Ezekiel 37: 1-14 (links validated 3/8/23)

Mark Yaconelli is a spiritual director, retreat leader, community activist, and storyteller. He is a creative, soulful person who has done a lot of youth ministry. This story comes from one of those youth ministry experiences. Several years ago, some one came up with the idea of writing a book for teenagers on the theology of the church. They got grant funding for the project and invited 15 theologians to collaborate. They asked Mark to serve as a consultant for the project. He says that he’s not a theologian, but he had a reputation for understanding teenagers, so he was invited and he agreed. [1] They all got together at the appointed time and place – fifteen theologians, academic types from across different denominations and schools, each writing a different chapter in the book Mark listened to their ideas for a while and then he said, “I just have one suggestion. Since this book is for young people, why don’t we, you know, get some actual teenagers involved?”...

It is a sad statement on the last 100 years that we can rather easily imagine the scene Ezekiel describes in his famous 37th chapter. Whether or not the people in Ezekiel’s original audience had ever seen such a valley full of bones, we have. We’ve seen the mass graves of Auschwitz and Kosovo. Our minds cannot erase, much though we’d like to, the carnage of Rwanda and particularly of that one photo of a church sanctuary littered with the skeletal remains of those who sought refuge in God’s house but who found instead swift death at the hands of machete-wielding thugs. Perhaps most dramatically we’ve seen the killing fields of Cambodia (see below) with bones and skulls stretching to the horizon. We know what Ezekiel saw and we know that such a scene represents death in all its finality, intensity, and horror. And so we also know what we would say if someone asked us, “Do you see any life in all that carnage? Can those emaciated victims of Hitler’s Final Solution live? Can Pol Pot’s legacy of murder lead to life?” We know what we’d say and we know that from just the human side of things our answer would be a resounding, “No!” If you’ve ever toured one of the Nazi concentration camp memorials, you know of the almost choking sense of death and finality you sense in those places. When years ago I visited Buchenwald, I was struck by what a glorious place of natural beauty it is. Located near Weimar in what was then East Germany, Buchenwald overlooks a broad vista of rolling hills and valleys. Even in the dead of winter when I was there, the view was lovely. And yet it wasn’t lovely to me. Buchenwald, like the other camps I’ve seen at Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Plötzensee, hangs so heavy with a sense of mass extermination that all else is eclipsed. By the time you’ve viewed the memorial plaques, glanced at the grim photos of corpses stacked like cord wood, and passed by the crematorium onto which is now engraved with the words, Denket Daran Wie Wir Hier Starben / “Ponder How We Died Here,” there is little left in your mind than the overwhelming sense of death’s tragedy and of its apparent absolute finality. There is no beauty there and often very little sense of hope...

The TV show, “Bones,” is categorized as a “crime procedural comedy drama” which ran for 12 seasons. Comedy and crime do not seem to go together but this show did it well! Dr Temperance Brennan, a brilliant forensic anthropologist, and her eventual husband, FBI Special Agent Sealey Booth, and their colleagues solve murders and sometimes leave us in stitches. Dr Brennan has little or no tact, no religion, and few social skills. Booth, on the other hand, is staunchly Catholic, suave and tactful when that is needed. She often responds, “I don’t know what that means” when someone refers to just about anything in contemporary culture. In the show she helps to identify the dead that show up in the vicinity of Washington DC and we have been told that she has helped identify the victims of massacres overseas - where, for example, activities of ethnic cleansing eliminated entire communities. In one episode she and her team identified the remains of a person from just a few bones of one hand. When she is not busy studying current remains to catch killers, like many forensic anthropologists, she studies remains of people dead for hundreds or even thousands of years. She works with Angela, an artist who can take a skull and using the gifts of modern technology and a bit of guesswork, give that skull a face and often, a name. They seek to bring closure to families looking for answers to the fate of their loved ones. Under their skillful artistry, the bones live...

("The Ezekiel text reminds me of an Inuit story that I first encountered in Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. It is titled, "Skeleton Woman" and is a beautiful parallel tale to the Hebrew story of Spirit calling life into and breathing flesh upon the dry bones...")

Every once in a while someone comes along who stuns us with the power of a life which has nothing going for it except the power of God's Spirit. Such is the life of a young woman who was born in Yugoslavia of Albanian parents. She gained her life's dream when she became a novitiate in a convent in India. She asked to live outside the cloister and moved to the slums of Calcutta. With absolutely nothing in the way of earthly value, she became responsible for 81 schools in India alone, 35 mobile medical dispensaries, 28 family planning centers, 67 leprosy clinics, 28 homes for abandoned children and 32 homes for the dying...

A small boy was intent on going to church one particular morning. Because his sister was sick his mother allowed him to go alone on the condition that he tell her what the sermon was about when he returned. When he returned his mother was very curious but waited to quiz him until after he ate his lunch. He ate in silence. Finally she asked, “What was the topic of the sermon, honey? Were you listening?” “Yes, Mom. I was listening but the sermon made no sense, the sermon was on quilts.” “Quilts?” questioned the astonished mother. “I’ve never heard a sermon on quilts! What did the minister say about quilts?” “Well, all I got from it was, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get a quilt”. “You’re right dear. That doesn’t make any sense! We don’t need a quilt. Maybe they are collecting quilts for the Red Cross. They give out quilts to people who need them, you know.” “No, Mom! Everyone will get one.” Very puzzled the mother finally picked up the phone and called the minister...

