Not Change, Death and Resurrection

Ezekiel 37:1-14

            It is extremely normal to be afraid of death, and not just physical death. It is natural to fear the death of things, the death of ideals, the death of the past. Ezekiel and the valley of the dry bones is a response to all of this. What better sign of death than dry bones—and this is a valley filled with them! It makes a person wonder: How did they die? Some brutal war, famine, genocide… For me, it brings to mind pictures from Auschwitz or from the genocide in Rwanda. Bones upon bones. Bodies upon bodies.

            That’s a heavy way to start on a Christmas program Sunday, but I think it’s important that we don’t too quickly romanticize this story. It’s important not apart from Christmas but because of it. I don’t want to jump ahead straight to the resolution; I want to sit for a moment in the silence of the valley of dry bones, because that feels like Advent to me—because in the dry bones we have whispers of resurrection.

            God does nothing apart from death. This is where God and the rest of us are profoundly different. We have a strong desire to keep things alive. We remember what was good, and we recognize that good thing (or good person) for what it was, and so we, quite logically, put that good thing on life support and try to keep it going and going and going both to honor the good thing that once was and to hope that that good thing may one day come back again.

            “I remember when the church was full on Sundays,” we say with a hint of sadness.

            “I remember when we had so many people in town…”

            “I remember when so-and-so was here, doing such-and-such a thing. It will never be the same as when they were here.”

            I suspect all of these things are true. I hear them all the time. We need to say a couple things about those things from the past. One is that it’s true, we absolute can’t make things to the same; but the second thing we must do is admit that the past was great but the past is those dry bones. Trying to keep it alive is fruitless. Keeping it on life support drains us, and it’s ultimately futile. It’s like telling somebody in the nursing home who has lost their mobility that if they just started playing basketball in the mornings—because hey, it works for me!—they’ll get stronger. It pains us to admit that some goals have to change, some things die. And that’s either the end of the world or it isn’t; that’s the real question for us: Is death the end of the world or not?

            My grandma, Myrtle, died a couple nights ago. She was healthy most of the time; she lived at home until she was 95, the last thirty-plus of those years on her own, and then for four years in a Senior Apartment until finally moving into the nursing home in her 100^th year of life. The last time we saw her a few weeks back for her one hundredth birthday she told us that she was going to die soon, and she was right. I’ve seen people who are very ready to die, desperate even to move on. This wasn’t my grandma. It was more matter-of-fact than that; it was just “I’m not going to be around much longer,” and the implication was: That’s OK.

As I think about the dry bones I really want to contrast my Grandma Myrtle with my other grandma. My grandma, Margaret, died a few years back—she had Alzheimer’s that got gradually worse, which was tough on the whole family, as it is for many of you who have loved ones with dementia. I was visiting her one time while I was in seminary. I had just finished a triathlon that morning in St. Paul when my parents and I stopped by the care facility, which was just down the road. I remember two things about that visit. One was that I still had the number in Sharpie written on my arm from the race. I don’t know why I remember that—probably because I was proud of it. The second thing I remember was my grandma looking at me and saying, “Everything is changing out there. Why is everything changing? Change always makes things worse.”

            My grandma didn’t realize it—couldn’t have realized it, really; it wasn’t her fault—but her words could have felt like judgment on me, like she was saying, “Your life will be measured by how good you are at recreating the past.” Your way of living—this triathlon you did this morning—that’s not something your parents did, so why are you? This is what Minnesotans are so often saying when they say, “Oh, that’s interesting.”

The implication is that your choices in life—your path you are following; it’s a worse path than those before you. Please understand, I didn’t feel any bad feelings toward my grandma at all. Even if she didn’t have dementia I wouldn’t have been bothered by this; it was simply her feelings about the world out there, and it is scary out there and how much more for a person who is losing her memory! No, instead I mostly just felt sad; sad first for my grandma dealing with what she was dealing with; sad that the present is always being judged compared to the past; sad that new and old have good or bad connotations for people; sad that each generation just seems to pick up the battles started by the generations before; sad that we all have at least a little bit of generational dementia.

            We need something better. So let’s return to Ezekiel. In this story God does not bring back a bunch of dying Israelites. In the same way, God didn’t heal Lazarus. Jesus doesn’t hang on the cross until the edge of death and then make a triumphant leap down off the cross. Israel dies. Lazarus dies. Jesus dies. Death is both completely not OK—it is the wages of sin, after all—and yet it is the one thing God uses for good time and again. Death is God’s most beautiful canvas, because dead people don’t resist; in death God can do with us what he would have had our poor little selves not gotten in the way in life. In death we remove all the presumptions we have of living. Several times in scripture somebody presents a sick person—a couple times a child or Lazarus—and by the time help gets there—Jesus, Elijah, whoever—the sick person has died and we hear those familiar words, “It’s too late.” There’s no time. Death is death.

            That’s where we need a shift in thinking, because while we are busy trying to keep everything alive God is practicing resurrection. Resurrection requires death. You need death to bring new life, just as fire burns a forest that becomes re-invigorated from the ashes—just as last year’s plants provide nutrients for soil and fertilizer for the next year’s crop. Just as dead plants and animals and even people sustain the future—all death leads to new life. Every bit of it.

            We see these signs because we are resurrection people.

            So it is that Ezekiel comes across this valley of dry bones and prophesies to the bones. First they rise up and come together, second they are re-formed zombie-like, and third they receive the breath of God—the spirit inside of them. GET UP AND WALK! You see, every healing story of Jesus’ is a resurrection story. Get up and walk! Every little step of faith is a resurrection story. Get up and walk!

            Nobody walks backwards. We walk into new life, not looking back but forward. Get up and walk! God promises Ezekiel that this house of Israel will rise up from their graves. That’s their future and, despite the current circumstances—despite the fact that Israel is in exile and everybody can remember a time better than this one—still, the past cannot hold a candle to the future. All this talk of decline is subterfuge for a reality in which God is not just making all things new but also putting death to death. Dry bones? Pfft. GET UP AND WALK!

            This is a funny Advent message; it is an Easter message, really, except for this: The baby in the manger? He is both our past and our future. Advent is this marvelous time where the past and future collide as we wait on a Savior born in Bethlehem long ago, who is born for each of us every day to let go of all the sin and burdens that hold us down. He is a baby who will raise us by telling us to pick up our crosses and follow, who will invite us into death, because Jesus knew what God does with dry bones.

            To God, that valley—the one over which Ezekiel stood—was a valley filled with potential. That is the stunning revelation of this God in Christ Jesus in whom we have faith: Death is full of potential. It is not the end of it; it’s not the end of us. Ezekiel foretold it; Jesus embodied it; you and I get to live it, and it’s hard for us to see because death feels strong. We miss those who we’ve lost, the memories are never a substitute for the experience—for the touch of a person we miss dearly. And that’s exactly why we need a God who looks at dry bones as full of potential, who speaks into them, who raises them, because the dry bones are us—at least that’s where we will end up—and the baby in the manger whispers—just whispers—that things will not be the same.

And thank God for that.