Hope for Uncertain Times [Lent 5]

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Last week was the first week we posted video of the liturgy and the sermon to our YouTube channel.  And the response was overwhelming.  I don’t mean to the prayers or to my sermon.  I mean that we have the most passionate group of armchair quarterbacks I’ve ever seen when it comes to camera angles, lighting, and video editing!  Some loved the profile view camera angle; some hated it.  Some loved the stained glass background for the sermon video; some found it really distracting.  So I look forward to annoying you in slightly different ways this week.  And I’m confident I’ll hear all about it!

 

Ok let’s come to today’s reading.  This weird dream is a gift from God to us.  It is a gift of hope in uncertain times.  During Ezekiel’s lifetime, Israel had given up all hope of returning to their homeland.  We too are finding it hard to live with hope.  We too find ourselves in an uncertain moment.  We are anxious and unsettled.  We’re uneasy and out of step with our familiar routines.  We’re missing our friends and loved ones.  We’re worried about work and finances and how long these restrictions will be part of our lives.  I think that Ezekiel’s strange dream is God’s gift to people like us who need hope when our lives feel uncertain.

Ezekiel tells us about a dream or vision he has “in the Spirit.”  Ok, so this is some sort of God-authored, Spirit-inspired dream.  And because Ezekiel is sharing it with the rest of us, we can only assume that this was not some private hallucination, but a gift given for us.  So the Lord leads Ezekiel around and around in a valley full of dry bones.  You can’t put one foot in front of the other without kicking a skeleton.  This is a scene of utter despair, hopelessness, and death.  The situation at this point is irreversible and irredeemable.

Then matters go from somber to bizarre.  The Lord says to Ezekiel, “start preaching.”  “What?” asks Ezekiel.  “Start preaching?  Why?  To whom?”  “I want you to start preaching to the bones.  I want you to give your best sermon to these scattered skeletons.”

This strikes Ezekiel as an odd request.  But we’re in the middle of a dream, so let’s just go with this, ok?  So he starts preaching to the valley full of dry bones.  And when he does, the bones begin to rattle and move, slowly they gather and organize themselves back into recognizable skeletal form.  He keeps preaching.  Now these skeletons are clothed in tendon, sinew, and flesh.  Ezekiel pauses here, but God tells him to keep preaching.  “Preach now to the winds or spirits from the four corners of the earth.”  He does so and a gust of spirit blows through the valley and fills the bodies with breath.  They stand on their feet, alive and awake and ready to praise - an entire army of God’s people rescued from death and decay.

Like Ezekiel, I’ve preached to some pretty tough crowds.  I can preach when people are sleeping.  I can preach while people are on their phones.  I can preach when kids are wiggling and crying and crawling under pews.  I can preach when certain members in the balcony wander off to refill their coffee.  I can preach when it’s bad weather and there are only a few people here.  I can even preach when the lighting isn’t right and the camera angle is suboptimal!  But there’s one thing I’ve never done, and that’s preach in a cemetery.  I’ve never tried to raise the dead.  But that’s exactly what happens in this vision.

In this dream, the bones are a picture of God’s people in distress.  It’s an image for people who feel like life has “dried up” and all “hope is lost.”  It’s an image for people who feel “cut off” from what matters most.   

The graphic I chose for this weekend is not quite a valley full of bones.  There was lots of imagery available online.  But to be honest most of that imagery was too scary for young children, and maybe not quite what we adults need right now either.  Instead, I chose an image of a bright yellow flower against the background of dry, cracked soil.   For me, that image better captures our hope that God will bring us through difficult times. 

I don’t mean that God will perform magic.  I don’t mean that God will protect us and our loved ones from illness and infection.  And I don’t mean that God will fix everything wrong with us.  But I do trust in God’s promises to be good to us even when everything around us feels uncertain.  I do trust in God’s promises that we have a future where we’re loved and connected to others even when we can’t yet see the shape of that future.

Let me spend the next few minutes on a few questions for you to discuss – just pause the video anytime you want to talk, pray, reflect or journal.

Cultivating Awareness (in times of uncertainty)

This pandemic means that all of us are living through a situation for which we weren’t prepared.  These are uncharted waters.  Our familiar rhythms and routines have been interrupted by a crisis.  And so now everything feels jostled and disjointed.  The frameworks we had for moving through our day and our week have been taken from us.  And now we are in a fundamental situation of uncertainty.  We aren’t quite sure how be at home; how to parent; how to lead; how to identify and deal with the strong and strange feelings that emerge within us.  Here are some questions that can help us cultivate a deeper awareness of how our bodies, hearts, and minds are responding to this uncertainty. 

·      Do you tend to dismiss the crisis as overblown or do you tend to catastrophize and exaggerate towards doomsday scenarios?

·      Are you keeping to your regular rhythms of times to go to sleep and time to wake, or do you find yourself drifting towards a less predictable schedule? 

