There Will Be Life

Ezekiel 37:1-14

Mortal, can these bones live?

O Lord God, you know.

The vision of Ezekiel reads like a ghost story, or the plot of a zombie movie. Ezekiel finds himself in a vast valley, and as far as the eye can see, the ground is covered with bones. These bare skeletons are everywhere, and Ezekiel notes that they are very dry, bone dry, if you will. That detail matters because it is a marker of time. The bones are bare, meaning the bodies to which they belonged have long since returned to the dust. They have been exposed to the elements for long enough that every drop of moisture, every last sign of life has been drawn out by the heat of the sun. Not only are these bones dead, Ezekiel wants us to understand that they are dead-dead. These people have been gone a long, long time.

Mortal, can these bones live?

It feels a bit like a trick question. On the one hand, Ezekiel knows that these bones have no life in them, there is nothing left. On the other hand, this is God asking, and God can breathe life into dust and clay and a spare rib. Either way Zeke answers, he might be equal parts correct and incorrect, so he chooses a third way, an answer that he knows is always true. O Lord God, you know.

But Ezekiel isn’t off the hook, even if he gave a clever answer to the Lord’s question. God gives him a task, one that might have offended or drawn laughter from anyone but a true prophet. Prophesy to these bones, Ezekiel. If God told me to go outside and preach an off-the-cuff sermon to the gravestones outside, I think I would ask some follow-up questions. But Ezekiel is much more accustomed to the strange stirrings of the spirit, and so he does what he is told.

You shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.

Suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. At the sound of the prophet’s voice, upon hearing the name of the Lord, bodies form from the dust. Where there was desolation, there is now potential. Where there was emptiness, there are now lungs to be filled. Where there was death, life is on the brink of being. Ezekiel was in a valley full of dry jumbles of bone, and now he is surrounded by the bodies of a vast multitude. But there was no breath in them.

The Hebrew word for breath, ruach, is also used to mean life, and spirit. The ruach of God moved over the waters at the beginning of creation, and the ruach of God is what filled the lungs of Adam and Eve, and the ruach of God is what descended upon the apostles 50 days after the resurrection of Christ. Ezekiel’s preaching has inspired the new creation, but without God’s breath, life is not possible.

“Come from the four winds, O ruach” and the breath came into them, and they lived.

Mortal, can these bones live?
With the Spirit of God, they will. With the breath of God, they do.

This prophecy was first for the whole house of Israel, for a people who had been separated from their homes and their families and forced to flee or face death at the hands of an Empire. The people to whom Ezekiel first spoke these words were a people in desolation, people who had lost everything and were afraid they were losing the sacred connection with their God as well. Ezekiel’s first audience were grieving the death of the lives they knew, and they felt completely cut off from life.

God promises through the prophet that this death and desolation is not the end of the world, or even the end of their story. God promises in the valley of the shadow of death that even when all hope seems lost, when nothing is left but dry fragments of memory, the day of resurrection will come.

When the disciples lost Jesus, they thought death had won. When Jesus ascended into heaven, the disciples feared that they would be completely cut off. When the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples on the day of Pentecost, they were gathered behind closed doors, frozen in grief and confusion, too afraid to take the Gospel message into a world that had caused them such pain. But the breath of God did not leave them there. The breath of God filled the entire house, and then it filled each and every one of them with new life and the power of the Spirit. Like the dry bones, they were reanimated, reformed and revived for a new and renewed purpose. This is how the Church was born, when life breathed into what looked dry and empty and finished. The same promise that was made to Ezekiel was kept on Pentecost, that God has spoken and will act. The promise that when God speaks, there will be life.

This promise belongs to us too, a Word for God’s church today.  The breath of God, God’s animating spirit, will not leave us dry and hollow, but will instead fill us and revive us in body and spirit. Even when all else has failed us, God promises that we shall live. There are many who look at the attendance trends and the demographic changes and the empty pews of American churches, and they see a valley of dry bones that cannot live. But we know better. We know that God has promised that wherever death comes, resurrection and life will follow. We know what God can do with dry bones, and so we need not be afraid.