“Are We Nuts Enough?”
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Ezekiel was a nut. Listen and try to visualize the opening vision of his book:
“I looked: I saw an immense dust storm
come from the north, an immense cloud with lightning flashing from it,
a huge ball of fire glowing like bronze. Within the fire were what looked
like four creatures vibrant with life. Each had the form of a human
being, but each also had four faces and four wings. Their legs were
as sturdy and straight as columns, but their feet were hoofed like those
of a calf and sparkled from the fire like burnished bronze. On all four
sides under their wings they had human hands. All four had both faces
and wings, with the wings touching one another. They turned neither
one way nor the other; they went straight forward.
Their faces looked like this: In front a human face, on the right side the face of a lion, on the left the face of an ox, and in back the face of an eagle. So much for the faces. The wings were spread out with the tips of one pair touching the creature on either side; the other pair of wings
covered its body. Each creature went
straight ahead. Wherever the spirit went, they went. They didn't turn
as they went.
The four creatures looked like a blazing
fire, or like fiery torches. Tongues of fire shot back and forth between
the creatures, and out of the fire, bolts of lightning. The creatures
flashed back and forth like strikes of lightning.”
Now that's a vision. This is just the
beginning for Ezekiel. As my seminary professor liked to say, he was
nuts. He has also been called the psychedelic prophet (for you who are
acquainted with the 60's).
But Ezekiel was nuts not
primarily because of the many long, bizarre, elaborate visions you find
in his book. He was not primarily a nut because of his style, he was
a nut because of substance. He dared to prophesy the Word of
the Lord. As Eugene Peterson says in his translation that I read, “God
grabbed him.”
If you or I had received visions such
as Ezekiel's, we might be tempted to keep it too ourselves, lest people
think we're nuts. But Ezekiel received the Word of the Lord, and though
it came in strange images and visions, he let that word fly.
These visions and prophecies were addressed
to exiles from Israel who had been conquered and forced to migrate to
the far off land of their conqueror, Babylon. These exiles had lost
everything. They had lost their homes & their land. Their temple
had been destroyed, and, it seemed that they had witnessed the very
defeat of their God, the Lord. They had lost everything.
“Our bones are dried up, our hope
is gone, there's nothing left of us.” the left over bones exclaim.
Ezekiel was nuts because he dared to proclaim to these exiles that the
mess that they were in was wholly of their own making. They shouldn't
blame God. They should look at their own responsibility, their own culpability.
Bet that went over real well.
But Ezekiel was also nuts because he coupled his Word of ultimate judgment with a Word of ultimate grace. Ezekiel was nuts because he dared to offer God's Word of hope in the face of the ultimate despair of God's people. Exile was not the final word. Death was not the final word.
“Come, spirit! Come breath! (The same
word in the original Hebrew). Breathe life!” He was nuts because he
dared to proclaim that out of lifeless dry bones, life can be reborn.
This is what happens when God grabs you: you go nuts. You go crazy
with hope.
Can these bones live? Can there be life
in the midst of desolation? Ezekiel proclaimed God's Yes!
to exiles long ago. Well what about us?
Here's where we can take two roads as
religious types. We can read these words as armchair, theoretical theologians.
We can appreciate them from a distance. We can take note of their powerful
imagery. We can imagine that they are about some time in the future,
or are relevant to some other lives and not ours.
Or we can, like Ezekiel, read these
words as God's Word to us and we can accept God's invitation
to walk among dry bones, not the dry bones of Israel millennia ago,
but our dry bones.
Do we have dry bones? Are they our responsibility?
Are we culpable?
It is now 2008, and we are 5 years in
to a war in Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead.1
Thousands of Americans are dead. A way out that leaves Iraq in a better
situation then when we got there remains murky. There are plenty of
bones.
There are other plenty of other places
in the world we could mention.
We have come to the place where we can
rationalize torture. We pretend that water boarding, and other extreme
interrogation methods do not turn our values of human rights, respect
for life, of freedom into empty rhetoric.
Christian People, we who follow a leader
who was tortured to death, we who follow a leader who submitted to torture
for others rather than strike back to protect himself, we support these
policies in the name of security, or stand complicit with them by our
silence. There are bones here.
We continue to marginalize, even under
the umbrella of faith, even in light of Scripture that highlights again
and again concern for the alien residing in the land, we continue to
marginalize the undocumented immigrant. There are bones here.
