Pastors extend much intellectual and imaginative work each week to discover and articulate the connective tissues between all the lectionary readings of the day. But today our work is simpler than normal. You can’t help but hear the harmony and get the point: God has sent the Spirit, who is life and who is the aid to life.
The reading from Ezekiel could be enough on its own: National life dead, the prophet says. Israel has passed away; Judah is exiled; and Jerusalem fallen. No visible life remains, nor a means of reviving it. Instead, we have bones that fill a valley. Is this the untended scene of a battle lost — a defeat so thorough that no one is left to bury the dead? Did the horrible act take place long enough ago that flesh has rotted away, but not long enough ago that the earth has reclaimed the bones? Or are we waiting for a proper burial, with exhumed remains waiting to be encased in a stone casket for all eternity?
Either way, what we’re facing is death without remainder. Here was life, but now it is no more. “The bones were very dry.” We are haunted by what once was — by what is irretrievably gone but not forgotten.
But wait! A prophet is told to speak to the bones. And suddenly we remember that “in the beginning” God spoke and all life came to be. How, we ask, did that which did not yet exist hear the words of creation? And similarly, how do these bones, which once lived, hear the words of their re-creation?
We don’t know how. We only know who is responsible — the same creator. The important person here is not the prophet Ezekiel, but rather the God who speaks through the prophet — who speaks to the bones, which represent everything in our common life that is long dead. Like the original divine creation, there is a process leading to fullness. Bones grow tendons, then muscle and skin, and finally breath and life. There is a pause before breath — a second command, and only then breath.
A pause. After promise and in process, always pause. To a people who had heard the promise, but had not yet witnessed the process, the promise is repeated: “I will open the graves of my people, bring them up, put my Spirit in you and you will live.” This is said to a people whose hope had dried up. Did they begin again to hope when they heard the prophet? Are bones rattling in a valley off the beaten path? What rattling now can I witness to restore hope in divine restoration?
I confess that I have imagined that some future author, when writing of the decline and fall of America, will give as its cause our lack of common conversation, our dearth of patient and persistent listening, our loss of honest but humble speaking. Future historians will note that we lost any agreed-upon measures of discernment and decision and any mutually recognized marks of public truth. And that these were lost in what once was the world’s first large and longest-standing democracy.
Historian Edward Gibbon, author of “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” despised the church for taking from the empire the best and brightest – Ambrose (Milan’s governor), Augustine (holder of the Emperor’s chair of rhetoric), Gregory (prefect of Rome) – and wasting their gifts on the ecclesial rather the imperial. Rome needed them, Gibbon said. But they failed the empire.
Nonetheless, I see the wisdom in what these Latin Fathers chose to do instead. Augustine’s “City of God” lets go of empire (the “city of man”) but holds on to what was right and true in that empire, though not the empire itself. Mostly through its monasteries, the church preserved the wisdom of the past, allowing much of that wisdom to reemerge a millennium later during the Renaissance — dry bones that were reunited, given musculature and then reinfused with life. Gibbon’s hatred of all things Christian blinded him to this. It makes me wonder: Should a future historian write of America’s decline and fall, will our own ecclesial preoccupations be cited as the cause of our failure at this critical moment?
But Ezekiel doesn’t blame. Nor does his fellow prophet Jeremiah, who prays for the prosperity of the city. Instead, God commands Ezekiel to speak to bones. And we too are commanded to speak to those who seem least likely to hear. We are commanded to hope, with boldness. We are promised that graves will open and we will “settle in our land.”
These things are too much for me. I expect that American Empire will end — perhaps with divisions into two nations with different languages, different arbiters of facts and knowledge, different visions of what will and should be. But I cannot believe that Ezekiel would say that now is the time to quit. Neither is now the time for monasteries. Rather’s it’s time for public theology, witness, and an exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven – the City of God. This is a Reformed instinct. I think it will serve us and the city well, even the city of human making.
Speak. “The Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father will testify about me (Jesus). And you also must testify,” said John.
Hope. “Creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay. … Creation is groaning as in the pains of childbirth,” said Paul.
Gather. “They were all together in one place,” said Luke.
On Pentecost, a newly Spirit-filled people declared the wonders of God in the divided languages of a divided humanity. And at the end the day there was salvation. Though very dry, the bones lived.
This week:
- Sit down with a fellow citizen who believes differently than you for the sole purpose of hearing each other. There are few better remedies for our self-righteousness than hearing ourselves out loud. And listen without planning a rebuttal, or wondering about your neighbor’s sanity, but seek the wisdom in the other and contemplate it.
- Do the same with two opposed to each other, and serve as moderator (or better yet, mediator). Moderators cannot make peace, but they can invite and inspire it. Recognize both sides, and both people, within you. Propose ways of going forward together.
- Write a letter to your state and national representatives. Tell them to tone it down. The way they speak can speak for you better than any single speech on any given subject.
- Visit older adults you know and others who are isolated, if you can do so safely. They are most in need of a second set of ears to discern what all the clamoring voices are saying.
- “Pray for the king.” This is the most obvious command given us. “Live at peace with all” is a close second. What do these commands mean to you today? How can you put them into practice?
- Spend time wondering about what God is doing.
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