·      Are you sitting and staying inside more than usual, or are you keeping yourself frenetic and busy in a way that makes it difficult to rest and relax?  

·      Are you consuming allegedly breaking news all day long, or are you getting what you need in small doses so that you can enjoy activities that are more meaningful and that help reduce your stress? 

·      Do you find yourself eating too much, or do you find yourself forgetting to eat? 

·      Are you staying connected to others via email, phone, text, or social media, or are you hunkering down, hibernating, and isolating? 

Cultivating the Imagination (in times of uncertainty)

This dreamlike vision of the valley of dry bones reminds us that faith is always imaginative.  Hope is always artful.  Pictures and colors and sounds and movements are as important to our life with God as are holy texts, important beliefs and loving actions.  So -- is your faithful imagination turned on? 

I want to encourage you to find things that stimulate your sense of wonder.  One of my favorite authors, Hilary Mantel, just came out with The Mirror and the Light, the third book in a trilogy about King Henry VIII.  So I’m rereading the first two novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.  I love the reformation and renaissance period.  So these historical novels are an absolute delight for me.  I get to escape completely into another world for an hour or two.  But it’s not just that.  It’s also that this journey into an alternative world let’s me come back to my own life with fresh eyes and new questions.

Ezekiel’s imaginative imagery can fuel our own creativity as people of faith.  We have a couple of art pieces in our house that we made with our kids.  We like them, but they’re just ideas we stole from others.  The first piece is just a bunch of scrap lumber painted in colorful horizontal stripes.  I’m embarrassed to tell you that we saw a piece like this hanging behind the cash register of a JCrew store.  I took a picture.  And on one rainy day when our kids were driving us batty, we sent them down into the basement and had them each paint their own boards.  The second piece is just as simple.  It’s a standard sized piece of plywood I bought at the lumber yard for $16.  We cut a hole in the wood, burned it and painted it.  We saw a piece like this in Kemper Art Museum in Kansas City.  

Sometimes when we’re stressed we lose our playfulness, our creativity and flexibility.  So I guess I’m encouraging you to borrow what you need from Ezekiel’s dream and see where it leads you.

Just one more note before we leave this practice of cultivating the imagination.  Ezekiel’s vision is framed as a Spirit-inspired dream.  Paying attention to our dreams and daydreams is an ancient way of staying open and alert to what’s going on in our own lives.  What if in your dreaming or daydreaming there is a hint, a suggestive possibility, an unturned stone, the faintest trace of God’s Spirit speaking to you in the depths of your life?  Are you paying attention to your dreams and daydreams?  You might want to journal about them.  Or reflect on them prayerfully.  Don’t judge your dreams – just hold them up to the light, turn them round and round.  Just be curious, ask what this dream might suggest about your desires and strengths. 

Cultivating Patience (in times of uncertainty)

I have been testifying to the power of Ezekiel’s dream.  But the truth of the matter is that it was a promise.  The dream carries God’s promise to reconnect the exiles back to home, but that promise doesn’t happen immediately.  Ezekiel’s people have to cultivate patience as they wait for the promises of God’s goodness to take shape in their lives.

We bought our house last year and we had the worst yard in the whole neighborhood.  It was uneven, patchy, weedy, just a mess.  It’s nothing but crabgrass and henbit.  And this year . . . we still have the worst yard in the neighborhood.  You see, I love working in the yard. And I did lots of work last year.  And I’ve already got a plan for what needs to be done this year.  Last fall we planted tulips by our driveway.  We put the bulbs into the cold dark earth and waited patiently.  And just now they’re beginning to emerge.  So I’m learning patience.  By cultivating patience, we keep our lives focused on things that matter, we refuse to be deflected off course, even though we know we are only planting seeds that require a wait before we see any results.

How can you cultivate patience during this difficult time?  How can you learn to wait, to restrain your need for instant gratification?  How can you leverage your energy into the healthy habits that will enable you to flourish in the future?

Cultivating Hope (in times of uncertainty)

Right now we’re so caught in the urgency and newness of adjusting to change, it’s hard to lift our eyes and see anything different.  But Ezekiel imagines dead bones reclothed in tendon, sinew, skin and filled with breath.  So look out beyond this month.  What will it feel like to come out of this?  What will it feel like to re-enter the freedom of movement, the freedom of friendship, the freedom of gathering and touch and closeness?  When this is all over, what’s the first thing you’ll want to do?

Friends, we are in the thick of the Lenten season.  We are on our way into the reality of pain and and loss with a God who keeps trying to teach us that love and sticking together is what matters most.  There is a future filled with goodness.  There is a future where our dry bones rattle together, take on flesh and begin to breathe.  There is a future when we will be together again.  We’re not quite to Easter Sunday.  But we can already begin to feel our hearts rise with anticipation as we make our way through the valley of death towards the light of resurrection hope.  We can’t be physically together right now.  But God’s Spirit weaves among and between us, filling us with breath and hope as we wait.  Go with God’s peace this week.