Sermon, November 11, 2007 -- Ezekiel 37:1-14

“Vision” (Ezekiel 37:1-14)
Rick Olson, November 11, 2007

A certain father of a certain president—himself president at the time—spoke often of “that vision thing,” and I can’t think of that without thinking of Saturday Night Live . . . and though it wouldn’t be prudent to do Dana Carvey doing George the First, because I can’t mimic my way out of a paper bag, one thing George Herbert Walker Bush understood is that without vision, something in a people dies . . . without that vision thing, there are no big projects, no big dreams . . . John Kennedy articulated a vision of a human being walking on the moon, he came right out and told it to our nation, before he got shot, and in not too many years, there we were, taking that one great step for mankind . . . Martin Luther King had a vision—he called it a dream—and it was a vision of an end to racism and the poverty that springs forth from it, he articulated that dream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and it wasn’t too long before he was shot, it seems creating vision can be a dangerous thing, and lo and behold, a largely peaceful revolution took place, and although there is a long way to go, equality is no longer simply a dream . . .

And it seems like our country right now is singularly lacking in vision, singularly short on dreams . . . we’ve got monetary woes, our economy is shaky, we’re beset on all sides by problems . . . our infrastructure is failing, our bridges failing into the rivers and our schools direly in need of a makeover . . . we’re running out of oil, the prices are going through the roof, and there’s nothing viable in the wings to wean us off the barrel. Statistics say the middle class is getting smaller, the lower socioeconomic classes are getting larger, as more and more wealth is concentrated in the highest 2% or simply shipped overseas. And we seem unable to come up with solutions, much less dream heroic dreams . . . maybe we’re just too economically strapped these days—after all, when people think only of survival, only of how they’re gonna pay the bills, and make it through one more church-night supper, they don’t have the energy to dream, it can be mighty difficult to en-vision.

That was the problem in Ezekiel’s time, only the Israelites had it in spades . . . they weren't just worried about the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage industry, or undocumented workers along their borders, their entire country had collapsed, they’d been literally wiped out as a nation, their beloved Jerusalem sacked, their temple—where they believed God physically lived—reduced to rubble. Not for nothing that the first vision Ezekiel had was of God leaving the land . . . and he was commissioned by God to be God’s mouthpiece, to preach and demonstrate God’s word from exile, he was a prophet in exile himself, with his people, while they were held captive in Babylon . . . There’s a song of that era—preserved for us in Psalm 137—that amply demonstrates the mood of the time:

“By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down
and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our harps.
For there our captors asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth,
saying, ‘Sing us a song of Zion!’
But how could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?”

How could they sing songs, how could they dream dreams, how could they get vision while they were struggling to survive in a foreign land?

How indeed? Well . . . in our passage, we find out . . . Ezekiel is speaking, and he tells us of a dream: the hand of the Lord came upon him, he says, and he brought him out by the Spirit of the Lord—God’s animating force on the earth, pulling him out into his dream-state—and set him down in the middle of a valley . . . and in his vision he saw that the valley was full of bones, of bones dry and brittle, bones bleached white by the Palestine sun, and there were very many of them, they filled the valley, and they were very, very dry . . .

And the Lord asks him “Mortal, can these bones live?” and what a question that was, if God didn’t know, who would? And Ezekiel says as much, “O Lord God, you know,” and then God tells him what to do . . . but he doesn’t say “Pick ‘em up and put ‘em together,” start a new program or worship service or outreach plan,” he doesn’t tell them about a sure-fire, step-by-step procedure to put them back together, he tells them to prophesy to the bones, to preach to them, to tell them a story. God gives Ezekiel a vision and commands him to tell it to the bones.

We know who the bones represent, don’t we, without even skipping down to the explanation, without peeking at the end of the story. We know that the bones are a vision of Israel, dead and lifeless in the valley of the rivers of Babylon, cold . . . and dry . . . and gray, O dry bones, O brittle husk of Israel, now hear the word of the Lord . . . and God tells them what is going to happen, God gives them this vision in poetic form, which is after all the metaphoric language of dreams, of vision, God says that God will cause breath to enter them, and that they shall live . . .

Now the Lord fleshes out the vision—pun intended—and it’s a very vivid image, an image of creeping sinews and slinking flesh, slithering up the lifeless bones, coalescing around them and encapsulating them, until they look like the visible man, or that movie where the scientists appear one organ at a time . . . skin and hair and guts and teeth, and eyeballs and fingernails and vessels full of blood, until there is a perfect people lying there, a perfect, beautiful corpse, but it does not move.

