Sermon:
September 23rd, 2007
Mid-day Service

Scripture:
Ezekiel 37:1-14 : Romans 12:5

Sometimes, I wish I could ask God a few questions. Really tough questions. Questions about war and disease and suffering. Questions about relationships and pain – personal pain, and the pain of the whole world. 

In our scripture today, we find that God may also have a question for us, as well. And if we can find a way to answer God’s question, we may find a way to live with all those other questions, as well. 

Ezekiel was a prophet who lived 600 years before the time of Christ.[1] He was taken as a captive into Babylon, along with  thousands of other people, when Israel suffered one of its worst defeats ever. As they were marched out of their homes into exile, they may have had to walk right past the bodies of their fallen army. Living in a foreign land, unable to go home, would be hard enough. Carrying the scars of what they saw would be even harder. 

After four years in exile, Ezekiel receives a vision from God. In the vision, God takes him to a painful place, a place that holds his deepest questions: It is a valley filled with bones. Ezekiel walks round and round among the bones. Perhaps he is asking, “Why such suffering? Will it ever end?” 

But God has a Question for him. God asks Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these bones live?”  This was not Ezekiel’s question.  It seemed a pointless question. But God asked it anyway. Sometimes the pointless question is the most important one. 

In 1978, young Matthew Sanford asked his doctors a pointless question. When he was 13 years old, his family was driving home from a Thanksgiving dinner, when suddenly they hit a patch of black ice. Matthew’s spinal cord was severed. The doctors thought the only question that mattered was this: Would Matthew be able to walk again? And the answer to that was no.  

But Matthew had a different question. When he woke up from his coma and learned that his father and sister had been killed, he realized right away that his family desperately needed him to live, no matter what. And for him to live, he needed to know if he was still a whole person. “I came up to the doctors and I'd say, 'Well, yeah, but I feel stuff. I feel tingling and kind of burning and itching.’” [2] 

The doctors were worried that he would think the sensations in his legs were a sign that he might walk again some day. They told him no, there were no feelings, only his imagination. Their question was a matter of science. Matthew’s question was the deeper one, a matter of life. 

Eventually, Mathew found his own answer about his wholeness, about the meaning of his life. He learned to listen deeply to his own body, and he found connections that all of us have but most of us don’t pay attention to. “One of the big healing things for me was to recognize that my paralyzed body didn't stop talking to my mind. It changed its voice. It went to a more subtle whisper that doesn't have as much clarity. It's sweeter, it's quieter.”² 

Matthew used that healing insight to build a whole new life for himself. Now he teaches yoga to people like himself. He has found meaning in showing others that they can be whole, regardless their body’s brokenness. 

When Ezekiel looked at that valley of dry bones, he saw only death and hopelessness. He remembered the painful defeat and humiliation that his people had experienced. But God asked him a different question. “Mortal, can these bones live?”  Do you believe, Ezekiel, that God can make them whole again? 

In our daily lives, God calls us again and again to the most critical questions, to the ones that make all the difference. Questions like: Can we lose our connection with God? For a little while?   Maybe for a very long time? If we have lost that connection, will it be possible to reconnect? Will it be possible to come back, to come home, to breathe again? 

“Mortal, can these bones live?” That is God’s question for Ezekiel, and for each of us. Do you have faith in me? Jesus worded the question in a slightly different way. He asked his friends, “Whom do you say that I am?” 

Ezekiel’s answer to this important question is a bit tentative, but it’s a start. He says, “O God, You know.”   

So now the ball is back in God’s court. It’s time for God’s to respond to Ezekiel’s bit of faith. But God’s answer doesn’t seem like an answer at all, not at first. Instead, God gives Ezekiel a task. Ezekiel is going to have to do something. For him, the task is to stand in the middle of the field and speak to the bones, to tell them that God will give them life.  

This is where Ezekiel has to make a leap of faith.[3] He has to decide whether to believe God or not. To follow God or not. He makes his decision, and he acts. “So I prophesied as I had been commanded.” That’s when God’s power becomes apparent. 

There is a rattling sound, and the hodge-podge of bones move towards their appropriate mates, bone to bone. Once they are touching, tendons begin to bind them together. Flesh and skin cover them and they become whole bodies again. But they still are not alive.   

So God again asks Ezekiel to do something else. To speak this time to the breath that is to be carried by the four winds. To ask the breath to breathe upon these bodies. Once again, Ezekiel acts. And the dead bodies come to life, and they stand on their feet, and there is a whole multitude of them!  

It seems to me that this is the way that God acts within our lives. God knows what is heavy on our hearts, and God cares about our questions. God cares very much about the things that cause us to be broken and hurting. And God wants to put us back together again. So God asks each of us the question, “Mortal, can these bones live?” 

Then we have to decide, like Ezekiel, how to answer the question. Do we want to be put back together? Do we want to do what God asks of us? A question of faith. A very deep question.  

But we don’t have to answer it alone. Six hundred years after Ezekiel’s vision, God came among us directly in the person of Jesus. Because of his life and death and resurrection, we experience God’s transforming grace, helping us to find our answer. 

We don’t have to answer alone, because we are called to be a part of the body of Christ; every one of us. Romans 12:5 says that we are members together of the body of Christ, and that we are members of one another. Mother Teresa said it this way, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” 

In this 12:30 service, we plan to stick together and listen together and pray for each other. We are going to look for God in traditional places, but we are going to look with fresh eyes. We are going to listen together for God’s questions. And then we are going to trust God to act. Trust God to show us the questions and the tasks that will bring us healing and hope. Trust God to breathe new life into us, week after week. “I will put my spirit in you, and you shall live.” 

At the end of the book of Ezekiel, there is a final vision. Ezekiel describes a city of hope for the exiles, as a sign that God will finally bring them home. And the city has a new name: It’s simply called “God Is There.”  In this new service, as we pray and sing and question together, may it always be said of this place, “God is there.”[4] Amen. 

One of the ways that we know that God is here is in our prayers together. Today, all of the clergy of this church would like to join together to pray for you. As they are coming, I would like to invite you to bow your heads together with me, and spend a moment sitting in the silence of God’s presence.