There are nearly 37 million poor Americans. Most Americans living in poverty work, but still cannot afford to make ends meet. Inequality in wealth distribution is growing. The top 1 percent of Americans received 21.2 percent of all personal income in 2005, according to the latest
Internal Revenue Service data. That's a big jump from 2004, when the top 1 percent's share was 19
percent, and slightly above the 2000
figure of 20.8 percent - the modern-day peak. The bottom 50 percent
of Americans got 12.8 percent of all 2005 income, down from 13.4 percent
in 2004 and 13 percent in 2000.2 There are bones here.
We continue to judge the qualities and
status of a person based on the color of their skin, and yes, their
gender. One very well known and popular columnist, on a possible matching
of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on a presidential ticket, said this
past week, “...you've got a woman and a black for the first time ever
on the […] ticket. Ahem. They don't have a prayer."3
I see dry bones here.
We lift above all others a small handful of biblical texts that place a certain interpretation on homosexual relationships. These texts don't even have homosexual behavior as their primary focus (and certainly not sexual orientation or loving, lasting, faithful relationships); yet we make them absolute. We lift them up above all other texts in naming sin. Ignoring the thrust of the rest of scripture, and ignoring the very essence of an inclusive gospel that screams from Genesis to
Revelation of a God who seeks to draw
the circle of grace ever wider, we seek to draw the circle of inclusion
ever narrower. There are bones here. These are our
bones.
Oh, I know I'm getting in trouble now.
Bones, particularly our bones, cause dissension. This is the sharp edge
of faith. I am nuts to bring them up. Perhaps you see different bones
than I? Perhaps the bones that you see are born out of your faith and
reading of Scripture. I accept that. I affirm your sincere faith,
but we can't leave it there.
God took Ezekiel and had him walk around
the bones, and amongst them. He plopped him right in the middle so that
he could not keep from tripping over them, or stepping on them. In the
same way, our faith invites us, no compels
us, to address our bones, to discern our bones, to pray and reflect
together without ceasing until we come to agreement on God's vision
to breathe new life into them, and not remain passive or silent.
Perhaps you are overwhelmed with dry,
dead bones in your own life. Perhaps there are bones in the form of
relationships, addictions, wounds, questions, struggles. I have bones.
Sometimes our bones are revealed for others to see, and sometimes only
we know our own bones, we and God.
Then God asks Ezekiel if these bones
can live. Isn't that a funny question for God
to ask? We usually are the ones asking the question, but God is asking
us - teasing us, challenging us, seeing if we will give into the
despair and hopelessness that characterizes dry bones, or if we are
willing to entertain another scenario. Perhaps God is seeing if we are
ready to perceive another out come for these dead bones.
This is the fifth Sunday in Lent. We
look at our bones. We walk among them. We hear them crack and crunch
as we step on them. But we are on the edge. We are on the cusp of, well,
something nuts. This vision of Ezekiel's is nuts because it calls
us, when faced with dead bones, to entertain the possibility of resurrection.
Are we, like Ezekiel, open to being
a little nuts too, just a little? Nuts enough not to remain silent?
Nuts enough, when we disagree, to sit down, pray and reflect in a spirit
of love and not dissension and judgment? What a great vision this would
be for our church: a community of people - not all the same, not all
uniform in our perspectives - but nuts enough to love and enjoy God
and each other anyway.
Is this what Jesus is talking about
when he encourages us to pick up our cross and follow him?
Is it time for us to prophesy? To preach
new life? Are we nuts enough?
How do we prophesy? It is not just employing
a preacher. We prophesy by living lives of forgiveness and grace. We
preach by ordering our lives with justice. We proclaim by standing for
those who cannot stand for themselves. We proclaim by loving - not just
when loving is easy, but when loving is hard. (This is
the story of the cross, isn't it?)
Resurrection isn't just for Sunday two
weeks from now. It breathes life, today and every day, into lifeless
bones, our bones, if we are nuts enough to believe it...and proclaim
it.
1 Center for Refugee and Disaster Response, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, http://www.jhsph.edu/
refugee/research/iraq/index
2 Greg Ip, “Income-Inequality Gap Widens: Boom in Financial Markets Parallels Rise in Share For Wealthiest Americans”
Wall Street Journal Online,
10/12/07, http://online.wsj.com/public
3 “Limbaugh: So-called 'Dream Ticket' doesn't have a prayer”, CNN Political Ticker 3/6/08, http://
politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com
March 9, 2008
Rev. Paul Heins
First Presbyterian Church
Logan, Utah