In the Valley [Ezekiel 37:1-14 - Lent 5A]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Lent 5A

3-29-20

Ezekiel 37:1-14

In the Valley

Lazarus is dead.  In the passage from John’s Gospel that we heard today, Lazarus is dead, actually dead – at least at the beginning of that passage, at least until the breath of God fills his tomb and his body.  But in the valley of dry bones, that place in which there is nothing but death, no one is actually dead. 

In our reading from the prophet Ezekiel, our first reading this morning, no one, not a single person in that valley, is dead, but something is dead…and that is hope.  And that is what this strange vision is about.

This passage from the prophet emerges from the days of exile.  The nation of Israel was in exile and so was their prophet – away from home, stranded in a strange land.  It was a painful and disorienting time.  Very suddenly, everything around which the community gathered was taken from them.  They could no longer worship together in the Temple; it had been destroyed.  They could no longer rely on their physical proximity to one another; they were no longer together; they had been displaced and dispersed.  They were no longer comforted by their routines; life had thrown them into chaos.  Even the future was no longer any consolation; whatever plans they had, whatever dreams they dreamed, were now gone.  They could no longer plan for, or even imagine, a future.  And, as everything else in their lives was reduced to rubble, even their hope died.

It is right there in the vision.  The dry bones speak to the prophet and say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.”  That was their truth: packed into one short, honest, and painful statement.  Their truth was lamentation.  They were grieving; they were hurting; the valley in which they were living shadowed them with despair.  The picture God shows the prophet Ezekiel is bleak.

It was God who led the prophet to that place; probably he wouldn’t have visited that valley of full of dry bones on his own.  And there God asks Ezekiel one question: Mortal, can these bones live?  The answer was obvious; the answer was, of course, no.  Not only were the bones absent of flesh and blood, they were dry.  There was no life left in them.  But to the prophet’s credit, he had just enough faith to answer, “I don’t know.”  That’s not a yes, but it’s also not a no.  Ezekiel leaves just enough room for something to happen – which may be proof that there is yet a sliver of hope left in Israel – a little life left in the bones.  

The exile was a traumatic event in the life of the nation.  Before they were led away in chains, they watched as their homes were burnt, their Temple demolished, their friends killed, their relatives assaulted, their children silenced forever.  They witnessed the devastation of war, the manifestation of heartless human violence.  And it dried out their bones.  The darkness of that valley swallowed their dreams.  The pain of those days suffocated their hope.

And that is what the prophet saw in the valley: he saw a people overwhelmed by despair.  He saw that they could not bear to think about life beyond the valley.

We are living, right now, in our own kind of exile.  An exile from our place of worship.  An exile from the altar banquet.  An exile from human touch.  An exile from normalcy.  And as tales of disease and death dominate the news cycle, and our psychic spaces, it has the potential to chip away at our hope, to leave our bones feeling dry, to replace our dreams with nightmares.

Those who lived in the valley of the shadow of death, the valley of dry bones, they lost hope because they could not see God for the shadows.  The gravity of the moment, the weight of the despair, clouded their vision – cast a pall over both present and future.  And so they cried out in tortured prayer: “Our hope is lost.”  Which is to say, “We cannot find it in this valley, in this moment.  We cannot see it.”

They could not see it, but it was there.  They could not see it because it was riding on the wind, on the breath of God.  They lost hope because they thought, perhaps, that God had lost them, lost them in the valley.  They were looking up, but God was down in the valley with them, breathing life, new life, into their dry bones.

We call the valley in this passage the valley of dry bones, we think of it as a place of death, but there was no one dead in that valley.  That valley was flush with the breath of life.  What happened in that valley is that those dry bones came to life; they came to life in a place of despair.  Because God was with them in their darkest place.  God was with them when it seemed all hope was lost.  That is where God was.  And we are an Easter people, we know that that is where God is.

When your hope is flagging, when it feels like the wind has been knocked out of you, when the pit of despair feels too deep, close your eyes and feel the wind on your face.  God is so close you can feel the breath.  There is hope in every valley.  There is life in every place of death.  Because that, that is where God is.