Sermon on March 29, 2020: Lent 5
I’ve been looking for the right word to describe what the last two weeks has felt like, but I haven’t managed to find it. There’s the feeling of isolation, except that I am not alone; or the sense of being deeply unsettled, though in reality we are settled to the point of oppression. And even as I have spoken to a lot of you over the last week, and heard reports that many of you are in good physical health—thanks be to God—it is also true that we are experiencing a profound dis-ease. We don’t know what the next day or week will bring, and how far we have to travel down this road to a strange land that we have never known. The truth is that, even as we now shelter in the most familiar of places—our homes—they don’t feel much like home anymore. That’s how I feel, at least. Home doesn’t really feel like home; Doylestown just doesn’t feel like Doylestown, anymore. It feels more like exile—like being exiled in my own home. Forced to be in a place that is no longer yours, even though it so very familiar. That’s maybe the closest word that I can find to describe this relatively brief period of social distancing: exile. Living as a stranger in your own home—and sensing that it isn’t really yours anymore.
The people of God have never been strangers to alienation. Even in the very first story, the story of Adam and Eve, we see that to be a human being is to be marked by a profound sense of alienation—from God, from one another, and from our home. The alienation that we feel is the symptom of a deeper disease, and the word that our faith uses for this disease is sin. Sin, as the Prayer Book tells us, is “the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.” In other words, sin is just doing what we want, when we want, regardless of the consequences. It is a disease from which none of us is immune, from which we can’t develop a herd immunity. Even the people of God. It’s no exaggeration to say that the story of the Bible is the story of God rescuing God’s people from alienation, and from the power of sin and death. Over and over again, when God’s people fall into sin and become alienated from God and from one another, the Spirit of God comes to their rescue. To breathe new life where before only death was to be found. To take a valley of dry bones, and make them live again.
Today’s reading from the book of Ezekiel is good news for a people in exile, for those suffocating from alienation. In the year 597 BC, king Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon invaded and destroyed Jerusalem, forcing all the Jews into Babylonian captivity and exile, where they lived for nearly fifty years before they were able to return home. Fifty years. Can you imagine? We can barely make it through two weeks of social distancing measures. Fifty years. It must have been utterly devastating for those who experienced it. It must have felt like death. Indeed, most of them did die in exile; it was their children and grandchildren who eventually returned home. And so in the midst of feeling utterly alienated and abandoned, as though they were living in the valley of the shadow of death, suddenly the hand of the Lord comes to Ezekiel and places him right in the middle of that valley, the valley of dry bones.
“Mortal, can these bones live?” the Spirit of God asks Ezekiel. “O Lord God, you know,” he replies. Ezekiel looks and sees all the dry bones, piles upon piles of them. This is a place of death, where the dead bones of the exiled have accumulated for years. Can these bones live? Not to Ezekiel’s knowledge. These bones such as they are cannot live. They are a sign of alienation, of being cut off from the promises of God. They aren’t going anywhere. Not until the Spirit of God intervenes in a decisive way and makes them whole again—causing flesh and sinews to come upon them, and breathing the breath of life into their lungs. Only then, and not a moment before, can those bones be anything else. Only by the power of God can they live.
In this time of alienation, we are confronted yet again with the truth that it is the Spirit of God who gives life, who can make dry bones live, who raises the dead from their tombs. The fact is that we don’t know what the next day or even the next hour will bring. No one can see a light at the end of the tunnel, and we don’t know whether we’ll be in it for just a few weeks or for the next fifty years. As followers of Jesus who hear his command to love others as he has loved us, we know we are called to be separate from one another for a time, out of love for our neighbor, most of whom we will never meet. We cannot measure the impact that this act of love will have. And while it may feel like exile, it will not last forever. We are called to remember that we do not know the length of our days, and that every day, every moment we have is a gift.
This is not escapism. No one gets out of life alive, but Ezekiel’s vision is not about a wish to escape from death. It is the memory that the valley of dry bones can live again. And it is only by the power of God that they live.
For our part, we live amidst the changes and chances of a life that we cannot control, and which was never ours in the first place. The breath in our lungs is a gift of the Spirit of God, who breathes dust into life, who makes dry bones live. In these trying times, when we feel isolated, unsettled, exiled, or alienated, let us evermore deepen our devotion to our Lord Jesus Christ, who overcame death and the grave, so that even in the hard times, our hearts may be fixed on him, who gives us true peace, and where true joy is found.
Amen.