Sermon

Zombies and dry bones

Scripture Text:

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

Sermon:

Welcome to the Fifth Sunday of Lent, also known as “Zombie Sunday.”  We have Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones and Lazarus, wrapped in bandages, emerging from his tomb!  Spooky.  But those scripture passages shouldn’t seem too unusual.  We Americans are rather obsessed with death and murder these days.  Zombie this and zombie that – my husband Adam has a game on his iPhone that he was obsessed with for a while called “Plants vs. Zombies.”  There’s a book: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and another called Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.  On TV, we have “True Blood” and “Vampire Diaries,” and in the non-zombie-but-still-death-and-torture-obsessed realm: the “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” series and TV shows like “NCIS,” “Bones,” and “Criminal Minds.”  Sometimes I’m flipping through channels and it seems like every blasted channel is showing some version of a crime show.

Maybe it helps us deal with death to have ways we can make it entertaining or romantic or so cartoonish that we can kind of numb ourselves to it.  We can even become numb to real accounts of murder or torture. The first time I read about something truly awful, I’m shocked for a few days or maybe a week.  And then when I think of the event again or see it in the news, I notice that I’ve gotten used to it.  I hate to think that I feel that way now about the Twin Towers collapsing to the ground, but I think I do.  Or the horrific carnage of African chattel slavery in this country, or the American Civil War, which started 150 years ago this week.  Or even the very recent deaths of so many people who were carried out to sea by the tsunami in Japan; I think I’ve gotten used to the whole idea, which may be necessary but is also a little disturbing.

In 1991, 138,000 people died in a tsunami in Bangladesh.  Annie Dillard, one of my favorite authors, said to her young daughter over dinner that she couldn’t quite imagine what 138,000 people drowning might look like.  Her daughter surprised her by replying, simply, “That’s easy, Mom. Lots and lots of dots in blue water.”[1]

Lots and lots of dots.  In the end, I wonder if the earthquakes, the tsunamis, the AIDS dead in Africa, American military and civilian casualties in our wars, begin to look like that: lots and lots of dots.  We numb ourselves to death and evil.  I see articles on my usual news websites about torture in Libya, human rights violations in China, and street battles in the capital of Ivory Coast, and I flip past them to articles about gardening with chili peppers and Civil War history geek-stuff.  I’ve heard the world is bad; it’s hard to hear more.

Ezekiel is in the same boat.  Although he’s seen a lot more than tragic news articles! He’s been through the wringer: he’s faced down corruption at the Temple in Jerusalem, his wife died, he survived a brutal siege of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians and then their invasion and destruction of the city, then he was exiled from his country along with all other inhabitants of Jerusalem who weren’t killed by the Babylonians. He’s seen evil and death, but God brings him back, through a vision, to face them again in a valley of dry bones: the bones of the people of Israel, lost to the swords and pikes of the Babylonian army. When Ezekiel sees the valley, he describes it almost as simply as Annie Dillard’s daughter, saying: “it was full of bones.”  He doesn’t see former people or the scene of a terrible massacre – just a very many bones.  Dry bones.

The bones are all disjointed from one another and they’ve been dried by the desert winds.  But God doesn’t just let Ezekiel look; God asks the prophet, who is probably deep in the throws of PTSD: “Mortal, can these bones live?”  Ezekiel musters a noncommittal answer: “O Lord God, you know.”

A zombie is a dead person who’s walking around but isn’t actually alive.  When God talks to Ezekiel about breath and life for those dry bones and when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, it’s not just the reanimating of a body so it can walk and move its arms around and maybe moan a little.  When Ezekiel saw the bones come together in his vision, it must’ve been, well, pretty amazing:  they rattle and clack against each other as they reassemble and then they’re covered with muscle and skin… but there’s still no breath in them.  Sometimes we, too, go through life hauling our bones, muscles, and skin… but without breath, without life.  We get our bones and skin out of bed in the morning and walk them through the day but it’s hard to do or feel much more than that. New life, the breath of God, the grace and love of our Lord Jesus Christ…?  They seem unreachable, or even like things we don’t deserve.

We, also, can see ourselves as just bones or just dots.  We become numb to our own struggles and fears.  We get used to them and maybe we stop thinking that things could be better or that the love of God can transform death and evil into something new.  We give up and figure: this is how it is, so I’m going to read an article on gardening with chili peppers, because love and grace? that’s obviously not working!

Nations and their leaders get stuck, too; they get used to death, violence, stalemate, and pride and can’t operate from anything else: look at Gaddafi, North Korea, Congress, or, gulp, Charlie Sheen.  But we can’t only blame the infamous for the death and dry bones in our world. We ordinary disciples get stuck, too, forgetting that we have power to make the world better: we get compassion fatigue, we want people in trouble to solve their own problems, we forget that our money can not only buy us doodads and fun stuff but can make a difference in the lives of people who are suffering or desperately poor.

Dry bones.  Lazarus in the tomb.  “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.” (Ps. 130)  Lots and lots of dots.  A friend of mine at my bible study this week said, “All you can hear when you’re that dead is God.”  Thank goodness for that, though.

The good news is that God is in the business of opening graves.

The good news is that Jesus, who could’ve waited for his own resurrection to give away the secret, to let slip the power of God’s love, chooses instead to show his hand before his own death and to resurrect his friend.  He’s a few days late.  Lazarus still stinks of death.  But he shows up for his friends, two women (scandalous!): Mary and Martha.  He saves a man from death and he keeps walking that road to Jerusalem, walking to his own death, which he will walk right through to resurrection – making a path for us to follow Him.

Please believe that you can walk from death into life.  That dry bones can take on flesh and breath.  That life as a zombie is not what God has in mind for any of us.  That we are called to be witnesses to suffering and evil, to fight the urge to dull ourselves to how real they are.  That death is not the end.  That Christ calls us all out of our tombs.

“Thus says the Lord God: … you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people.  I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.”

Amen.

 

Uploaded on April 11, 2011 in by RevHeidi

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