“Is
Resurrection Possible?” Lent 5 April 2,
2017 Community Christian
Church
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. 2He led me all round 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.’
7 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. 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 …
11 Then
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.
If I held our local newspaper in one hand and in the
other I held the collected works of Shakespeare and asked you, “Which one is
more true?” How would you answer? Certainly, Shakespeare never claimed to be
writing history or a news report, though some of his plays were loosely based
on historical characters or events. Others, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream are entirely imaginary fictions. But, how
much of a stretch would it be to say that our local newspaper accounts are only
based on actual historical characters or events and some of their columns are
total fiction?
Speaking critically, we would not say that either a
newspaper or Shakespeare is “true” though both will contain certain truths. The
newspaper may give you some factual accounts about the city’s mayoral election
but Shakespeare might give you some real insight into political intrigue and
the abuses of power and money among kings, mayors, and among lovers. You might
even say that there are almost no facts in Shakespeare but there is a whole lot
of truth.
And most of us would likely say that there is a real
paucity of truth in the media though we still depend upon them for facts. And
that, my friends, is not a subtle difference.
Traditional religious people often read their sacred
scriptures looking for facts, but they are looking for facts in a book that
doesn’t have many facts in it…. However, if they were looking for truth they
might be pleasantly surprised.
We are now just a couple of weeks away from Easter.
The Revised Common Lectionary assigns this reading from Ezekiel today about the
prophet’s vision of a valley full of dry bones that, at least in the vision,
are brought together and restored to life. Next week the lectionary would have
us read a gospel account of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm
Sunday, and the next week, of course, we would read accounts of the
resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
Even in conservative traditional churches, they
would read this passage in Ezekiel as being symbolic, as a metaphor, recognizing
that it was an account of a dream or a vision and not something that happened.
They would, in most cases, read the Palm Sunday and Easter texts as if they
were eye-witness accounts reported on the 10 o’clock news.
But, I think those accounts are a lot more like
Shakespeare’s account of Julius Cesar than they are a journalist’s account of
the life of Jesus. Jesus was probably a real person but his name and reputation
are used to form a character used in religious narratives with little attention
to history.
I know that none of that is new to many of you but I
am beloaboring the point a bit to try to rescue this vision from Ezekiel, both
to mine it for the truth is conveys and to put it up on its feet so that I can
have a little theological boxing match with it at the same time. Since Ezekiel
has been dead for a long time, I’m feeling good about my chances of winning
this one.
I won’t bore you with a lot of the history behind
Ezekiel’s vision. Let’s just say that his country had been through a horrible,
crushing defeat on the battlefield. Within a few years of this national defeat,
people could hardly remember what their country had been like before it had
been ruined.
And I don’t want to go all apocalyptic on you here
but the truth is, people will acquiesce to almost anything, given a little bit
of time. People live in poor ghettos for a few decades and they start to think
of themselves as the kind of people who live in poor ghettos. Harriet Tubman
was alleged to have said, “I freed a thousand slaves and I could have freed a
thousand more if they had known that they were slaves.”
Now, this is a good example…. Harriet Tubman didn’t
really say this and there is no source for it prior to the 1990’s. And the
historical Harriet Tubman managed to help free about 70 slaves in 13 trips she
made following the Underground Railroad. Still, though it has no basis in
history, the fake quote carries a lot of truth in it. People get used to
slavery. They come to accept poverty. They will bow to a second class status in
life without ever making a conscious decision to give up their humanity.
Martin Luther King, Jr. had to convince his peers in
the 50’s and 60’s that if a black man will stand up straight, white men can’t
keep riding on their backs. My new hero, Chase Ironeyes, is desperately trying
to convince his Native American peers that they do not have to live forever in
a locked box called poverty.
Ezekiel says, in his vision, that the Lord took him
out to the place of his nation’s greatest humiliation, the graveyard where the
bones of the armies of Judah lay scattered about and the Lord asked him, “Tell
me, can these bones live?”
