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Text: Ezekiel 37:1-14

Two weeks ago Hurricane Charley made an unexpected turn and caught most of the residents of South Florida by surprise. Ten thousand homes have been destroyed and sixteen thousand are unlivable! Hundreds of thousands of people have been without power. Many of the residents there are elderly people who took their life savings and bought house trailers along the warm coast near Ft. Myers. The hurricane was devastating to many of these people.

Someone described the scene by comparing it to a tornado. They said the damage was just as bad as a tornado, but the hurricane destroyed a path twelve miles wide!

Sarah's sister lives in Orlando and she has been giving us updates on the aftermath of the hurricane. Yesterday she sent an email that included an article from the local paper entitled, "Things we learned from Charley:"

Water is comfort food but three-day old Cheetos are too.

Air conditioning - Best Invention Ever

Gasoline is a value at any price.

You can't spell "priceless" without ice.

Shadow animals on the wall are still fun.

You can use your washing machine as a cooler.

The lifeblood of any disaster recovery is coffee.

There's a plus side to having nothing in the refrigerator.

You should never admit to having power at your house in the presence of co-workers or neighbors who don't.

SUVs are the best makeshift tents on the market.

Somebody's got it better. Obviously they are getting preferential treatment.

Somebody's got it worse.

Chain saw wielding men are nothing to be afraid of.

An oak tree on the ground looks four times as big as one standing up.

We can only imagine the impact on those poor people, especially the elderly who lost everything. They surely feel that all hope is gone. Devastation is the only word for it.

That is something of the feeling that the people of Judah must have had in our text for today. Last week I described for you the crisis of theology that their national failure presented to them. In spite of their best hopes and their faith to the contrary, Babylon had invaded their country, destroyed the walls of Jerusalem, torn down their precious Temple of God, and deported thousands of the people to Babylon. Among them as a young priest named Ezekiel who was deported with the rest of the leaders of Judah. He shared their despair and hopelessness.

But here in the last part of Ezekiel we find a message of hope. But how can they hear about hope when they are still in exile. They were in no condition to focus on hope. So God gives Ezekiel this vision.

It begins with verses that reflect his calling from chapters 1-3, "The hand of the LORD came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones."

In Clovis Chappell's sermons on this text, he concludes that Ezekiel had probably seen such a valley in his lifetime. It must not have been very unusual for a major battle to occur in a valley and the birds and wild animals got to the bodies. After months, there was nothing but bones scattered around.

Verse two says, "He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry." In order to get the full impact, God leads him round about them. He is struck both by their great number and by their extreme dryness.

God showed Ezekiel that vision of a hopeless valley because the future of Israel looked about as promising as the future of those bones. The nation had ceased to exist. It had been conquered by the Babylonian Empire and taken into exile. There was no hope for the Israelites. The glory of kings Solomon and David were long gone. The people's fate was to be refugees with no place to call their own. Their destiny lay in the hands of the captors.

Verse 11 records a little poem the people were saying, "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely." Their hope had perished and without hope, they might as well be dead.

Then God asks Ezekiel the pivotal question, "He said to me, 'Mortal, can these bones live?'" Of course, bones don't live. In modern language Ezekiel might have responded, "Right! Bones come back to life all the time!" But this question points out a basic attitude toward life. Do we have hope or despair? Many people choose despair.

"H. G. Wells once said: 'Man, who began in a cave behind a windbreak, will end in the diseased soaked ruins of a slum'" (Barclay, The Letter to the Romans, 115). In Macbeth, we find these words, "Life's but a walking shadow... a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing." Even the psalmist gives this message in one place: "All flesh is grass. The grass withers, the flower fades."

When life is examined from a certain point of view, "the glass is half empty." We have a choice of whether we see it half full or half empty. Many people choose "empty."

In one of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, entitled A Good Man Is Hard To Find, she sketches the character of an escaped convict known as "The Misfit." The Misfit is on a crime spree. He accosts a family that is out for a drive and one by one he has one of his two sons take each of them out into the woods and shoot them. First he kills the father and son, then the little girl, the mother and the baby. Finally only the grandmother is left.

The grandmother puts forth every argument she can think of to save her life. She first calls upon his sense of chivalry: "You wouldn't shoot a lady, would you?" "I would hate to have to," he replies. She then appeals to what she thinks must be The Misfit's better nature: "I just know you're a good man," she tells him. "Nome," he says, "I ain't a good man." Grasping at straws she encourages him to pray to Jesus for help: "I don't want no help," he says. "I'm doing all right by myself."

Every attempt to dissuade him fails. And in reality she knew that her arguments, her pleadings would not succeed. How did she know? Because of something he had said earlier. He had told her that he believed in a world "where the lame don't walk, the blind don't see, and what's dead stays dead." And in the end the Misfit kills her too.

What kind of world do you live in? Is a world where the glass is half empty? Is it a world where the "lame don't walk, the blind don't see, and what's dead stays dead?" In this respect he's not a misfit at all, he's right in there with most of the rest of us.

When Ezekiel was asked the question, "Mortal, can these bones life?" Ezekiel answered, "O Lord GOD, you know." It's hard to tell if this is a response of faith and confidence, or a response that tries to avoid being nailed down.

Ezekiel's answer reminds me of the trick question asked by a Oriental mystic, "Is the bird in my hand alive or dead?" If one answers "alive", the mystic crushes the bird in his hand and it is dead. If the answer is "Dead", then the mystic opens his hand and the bird flies free.

