Ezekiel, 5th of 5 'Not-Yet Guys'

Text: Ezekiel 37:1-14

Today was the last of a series of 5 sermons, revisiting what you already knew of some basic Hebrew bible characters, and inviting you to think about them as adults. We started today with the whole congregation singing an old spiritual that seemed familiar to most of you:

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones…
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones…
Now hear the word of the Lord –

The hip bone’s connected to the leg bone…
The leg bone’s connected to the knee bone…
The knee bone’s connected to the shin bone –
Now hear the word of the Lord!

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones…
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones…
Now hear the word of the Lord –

Look, this is not just orthopedic naivete, or a bad anatomy lesson! Jack Zimmerman with his new knees, or Irene Locke with her new hip plate, should continue to rely on their surgeons! Ezekiel is answering a different questions, with a different answer. Did you wake up this morning, and look at another snowfall that needed shoveling, in this record winter, and moan: “Oh, my aching bones”? This is not always diagnostic medical symptom, but a lament. The psalmist says ‘teach these broken bones to dance’ – from a similar psychic space.

This Wednesday evening, I was at an opening event for 'Darwin' at the Royal Ontario Museum. It’s in the basement of the crystal, and includes not only his actual bugs, but also his Greek New Testament, from the voyage of the Beagle. There are live Galapagos turtles (and dead ones). We were proud to be among the individual patrons of an exhibit that did not need security guards against creationist protesters. We are smugly aware that only 51% of Americans believe in evolution, and many of those only buy it as part of an ‘Intelligent Design’ vision. But the Globe yesterday informed me that no corporate sponsor was willing to back Darwin at the ROM – and that Angus Reid polls only 59% of Canadian believing in evolution.

I happened to read Barack Obama’s 'The Audacity of Hope' last week. He acknowledges most Americans don’t “believe in evolution”, then he models how to be respectful of that statistic, instead of assuming that all those competent voters are idiots. More Americans believe in angels than evolution. What’s going on? Perhaps, like our rendition of ‘dem bones’, we’re talking about different answers to different questions. As Dom Crossan warns us, ‘you don’t just want to have the right answer to the wrong question’. We looked at the snow and moaned ‘oh, my aching bones’, then echoed the chorus of ‘dem bones’ this morning – but it wasn’t about medical diagnosis, but spiritual lament, seeking some expression of hope, meaning and purpose.

Charles Taylor’s 'A Secular Age' visits the ‘Darwin refuted the bible’ script, and concludes that ‘one moral vision trumped another’. The sophisticated philosopher canvasses issues of epistemology, buffered identity, instrumental reason, agency, the good, teleological order, and other esoteric terminology for the related philosophical issues. What I offered you today as most helpful is Taylor’s distinction between ‘closed immanent frames’ and ‘open immanent frames’. Granting the power of materialist empiricism within an ‘immanent frame’, he suggests that one need not stop there with a ‘closed immanent frame’. You might acknowledge the power of the ‘immanent frame’ for instrumental reason and agency, but maintain an ‘open immanent frame’ that allowed for a transcendent dimension, including meaning and purpose.

Many people who tell pollsters they ‘don’t believe in evolution’ mean a popular version of Taylor’s esoteric complexity. We (that’s right, people including me) deny a ‘closed immanent frame’, and reject the denial of teleology or providential order. We demand that there be a point to our existence. It’s the Peggy Lee theology of her song ‘Is that all there is?’, or Harry Nillson’s ‘Me and My Arrow’ song from ‘The Point’, where a boy with a pointed head is sent to the pointless forest since he can’t fit in – but his dog has a point, too, and can play triangle toss.

Don’t be afraid to sing along! Hans Kung’s trilogy, on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, applied Thomas Kuhn’s theories of scientific revolution to the paradigm shifts and layered meaning in religious traditions. ‘Dem bones’ is not a song of orthopedic naivete or anatomical ignorance – let’s at least allow that there might be different questions, provoking different answers, and wonder with me what they might be!

Ezekiel was the 5th and last of 5 ‘not yet guys’ in Lent, after Adam, Abraham, Moses, & David. We revisited Genesis, then Exodus, then former prophets, now major prophets. It’s 600 years before Jesus. The north fell to Assyria over a century earlier, and Josiah’s reform 20 years before was followed by younger kings, tipping a geopolitical balance between Egypt and Mesopotamia, Nile and Tigris-Euphrates valleys, Africa and Asia – let alone Mediterranean Europe. The 1st deportation of an elite from Jerusalem to Babylon occurred in 597. Cut the heads off a society, and leave a puppet king: that was the plan. Ezekiel was a name on the list. Was he our prophet?

