Can these bones live?

 

Ezekiel 37: 1-14
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
May 23, 2021 – Pentecost

Does anyone have visions anymore? When was the last time you had a vision? And I don’t mean an idea or a goal or a plan or even a daydream. This is nothing over which any of us has control. It comes unbidden, unannounced, like that wind, a force of nature, that grabs Ezekiel and lands him in a valley filled with bones. I question that perception, that trope of creativity paired with suffering—Sylvia Plath, Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton—and yet prophets and truthtellers are also often born out of tumult, oppression, marginalization; to not only to shake us up and show us how we’ve gone wrong but also how we might go forward with justice toward wholeness.



Ezekiel was a prophet born of suffering in exile in Babylon, and the imagery in his visions, much of it mystical and disturbing, reflected the catastrophic reality of his people. Eugene Peterson in his introduction to the book of Ezekiel reminds us that people respond to catastrophe often in two ways: denial and despair. People time and again refuse to acknowledge their suffering and the suffering of others by taking refuge in distractions, lies, and fantasies. Or people are overwhelmed by their suffering and resign themselves to the world ending, unwilling to do anything to alleviate or mitigate the trauma of the catastrophe. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

And yet in these visions Ezekiel witnessed God working through and in and with the catastrophe, this time of exile and captivity. It wasn’t exactly a silver lining but a richer reality, a deeper truth, like a quantum universe within the observable one. To those who were in denial, Ezekiel declared that yes, there was a catastrophe and yet God had not abandoned them to it. God was active and available, a very present help in trouble as the psalmist put it. To those who were in despair, those who had lost everything and saw no hope, Ezekiel assured them that God was in the wreckage and rubble of their lives and through them God would rebuild what had been destroyed. Ezekiel was the voice, the vision that got God’s people through the worst of their devastation.



After the past few years on top of centuries of racial and economic injustice, civic unrest and protest, egregious policies against the LGBTQ community, and now more violence between Israel and Palestine in the midst of a global pandemic, this passage from Ezekiel seems a more appropriate text for this Pentecost. The Church needs more than fresh winds of the Spirit. Reforming what was will not cut it. The flames dancing over our heads are not tiny and non-threatening. The climate emergency is our next catastrophe. We are at a crucial turning point, and there is no going back. Black, queer, body-positive activist Sonya Renee Taylor wrote, “We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was never normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.”

The question before us is, can these bones live? Though the bones of Christianity or of the Church or each of us a bone in this Body may be intact, we are changed nonetheless. And so the sinews—the connections; the muscles—the strength; the skin and features—how we present and engage: all these will be different. When we return to the building we will be a hybrid church: some of us will be in the building and some of us will be online. We will be the New Ark United Church of Christ wherever there are people engaging with us and us with them.



As we emerge from these past fourteen months, from isolation and fatigue and so many deaths, we will need to acknowledge our losses and grief and what has been revealed in this time. Theology professor David Fitch of Northern Seminary posted on Facebook that there are five needs we are called to tend to as we ‘come out of COVID’:



There are those who have suffered broken relationships revealed by the isolation of COVID: we will need spaces for relational connection.



There are those who have been questioning and deconstructing their faith after many of the structures of our faith communities were not available to us during COVID: we will need spaces for deconstruction and discernment.



There are those who are angry and rageful at the various coercions and abuse in their lives, including racism, sexual abuse, misogyny, all of which were exacerbated during the pandemic: we will need spaces to lament and to disentangle the bitterness and the hostilities.



There are those who are exhausted from the constant grind of having to move through the blunt challenges of COVID: we will need spaces to rest, to give thanks and honor God’s sustaining power, the resources that brought us thus far and that give us hope for the future.



All of us have grief over the loss of family, friends, economic security, almost 600,000 people to COVID in our country alone, our illusion of certainty and control: we will need spaces to grieve and give one another comfort.



Perhaps most important, as one of you pointed out to me, we are awakening to more of the Church’s structural and systemic hypocrisies and the trauma associated with those failures: we will need space in every aspect of the Church for the Church to confess its wrongs, its hubris and repent for the harm it has caused. And some will view this church as a safe space where these needs could be met.

In 1979 this church began without a building and purposefully remained that way for more than a decade. Thirty years ago, the future of this church became bricks and mortar. Now we will be both a church with a building and without a building. Our notions, our very theologies of what makes us a Body, a covenanted community will be changed in ways we can’t quite imagine as yet. Rather they will be revealed as we ask hard questions of ourselves.



What does it mean to be a member or a participant of a church you never set foot in?



Church life already consists of many moving parts; now we’re adding even more. We will make mistakes and missteps. How will we respond to the inevitable discomfort and disappointment?



More and more we are an aging congregation and our ability to do the work of Church is shrinking. In the next year there will be several openings in leadership roles because many of our leaders have served long enough. If our purpose is not institutional survival but authentic, transformative, justice-seeking relationships, how do we share this good word?  How do we call forth new leaders?  Is our current model even sustainable?

What brought you to this community? What keeps you here? More importantly, who keeps you here? We all are here for similar reasons and some very different ones too. More and more the world is telling us that it doesn’t need religion to be good, moral, ethical, just, or kind, but it cannot be those things without community—covenanted community that declares “I am willing to disrupt my life for you”. The demands of empire exploit and demand the disruption of our lives. In a covenant community, the disruption of our lives is an offering—not only for ourselves but for the sake of the whole. What brings us together is what makes these bones live, which is the power of what we can do together.

Amen.



Benediction – adapted from “Pentecost” by William Blake


May the eye catch fire,
so God will be seen.

May the ear catch fire,
so God will be heard.

May the tongue catch fire,
so God will be named.

May the heart catch fire,
so God will be loved.

May the mind catch fire,
so God will be known.

May the Body in all its beauty and weakness catch fire,
so God will move and dance, have agency and passion.