 Readings: Exekiel 37:1-14, Secrets of Heaven #2916 (see below)
See also on Youtube Our text today tells us of the Lord bringing Ezekiel to a valley full of bones, a great many on the floor of the valley, all dry, and lifeless. It is powerful imagery, and it was written to a people in exile. The Kingdom of Israel had fallen to the Assyrians and its people were scattered. The Kingdom of Judah held on a while longer but eventually was also defeated by Babylon and its people taken into exile there. God’s promise to Abraham, that they would be a great nation, given many hundreds of years before, now seemed shattered to pieces. They were not only defeated and subjugated, but not even allowed to remain in their own land. Understandably, many felt there was no way forward. The book of Ezekiel depicts this despair with the imagery of the valley of the dry bones. Could there ever be a picture of something more lifeless? Not just a dead body, but bones separated from each other, dry and dessicated. It’s incredibly bleak, no space for hope, no space for life. But these images are full of symbolism of course, which is why texts like these speak so powerfully. Swedenborg writes that a valley represents our lower states of mind, times of obscurity when it feels harder to see the bigger picture.(1) We recall Psalm 23 from last week: Yea, though I walk through the valley of of the shadow of death. Valleys can be low dark places, difficult to see where we are, difficult to see where we are headed, difficult to see how to get out. The bones themselves represent to us our selfhood. In the book of Genesis, Eve is built out of one of Adam’s rib bones, and Swedenborg describes this as the creation of our sense of living autonomy, our sense of self. It is the thing that allows us to have a relationship with God, to exist with self-consciousness. He writes: When the Lord brings it to life, our sense of self gives us the ability to perceive all the good desired by love and all the truth taught by faith. So it holds within it all wisdom and understanding, joined to an indescribable happiness.(2) So, in one very real sense, our selfhood is incredibly necessary. It can be an immense and effective gift; it holds us up, it structures our life. We rely upon it and that is appropriate and good. But our selfhood can only take us so far. And this is because anything living in us comes from the Lord's life, not our own(3). The bones scattered on the valley floor represent to us the limits of our selfhood, the limits of self-reliance, the limits of believing we can do it all and control everything. The limits of identifying too closely with our God-created selfhood and believing it originates with us. Not only are the bones in a valley, but they are also dry. Being dry represents a lack of truth, a lack of a way to structure our thinking and our acting(4). Perhaps this strikes a chord —in an increasingly divided country, in an increasingly online world, how thirsty we all are these days, for sources of information that we can rely on, for systems that will tell us what to do, for tribes that will make us feel okay, for something that can give us some hope. And finally, the bones are scattered about, disconnected. This may resonate as well. Not only in regard to a time when we were on lockdown, but also for the many ways in which we yearn for community even now, for the ways in which we separated from each other, by things as deep as ideology and prejudice, and as unseen and ordinary as urban planning. In a larger sense, in times of crisis, it is also easy to feel disconnected from providence, from a sense of God’s care. Swedenborg writes that angels can easily see how things are connected but often it is harder for us(5). And so sometimes we find ourselves in the valley of the bones: shadowed, scattered, desiccated, and seemingly alone. And when we find ourselves in the valley, it is hard not to imagine the worst. Our minds very naturally start to cast about for what might happen to us going forward. We shouldn’t shame ourselves for that, it’s our brain’s job to do this for us. We have been trained over millennia to project and anticipate potential dangers and avoid them; this is how we survive. Our brains are trying to protect us. But our world today is full on chronic and ongoing stress, many times with only a small part of it within our control. And so our brains keep returning again and again to the dry bones, warning us, prompting us to act, even though many times we can’t. The result is that we continue in anxiety, constantly in fight or flight mode. And this can be exhausting and debilitating. We especially learned how difficult this was during the pandemic, and lessons learned then can still be helpful now. I recall one expert during the height of the pandemic, naming our collective stress as anticipatory grief. Our minds were doing their best to keep us safe in an uncertain situation, grappling not only with actual losses but telling us to be careful about potential ones to come. His advice: to find balance in the things we are thinking. Whenever our worst predictions start to take shape, we can choose to also imagine alternatives, and to place them alongside.(6) We can choose how we try to balance the images we are focusing on. Our mind will continue to do its job and will talk to us about the dry bones; let us give thanks for its capacity for foresight. We rely upon it. And also, let us with intention focus on the other images that God has given us in the Ezekiel text: breath and enlivenment. For we see that the dry bones are not the end of the story, that God has something else to say, something else to prophecy. Our minds prophecy in their own way, speaking to our own personal context of survival and loss and how-to-get-to-the-next-day, our God-created selfhood doing what it needs to do. But God also has a prophecy to offer; one that speaks in a broader way about resurrection and hope and answers our most basic and plaintive question: can these bones live? God tells us: Yes, these bones can live! This has always been God’s most basic and fundamental promise: what seems dead to us can live again. It is the heart of the holy day of Easter just a few weeks ago. The empty tomb with the stone rolled away is the same as Ezekiel’s valley where bone joins to bone, flesh and skin and breath come into being, and a nation of people figuratively come back to life. “Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them.”(v13) God can be relied upon to take the initiative, for this is the one true purpose of Providence, to always and forever bring us out of the valley that we find ourselves in, to give us a hand up and out of the graves we have dug for ourselves, to walk alongside us in any challenge that befalls us. God will bring life to the crucified parts of our lives, and in order to show us that this is so, God went first. Now, enlivenment does not always arrive in the ways we might imagine. We don’t always get to direct the process or decide how and where the life and breath manifests. If we were in charge, we would always just want things to go back to exactly however they were before the valley. But when the people of Israel finally got to return to their land, it wasn’t the same as before. They had to rebuild their cities, they had to rebuild their society, they had to rebuild their relationships. And it wasn’t without challenge. But this rebuilding brought them closer to each other, and closer to their God. God hasn’t promised a lack of danger or difficulty; God has promised resurrection. God has said “I will put breath in you and you will come to life.” (v6). We just get to decide if we are open to it. We get to decide if we want to imagine it. We get to decide to make space for it. In the valley of the dry bones, we find that we have reached the end of our selfhood. A necessary end, a painful and anxious one to be sure. But God whispers in our ear: “I will put my spirit in you and you will live.” May we see this vision God has promised us, and may our breath and the breath of God, join together as one. Amen.
Ezekiel 37:1-14 1 The hand of the LORD was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. 3 He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” I said, “Sovereign LORD, you alone know.” 4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! 5 This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. 6 I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.’ ” 7 So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. 8 I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them. 9 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’ ” 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army. 11 Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.’ 12 Therefore prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13 Then you, my people, will know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. 14 I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the LORD have spoken, and I have done it, declares the LORD.’ ” Secrets of Heaven #2916 In the internal sense of the Word 'a grave' means life, which is heaven, and in the contrary sense death, which is hell. The reason it means life or heaven is that angels, who possess the internal sense of the Word, have no other concept of a grave, because they have no other concept of death. Consequently instead of a grave they perceive nothing else than the continuation of life, and so resurrection…Now because 'burial' means resurrection, it also means regeneration, since regeneration is the primary resurrection of a person, for when regenerated we die as regards our former selves and rise again as regards the new. It is through regeneration that from being a dead person we become a living one…
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