I don’t know if Ezekiel prophesied in Iraq about Jerusalem’s follies, or in Israel, but for 36 chapters, he fulminates doom and gloom, accusations and blame and warning, for Jerusalem and all the nations: ‘don’t think God’s going to bail you out!’ In denying the easy nationalist line, Ezekiel moves to a sacred history, beyond secular time, and speaks of ultimate outcomes: imagine a valley of dry bones in a desert valley. Can these bones live? God knows. This is not a problem to be solved, not a matter of progress of evolution. These are terminal, unsalvageable, dry bones. No program or legislation can fix this situation!

Once you’ve got the bleak vision – then you appeal to the supernatural, transcendent change: rattling of the bones, making skeletons, then flesh and skin, then breath, and standing. I hope this reminds you of adamah and issah, earth and breath, flesh and spirit, body and soul. If Adam was the ‘not-yet guy’ of creation, then Ezekiel is the ‘not-yet guy’ of resurrection. This is no tale of self-made men pulling their own bootstraps, but of prudence relying on providence. Ezekiel yells at us for 36 chapters, but we focus on the hope of these chapters, a vision beyond history, of hope for a river flowing from the throne of God, a battle of Gog and Magog – apocalyptic stuff.

We began with an individualized take on ‘dem bones’, identifying with our personal laments of ‘oh, my aching bones’. I invited you to think communally, too, before we ended. People my age and older grieve and lament the ‘good old days’ of Christendom, when the churches were full, and the hymns rang out loud and clear because everyone knew them. We see a valley of dry bleached bones. Younger folks simply imagine how the bones might go together as a puzzle, and imagine life breathed into the company raised up. We can gather and blame leaders and programs at annual meetings or General Council meetings, like the first 36 chapters of Ezekiel. We might instead lament the dry bones, and wait and watch for a deeper hope to raise us up.

If you take that communal lament and hope to a political level, you can face the failures of leaders and their programs and get a wider, deeper perspective to sustain your engagement. Diefenbaker promoted a Bill of Rights as a program, long before our Charter of Rights, but that initial attempt to enshrine human rights in our constitutional framework failed. The key test case, ironically, was R v Drybones. There was a law that said ‘Indians’(sic) could not buy or drink alcohol, for their own good. Drybones was an aboriginal man charged with drinking, whose defence was that the law breached the Bill of Rights, discriminating on the basis of race. The Supreme Court of Canada rejected the defence, and cut the Bill of Rights off at the knees. That failure of the human rights movement was worthy of lament, but not the end of hope. We might do well to have the same sense of penultimacy this week, as Louise Arbour announces retirement from the UNHCR, and pundits praise or pillory her for her international efforts in recent years

‘Oh, my aching bones’ can be a lament, seeking hope, personally, communally, or politically. That’s neither orthopedic naivete nor anatomical ignorance. If you wish for a program or a leader to save you, or relieve your aching bones of lament and grief and despair, you will not find hope, just wishes. Ezekiel is answering a different question, with a different answer, in this vision of a valley of dry bones. Spend some time re-imagining his vision, seeking hope and purpose and meaning in a disenchanted universe of secular ‘closed immanent frames’. Let the sound track play in your mind again: Peggy Lee singing ‘Is that all there is?’, Nilsson ‘Me and My Arrow’, or our whole congregation, ending as we began today, singing together:

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones…
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones…
Now hear the word of the Lord –

The hip bone’s connected to the leg bone…
The leg bone’s connected to the knee bone…
The knee bone’s connected to the shin bone –
Now hear the word of the Lord!

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones…
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones…
Now hear the word of the Lord –

What word do you have for our hearts, O God, give us ears to hear. Amen.

Prayer from March 9

God who calls us, we’ve come –
Through the snow and the sun, we’ve come
Despite the winter, because of the winter, we’ve come

You know the aches and pains we bear –
You know we come despite them, because of them
You know how we have whined about our aches and pains
You know how we’ve cared for our pains, not others pains

We’d rather have our aches and pains
Than the alternatives of oblivion -
We don’t want numbness –
we don’t seek to rush to our death
We don’t just want to escape
But you know, God, how often we do numb our pain
Suppress it, redirect it,
Run from it, mask it…

You gave us the roots of our empathy
For others’ aching bones
Solidarity and community –
Our basic humanity….
Remind us of all we share –
All we have in common
Though much of it we’d rather avoid…
Teach us to recognize our sisters
Who are not, like us, temporarily physically able,
Who are not, like us, temporarily employed, and solvent
For we confess how much and how many
We overlook, as if they were not, like us, yours

God who calls us, we’ve come –
Through the snow and the sun, we’ve come
Despite the winter, because of the winter, we’ve come

You know the aches and pains we bear –
You know we come despite them, because of them
You know how we have whined about our aches and pains
You know how we’ve cared for our pains, not others pains

Forgive us, we pray, as we sing together
Kyrie Eleison –
Lord, have mercy….