Please pray with me as we
begin. May the words of my mouth and the
meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our
Redeemer. Amen.
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Who remembers the old tune
“Dem Bones?” Now, because I can’t stop
humming it this week, I figured you should join me. Delta Rhythm Boys
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How many of you had any idea what that song
was about when you first sang it in VBS or Sunday School?
Not too many of us, I’m sure. I
always thought it was something maybe my mother used to help her pass her med
school exams. No, not really, but as fun
as that song was, I never gave its meaning in relation to our faith a single
thought.
Of course, if you never made
the connection before this morning, you probably figured out today that the
song comes from our Old Testament lesson which is found in Ezekiel. In the story, we see a vast plain strewn with
bones…dry, sun bleached bones…something like horror story meets the Wild, Wild
West…dry, dusty, lifeless bones as
far as the eye can see.
But maybe what you didn’t
know is that in this lesson, the bones represent the people of Israel. At that time, they had been devastated: the Temple was destroyed, the people were
(mostly) taken captive into Babylon, and life as they had known it was over…a desperate
situation. In fact, being cut off from
the Temple meant they could not seek God, and being cut off from God meant personal
and spiritual waste. Exile.
Exile. What does that mean? What do you think of when you hear that
word? Outcast. Despair.
Scattered. Alone. I think we have all been in places, maybe not
dots-on-a-map places, but times and places where we have lived in exile.
Can you think of a time when
you were cut off from all you held dear?
When you felt scattered, cast aside or pushed away, relationships
broken? Or maybe you have just been far
away from anyone you love from anyone who can call you to life by calling your
name…can you remember a time of spiritual desolation? When have you been dry as sun-bleached bones?
For me, an experience of
exile comes every two years or so as we move around the country as the Navy
dictates. It’s always hard to leave a community
into which we have grafted ourselves, and it always takes a little while to
feel fully grafted into the new one…and those in-between times can feel
desolate, indeed.
Maybe for you it is the
reality of loving someone who is bound by addiction to substances or to
actions…alcohol, food, gambling, or spending.
Or maybe you are an addict yourself.
Maybe for you it is the idea that you are unlovable so you hide to protect
yourself. Maybe your exile is a
terrible, life-sucking job. Or the
loneliness which settles in after you’ve lost your husband or wife, your life
mate. For many in our community right
now, exile looks like a seven story pile of slurry and mud and feels like
despair as they continue to search for the bodies of neighbors and loved ones
in Oso. Exile comes in many different
looking scenarios, but they are all terrible and desolate for the ones living
there.
In the year 2000, Dreamworks
released a movie starring Tom Hanks called Cast
Away. If you haven’t seen it, that’s
your homework for the week. In the film,
Chuck Noland is a time-obsessed systems analyst, who travels around the world solving
efficiency problems at FedEx depots. He is in a long-term relationship, and
although they want to get married, his schedule interferes with their
relationship. Even on Christmas Day, he leaves to solve a problem in Malaysia,
and his plane crashes in the Pacific Ocean.
He is able to escape the plane, and after a terrifying night clinging to
a raft on the open sea, he finds himself washed up on the beach of a deserted
island.
Several packages from the
crashed plane wash ashore. He opens most
of them searching for things to help him live or to help him signal for rescue
or to help him escape. He leaves one package, with a pair of wings painted on
it, unopened, and he muses aloud about what the package could be or from whom
it could have been sent. During a first attempt to make fire, Chuck receives a
deep wound to his hand. In anger and pain, he throws several objects, including
a Wilson volleyball from one of the packages. A short time later he draws a
face in the bloody hand print on the ball, names it Wilson and begins talking
to it.
As years pass, Chuck has
changed to adapt to his situation. He
looks drastically different, but the real difference is in the skills he has
developed for survival, a key portion of which is his relationship with Wilson
who has become a key figure in our hero’s sanity. Eventually, enough debris washes up on shore
that Chuck uses his developed skills to build a raft. He takes Wilson and his mysterious winged
package and boards the raft in an attempt to escape. After
some time on the ocean, a storm nearly tears his raft apart, then
"Wilson" falls from the raft and is lost, leaving him overwhelmed by
loneliness and despair. Eventually, as all hope appears to be lost, Chuck and
his winged package are picked up by a passing ship and returned to
civilization.
There he learns that he has
long been given up for dead; his family and friends had held a funeral, his
fiancé has married. So he buys a new
volleyball and sets off to deliver the winged FedEx package to its sender.[1]
Now, I won’t completely ruin the story for you, but I
think it is fair to say that this movie was a modern day retelling of our
Ezekiel passage. Chuck is indeed in
exile and as he returns from physical exile, he discovers that he has been assumed
dead and so they’ve moved on…he’s been cast away by those he loves, and so the
emotional exile continues.
Where is God in all of this?
In Cast Away, God says, “Chuck, don’t give up, I’m giving you a great
imagination, a volleyball, and a winged package of hope.” (Sometimes God is a little less direct than
we’d like.)
In our Old Testament lesson,
God speaks directly to Ezekiel and to the valley of the bones…to those in
desperate isolation…and God says, “Watch this:
I’m bringing the breath of life to you and you’ll come to life. I’ll attach sinews to you, put meat on your
bones, cover you with skin, and breathe life into you. You’ll come alive, and you’ll realize that I am God!”
By the grace of God, hope
remains alive in the most seemingly hopeless of situations.
So, too, if we cling to our
faith and leave our hearts open to one another, we discover that hope never dies
even if our spirits become dry as bleached bones. Even in exile, whether caused by war or a decree,
a storm or a landslide or addiction or by our own breaking of relationship,
there is hope to be found in the grace and faithfulness of God. “I’ll breathe my life into you and you will
live. I’ve said it, and I’ll do it. I promise.”
God will breathe life into us, we will be connected, and we will walk around! Dem Bones, Dem Bones
gonna walk around, now hear the word of the Lord.* God does
breathe life into us, and we do live.
Amen.
