Can These Bones Live

Come, Creator Spirit, and move over this chaotic world.

Come, Creator Spirit, and bring life to this world.

Come, Creator Spirit, and move over the chaos of our lives.

Come, Creator Spirit, and bring us new life. Amen.

Reading of Acts 1:1-4, Reading of Ezekiel 34:1-14 (Valley of the Dry Bones)

Have you ever felt like you were caught in a situation where there was no hope? Where you thought there was no escape? The word we often use in describing this feeling is despair.

Despair is what the Israelites were feeling. After a long siege of Jerusalem, where many of them died of starvation, the army of Babylon breached the walls many were killed, others would be taken into captivity, marched in chains from Israel to Babylon. It is here where you hear the stories from Sunday School, Daniel and his friends called upon to serve the king. Daniel in the Lions Den, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace.

Moses and the Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years. Since some of the exiles had already been in Babylon for 10 years, they would be away from their land for double the time of the wilderness 10 before the fall of Jerusalem and 70 years after.

Jeremiah would write them and tell them to live where they were planted. To pray for the people and country around them because their safety depended upon the safety of the land in which they were lived.

In the trauma they had just undergone it was hard to understand or to accept. They had watched their friends die. They had seen their farms and homes destroyed. Even the temple was in ruins. And now 70 years? They would never go back – only their grandchildren would return. How could God have done this to them? Psalm 137 begins this way:

By the rivers of Babylon— there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there we hung up our harps.

For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? Maybe some of you have been asking that very question as you felt as if you too were in exile from the church where your heart was. Yes, there were services on the internet, but how can we sing the Lord’s song in a place that isn’t the church?

So the Israelites brought to Babylon got it. Despair, it swept over them.

The problem with having no hope at all is that you give in and don’t try. And God had a plan for restoration and needed them to understand that this was not forever. So God sent Ezekiel.

In this passage the hand of the Lord sweeps Ezekiel up and places him in a valley – not just any valley, but a valley filled with dried bones of people who had died there. The valley was covered with ancient human bones, long scavenged and scattered by the beasts of the field.

As Ezekiel walked round the valley, God asked him, “Can these bones live.”

For many years, this particular passage has been impressed upon new pastors facing the work of leading the church. We look out on the congregation, sitting in the pews and ask if these are living people or just bodies. We wonder if God’s Spirit is in this place. We ask if it is possible to convince these people that the church isn’t just coming to church on Sunday, but rather that we ARE the church. How do we make these bones live?

And then the pandemic happened, and the doors were closed. And suddenly Christians were faced with the question we had been posing them with for a very long time. Am I a Christian when I can’t come to church? Am I living my faith in the world?

At the beginning, as I looked at the members of the church I wanted to answer God the same way Ezekiel did. Can these bones live without the building? “Only you know, Oh Lord.”

As your pastor, I tried to figure out ways to keep us connected. Since so many of our younger members are online, I immediately updated our Web Site to be able to feed them. From daily devotionals to written worship services, it all went up.

On Easter, we held our first Drive-in Service at Longwood, and I discovered people wanted to see video of worship. And I started going to Longwood every week and taping my sermon and uploading it. More people came.

Two weeks ago we had a test run at Range Line of a Drive in Service. I expected one or two people to show up, and was amazed to find a rather full parking lot. People were hungry. They were coming even though they had to stay in their cars, not the most comfortable place to worship. They were coming not because it is what they had always done, but because they wanted to worship in community, no matter what that community looked like.