Preach to the Bones, Ezekiel

Homily at Emmanuel Episcopal Shawnee, OK

There is a common misconception associated with prophets, that their primary function is to foretell the future.  Well, this is often true, but at its most basic, is still not descriptive of what a prophet is.  A prophet is (to use an ethereal word) an oracle.  They are a medium through which the Divine speaks to human beings.  Prophets speak for God.  Sometimes these messages include a prediction of the future, but not always.

One way of understanding the role of leadership in the Jewish tradition was to make a distinction between a prophet and priest.  Both had the function of interacting with God but from very different vantage points.  The priest went to God on behalf of human beings.  They would enter the temple, into the holy of holies, to make a sacrifice on our behalf.  In doing so they would advocate for people in the same way that a lawyer speaks for a defendant to a judge and jury.  In this way, a priestly role has great potential for being a comforting kind of thing.

The prophet, on the other hand, is the inverse of this.  The prophet is one who approaches humanity on behalf of God.  The Oracle.  Most often, the message that the prophet brings is an indictment.  Not always, but most of the time.  In fact there are a great many instances in the Hebrew scripture when the language of God “taking us to court” shows up, the prophet Isaiah, the prophet Joel use this judicial language.  And Ezekiel, like them, lays out a series of indictments against Jerusalem.

Priests speak to God on our behalf.

Prophets speak to us on God’s behalf. 

I can imagine that each of you have had a wide variety of friendships over the years.  Some are social friends, some are your political friends, the ones you know you can speak freely with.  You might characterize some as your church friends, the ones you can speak to about religious and spiritual things.  I’ve got “baseball” friends, the ones I know I can talk to about whether or not Neftali Feliz has developed enough of a slider to move from being a closing pitcher into the regular rotation.  You know, people whose eyes won’t glaze over in polite engagement when you bring up whatever subject it might be.  But who are your priestly friends?  And who are your prophetic friends.

Who in your life is your biggest advocate, no matter the depth of your brokenness and frailty, the severity of your mistakes, always is the person who believes the good in you will emerge?  Your encouragement. 

And maybe the harder question, who have been the prophetic friendships?  We do not typically make any heroic efforts to cultivate these kinds of relationships.  These are the people who call you on your bull, the ones who have the courage to do little interventions in such a way that you are able to hear them and value their often-difficult insight.

I have a former pastor that years ago I would regularly call on for advice.  There would be some situation at work or a decision I was trying to make.  The pattern of the calls were pretty much the same, I’d give him the background and share with him what I was thinking my response would be.  He would listen and then eventually he would tell me he thought I was on the right track and to trust my instincts, something akin to that.  I liked calling him.  Who wouldn’t, right?  But it eventually dawned on me that some of these things I was sharing with him were very complicated and one of the reasons I was calling him was because I needed someone to help me see the aspects of the situation that I was blind to.  I liked the supportive voice, but I couldn’t help but wonder if what I needed more was the critical one.  

(I often wondered if I had called him to tell him that I was considering becoming a Druid Warlock if he would have been supportive.)

Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a book called Team of Rivals:  The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.  Goodwin examines Lincoln’s relationships with three men he selected for his cabinet, all of whom were his political opponents for the Republican nomination in 1860: William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates.  These men, all accomplished, nationally known, and presidential, originally disdained Lincoln for his backwoods upbringing and lack of experience, and were shocked and humiliated at losing to this relatively obscure Illinois lawyer.  Yet Lincoln not only convinced them to join his administration--Seward as secretary of state, Chase as secretary of the treasury, and Bates as attorney general--he ultimately gained their admiration and respect as well.

Can we make room for prophets in our lives?  We surely can name those folks who are supportive, people who advocate for us in our work and family life, even perhaps advocate for our understanding of what is most meaningful in life.  What is much harder, and I dare say very rare for any of us, is to have people in our lives who serve as prophets, who challenge some of our most comforting assumptions about life and help us see and deal with the shadow sides of our life.

The prophet Ezekiel, in this beautiful vision of Judah, the valley of the dry bones, in many respects, is playing an atypical role for a prophet.  His vision is a picture of restoration and renewal.  But it is not delivered within the context of sweetness and light.  It was hard earned in the wake of some very disturbing messages sent through Ezekiel. 

• God commanded Ezekiel to literally eat the scroll of God’s judgment, which for the next eight years rendered Ezekiel unable to speak, save only when God commanded him.  
• God commanded Ezekiel to make a toy model of Jerusalem and play war games of judgment with this toy city, lying on his side in the dirt for over a year as he “played” judgment on Jerusalem.
• God told Ezekiel to shave his head with a sword and to divide his hair into three piles, each demonstrating the fate of the people of Jerusalem.

Vision after vision, strange behavior, awkward stretches of silence, Ezekiel warns the people of Judah that the attention they had given to foreign Gods had compelled God to leave them, and finally God left.  Reluctantly.  Slowly.  God left.  Ezekiel saw the cloud slowly lift up from the holy of holies to the threshold of the temple.  It stayed there until seven men had been sent out--one scribe to mark those who were true to God and six executioners to kill the rest. The cloud then slowly moved on out of the city, hovered briefly over the Mount of Olives, and then disappeared.  His message was one of judgment.

But it does not end there. 

God gave him a vision of valley filled with dry bones, a vision of death.  And God asked him, O’ human being, can these bones live?  Only you know Yahweh.

Preach to the bones, Ezekiel. Tell them I will cause breath to enter them, and they shall live. I will lay sinews on them, and will cause flesh to come upon them, and cover them with skin, and put breath in them, and they shall live; and they shall know that I am Yahweh.  Preach to the bones, Ezekiel.

And Ezekiel did, and the bones began to dance.

Often we see this mingling of the prophetic and priestly in the words of God’s messengers.  We see it richly mingled in the person of Christ--our prophet, priest, and King   And undoubtedly we know it is because we need both.  We need a love that both comforts and disturbs, that is realistic with each of us about our own tendency to self-destruct and God’s desire to reconstruct. 

May you have the wisdom to make room for both in your life.  And may God speak to you God’s words of judgment, all the while to make you ready for your dry bones dance.