March 29, 2020 - Sermon - Rev. Hamilton Throckmorton

Scripture:  Ezekiel 37:1-14                       

     I received an email this week from a small fair-trade shop in southwest Ohio, a store at which Mary and I had shopped last fall. The proprietor writes about many of the ways her life has changed in the last few weeks. She shows a picture of her dishwasher, overflowing with suds, and says, “This was my dishwasher when my kids did the dishes with us this week. They also made cookies with five cups of sugar instead of 2/3 of a cup (the third grader is still working on fractions) and one of my kids ran screaming from the computer after her teacher emailed her a photo of a slug she found at the pond that she wanted my child to research and identify. On top of crazy kids-at-home shenanigans, my husband and two kids and I are all trying to work from home from one dining room table that is also half covered by THE WORLD’S HARDEST JIGSAW PUZZLE. Emotions are running high, tempers are running short, and we are all running wild” (March 24, 2020). Maybe that’s a scene familiar to some of you.

     And maybe your days are nothing at all like that. Maybe you’re holed up by yourself, with no one to talk to, no one to share a meal with, no one to hold hands with, and only a TV to keep you company. Or maybe you’re confined to a home in which the tension is thick. Or one in which abuse rears its ugly head.

     In any case, we’re all holed up in some way, isolated from each other. And except perhaps for the extreme introverts among us, it can be difficult. I can’t tell you how much I miss seeing you, and laughing and crying together and hugging each other. It feels like a giant hole in my life. Noted pastor and author Brian McLaren said in a tweet on Friday, “That discomfort you’re feeling? It’s grief” (adapted slightly). So many of us grieve the loss of familiar routines and treasured companions and maybe even retail therapy. With the loss of normalcy, it feels a little as if something has been stolen from us.

     Not to mention the far more devastating occurrence of those whose families have been directly ravaged by COVID-19. People are dying without family able to be present. Weddings are postponed. Funerals have to wait. All these ways we gather and celebrate life are put on hold. Grief? You bet. If you haven’t wept about this, it might do you good to let yourself have a good cry. A perfectly healthy reaction to it all, and maybe just the relief you need. We’re all suffering with what has happened. It’s a giant loss.

     The ancient Israelites would have known just how we’re feeling. Having been ushered into the promised land by God centuries earlier, about 600 years before Christ they are carried into exile by the Babylonians. The homeland they are sure would always be theirs is suddenly taken from them. Complete dislocation and despair. What is there to live for anymore? And where in the world is God? It doesn’t take much imagination to be able to picture all our friends and family neighbors carried out of the Chagrin Valley to live in Germany or Brazil or China, with some occupying power gleefully taking over our homes and businesses. This is the situation in which the Israelites find themselves.

     So along comes the prophet Ezekiel, and he tells a story. It’s a vision, really. It’s a vision of dead, dry bones lying in a valley. They’re the bones of a life that has seeped away, the bones of a hope that has all but vanished. And of course those bones are the people Israel. Their existence together has become arid and lifeless. When I went with a group of Federated pilgrims to the Holy Land a few years ago, I was struck by just how parched and brittle that land can be. Think Death Valley. Think Sahara Desert. Things in their soul are that grim.

     And it’s what happens next that makes this such an arresting story. In his vision, Ezekiel sees these bones coming together, bones reconnected by sinews and filled out with flesh and covered with skin. And most of all—most of all!—bodies coming to life with breath and spirit. Who could have guessed it! In the midst of destruction and death, God makes it all come to life. And this, says Ezekiel, is what God is doing for Israel. God is taking their scorched skeleton and restoring its vitality. God makes of the desolation something blooming and verdant.

     And this is the way it is for us who are living with this COVID-19 pandemic, as well. Yes, we grieve. Yes, there are abundant losses—losses of life and of jobs and of financial security and of a sense of connectedness. We, too, know the valley of dry bones. We know anxiety and grief and fear. And it tests us. And we ache for a return to what we think of as normalcy.

     And all the while, says Ezekiel, God is doing a new thing. The world is being remade even as we speak. Dry bones are coming back to life. Can we see it?

     The most popular course in the history of Yale University was developed by a psychology professor, Laurie Santos, a couple of years ago. Some 300 people took the class in its first year, and some quarter of the student body has now taken it. It’s called Psychology and the Good Life, and it’s referred to informally as the course on happiness. The course is now being offered online for no charge, and more than a million people have registered for it.

     The core of the course is Santos’ conviction that happiness, or maybe we should say fulfillment, is not about how much money we make or how big our house is or whether we married the most attractive spouse. Happiness isn’t about our accomplishments, which are so fleeting, of course. It’s about how we approach life. And it’s about the little things we do, the attitude we bring to what we do and who we are. Happiness, in other words, isn’t about our life circumstances at all. We can be happy even when the situation seems, to anybody else, to be dire and bleak. Happiness is about the practices we engage in on a daily basis. And there are three habits, says Santos, that jump out as being especially important and life-giving: making social connections and practicing gratitude and taking time to be in the present moment. “Happiness and contentedness,” says a CNN article about the course, “stem from repeatedly doing simple tasks” (https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/23/health/yale-happiness-course-wellness/index.html).

     I suspect that dry bones come to life in this constricted and fearful time in which we live as we repeatedly do just that sort of simple task: make social connections, live gratefully, and live in the present moment. We know how to do this, don’t we. Call or FaceTime friends and people about whom you worry. Make a gratitude list and add to it every day. Maybe you’re grateful for a warm shower or a delicious meal made from scratch or the time to read a book or take a leisurely walk through the neighborhood. Connect and be grateful and then live in the present moment. I remember that great Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh saying years ago, “When you’re doing the dishes, do the dishes.” Don’t get lost in regrets about the past or anxiety about the future. Lose yourself in this present moment. And remember that every moment is a gift, that each second of life is a privilege, and that happiness and fulfillment are not the result of every circumstance working out right or the way we had planned it. Happiness is, instead, about learning to accept the situation we’ve been given and finding our joy and our purpose right there where we are.

     I have made it a point this week to connect and to be attentive to the moment and to be grateful for the countless gifts I see and receive. I savor tasty meals. I relish talking and FaceTiming with friends and extended family and church members. I give thanks for some relaxed time at the end of our neighbors’ driveway Friday evening, sitting in lawn chairs twelve feet apart, talking and laughing. Dried bones coming to life.

     And I remember in all this that so many of the rich moments of life have to do with people being there for others. Who of us isn’t grateful beyond words for dedicated health care professionals risking their own health and their lives every day to do everything they can to stem the tide of this contagion. Dried bones coming to life.

     I think of Federated’s Tapestry Circle putting together sensory lap pads to give to people with dementia in hospice care so they will have some welcome sensory stimulation. Dried bones coming to life.

     This morning, I think of the event we had planned for today’s Fifth Sunday worship service, an opportunity for the congregation to plant seeds which would take root and flower this summer. With our necessary separation this morning, you’ll see some Federated hands doing that planting on behalf of all of us. Dried bones coming to life.

     I think of children in our neighborhood who know that several of their neighbors who are older may well feel isolated and alone, so they go to these homes with their sidewalk chalk and on the road in front of the houses, they draw huge smiling faces and messages of affection: “we love you, Nancy; we miss you, Pete.” Dried bones coming to life.

     I think of a woman whose mother is dying and who, because of her own compromised immune system, can’t be at her mother’s bedside, so she stands outside her mother’s nursing home window, and her sister holds their mother’s hand inside and with her other hand touches the window in the room. On the lawn outside the window, the sister whose health is compromised places her hand on the glass so that, through the glass, they can have some connection. Dried bones coming to life.

     I think of a ten-year-old boy in New Jersey whose father is dying here in Ohio. And the boy isn’t going to be able to make it here to say good-bye, so he records a video on his phone and sends it to his father, and through sobs of grief he tells his father in the video that he loves him so much, and that he’s been the best father ever. Such love! Such dried bones coming to life.

     And I think, too, of Martin Rinkart. Four hundred years ago, Rinkart, says Lutheran pastor Peter Marty, “was a gifted musician at several prominent churches in Saxony, Germany, before turning to the pastorate. He then served as pastor to the people of Eilenburg for 30 years before his death—years that almost exactly overlapped with the dreadful Thirty Years’ War.

“Because it was a walled city, refugees from the surrounding countryside, besieged by invasions of the Swedish military, poured into Eilenburg. It didn’t take long for famine and pestilence to set in. In 1637 alone, 8000 people died of disease—including other clergy, most of the town council, and Rinkart’s own wife. Rinkart was left to minister to the entire city, sometimes preaching at burial services for as many as 200 dead in one week. Known as a faithful and caring pastor, he gave away everything he owned except for the barest essentials to care for his family.

     “In the depths of the communal suffering that surrounded him, Rinkart wrote a hymn text with words now familiar to many of us: ‘Now thank we all our God,/ With heart and hands and voices;/ Who wondrous things has done,/ In whom this world rejoices.’ In another verse, Rinkart speaks of a bounteous God staying near us through our anxiety: ‘Keep us [full of] grace,/ And guide us when perplexed,/ And free us from all [ills],/ In this world and the next’” (Christian Century, April 6, 2020, p. 3).

     Dry bones? Certainly. You don’t have to look far to find them. But there’s so much more than that. All around us, signs of life and hope abound. We’re invited to see and notice them, and to give thanks for them, and to join in that healing and redemptive work. Even in the midst of crisis, God’s Spirit restores us and makes us new. Dead bones come to life. Thanks be to God.