This is a sermon on the vision of Ezekiel, the valley of dry bones. It is a sermon not only on the end of death, but on the end of fear, which is at the heart of Ezekiel’s vision. I promise I will get to that vision, and more, but first I will tell you a story—on this night of stories—from my family history, to show you why I believe God’s determination to bring an end to our fear is as important as his decision to annihilate our death.
A little more than a hundred years ago, on my grandmother‘s dressing table in the town of Booneville, Arkansas, there was a silver-plated hairbrush she had received as a wedding present from my grandfather. My grandmother was one of the great beauties of her day. She had golden hair that reached to her ankles. When my dad was a little boy, those brushes were particularly precious to him.
You see, as the oldest of three, at the age of 6 or 7, he was sometimes allowed to stay up a half-hour later than his brothers and help brush his mother‘s hair while she sang to him out of an old Methodist hymnal. I am sure that in the broad twilight of that room on a summer evening, with that brush in his hand, and his mother’s voice in his ears, my father felt as close to God as it is possible for a little boy to get, this side of heaven.
In 1916, when my father was 8 years old, his mother was about to deliver her fourth child. My grandfather, being concerned about the position of the baby, took her to Fort Smith, where there was a fully equipped delivery room and OB ward, while my dad and his brothers stayed with their grandparents. Late one night, they were awakened by their grandmother, and hurried downstairs into the parlor, where my great-grandfather sat in his big chair. There was an old kerosene lamp on the table, next to him, and my dad saw by its light his grandfather’s spectacles lying next to a yellow sheet of paper.
The room was narrow and dark, except for the lamp, but my dad could tell the old man had been crying. The boys stood before him in their PJs, wondering why they were there. Finally, the old man gestured weakly to the yellow paper and said, “Boys, I have received a message from your father. He says, ‘Please tell my sons that God has seen it best to call their mother home.’”
And that was all that was said. The grownups led the children in the Lord’s Prayer, then they all went to bed. They never saw their mother again, or the baby she had been carrying. They did not go to the funeral. They did not speak of her death, as far as I know, until my dad told me the story more than 50 years later.
My father grew into an attractive, energetic man, one of the youngest generals of his generation, a great storyteller, a brilliant strategist and commander; but that dark room, with its kerosene lamp and weeping old man, he carried inside of him for the rest of his life. The absent mother, the silent grief, gnawed at his insides in a way he could never escape, through four marriages, decades of alcoholism, pushing away everybody, including me, even pushing away my mother, Sally, who would have done anything to help him, but whom he neglected and finally divorced after 26 years in a fit of pride—all from the fear of death that chained his heart as a little boy.
Specifically, I think it was the fear of his mother’s death, and the guilt that he may have had something to do with it, in that magical way of blaming themselves that children have, that turned his interior life into a valley of dry bones. Of all the regrets in his time on this earth, he most regretted his divorce, and I do not think there was a day that went by, in the 16 years he lived alone until his death, that he did not grieve over what he had done. I also know that on every one of those days, my mother, who was a devout Episcopalian, prayed for him, prayed to forgive him, prayed that he would one day rediscover the grace of God he had learned as a child from his mother’s songs.
If you look at all the texts about Easter, you will see they suggest in one way or another that the great problem we all face is not the mere fact of death. The end of biological processes in individuals does not necessarily mean their lives have been fruitless or their legacy barren. It is the fear of death that is also the enemy—the annihilation of meaning, the possibility that all our efforts, our loves, our very existence, in the end will amount to darkness and silence in a universe without God. A grieving little boy, staring at a silver-plated hairbrush after his mother is gone, may be forgiven for building walls over a lifetime against anything that might make him vulnerable, even love. Such is the power of fear.
You can hear the power of this fear underlying the lament in Ezekiel’s vision, of a defeated people, captive in Babylon: it isn’t the exile that threatens their existence, but rather it is the end of hope. You can hear the hysteria under the words: our bones are dried up, our hope is lost, we are completely cut off, as if the whole culture were suffering a panic attack lasting for years. My experience of fear is that of walls closing in, not unlike what I am sure my father felt in the dark room with the kerosene lamp: you’re faced with a reality you are sure will kill you, and there is no escape. The Hebrew word for Egypt, the country of bondage, translates literally as “the narrow place.” And that is, under the power of fear, what our whole world becomes. God knows this. Ezekiel knows this, and so God through Ezekiel offers an ingenious therapy to a terrified people.
Imagine, he says to this exiled and grieving people (and to us, this night), that the world is what you most fear it is. Imagine the whole earth is a narrow place, a valley, and imagine that valley is full of bones. Take the killing fields of Cambodia, the civil wars of Africa, the poppy-strewn no-man’s land of Verdun, the bloody Lane at Antietam, and pile them together into one continuous heap of dried carnage. Then stand and take it in. This is the portrait of your soul, the wellspring of your fear. It is no wonder you feel as though you are walking around with a graveyard inside of you, because you are. This is the human heritage of desperation since we were first exiled from Eden. This is sin and the consequences of sin. Just take a moment to look at it, and then ask, “Is there anything here that is beyond the sovereignty of the One who made all things to begin with, who breathes life into everything that is? Is there anything here in all this death that God cannot undo?” And then, wait. Wait and see.
It starts slowly, of course: a little rattling, a little sorting of the piles, like putting together a puzzle, piece by piece, bone to its bone, but then it gathers steam, and soon there is a rush of life, a flood of blood and flesh and vigor, until suddenly you see them standing again, a whole naked army of the once-lost, now found; once-dead, now alive again. And the prophet says, “Can you see your whole people there, your tribe? And if God is capable of that, isn’t he capable of triumphing over your loss, your fear, your grief?” Of course the big matter, here, the elephant in the room, is how this moves from the level of vision and gets on the ground, actually makes a difference in our narrow places, for example, in the wounded heart of a little boy who has lost his mother.
The answer to this is maybe not as easy as we would like, because to make this new life real, God actually narrows the narrow place. I have suggested that the conquest of death and the fear of death has to be the conquest of my particular death, my particular fear. The battleground of that conquest is narrow indeed. That place is the borrowed grave, where the body of Jesus was hurriedly wrapped and laid by his grieving and frantic friends.
They would return after the sabbath. They would take the time then to do it right, but as they rolled the stone against the mouth of the tomb and sealed the darkness inside, it must have seemed to them that nowhere else on Earth had more sorrow and injustice been shut up in a smaller space. For two nights the sorrow continued, until sometime before dawn on the third day, when a light was kindled in that body and the narrow place was changed; the risen Christ got up, walked through all that darkness and stone, walked out into the world, and turned it upside down.
He visited his friends, forgave their cowardice, their denials, their betrayals, then breathed into them his Spirit, poured his light into their narrow places one after another, and changed them all. And most importantly, he sent them to change others, to bring life to others. He sent them to speak hope into the darkest and most narrow places we carry within us, the ones that harbor the deepest shame and the most stubborn fear of death. By the prayers and love and ministrations of the saints, the risen Christ declares that the light of his risen life will flood our graves with immortality, putting all our fear at an end.
As my father lay dying, he thought he had a vision. He had been sleeping, and when he opened his eyes, there was a woman sitting by his bedside. The room was a little dark, so he couldn’t see her well, though she seemed very beautiful, and he was sure he knew her. At first he thought it was his mother, but then as his eyes adjusted, he saw it was my mother, Sally; she greeted him by name, and he realized this was real. She was really there. She held his hand. She told him she forgave him. She told him she had always loved him, and before she left, she kissed him on the forehead.
He was so old and so full of feeling, he could not think what to say. He could only smile, but I imagine in that moment, all the decades of fear went out of him, and inside him a light was kindled and a whole valley of dry bones came to life. The only witness was my sister-in-law, who reported that after the visit, my father looked overjoyed. He was silent for a long time, just smiling from ear to ear. Finally he said to her, “That was Sally. Sally came to see me.” “That’s right,” she said. “Well,” said my father, his voice quiet with awe. “Isn’t that something?”
And I would say it was more than something. I would say, what I believe my father knows now, that it is everything, that by the power of the risen Lord, my mother became in the end the grace she prayed for, by that same power through her, my father found a way out of the narrow place, out of the fear that had chained him for a lifetime. And the question for us, on this feast of the Empty Tomb, is this: as we contemplate the valley of our own dry bones, can we see ourselves there, among that exceeding great host, raised by the power of Jesus, delivered from the bondage of fear?
There is a pious story that in the day of the Resurrection we will be welcomed by the saint with whom we had the most trouble when we were alive. You might ask, through the rest of the prayer of this night, who might that be for you. For me it would unquestionably be my dad, but I suspect, if that is true, he will not look anything like he did the last time I saw him, in death. I believe I will know him if I am ushered into heaven by a small boy, who takes my hand in his, and I see in his other a silver-plated hairbrush. May the Lord Jesus who has conquered sin and death, put his praise forever in our hearts and on our lips, and raise us all with him in the age to come. Amen.