In his Trilogy of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien tells the story of Frodo Baggins and his company who are on a quest to destroy the evil Ring of Power. They journey into the elvish kingdom of Lothlerien, where Galadriel tells Frodo of the elves’ long resistance to the creeping evil of Sauron. Though they have lost their country bit by bit, she encourages him with these bracing words: “together through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.” That’s often how it seems; our battle with sin and evil, even in our own selves, is “a long defeat.” That is surely how it felt to ancient Israel. But God has a surprise for us. Defeat will turn to victory, as Frodo and his company will finally discover. And death will be overcome by sovereign love, as the Exiles and the followers of Jesus discovered.

Italian painter (and architect and inventor and civil engineer and sculptor and ninja turtle and...) Leonardo da Vinci captured the beauty and function of human bones and sinews in his many anatomy drawings. The importance of the figure in Renaissance art made an understanding of human anatomy a necessity for any artist. Leon Battista Alberti, a 15th-century art theorist, instructed artists that they should understand and paint the human figure as it is in nature: a skeleton and musculature that is covered with skin. For Alberti, drawing an external appearance was not enough. Artists needed to understand how the human body worked - bone to bone with connecting muscles.

There is a scene in the movie Return of the King, based on the third volume of J.R.R. Tolkien’s saga The Lord of the Rings, where Aragorn gives dead soldiers who deserted their king a chance to regain their honor and be restored to peace if they will help to defend the City of Kings which is under attack by evil powers. He enters a cave through a small crevice in the mountain. It is dark and the sound effects make it clear that this is not a pleasant place. He steps over piles of dry bones heaped up against the walls of the cave and it appears that these are nothing but dry skeleton bones. Suddenly, in the center of a large room, these skeletal creatures begin to threaten, but they are not really alive. Aragorn offers them a chance to redeem themselves by making good on their pledge to defend good against evil, and to be a part of a community that will restore the kingdom...

When I think about superheroes, I don't think about powerful, strong, mighty superhumans, but about El Chapulin Colorado who was the antithesis of this image. Whenever we turned on the TV to watch El Chapulin, a deep voice would introduce him with the following words: “More agile than a turtle, stronger than a mouse, nobler than a lettuce, his shield is a heart… It’s El Chapulín Colorado!” El Chapulin was a small, feeble and accident-prone superhero who seemed to cause more problems than the villains he faced. And yet, whenever he would find himself in the Valley of Dry Bones, whenever all sense of hope was lost, the answer to all his issues came from everyone else but himself...

On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela walked out of the Victor Verster Prison after 27 ½ years. His wife holding one hand and the other hand held high in a closed fist of victory. Certainly, there were days of hopeless darkness, but that day he embraced his freedom. He was a man who was prepared to die for the anti-apartheid efforts in South Africa but was breathing new life. Ezekiel himself knew pain. He was taken captive during the Jehoiachin deportation in 597BCE. His wife died after they were in exile. As a priest and prophet, he was aware of the people’s actions and needs.

Let me tell you about Broad Street Ministries in my hometown of Philadelphia. It is run by Presbyterian ministers in a former large church building given by the Presbytery of Philadelphia, but it is incorporated as a 501(c)3 non-profit. Broad Street serves over 6,000 of our homeless neighbors with food, mailboxes, health screening, clothing and art therapy. It attracts thousands of volunteers annually. Over a hundred people gather each Sunday for worship and half again as many for Wednesday night Bible study. But there isn't a single "member." The mainline churches are going to have to think of new ways to conceive of what constitutes a church and new ways for denominations and traditional congregations to support them...

("Remember the musical The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy's house was swept up by a horrible cyclone. When her house finally landed in Munchkin City, it landed right on top of an evil witch who had been tormenting the Munchkin people...")

Scroll down the page for this resource.

(scroll down to page 41)

Scroll down the page for this resource.

Scroll down the page for this resource.

Scroll down the page for this resource.

Scroll down the page for this resource.

Scroll down the page for this video.

(Puppet Script by Louise Ferry)

In her book Learning to Walk in the Dark, author and priest Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of being in Florida, at a time when the loggerhead turtles were laying their eggs. One evening, when the tide was out, she watched a huge turtle heave herself up on the beach to dig her nest and empty her eggs into it. Afraid of disturbing the event, Taylor quickly and quietly walked away. The next morning she returned to the beach to see if she could find the spot where the eggs were hidden. What she found instead were sea turtle tracks heading in the wrong direction. Instead of moving back into the sea, the loggerhead turtle had wandered into the dunes, the hot, dry, sandy dunes. Taylor eventually found the turtle a little ways inland, exhausted, all but baked in the sun, head and flippers covered with sand. She poured the water from her water bottle over the creature and then left to notify the beach ranger. The ranger soon arrived in a Jeep to rescue the turtle. He flipped the loggerhead on her back, wrapped two chains around her front legs, and then hooked the chain to the trailer hitch. Taylor watched horrified as the ranger then took off in the Jeep. The turtle’s body was yanked forward with such thrust that her mouth filled with sand. Her neck was bent so far back Taylor feared it might break. The ranger continued over the dunes and down onto the beach. There he unhooked the turtle at the edge of the water and turned her right side up. The loggerhead laid motionless in the surf, water lapping at her body, washing the dry sand away. As another wave broke over, the turtle lifted her head and moved her back legs. Soon other waves crashed over her and brought her slowly back to life. Finally one of the waves completely overcame the turtle, making her light enough to find a foothold and push off the beach, returning safely to the ocean. Taylor writes that watching the turtle swim away and remembering the horrible scene of the turtle being dragged through the dunes, she learned something -- that “It is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.”...