Dry Bones Live Through the Spirit
April 6, 2014/ Lent 5, Year A

There is a catchy song I couldn’t get out of my head after we talked about our Old Testament reading from Ezekiel at Bible study this week. Turns out “Dem Dry Bones” is a spiritual written by James Weldon Johnson, an African American born in 1871.

Sadly, the song has lived on mostly as a children’s song not a spiritual. It has been renamed “The Skeleton Song” by many sites on my internet search.

That is ironic considering that the Book of Ezekiel and its apocalyptic and alarming visions were so vivid and in need of explanation that Jewish children at that time were not allowed to read the book without adult supervision.

Rather than a funny story about skeletons, the real life situation, which inspired the Prophets vision came from Israel defeated, and in exile in Babylon, not knowing if the people would ever return home.

Jerusalem fell and the great temple was destroyed in 586 BCE. So Ezekiel wrote at a time of catastrophe, a time where people were losing their faith in God, indeed in everything.

And so Ezekiel has this vision that he is set down in the midst of a valley of dry bones. God asks him the question: “Can these bones live?”

Bones were important in Hebrew thought. The root meaning of bones, is powerful, which means the frequent references in this passage would stress the stability and firmness represented by the bones. And if the bones were strong so was faith.

That’s why the image of a field with very dry and unburied bones would indicate a spiritual calamity for Israel. Usually the bones would have been carefully buried.

Can these bones live: it is a question which humanity has often faced throughout history whenever there is catastrophe: when the Black Death swept through Europe in the middle ages, taking a quarter of the population, when The United States was plunged into a civil war with millions of casualties, when Jews were herded into concentration camps by the Nazis, when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when apartheid enslaved and brutalized black people in South Africa…the list could go on.

And the answer is the same each time, only God knows. Only through God can the dry bones of catastrophe turn into bones, which are living, with sinew, flesh and skin.

To look at this passage symbolically, we all face times when we feel like “dry bones” without life, without spirit. But like Ezekiel we need to say to our dry bones---hear the word of the Lord.

What happens when Ezekiel prophesies to the bones---God promises to put flesh on the bones, bring them back to life.

Then there is a rattling sound and God breaths life into the bones.

The bones are the whole house of Israel. A whole people have been revived and God promises them new life and a return to their homes.

It is powerful vision, but God doesn’t act without Ezekiel’s participation.

And so when we encounter our own “dry bones” we need not only to pray for God’s intervention, but prepare to respond creatively, rather than passively and become agents of our own renewal.

The spirit, which blows in this passage from Ezekiel and makes the bones live, has echoes of the spirit of the creation stories in Genesis, and of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Disciples at Pentecost.

Having this Ezekiel passage read today is a good preparation for the story of Lazarus in John’s Gospel, which is rich in symbolism and in themes.

Just as God breathes new life into the valley the dry bones, Jesus offers the sixth sign of John’s Gospel---the resuscitation of Lazarus, four days in the tomb.

It is the sign, the miracle, that ultimately leads to the Cross in John’s Gospel. The message is clear Jesus is not only a healer and teacher, he has the power of life and death.

The raising of Lazarus foreshadows the Crucifixion of Jesus, but the raising is not the same as the empty tomb, and the resurrection we celebrate Easter morning.

Jesus is not only reviving a friend, he is showing that as God’s incarnate son, he has the power over death, and that death is not the end….that teaching will be reinforced by his Resurrection.

Jesus says to those who witnessed Lazarus rising: “Unbind him and let him go.”

That message can be for us to. To unbind ourselves, and allow God to work in us in birth, in life, in death, in resurrection.