Untying the Knots
5) Can Dem Bones Walk Around?

Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45

March 9, 2008, Fifth Sunday in Lent

When I was in the Maryville College Choir we would go on tour every year during spring break. We sang in churches every evening and twice on Sundays. We also sang in high schools during the week. It was a great recruiting tool for the college. The songs for the high schools had to be cool, so we would only do a few from our evening concerts and then had some just for the high schools. One of the high school songs we sang just about every year was the Robert Shaw Chorale’s version of our Ezekiel passage entitled Dry Bones. “Dem bones, Dem bones, Dem’a, Dry bones. Now hear the world of the Lord.” It was always a crowd pleaser with the high schools, because we had different noise makers for each bone which sounded when each bone was connected to the other. “The foot bone’s connected to the, ankle bone; the ankle bone’s connected to the leg bone…” It was a version of the old spiritual, “Dem bones Gonna Walk Around.” As the blacks worked in the fields they sang this song, truly feeling that their bones were dry, bleached and disconnected and lying in the cotton fields of the south. The song spoke of their hope that the time would come when God would connect the bones of their lives and let them walk freely on the face of the earth. Just as the hope of the Israelites during the exile was that God would reconnect the bones of their nation and let them go freely back to their land. That God would be God, and save them.

On this last Sunday of Lent and of our series Untying the Knots we are left to wonder if God can give new life to these knotted up lives of ours. We’ve talked about the knots of the fear of being vulnerable, the knots of the holding too tight to our certitudes, the knots of the fear of loss and losing, the knots of our human perception that get in the way of our seeing the truth in other people.

Today I want to look at the knot of the fear of hope. Have you ever thought about how hard it is to hope – to believe that something good can happen to you? It is hard precisely because we’ve hoped many times before and feel like we’ve been disappointed. We become afraid to hope again. Think of the Israelites, they had hoped and believed that as long as the temple stood in Jerusalem God would take care of them. But that had not been the case. Now in exile they are afraid to hope, or perhaps don’t even know what to hope for. They are the parched bones in the valley, who have given up ever being the people of God again. When hope dies life feels dry – stagnant – no life, no air.

Martha and Mary had hoped that when Jesus heard that their brother was ill he would come quickly and save him before he died. But Jesus did not come, and their brother died. What we hear in her words to Jesus, “If you had been here my brother would not have died,” is despair. I mean what good is a God, or a son of God, if he won’t listen to your prayers and answer when you call. Yeah, I know he will rise on the last day, but I wanted him in my life longer here on earth, and you let me down!

God, you let me down. I don’t know if I can hope again. Craig Barnes, a former pastor of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. wrote the following in Christian Century Magazine six years ago in a piece on our Ezekiel passage.

Often when people’s lives have been interrupted by a great tragedy, they stop coming to worship. I used to think this was because they were embarrassed by their loss of a loved one, job or health. But I’ve discovered that more often the reason people stop worshiping is that they have lost their vision of God. To stand in worship beside so many who are singing praise to the Lord just creates too much existential contradiction. It’s a tragic irony of the soul that in the times we most need to worship, we find it most difficult.

A crisis of hope is a crisis of faith. As the author of Hebrews reminds us in that well known passage of chapter 11, verse 1:

Now faith is the evidence of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

One cannot have faith without hope; thus Jesus said to Martha,

I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?

Do you believe this? What you want cannot happen unless you have faith, unless you have hope. We may not want to be vulnerable, we may not want to experience loss, we may not want to lose, and we may feel that we will never get the knots untied in our lives, but unless we have hope we will not even make the attempt. Unless we believe that God is there with us we will not believe that we can become the people God wants us to be.

When Ezekiel said, “O Lord God, you know,” he was making a faith statement. If God wanted them to walk they would walk. I find it interesting that those who developed the lectionary have these passages from Ezekiel and John the last Sunday before Holy Week. I believe their intention is to force us to ask, “Do we have hope that God, and God’s son would go through the events of Holy week for us? Do we have hope that God can be resurrected in our lives? Do we have a faith that can believe in an Easter in our lives?” There are so many areas in most of our lives that feel disconnected. Can we have hope that our lives will ever be connected and whole? Is God greater than our disconnectedness?

I’m reminded of William Sloan Coffin, the late pastor of Riverside church who told of how a young man came in to see him and blurted out that he could not believe in God anymore. Coffin asked him to describe the God he could not believe in, and after he described this God to Coffin – Coffin replied – “Well. That makes two of us. I cannot believe in that God as well.”

In one of our Wednesday night video segments John Dominic Crossan talks about the four questions that each and every one of us needs to ask ourselves and wrestle with. The first question is, “What is the Character of your God.” Does your God care about people, or is your God a vengeful God who delights in putting sinners in hell? Is your God one who finds it easy to leave you to fight your demons alone, or is your God there with you helping you to fight them? How you answer that question will greatly determine whether or not you can hope in your God, and have hope for your lives. How you answer the first question will also determine how you will answer the other three questions which are 2.) What is the content of your faith? 3.) What is the function of your church? 4.) What is the purpose of your worship? These are important questions, but the first is a question about faith and hope, and how you answer it will determine your answer to the next three. How you answer that first question will determine how you respond to the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Someone once asked Joseph of Arimathea, “That was such a beautiful, costly, hand-hewn tomb. Why did you give it to someone else to be interred in?” “Oh,” said Joseph, “He only needed it for the weekend.” It takes hope to believe that Jesus needed the tomb for only a weekend. It takes hope to cast your bread on the water and expect that something good will come of it. Every week as I write my sermons that is exactly how I feel, that I’m casting my bread on the water in hope that it will feed somebody. If I did not have hope I could not do that; I could not write a sermon. And believe me there are times that I find it very difficult to write a sermon feeling I have nothing to say, that what I’m saying will not offer new life, new hope to anyone.

Where are you feeling dry in your life? Where are you feeling bound up by your own failings and idiosyncrasies? Where do you feel that your life is disconnected? Is “dem bones” gonna walk again? Is “dem bones” gonna feel the breath of the Lord blowing new life into them? May God help each of us to untie the knot of the loss of hope and faith, and find new life and new movement, new dancing in our lives.

Amen

© 2008 Rev. Dr. Thomas T. Peters