Well, they don’t look too promising. That kinda dead
tends to stay dead. You think about all of the things that made waves of
immigrants come to these shores for the past two hundred years… what made
people leave England, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Romania, what
made people risk their lives in little boats coming from Cuba, Haiti, the
Dominican Republic, why have people walked and ridden on top of trains from
Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico? What were they coming here for?
A chance, an opportunity, to work their way out of
poverty. A chance for their kids to get an education? To be able to take their
kids to a doctor when they are sick? A chance, just maybe, to live long enough
to retire….
So when you take away health care, and gut salaries,
privatize retirement, close planned parenthood, and make education a luxury of
the rich and something out of the reach of the poor…. Tell me, tell me please,
can these bones live?
And now, forgive me, please, this is the part of the
vision, when the Lord asks the prophet, “Can these bones live?” The prophet
doesn’t have much faith in their future but the Lord says, “I got this… watch
this…” sort of a holy, “here, hold my beer.”
Harriet Tubman didn’t tell her peers still working
as slaves, “Just have faith and God will set you free,” she said, “Run!” Martin Luther King, Jr. didn’t tell the poor
blacks of America’s south, “You need to have faith that the Lord will provide,”
he said, “March with me!”
You won’t hear me quote the 19th century
evangelist, Alexander Campbell, very often but he hit the nail on the head when
he said, “Anyone who will get down on their knees and pray for something that
they will not then stand up and work for with all their strength is just
insulting God and disappointing themselves.”
I have never been satisfied with America as I have
found it, never, not Carter’s America, not Clinton’s America, not Obama’s
America, but, you know, I thought we were better than this. I thought we were
stronger than this. I thought, though the progress was slow, that we were
moving towards a better, a more just, a more humane society.
It could get worse. There are people who want to go
to war and I don’t know which country will get the short straw…. It could be
Iran, it could be North Korea, it could even by Syria…
But with or without a new war, much of what brought
those immigrants to our shores for the past two centuries is being dismantled
and thrown into the sea. And it is as if we have lost the ability to be ashamed
of ourselves.
In Senate hearings earlier this month when the
totally unqualified Betsy DeVos was nominated to be the Secretary of Education,
this woman who has given more than $200 million dollars to support Republican
candidates, was about to be voted on by a group of politicians, most of whom
had received more than $50,000 in political donations from her, and the former
stand-up comedian turned Senator, Al Franken, point blank asked her: “If you
and your family had not given $200 million dollars to Republican candidates
would you even be here being considered for this cabinet post?”
And the one obvious answer was the one thing she
would not say but there is no way around the fact that the only way that
someone with absolutely no experience or training in education could become the
Secretary of Education is to buy the seat.
I’ve finally gotten most people trained to not text
me during normal sleeping hours but I have one friend who persists and I hear
from him a few times a day since November 8th. He is a pastor of a
couple of rural churches where he can’t say exactly what he thinks so when
something bad happens he texts me…. and lately something bad has been happening
at all hours of the night and every day.
Brian said to me one day this week that a member of
his church had told him, “God made Donald Trump the President so we have to sit
back and let God’s plan work itself out.”
And
I said, Brian, “Does your church member think that God is a Russian
tyrant?” The tyrants, the corporate
demigods, the super rich, want you to believe that God is in charge of history
and you should just pray and wait for dem’ ol dry bones to live again because
they don’t want you to look behind the curtain and see who has really been in
charge of history.
Ezekiel’s
vision can be powerful and full of truth if he is saying that resurrection is
possible. If he inspires a nation not to simply accept that their world is
being torn apart. But he is lying to you if he is telling you that God is going
to fix it.
Folks,
this is not new information. More than 500 years ago St. Teresa of Avila said: “Christ has no body now
but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through
which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks
to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours
are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ
has no body now on earth but yours.”
If our world will ever
return to its senses it will not be because of the prayers of the faithful or
the good will of the tender hearted, it will be because of the good work of the
courageous, the generous, the noble, and the rebellious and I hope that I am
looking at a bunch of them right now.
