Ezekiel 37 (NRSV)

We are all deeply impacted by this awful Covid-19 virus. If not directly, well, by all sorts of indirect effects. We continue to pray for the sick, their superstar care-givers, those in both formal and informal leadership guiding us through this pandemic as well as all of their, and our, precious families. We understand the need for social distancing and isolation and are all doing our best to adhere to the guidelines as laid out. But we do recognize how very difficult it is to be cut off from community. Please remember that we, your church family, are just an email or phone call away from one another and are very willing to connect. We are also offering these opportunities for online worship uploaded each Sunday at 10.00am on our website and Facebook.

God’s got this, and God is with us, we are not alone.

In today’s reading we host Ezekiel’s vision of God’s Spirit moving through a valley of dry bones, bringing life from what seemed to be so very dead. It’s a vision filled with hope and promise… 

1The hand of the Lord came upon me, and brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, they were very dry. 3 He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?”

Ever felt like that?  Are you tempted NOW to feel like that? As we look at our circumstances, how do we feel physically…? mentally/emotionally…? spiritually…? We may find ourselves at that almost desperate point of exasperation: …can these bones live? ”I answered, “O Lord God, you know.”  ‘God-only-knows’

This virus which is destroying so much of what we know – leaving so much forever changed in its wake. Can there be life after so much seems to be ending? Our energy levels? Our spirituality? Our sense of meaning & purpose? Isolation is hard! Solitary confinement is among the worst of human experience! Eroding, soul-destroying…

4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. 5 Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath[a] to enter you, and you shall live. 6 I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath[b] in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

Ezekiel is pointing to the absurdity that we are given to believe as those who follow THE ONE whose specialty is RESURRECTION – even Jesus Christ! 

It was somewhere in the mid-6th Cent BCE – and Ezekiel was speaking to the people of Judah in Babylonian exile. A Biblical Archaeological Society[i] blog describes how life in Babylon was actually pretty good. They lived well – they were comfortable, perhaps TOO comfortable. Fairly recent archaeological evidence suggests that many were even pretty wealthy. The challenges Ezekiel addresses here had much less to do with their physical suffering as with their being drawn away from their God-given identity and purpose! They’d forgotten who they were, why they existed.

In their 70 year/three generations of exile they’d allowed themselves to lose their whole ACTUAL reason for existence – which was to be not just all for themselves but to be a ‘light to the nations’[ii]

“I will give you as a covenant for the people, a light to the nations”

Their whole identity & purpose was to bless creation in ways that reflect the character and purposes of a God of life, and love, and hope, justice, healing, compassion as opposed to the self-serving hedonism that was coming increasingly to mark their life in Babylon.

Their whole awareness of themselves as a covenanted community – created for a particular purpose – had withered – just dried up! Like so many old bones in a valley. That’s what Ezekiel was seeing and that’s to what he was commanded to speak!

 7 So I prophesied as I had been commanded; …and then, in Ezekiel’s vision, it happened! …as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones c