Sermon by Andrew Black

Crescent Hill Presbyterian Church

Rev. 21:1-5

Ezekiel 37:1-14

“A New Way of Seeing, A New Way of Being”

I recently heard a story about a group of inner-city high school students who took a field trip to a local planetarium. After the students positioned themselves to look up at the ceiling, the planetarium’s director hit the lights and everything became dark. The director began by presenting the students with an image of the local night sky as it currently looked with all of the city lights. Observing only a few stars, the students were unimpressed by what they saw. Removing this image, the director replaced it with another showing how the local sky would look if there were no city lights. In awe, the students admired a sky filled with millions of stars, constellations and galaxy dust. Leaving the planetarium the students commented on their amazement of watching the dull sky of every night be transformed before their eyes into a vision of light, beauty and hope. Some students remarked that every time they now looked into the sky at night they no longer saw just a few stars and darkness, but saw the sky beyond this sky, a sky full mystery and millions of stars. With irony, the students noted that star-filled sky had always been there, they just had not been unable to see it.

The theme I want to preach on today is how God is calling us into a new way of seeing and a new way of being in our world. There is no more an eloquent spokesperson for this call than the prophet Ezekiel whose imaginative faith and prophetic vision challenge us to see beyond merely what is, to a divinely transformed world of hope and new life. However, as Ezekiel’s vision indicates before we jump into exploring this world of hope, we must first begin with facing the dark and difficult realities that lay before our eyes. 

Today’s text begins with God’s hand and spirit leading Ezekiel into a desolate valley full of bones. Now I don’t know about you, but if God dropped me in the middle of valley full of human bones and skulls piled up and strewn everywhere, the first thing I would be thinking is get me out here. Not only would I be scared, but I definitely would not want to be sticking around to find out what caused all those bones to be there in the first place. Perhaps sensing Ezekiel’s fear and recognizing that it is often necessary for us to encounter the difficult truths of our world before we can see hope and transformation, God refuses to led Ezekiel out of this valley. In fact God does just the opposite leading Ezekiel on a tour “all around” the bones. With no escape, one can’t help imagine the hand of God leading the scared and even reluctant prophet to a survey each bone pile as Ezekiel tries not trip over the bones that are also strewn about.  

Whether he is prodded or goes along willingly, one thing is certain, Ezekiel’s survey reveals tons of bones that are very dry and dead. The magnitude of death Ezekiel encounters has led scholars to debate whether Ezekiel’s vision occurred in a physical place, perhaps an ancient battlefield, or in a spiritual dimension. Regardless of whether the valley of dry bones is a physical or spiritual place, one thing is certain, Ezekiel’s survey reveals just how lifeless and hopeless this valley truly is. 

Thinking about this desolate valley led me to wonder: What is the modern day valley of dry bones? Is today’s valley of dry bones a battlefield like that found in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, New York City, or the Sudan where war has left thousands dead? Or is today’s valley of dry bones just that—a dry, dusty, sun beaten desert where thousands of undocumented immigrants die each year in search of a better life? Perhaps it’s a global valley—a valley where 22 million people worldwide have died from AIDS? A valley without privilege where millions more die from hunger and poverty each year? Maybe it’s an ecological valley where thousands have died from tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes and where the skeletal bones of mother earth lie exposed by environmental destruction and over consumption? Or is it spiritual valley where religious communities die under the sword of division and where church personnel and programs are sacrificed on the altar of the bottom line? Maybe it’s a psychological valley where we feel afraid abandoned, depressed, and disconnected from God and others? What is the modern day valley of dry bones is indeed a question we must seriously ponder? But along this question we must also ask how do we maintain hope in midst of such suffering and despair?

In his vision, Ezekiel seeks to answer this very question for his own community who like the bones strewn all about laid divided, hopeless and spiritually dead in Babylonian exile after the fall of Jerusalem in 587. A question like where is there hope in the midst of such despair must have seemed somewhat absurd to both Ezekiel and the people since both believed that their exile was God’s punishment for idolatry and their failure to place hope in God. Undeterred by the absurd, hopeless and impossible, God commands Ezekiel to prophecy to the bones and as Ezekiel speaks--the bones begin to reform as human bodies. Echoing the Genesis creation story, God tells Ezekiel to prophesy a second time, this time to the spirit or breathe of God, which enters the listless bodies and restores them back to life. Before Ezekiel’s eyes, God transforms the valley of death and despair into a vibrant and lively community.