Next God says to Ezekiel, "Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD (4). I am struck by the power of preaching. This text makes it clear that it is the power of the preached Word that brings life to these bones.

In the New Testament, Paul talked about this theme in Romans 10, "But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” ...So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ" (Romans 10:14-17). It is a reminder that lives change because of the power of the preached word of God.

Some people say, "I can worship just fine while I am out hunting or fishing." There may be some truth to that but their lives are not changed because change comes when we hear the preaching of the word of the Lord.

Preaching for the prophets was a tough assignment because the crowds did not want to hear what they had to say, especially when he talked about the coming judgment. It's as if God said, "If you think the exiles are a tough crowd, let me show you something." From an audience that is emotionally and spiritually dead, Ezekiel is to move to an audience that is physically dead.

The preaching is powerful because it brings the message of hope. A true story is told of two women in a concentration camp. Gerta Klein and her best friend, Ilsie, were together in a concentration camp amid all the suffering and horror. One day Gerta was on a work detail. The weather was terrible and in the midst of all the misery that was going on around her, there she saw it! She never dreamed she would see it. But there she saw it! Right there on the ground! She picked it up and put it in her hand, found a leaf and wrapped it up, and put it in the pocket of the ragged coat she was wearing. All day long she was careful not to let anything happen to it.

At the end of the day when she got back to the concentration camp, there she bore it from her pocket. There as a gift of love, as an expression of compassion, she gave to her best friend, Ilsie, that which she had found and treasured all day long. There she bore it in her hands wrapped in a common leaf. There it was, a beautiful ripe raspberry! The raspberry was the symbol of hope that kept them going in incredibly difficult circumstances. Hope can do that!

The volunteer tutor was asked to visit a nine-year-old in a large city hospital. She took the boy's name and room number and was told by the boy's teacher that they were studying nouns and adverbs in class. It wasn't until the tutor got to the boy's room that she realized the boy was a patient in the hospital's burn unit. No one had prepared her to find a nine-year-old so horribly burned and in such great pain. She felt she couldn't just turn and leave, so gathered her courage and entered the room.

"Hi, I'm the hospital teacher," she stammered. "Your teacher asked me to help you with nouns and adverbs." And, clumsily, she launched into the lesson.

The next morning a nurse called the tutor. "What did you do to that boy?" The tutor immediately began a tearful apology, but the nurse interrupted her.

"No, no, no. You don't understand. We've been very worried about him. But since you were here, he's fighting back , he's responding to treatment. It's as though he's decided to live."

The boy explained that he had given up hope, until the tutor came. "I figured they wouldn't send a teacher to work on nouns and adverbs with a kid who's dying, would they?"

("Hope in the active voice," Connections, Solemnity of Christ the King, Nov. 1998.)

Verse 7 says, "So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone." This, of course, is the scriptural basis for that old spiritual, "Dem Bones:"

E-ze-kiel cried, "Dem dry bones!"

E-ze-kiel cried, "Dem dry bones!"

E-ze-kiel cried, "Dem dry bones!"

Oh hear the word of the Lord.

Then after the verse connecting the foot bone, the leg-bone, the knee bone, the thigh bone, the back bone, the neck bone and the head bone. The song ends with this:

Dem bones, dem bones gon-na walk a-roun'

Dem bones, dem bones gon-na walk a-roun'

Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk aroun'

Oh hear the word of the Lord

The message is, "If God can restore lifeless bones and buried bodies to life, then there are absolutely no limits to God's power. Ezekiel is here challenging his fellow exiles to view their circumstances not through their own, limited vision, but through God's eyes.

Can these bones live? Of course not. Not without the power of God. But look at this situation through God's eyes, and watch bones rushing to their appropriate partners. Watch as ligaments bind them together, flesh covers them, and skin finishes the task.

When we raise our vision to look beyond what our human eyes can see, we watch the impossible happen when we see through God's eyes.

"I can't believe my eyes," we say when we have witnessed an utterly unanticipated event.

But we can believe God's eyes, and looking through them, we can glimpse unimagined reasons to keep on hoping.

This theme of hope is picked up in the New Testament too. In Romans 8, Paul says, "But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you... If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness… If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you."

The proof of God's power to bring hope even to dry bones comes in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Surely, for Jesus' friends and family, who had pinned their hopes on him, the cross must have seemed the starkest of deaths, and the death of their hope. And yet, that instrument of death becomes for Christians of every age a powerful symbol of hope, of life beyond death, of salvation.

I remember reading years ago about a woman who was devastated by her divorce. She became so blue and despondent that she even considered suicide. But finally she left her children with her mother and took a long trip out west to think and pray. One day she found herself sitting, high up a mountain on a rock ledge, just staring into space. Suddenly, as she was praying, she realized what her eyes were focused on. She was looking at a small tree that was growing out of the crack in a huge boulder. She wondered at the ability of that tree to grown on a rock! And suddenly she realized, "If God can make a tree grow out of a rock, then surely he can bring something good out of the dryness of my life!" And she got up from that place with hope in her heart.

We have a choice in life. We can live like the Misfit of Flannery O'Connor's story - "where the lame don't walk, the blind don't see, and what's dead stays dead." Or we can be people of the Resurrection, a people who believe that hope is never lost. If God had the power to raise Jesus from the dead, then surely he has the power to bring our dead and discouraged spirits back to life again.