(prayer)
Last week, my sermon title was Consumers of Assumption and I began by telling about a the challenges I faced as a result of personal assumptions I make about the inherent goodness of people in light of the fact that our car was stolen from right in front of our house on March 23 just before 7am.
You might think that I chose today's sermon title (Something Is Missing) as a follow up to that car story. Just a coincidence. Although the car is still missing.
Our insurance company is in the process of assessing it as 'a total loss'.
My tentative sermon title for next week is Set In Motion, but, I assure you that it has nothing to do with the fact I might have purchased a new set of wheels by then.
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Ezekiel was a temple priest in Jerusalem in early 7th century BCE. Judah was in the cross hairs of King Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian Empire as it expanded toward the Mediterranean.
In 605 BCE, the newly acclaimed Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzor, laid siege to Jerusalem until King Jehoiakim to pay a tribute to the Empire solidifying Judah's subservient status as a vassal state of Babylon. Seven years later, a second siege happened after Jehoiakim refused to pay another tribute. This siege was more dramatoc and violent... Jehoiakim was killed. The new Judean king and several leaders in the government and temple hierarchies were forced into exile. Ezekiel was among this first wave of exiles in 597 BCE.
Ten years later, an attempted revolt, lead to another attack on Jerusalem, this time the city's walls were breached and the temple of Solomon which had stood for 400 years was destroyed. After the temple was laid to ruin, over the next five years more Judeans were forced to leave their homeland and eek out an existence in refugee camps by the Rivers of Babylon. Any remaining Judeans were simply assimilated into expanding Babylonian Empire.
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Ezekiel seems to have been of an eccentric figure in the history of the Exile. He was prone having vivid visions and preaching challenging sermons calling on the exiles to remain faithful to their God. Although, there was no shortage of blaming in the things Ezekiel said, he was also a prophet of promise and hope.
Even though, the northern and southern hebrew kingdoms had divided the united kingdom of King Solomon hundreds of years before Ezekiel was born and it had been 150 years since the northern kingdom was overrun and scattered by the Assyrians, Ezekiel preached a hope for a united Israel.
One day, he grabbed two sticks and said one of them was the kingdom of Israel and the other the kingdom of Judah. He held them together and said: Thus says the Lord God: I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from every quarter, and bring them to their own land. I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king over them all. Never again shall they be two nations, and never again shall they be divided into two kingdoms.
Ezekiel's message was that the Babylonian Exile was not to be the end of the Hebrew people and their nation.
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Perhaps the most well known of Ezekiel's visions was the one we heard today:
In his vision the prophet is transported to the site of an old battlefield. The corpses of the dead soldiers had been left to rot where they fell. So long had they been forgotten that all flesh was decayed and gone. Long ago, the bones had been scattered by scavengers and the wind and rain of the valley.
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God asked the prophet a rhetorical question...
Mortal! Can these bones live?
Prophesy: "Dry bones!
Hear the word of The LORD."
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Then... a sound: ק֨וֹל (qo-wl);
a rattling: רַ֔עַשׁ (ra-as), shaking as in the sound of an earthquake. It was the sound of bones clanking against bones.
Along with the sound, there was the sight of...
Toe bone connected to the foot bone
Foot bone connected to the heel bone
Foot bone connected to the heel bone
Heel bone connected to the ankle bone
Ankle bone connected to the shin bone
Shin bone connected to the knee bone
Knee bone connected to the thigh bone
Thigh bone connected to the hip bone
Hip bone connected to the back bone
Back bone connected to the shoulder bone
Shoulder bone connected to the neck bone
Neck bone connected to the head bone
Now hear the word of the Lord.
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.
Now hear the word of the Lord.
And more than bones... blood vessels, nerves, internal organs, muscles, eyeballs, hair, fingernails.
When the rattling ra-as ended... the valley floor was filled with the bodies of soldiers.
But something was missing (besides their clothes).
