Sermon 4-10

"Energy in the Spirit"
Ezekiel 37:l-14

Like me, do you ever struggle with being too busy?  Would you like to spend more time in the garden, or with friends, or in prayer?  But do you instead find yourself caught up once again in the myriad activities of life, those unchosen, urgent, seemingly endless tasks?  And once again at the end of a long day there you are weary and unfulfilled. Your dreams seem to be lying dead in some far away cemetery. “God,’ you beg, “Please, can’t I have just one day to myself, for myself?”  Don’t you imagine that God is as tired of hearing this complaint as you are of repeating it?

Sister Joyce Rupp wrote a poem about this situation as a spiritual state.

Tiredness grounds me into a quiet stupor of the spirit
I yearn to be inspired, to be lifted up, set free beyond the place of deadness.
The struggle goes on, however, and you and I, God,
we exist together with seemingly little communion
yet in the deepest part of me, I believe in you, perhaps more strongly than ever.
I am learning you as a God of silence, of darkness, deep and strong.
I do not wrestle anymore, only wait, only wait for you to bring my dry bones
into dancing once again.

Turn now to Ezekiel with his vivid tale of the dry bones, those very dry bones.  Bones were often associated with stamina or energy.  Metaphorically the dry bones Ezekiel was looking at were his own people, the former residents of Jerusalem who had been deported after the  Babylonians conquered it in 598 BC.  Their homes had been plundered, their leaders killed, their livelihood gone, their king captured and their temple destroyed.  Ezekiel himself had lost his wife.  Now a year later the Israelites found themselves a captive people in Babylon a long way from Jerusalem and very homesick. These exiles were dry bones; they lacked any hope for the resuscitation of their kingdom of Israel. 

Have you ever felt like a heap of dry bones?  Falling apart?  Broken up?  Wiped out?  Spiritually a long way from home?  Do we sometimes need low times to rattle us enough turn to God?  Can there be hope in dryness?

For Ezekiel, those bones out there on the plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers were both an opportunity because of their number and a challenge due to their dryness.  When the Lord asked  him, Ezekiel didn’t know what could be done with the bones.  The Lord told Ezekiel to repeat the Lord’s promises to the Israelites.  He did and the dry bones were resuscitated by the breath, or spirit, of God.  

Eugene Peterson in The Message translates the resuscitation this way:

God, the Master, told the dry bones, 'Watch this: I'm bringing the breath of life to you and you'll come to life. I'll attach sinews to you, put meat on your bones, cover you with skin, and breathe life into you. You'll come alive and you will realize that I am God.

This restoration of life foretells the Easter story.  And the Easter story is our story.  Can our dry bones live?  After our particular dark night of the soul, what do we need to restore our physical and spiritual energy? 

• We need daily silence in prayer or meditation - time to let the tensions, the thoughts and emotions to settle out.  We need times of inner stillness where the voice of the Holy Spirit, the breath of God, can be received. 
• We need time to appreciate the beauty that is around us in nature, especially in  this season of the year – time to drink in the life and promise of creation.  We need time to experience the beauty of expression and of character in others.  Music and poetry, too, have restorative powers.
• We need time to love. We need the free attention to forgive ourselves and others.  We need time to experience the God within calling us to nurture one another.
• We need time to develop a relationship with our source of life.  We need to practice turning to God everyday, not just when our bones are getting dry.

Perhaps a dry bones feeling is really a gift calling us to pay attention to that which we have neglected for too long.  What would archeologists deduce about our diets and habits from a study of our dry bones?  What would we discover about our spiritual diet and habits from a study of our spiritual bones?  Were we deficient in prayer, beauty or love?  Did we walk upright with our God or bent over burdened by sin?

Paul stated this problem clearly in the passage we heard from Ephesians:

You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived,
following the course of this world.(Eph 2:1)

Sin, of course is anything that separates us from God or one another.  That’s a situation that inevitably weighs heavily on us spiritually.  It saps our physical and emotional energy.  When our self-generated energy runs out, it’s time to plug into the Source.  In numerous places in the Hebrew scriptures God is described as the breath of life.  When we allow God to breathe into us, our separation from God disappears.  This is the same breath and spirit that resurrected Christ and the same one invoked in our baptisms.

There is tremendous hope in this story.  The breath of God is always there.  Dryness comes from holding our breath, from not letting God in.   What are the possibilities for the dry bones we see around us?  Ezekiel was not alone in pointing to the possibilities for his people in exile.  Nor was he alone in asserting that God would respond in new ways to their situation. The newness and possibilities are reminiscent of other places in the prophetic literature where the new is envisioned. Isaiah is quite explicit in owning this newness:

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43:19).

The promise of new life means accommodating a new way for God to be at work in the world.  New life is the place where hope transforms the Spirit-less what is into the Spirit-full what can be.   Here’s a story from Parade magazine to illustrate:

Edwin Land, the self-made millionaire who invented instant film, transformed the lives of a sixth-grade class in East Harlem.  Mr. Land had been asked to speak to a class of 59 sixth-graders.  What could he say to inspire these students, most of whom would drop out of school?  He wondered how he could get these predominantly minority children even to look at him.  Scrapping his notes, he decided to speak to them from his heart.  "Stay in school," he admonished, "and I'll help pay the college tuition for every one of you." At that moment the lives of these students changed. For the first time they had hope. Said one student, "I had something to look forward to, something waiting for me. It was a golden feeling." Nearly 90 percent of that class went on to graduate from high school. 

The gift of new life like this is a consequence of the breath of the Divine.  The Spirit breathes on us together as well as individually.  And now, since Ezekiel is dead, I’ll do some prophesizing.  If there are dry bones in this congregation, if hope is lacking, if energy is drained, we have both a challenge and an opportunity, just as the Israelites did in 597 BC.  Yet the spirit is still here; the promise is still here.  We can still breathe.

“I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live,” says the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Amen