In highlighting both restoration and transformation, Ezekiel’s vision challenges the exiles to live in a dialectical tension that recognizes God’s ability to restore the past while at the same time transform the sins and troubles of the past into a hopeful future. As both a priest and prophet, Ezekiel challenges the exiles limited understanding of God by highlighting that God’s holy judgment is always balanced by grace, love, mercy, justice and forgiveness. Indeed, Ezekiel’s vision portrays a complex God, who is beyond one dimensional, bigger than reality and wild, untamable and undeterred in the face of impossibility.

Thinking about the hopelessness of the exiles has led me to wonder: Are we really that different from them in terms of our faith and hope in God? A couple years ago in this very sanctuary, I heard a children’s sermon where Jane passed the microphone to each child asking them what they prayed for. One little girl, said “I pray for butterflies, my parents and the whole world.” The prayer of this little girl struck me as filled with prophetic vision and faithful imagination for it went from the smallest joys, to covering immediate loved ones to interceding on behalf of the whole world. In ministering to the poor and those with AIDS, I regularly hear prayers of thanksgiving for the small things in life as well as specifically for those who are poor and/or living with AIDS. Yet, unlike the little girl’s prayer, rarely do I hear big prayers to the big God like we see in Ezekiel’s vision. I am talking about the type of prayers that don’t just end with praying for those who are suffering and oppressed, but the type of prayers that envision a world without suffering and oppression, a world without HIV/AIDS, poverty, war, racism and the other isms, injustice and spiritual emptiness.

Don’t get me wrong prayer for the small things in life and those around us and those in great need are excellent and necessary. But in a world filled with countless valleys of dry bones we must also remember to pray the big prayers that recognize that things don’t have to be this way. Prayers rooted in an imaginative faith and prophetic vision that recognize the living God of the Bible is working right now to bring hope, transformation and new life to our broken world.

Like Ezekiel and the students in the planetarium, we must learn to see not only the world directly in front of us, but also the world hidden beneath this one, God’s Kingdom filled mystery, hope and potential.

Brothers and sisters, whether the call to see a new world comes from ancient prophets like Ezekiel, visionaries like Revelation’s author John or more modern dreamers like Martin Luther King, Jr. as people of faith we are challenged to look upon a difficult and groaning world with grace filled eyes. Eyes that can hold the gaze needed to see things both as they are and how God intends them to be. Eyes that look through lens of God and can hold the tension between hard-nose realism and the faithful imagination needed to realize the potential for something more in this world.

Friends, it is possible for us to hold the tension between hard-nose realism and faithful imagination. I want to close with the story of Charles Hamilton Houston a man most of you have probably never heard but whose prophetic vision and faithful imagination led to one of the most important decisions in American history. Houston was the head attorney for the NAACP in the1940s and rather than be overwhelmed by racial inequality under Jim Crow, Houston took this as his starting point. Houston recognized that though America had long proclaimed a declaration of equality, it had always failed to live into that declaration. Viewing racial injustice like an iceburg with lots above and below the surface, Houston believed that if he tried to attack the giant iceburg head-on, he would meet great resistance from white America and the ship of equality would fail and sink like the titanic. As a man of faith, Houston believed it was necessary to take a step-by-step approach that focused on winning small legal victories that created precedent for equality where there had never been any. Thus, he viewed his role as being like a kayaker who paddled up to the ice-burg injustice and used a legal ice-pick to slowly and methodically chip away at the edges. Undeterred by cynics who viewed equality as impossible and his approach as to simplistic, Houston went from California to Kansas to New York filing and winning small civil rights cases in housing, education and employment. In chipping away at injustice, Houston dedicated his whole life to creating a foundation for equality for future generations to stand on. 

Upon retiring, Houston handed the reigns of the NAACP over to his young understudy, a lawyer named Thurgood Marshall who stood on the foundation of equality created by Houston to file Brown vs. Board of education, the landmark Supreme Court case that led to the desegregation of schools nationwide. Marshall who later became the first black Supreme Court Justice recognized that without the prophetic vision and faithful imagination of Charles Hamilton Houston there would be no Brown vs. Board of Education. Like Ezekiel and Charles Hamilton Houston, when we join with the Spirit of God, we learn to see not only with faithful imagination and prophetic vision, but through grace + by grace, brothers and sisters, God calls us to be that prophetic vision and faithful imagination in our world. Recognizing that God is calling us into a new way of seeing and a new way of being, I leave you with a question: “As you gaze upon this world like Ezekiel once did, what is it that you see?”