Dry Bones?

He walked past all of the fancy yachts shrink-wrapped and up on stanchions for the winter, all the way to the far corner where the derelicts were lying, exposed and rotting.

He came across a “Beetle Cat”, a particular style of boat much favored years ago for teaching children how to sail, and favored by the general sailing fans for beautiful lines and ease of handling.

But now it was a rotting hunk, rigging lying in a heap, the ribs exposed, a worthless wreck.

So the man asked the boat-yard owner what was the price, and with a laugh the yard-man gave it to him and wished him luck in hauling the mess away.

Gary Williams rebuilt the boat completely, replacing the broken ribs, adding new decking, encasing the rudder in fiberglass, painting and re-rigging the boat.

What was worthless is now a beautiful and valuable addition to the local sailing scene.

We hear the parallels between this story and the First Lesson today, the valley of he dry bones in Ezekiel's vision.

It was a scene of total destruction, with no one left even to bury the dead.

It has been so long since the battle that the bones have bleached in the sun.

The ground is white with bones.

What pain, suffering, and horror is represented by this sight.

It is just as terrible as it was 2,600 years ago in Ezekiel's time.

I've read the stories of farmers around Gettysburg still coming across bones decades after the battle.

We've seen the photos of the carnage of WWII.

And the TV brings us fresh horrors from place after place around the world with sickening regularity.

Ezekiel may have had an actual field of the dead in mind as the background for his vision.

Judah had rebelled from the Babylonian overlords, and so in 587 BC a vast army encamped around Jerusalem after having systematically destroying every other fortified town in the realm.

The archeological evidence of those fires is everywhere.

The army surrounded the city and starved it for two years, and finally attacked.

At the end of the battle there was nothing left.

Everything was burned or destroyed, and everyone was either dead or dragged off to exile/slavery in Babylon.

It was a scene of total destruction, with no one left even to bury the dead.

Sitting in exile in Babylon, Ezekiel and others could only weep.

It is not just the bones for which they cry: the bones become the symbol for all of their hopes.

How is it that God is keeping his promises to us? They ask.

--there were the promises to Abraham of land, descendants, and being a blessing to the world.

--there was the promise to David of an everlasting kingship that would spring from him.

--there is the promise of God to the people right at the beginning of the Ten Commandments: I am the Lord your God.

What about all these things?

Has God simply gone back on his word?

Has God abandoned us? Does he care?

Should we bother? What hope is there?

Behold our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off.

Psalm 137 paints the sad scene:

By the waters of Babylon we sat and wept and on the willows there we hung our lyres.

For our captors force us to sing, they torment and taunt us:

“Sing one of the songs of Zion!”, one of the pilgrimage psalms that you used to sing on your way to the Temple in Jerusalem.

How can we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?

Does God's power extend to Babylon?

Does he have any power at all, since he allowed Jerusalem to be destroyed?

Can these bones live?

Ezekiel's response to the Lord's question is circumspect: O Lord, you know.

The Lord's word of promise proves to be effective.

In the vision the bones come together, and life is breathed into them.

It is clear that it is not due to the bones themselves, but to the power from outside, the creative Word of God himself.

The Lord dealt in just that same way with the dead hopes of Israel.

He raised up prophets like Ezekiel to keep the remembrance of the promise alive.

They told the old stories again and again, wrote them down, codified the old laws....

They remembered and anticipated that God had not forgotten his people and would yet do a fresh thing with them, which was fulfilled in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

The promise is not in vain, because we have the sample of God's final intention for life in our resurrected Lord.

Do we encounter parallels of Ezekiel's vision in our congregation and in ourselves?

Do we too have piles of dry bones?

Such places include the rooms where various of our members are struggling against deadly disease.

It is very hard to see positive things there.

What does hope mean there?

What is our prayer? ...keep things the way they are....or restore them to what they were 5 or 50 years ago?

No, our prayer is now, as it is at all other times, “O Lord, do your new thing with our brothers and sisters who are ill, and with us.

Show us the fulfillment of your promise, and give us an appetizer now to sustain us until you call us in for supper.”

We could repeat exactly the same analysis of the last five sentences as we face the anxieties of the Reconciliation Panel and its work among us in these weeks.

What is positive? What does hope mean? What is our prayer?

O Lord, do your new thing with us, and sustain us as things move toward your fulfillment.

We could repeat the analysis in other situations as well, such as someone caught in a deadly routine, or a mind-numbing sort of job, or a long-term care-giving situation with no respite, where the person does the same things over and over, with the same drudgery, the same squabbles, the same disappointments day after endless day.