Roger Ray, pastor
Lent 5 April 6, 2014
Ezekiel 37:1-14
37The 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. 2He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. 3He said to me, "Mortal, can these bones live?" I answered, "O Lord God, you know." 4Then he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. 5Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. 6I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord." 7So 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. 8I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. 9Then he said to me, "Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live." 10I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.11Then he said to me, "Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, 'Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.' 12Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. 14I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act," says the Lord.
I know that it is said that if you remember the 60's that you were not there. I suppose that I have some advantage for having enter the 60's as a pre-schooler but I remember where I was when I learned that President Kennedy had been shot. I was at my grandparents' home when Bobby Kennedy was shot.
I remember the Walter Cronkite telling us about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. I remember segregated schools, coloreds only drinking fountains, and more than that, I remember the vociferous debates about women's rights.
I remember enough that if you long for the good ol days that I am willing to say that you were not there. I remember when my sister had to wear a skirt to school in the dead of winter even when we were being dropped off by my dad on his way to work and we had to stand outside for 30 or 40 minutes while my sister and all of the other girls shivered in their absurdly short skirts.
I remember the public humiliation of anyone in the church who got a divorce for any reason. I remember the shame involved with out of wedlock pregnancy and the fight that did not come to the Supreme Court until the 1970's for a woman to be able to govern her own body and I remember how we lost the first for an equal rights amendment to the constitution.
The arrival of the birth control pill was relatively new in those days, setting off a heated debate about God's role in pregnancy and the moral decisions to either prevent pregnancy or terminate an unwanted pregnancy. The private and most personal aspects of a woman's life were literally on the witness stand of a culture that did not want to give up on 19th century morals in light of a 20th century culture.
I don't miss those days. The prevalence of television news, the advent of a phone in every house and the explosion of publication were helping the world to awaken from its infancy. But there were casualties along the way.
We did not know how to protest a war and honor the poor who were drafted to fight in the war. The seeds of political polarization and distrust for government were planted in those years with the publication of the Pentagon Papers and the televised impeachment of Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal. No matter how much TV sitcoms may try to romanticize this era, I was there and it was nothing to idealize.... And I was a white, male, Protestant, middle class, heterosexual which, in almost every way that mattered, meant that this was the pinnacle of social success for people like me.
I had only just adopted my little brown daughter when I moved to Springfield and at my first Council of Churches annual dinner, the speaker was a former president of what was then called Southwest Missouri State University. This distinguished white, male, Protestant, upper middle class, heterosexual spoke at length about the changing demographics of America.
In intonations of dread and fear, he recited the numerical shifts from a majority white America to a majority non-white America...from a safely secure English speaking America to a bilingual America. The brown, immigrant, woman I had mistaken taken to the dinner with me kept looking at me as if I had taken her to a KKK rally that I had innocently enough assumed would be a church dinner.
I'm pretty sure that the speaker was trying to say that we all needed to prepare for substantive change in our nation but he was not saying it with joyful anticipation.... It was more of a call to stockpile weapons and provisions for the coming anarchy.
More than 20 years have passed since that day and I'm certain if the speaker in question were to hear my description of his presentation that he would be mortified and would, just as segregationists of the 1960's did after integration, and he would insist that he had recited these numbers as a ebullient herald of good times to come.
The gains made in civil rights and women's rights in the 1960's and 70's and the gains made in gay rights as the millennial mark was passed were, in many ways, concessions of a majority to a minority. Now, as that majority fades into the reality of the approaching minority status, we are seeing some old bones of battles fought long ago, coming back to life to fight once more.
The image of a field of dry bones in the book of Ezekiel is, of course, a highly symbolic account. The question being posed to Ezekiel is if the ruined remains of Judah can ever be revived. The vision is set on a battlefield where Judah had suffered its most decisive defeat.
The text has appealed to preachers who see themselves as the prophet and their congregations as the field of dry bones. It seems to rarely occur to preachers just how narcissistic that setting really is. I have always hated the association with shepherding language in the ministry in which the pastor is the shepherd and the congregation is a flock of sheep. If you know much about sheep, that is not much of a compliment.
You are not sheep and I am not a shepherd. And you are most certainly not a field of dry bones being addressed by a prophet. We are either a prophetic community together or I am just an opinionated corpulent cleric as full of hot air as the next excessively opinioned guy with a web page and a podcast.
The dry bones that I am seeing come back to life in our nation right now are the dry bones from the 60's and 70's from battles that I thought we had won long ago and would never need to be discussed again. What we called "the pill" way back then is, for reasons I find to be absolutely beyond comprehension, under discussion again.
