestine like a strange virus and changed everything.  Society and the economy had collapsed, the Temple was destroyed and abandoned, leaders made bad decisions, people like Ezekiel were hauled away to refugee camps in Babylon, quarantined from the people and the places they called home.  They were the lucky ones, others were left to starve and struggle in the ruins of the city.  Everything had collapsed and Ezekiel and the people are having something of an existential crisis, wondering if God had completely abandoned them.  

This despair is very present in Ezekiel’s writing.  As you read, there are parts where he is bitter and biting.  He is critical of the Hebrew people, critical of foreign countries that have made their lives so miserable.  He conveys the honest cries/laments of the Hebrew people, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope has perished.  We are completely finished!” 

Look at the first line of today’s passage, though.  Ezekiel says, “The Lord’s power OVERCAME me”.  In the midst of Ezekiels grief and despair, his bitterness, God interrupts him and gives him a vision to share.  How easy it is to stay stuck in criticism and despair, but God is leading Ezekiel to something more.  

Next God asks Ezekiel, how these dead bones that he is seeing in his vision (which symbolize the lives and pain of the Hebrew people) will ever be able to live again.  We catch a glimpse of Ezekiels despair when he says, “Only you know God…I have no idea”.  I have felt that way before, what about you?

God then commands Ezekiel to prophesy, to proclaim resurrection and new life to a people that feel like dead dry bones.  God says to Ezekiel, tell them “I am about to put breath in you, and you will live again.”  Now...this is a hard task.  God commands Ezekiel to both trust in a future he can’t yet see and then proclaim that hope to others.  So he begins the hard work of a prophet.  It is no small task to proclaim life to those who feel dead.  The fear and darkness so easily quench any sense we have of hope.  We almost become angry and frustrated towards those who proclaim something more than the bitterness and reality of pain.  

Yet, Ezekiel does what God commands and ever so slowly and gradually, things begin to happen (we usually want God to work fast, on our time table, to minimize how long we live in discomfort and uncertainty), but slowly the dry bones receive signs of life.  In time God breathes into them and the people come alive again, but in a new way.  I am opening your graves…says God!

I wonder how that speaks to you today.  How is God opening graves in your life?  How in your pain and fear might you be trying to keep that door closed?  

Perhaps this time of altered ways of living invites us to be reflect on our lives.  How will God ask us to live again on the other side of all of this?  What in our lives needs to stay?  What needs to go, to change?  I think if we simply go back to how things were before, in our individual and our corporate lives, we will miss something important.  I am learning that I need to stop choosing busyness over things that God calls me to:  time for prayer, reading and writing.  I too easily choose busyness over things like this.  While some need to perhaps use less social media, I had to learn how to use it more in this time…to try not to be emotionally distant when we must be physically distant.  Life will be different on the other side of all this…and that is the hard thing about new life…it is never a return to what was, but a birth into something new.  I am opening your graves, God says today.

What I love most about Ezekiel’s story is that in the bitterness of criticism and despair.  God called him to more.  God called him to know hope and then to proclaim that to a people who were very afraid and distrusting of it.  Ezekiel really lives into this calling.  He is so captured with God’s hope that one of the last things he does is to give a visual tour of what the new temple in Jerusalem is going to look like.  Mind you, there is nothing of the Temple in Jerusalem but rubble, but Ezekiel paints a mental picture of what the new temple, what hope, will one day look like, everything down to the furniture, rooms and measurements.  It is terribly boring to read until you realize that he is giving them hope, a detailed mental picture of a future they can’t yet see.  

This morning, in this time of COVID-19, how might God want to use you to paint a picture of hope?  How might God be using you to open someone else’s grave?

What is required in all of this though, is a deep trust that God is working.  I don’t believe God ordained or caused this or is using at as punishment or to scare us about the end of the world.  I can’t explain all of the “why’s” but what I do know from the God of the Bible is that God will make good out of it…and it will feel like dry dead bones coming to life…and graves being opened.  We will not be the same on the other side…but that is the beauty of new life.

I want to finish with a favorite hymn today.  It is a relatively new hymn and Pastor Monique mentioned it in morning prayers this week.  Hymn of Promise, as it is aptly named, was written by Natalie Sleeth and was played at the funeral of her husband, a United Methodist pastor and professor, who died after a long battle with cancer.  In difficult moments in my own journey I have found great hope in its words.  I believe it speaks to us today, like Ezekiel proclaiming new life to dry bones…

In the bulb there is a flower;

In the seed, an apple tree;

In cocoons, a hidden promise: butterflies will soon be free!

In the cold and snow of winter

There's a spring that waits to be,

Unrevealed until its season,

Something God alone can see.

There's a song in every silence,

Seeking word and melody;

There's a dawn in every darkness, bringing hope to you and me.

From the past will come the future; what it holds, a mystery,

Unrevealed until its season,

Something God alone can see.

In our end is our beginning;

In our time, infinity;

In our doubt there is believing;

In our life, eternity,

In our death, a resurrection;

At the last, a victory,

Unrevealed until its season,

Something God alone can see.

Like dry bones coming alive!

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.