For you see . . . it takes more than flesh to make a people, it takes more than material things, more than armies and treasuries and departments of state . . . it takes spirit, it takes heart, it takes breath, and so God says “prophesy to the breath, speak to it, call it down upon the lifeless, cold body, say “Come from the four winds, O breath, O Spirit, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live,” and Ezekiel does, he articulates the vision, he animates it, calling down breath into the corpse and at first it seems not to work, the body is silent and still, and suddenly with a great convulsive shudder it comes alive, it’s alive! Filled with the spirit, quick with God’s mission, a living breathing people once again . . .

And we should stop and take our breath, and note that it just as takes more than flesh to make a person, so it takes more than bricks to make a church, more than organs and pews and pew Bibles, even . . . it takes the Spirit of God to animate a church, to enliven a local expression of the Body of Christ . . . you can have all the fine drawing rooms, all the fine sanctuaries and Sunday School rooms and fellowship halls you want, but if the Spirit of God doesn’t quicken it, if the Holy Ghost doesn’t stalk its halls and flit among its rafters and beams, then it’s nothing but a beautiful corpse. It is the Spirit, called down from the four corners of the earth, that wind that makes all others blow, that enables a church to fulfill its mission, which is nothing less than to be an outpost of the Kingdom of God.

But come on, now, what really happened with Ezekiel’s vision? How did it become reality, how did it go from being just a weird dream of a half-crazed dreamer to being reality for an entire nation? Well, along with the vision came concrete realities, along with the dream came a material plan for their restoration in Jerusalem. You can read it for yourselves if you go a little further along in the Book Ezekiel than today’s lection, a plan for the temple’s restoration, and when Ezekiel transmitted the vision and plans to the people, they began to buzz with excitement, they began to talk about the vision, to offer amendments and modifications, to debate the details. Folks disagreed with one another, with Ezekiel, even, and in the discussion, in the fussin’ and feudin’ and fightin’, a funny and wholly marvelous thing happened—the vision of the valley of the living, breathing children of God became inevitable. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, they knew what was going to happen, they were just arguing over the details. God gave them a vision, and in the wrangling over it, in the discussion of it and how to achieve it, it became a foregone conclusion, an incipient reality, a done deal. Within fifty years, the unsinkable Babylonian Empire had sunk, the Israelites had been released, and the restoration of the temple had begun. And God did it all beginning with a vision.

Brothers and sisters, God has given us a vision, just as sure as God gave one to those Babylonian captives . . . in a sense, that’s what the whole Seekers process has been up until now, a seeking after vision, a running after dreams . . . when your Seekers meditated in at their retreats, as they interviewed and listened to you, the congregation, as they studied our community, God was embedding a vision in their hearts, a picture of what Covenant could be like . . . God has used the process—as distressing as it has at times been for everyone—God has used it to bring forth a vision every bit as compelling as the one given to Ezekiel twenty-four hundred years ago.

We’ve been shown the valley, haven’t we? We’ve seen the bones, heard their rustling, their sighing in the wind . . . we’ve smelt the dry must and felt the hot wind, and looked into an uncertain, future . . . and it’s hard to envision when you’re worried about survival, it’s tough to dream when we’re worried about continuing on, and so the Seekers, and so the deliberate, difficult, intentional making time and space for dreaming . . .

And that’s what you have before you today, Vision 1.0, the first iteration of our guiding principles for church renewal . . . and like the one God gave to Ezekiel it is cast in metaphorical terms, poetic language, and just as Ezekiel’s vision drew on the Israelite people’s past as a sovereign nation, so does our vision incorporate the church of the past, planted on the edge, built by families of fearless faith, Covenant still stands.

I invite you to take this vision and live with it, turn it around in your minds, pick it apart in your heads . . . talk about it, gripe about it, discuss it among yourselves and with its architects, who are God and the Seekers, in that order. Pray about it, play around with it, and as you do, you can rest assured that we are just at the beginning . . . your Seekers are beginning the process of fleshing out the vision, of breathing breath and life into it . . . with our vision statement to guide us, providing a grounding in what we want to be, we are beginning to plan, to discern what the church might look like, what worship and building and programs might be needed, to actualize that vision.

Biblical scholar Walter Wink summed up the process: “That is how history is made,” he said: “by envisioning . . . new alternative possibilities and acting on them as if they were inevitable. That is how despair is overcome . . . by prophesying a course of action God is conspiring to bring to pass.” And friends, I am convinced that we are doing just that, that we have been given a vision for Covenant as vital and important and integral to our community, and I am equally sure that working within God’s powerful grace and providence, it will come to pass. I say these things in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.