“Dry Bones” The Rev. Lisa Chase
Silver Spring Presbyterian Church
March 26, 2023     
 Fifth Sunday in Lent 
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We just heard about this extraordinary vision that God gives Ezekiel to comfort the exiled Israelites. These chosen people are in a place of hopelessness and despair. In this graphic vision, with God’s breath, the dry bones representing this defeated nation, are fully restored with sinew, muscle and skin. They are told then they would also be restored once again to Israel.

The vision depicts humans, once dry bones, now purely in the flesh.

Now, let us hear from Paul in his letter to Romans, chapter 8: verses 6-11, where living in the flesh (only in the flesh) can create great problems and lead to death.

To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For this reason, the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed, it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, then the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.

The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones in a desert depicts despair and misery. But with God’s breath, which is ruach, in Hebrew, these bones are restored, bone connecting to bone, followed by sinew and skin. A vision of hope and new life. Living in the flesh is very important here. It’s where life and hope can begin again for the exiled Israelites.

But there must be more than just living life in the flesh.

Imagine being inside Ezekiel’s vision and seeing a creepy scene you would encounter in a horror movie – dry, bleached bones, whitened by years of scorching sun. A person can just feel the gloom, empty air – the strange silence, which ironically, has a sound of its own. It’s one of being hollow and alone.

On the other hand, it is a forensic anthropologist’s dream! If the bones in Ezekiel’s vision could be studied today, with carbon dating and looking for shape and form, the bones would provide clues about each person represented. Clues that lead to stories -stories of members of an Israelite nation, once glorious and chosen, and now exiled. Ezekiel’s vision is for those exiled men, women, and children who have lost their homes and worse – their heart, and zest for life. They suffer a death of the spirit in a foreign land. Their temple has been destroyed, their holy city plundered, their leaders maimed and put in chains, dragged off to this strange, exotic land that is not their own – that was not chosen and set apart for them centuries before.

If only these bones could talk, what stories they could tell! We’d hear tales of following God and conquests, but also tales of disobedience and ultimately being conquered by an enemy nation.  In Ezekiel’s vision, these bones come back to life. Filling that awful silence with clacks and rattles, as they join back together, forming person, forming a chosen nation. Hope is once again restored. Historians believe that more than the other biblical prophets, Ezekiel was given to symbolic actions, strange visions, and even trances. He eats a scroll on which words of prophecy are written, and finds these words sweet, like honey, to the taste, to indicate his approval. Another symbolic action is Ezekiel’s lying down for extended time to symbolize Israel’s punishment (4:4). The strange visions – the vision of the valley of the bones, and the wheel within the wheel, accompanied by four cherubim, spinning in the sky. Ezekiel is also struck mute on one occasion for an unspecified length of time (3:26), when God adheres Ezekiel’s tongue to the roof of his mouth.

As other prophets have done before him, Ezekiel sees the God-to-People relationship the same as that of a spouse to an unfaithful spouse, and this life in exile as a judgment for this heartbreaking infidelity. But then, with God’s breath, the bones are connected, forming humans, who come back to life.

Then God gives Ezekiel the strange vision’s meaning: – that the great nation of Israel will once again be restored – the Lord will put his spirit within them, and they shall live and be placed once again in their own land. But they must obey God and Live in God’s spirit.

This vision reminds us that God not only gives life but restores life, that death will not have the last word, even when all signs of life have been taken away. We are reminded that many people experience some kind of exile – separation from beloved friends and family members because of a misunderstanding. Even greater still, are the physical tolls that poverty, natural disasters, wars, have on people, which create that sense of hopelessness - that spiritual death where hope is lost.

Yet, while the vision of bones and flesh that come from the breath of God brings hope, a life lived solely in this state of the flesh brings death. Romans’ verses 6-11 speak to how life lived in the flesh is not pleasing to God, but life lived in relationship to God is the best kind of life through our relationship with and in Jesus Christ. It is a reciprocal relationship, where we are cherished and loved by our Creator, regardless of what we’ve done. But we must choose also to be in relationship with God through Jesus Christ, where the Spirit of Christ can live within us, and show God our love, praise, and gratitude, ready and willing to be the light and compassion that this dark, fallen world so desperately needs.

Have you ever been in a one-sided relationship? You give, you care, you love, and nothing or very little, is returned. Very frustrating and spiritually painful; it does not last, or it may last, but it is not healthy. There are cases of relationships of being one-sided, when we are caring for a loved one, who cannot converse because of health issues, but the love is still there. You can see it in their eyes.

Imagine God there – loving us, sustaining us, caring for us, but we shut God out, living our lives in the flesh – making choices that please us, but may not be pleasing to God.  That type of life is not what God intended for us. God wants us to stay connected to God, just as we are when we stay connected to those relationships that are healthy and sustaining.

The Romans text also reminds us how focusing on worldly things – status, power, money, relationships that don’t fulfill - that appeal to the flesh, do not give us lasting peace. And they get in the way of our relationship with the Lord. Instead, they make us feel, after a while, hollow to the bone. Dry and empty.

These things may give us short-term satisfaction, but that fades. We hunger for more.   Just as the Israelites were cut off from God because of their disobedience, if we separate ourselves from God’s spirit - from God’s breath, Paul says, we die. 

Friends, let us stay connected to God during this time – and always, and let God’s spirit breath into each of us, change us, mold us, storing new life and hope in us, like Ezekiel’s vision did for those exiled Israelites. Don’t focus on temporal things and the body – set the mind first with the Spirit. Seek ye first the Spirit of God and God’s righteousness, and then all these things will be added unto you.

Finally, Romans 8 gives us those verses we cleave to, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, not things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all creation, will be able to separate us from the Love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (8:37-38). Nothing but ourselves can separate us from God’s love and breath, breathing life into these dry bones, which God wants to restore for his purpose.

And may it be so Amen.