Rush Limbaugh made a complete fool of himself calling a young college student derisive names for wanting birth control bills included in their health care coverage two years ago but that that time he looked like a loan lunatic. Since then we have had corporations, churches, and even politicians weighing in from former Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee, suggesting that women just need to hold their knees together to just a couple of weeks ago, Alaska state senator, Pete Kelly insisting that women who use contraception lacked self control and even going so far as to say that women should have to take a pregnancy test in bars before being allowed to order a drink.... All of which is an attempt to put American women, not so much back into a skirt but into a social burka that would place them back in the control of men.
And, not that this is a comfortable topic for the pulpit, but just in the past three months there have been more than 40 state and federal attacks on providing birth control to women without so much as a mention of the money provided for both male impotence medications and even the $172 million dollars spent by Medicare for a pump used by men.
A device that, until recently, I just thought was an Austin Powers movie joke but, and I am sad to tell you, this is true, these devices exist and we are paying for them with our tax dollars for senior citizens while trying to deny young women basic birth control.
Abortion rights, hard fought for in the 1970's, has been under attack ever since but now, failing on that front and facing a declining majority, there is a veritable American Taliban trying to bring back an era that none of us would want to live in even if it could be brought back.
Just this week the conservative majority of the Supreme Court struck down, over minority protests, what little remained of the election reforms passed by congress after Watergate. As their voting base gets smaller and smaller, the white, male grip on power is taking desperate measures to make it harder for minorities to vote and easier for rich people to buy elections.
The congress passed these election contribution limits so that people could regain confidence in our government and believe that we were really a part of a democracy. But Chief Justice Roberts said that the campaign contribution limit of just less than $75,000 every two year election cycle was limiting freedom of speech.
Now, folks, work with me here... in a democracy, doesn't freedom of speech mean that we all have the same freedom? But if money is speech, then the people who have more money, have more speech, right? Did lifting the maximum contribution to political campaigns of $75,000 affect any of you?
Do any of you have more freedom of speech now than you had last year? Most people of modest income don't contribute anything to political campaigns. The highly motivated might donate $5 or $10. I am very highly motivated, I earn a professional salary and I have never made a political contribution of more than $50 because, quite frankly, I can't afford much more.
If I thought it was urgent.... Let's say that Wendy Davis had a real chance of winning her gubernatorial candidacy in Texas or if Elizabeth Warren were running for president, I might go crazy and donate a $100. Of course, now the very wealthy on the other side of the equation can donate a million dollars or more. So one wealthy person can have as much freedom of speech as a thousand people like me.
Or if you are one of the really big players, like Sheldon Adelson, who donated $93 million dollars in 2012, then he has more voice than a million people like me, and if you factor in the people who will donate $5 then this one casino owner has more freedom of speech than twenty million Americans. Is that democracy?
We have, at times, derided the compromise our founding fathers made in writing the constitution in which they decided that a black person was three-fifths of a person. There were those who felt that slaves were not people at all and southern slave owners who wanted to count their slaves in order to gain more political influence in the federal government so they settled on the compromise of the three-fifths rule.
That was a horrible, demeaning, morally repugnant page in American history but looking at our Supreme Court today, I would say that it was at least three-fifths! In matters of political speech, no one in this room is three-fifths of a person, none of us are one tenth, one hundredth of a person.
If we do not speak collectively, our voices cannot be heard at all. We do not exist.
These protections of democracy are being dismantled in hurried succession with the assumption that the collective will of the people that demanded an end to the war in Vietnam, an end to segregation, an end to gender discrimination and a liberation of the gay community is now either asleep or lying scattered around a field of dry bones..... no longer willing to muster the energy or breath to resist a return to the days of domination, oppression and control.
The greatest criticism I have of the modern day progressive is that our cynicism has become our sacrament. There is no collective action ever taken by people who are just privately bitter.
The real gift of Martin Luther King in the 60's and Rev. William Barber, the organizer of the Moral Mondays protests in North Carolina in our time, is that they have been somehow able to get people to bring their anger, their cynicism, their disappointment, their refusal to accept oppression, into collective action to stand together, to march together, to sing together, to worship, protest and organize so that they can bring the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the union movement, the gay rights movement, together to speak with one prophetic voice for justice.
Can the dry bones of our former passions be knit together, covered with flesh and given new breath? I don't know.... I honestly don't know. But I hope so. The only substantive hope is if we will stick together.