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Some version of the hebrew word ר֫וּחַ (ru-ah) appears eleven times in the fourteen verses we heard this morning. RU-AH can be translated as spirit and as breath and as wind.
The bodies of the valley's mighty host were restored, but there was no ru-ah in them... no breath, no spirit, no wind.
Something was missing... ru-ah.
Without ru-ah, there was no life.
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When the wind of life [the spirit of god] entered the bodies, they took air into their lungs... oxygenated blood brought muscles to life... they rose to their feet... and lined up in their columns ready for battle once again.
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The exiles in Babylon were a defeated people. They were prisoners of war left alive after the revolts and attempts to save their homeland had failed.
Even if they had wanted to, the exiles could not even begin to think about rising up against the babylonians in their current situation.
They were politicians, religious leaders, farmers, ranchers. There was no a soldier among them.
The most they could muster was a little passive resistance... refusing to entertain their captors by singing hebrew folk songs: We hung up our harps on the willow trees by the Rivers of Babylon. Our captors tormented us by asking us for "Songs of Zion". How could we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?
Psalm 137 expresses a worry (as the Exile stretched out over the coming years) that memories of life in Judah would be lost.
If (down the road) some future generation was allowed to leave Babylon, would they know anything about the former life in Jerusalem? Would they know the songs? And if they did sing them, would God even be listening?
Ezekiel believed that God was in exile with the people. Ezekiel worked hard to keep faith alive and to let it be relevant to the life of the exiles.
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The exiles had no army to win back their freedom, but Ezekiel's vision spoke of another way.
"Remain faithful."
Take in the Spirit of God and you will live... not just in the small sense that individuals would live full lives, but that as a nation, they would survive even an exile that lasted generations.
Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel.
They say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.”
Say to them,
"Thus says the LORD God:
'I am going to bring you up from your graves, and I will bring you back to the land of Israel'."
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In times of uncertainty, hope can be elusive. Anxiety about today has a knack of sapping hope right out of us. Who can focus on the future when the present is taking all of our energy?
That is how I interpreted certain political moves made in Canada and the US in recent weeks.
Public services cut, environmental regulations rolled back... all in an effort to achieve some short term gains.
Sure the impacts of climate change and the longer term well-being of people's health and education are of concern, but we can't afford to focus on them today - only this moment's bottom line matters.
Anxiety in the present makes future hope an expendable luxury.
As my go-to folk singer wrote: if the world's a box of chocolate cherries, then they can use it up and toss it away. They make it post-apocalyptic and scary to even dream about the future today.
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Is there something in your life trying to sap your hope?
Then try to think about what it is that gives you hope.
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The scriptures promise us that we are not alone. During a mountainside sermon Jesus said that - in times of grief - hope comes the form of comfort and the blessings of holy presence.
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In Ezekiel's vision today is a reminder that... unless we pull God's Spirit into us, and breathe in deeply, new life will be elusive.
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Today is the fifth Sunday in Lent. Next Sunday is Palm Sunday - the final Sunday of this season of preparation and reflection.
We still have time to Re-charge the spirit within us. To be ready to leap for joy on Easter Sunday.
It is time to swim to the surface of all that tries to keep us down and defiantly take in fresh breaths.
Let us let God's Spirit fill us.
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In a world empowered by short term thinking, we can be people of vision and deeper purpose.
When hope is set aside for a quick experience of fleeting joy, we can be holders of the stories of new life and promise.
I don't want to imply that we ignore real worries and the disappointments that many are experiencing. I just want us to not give up on a hope that God is - in the thick of it - with us.
Even worry leaves room for us to close our eyes for a second and take a deep breath. It helps. From personal experience, it has been true for me.
Can we take that beyond-the-literal and let the promise of the spirit of life fill us, as well?
I certainly hope so.
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Let us pray:
Help us to know, O God, that you are always present in our lives, daring to bring hope and challenging us to do the same. Amen.
#75VU “Spirit of Gentleness”
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