Calamity Happens
March 26, 2023 RCL Lent 5A
It says valley of dry bones. I don’t see bones in my minds eye. In the imagination of my heart, it is a valley of decimated, burnt out, fallen, rotted trees. A bleakness as if the tree of life itself had been slain. Our first reading today begins on a canvas of devastation. Bones dry brittle scattered. An image as heavy and perhaps more gruesome than a ruined and wasted forest.
The prophet Ezekiel speaks the word of God to the dispersed and despondent, the hopeful and we who turn away from the news in search of something that matters. Era after era of war and skirmishes. King after king posturing with powers bigger and more fearsome than tiny Israel and Judah, has culminated in what seemed like utter desolation. The temple destroyed, the branches of the tree of life feel cut off, burnt to cinders, scattered in exile. Ezekiel isn’t a prophet of sunshine or rainbow over the yellow brick road devotion. They have had uttered thus far mostly hard-to-hear realities, scathing indictments of our cruelty and selfishness and idolatry. Not the system, and yes the system, and our part in it. Not someone else’s sins and violence, and yes someone else’s, and ours.
The judgment on whether or not a prophet is aligned with God isn’t the ability to convincingly forecast the terrible. Anyone with a keyboard and a connection can do that. Predicting calamity proves nothing, because it happens, just as the day turns to night. The test of the prophet is being able to invite us beyond the fields of ruin toward the abundant forest. Holy prophets tell the truth about our terribleness, yes, and holy prophets give voice to the hope and mercy of God. Yes, where you sit may be ash and bone, and yes here – resurrection begins. Among and from the cut logs, are sprouts. These confused and over-it dry bones are given limber muscles to bind them to one another, are wrapped in new flesh to move these bodies to what’s next.
We have crossed over the part of Lent where the attention shifts from sin – Sin being the turning away from God and God’s ways – now the focus of Lent shifts to death. Shifts to Jesus’ death, to our natural end, and the metaphorical deaths that are the whirlind of heartbreak, the impact of our sin-soaked reality, the tiny but bitter sting of thorns and decay and collapse. Jesus is there in the middle of all of it. Jesus weeps for all of it and for reasons we can barely grasp. He weeps for the violence we do the hatred we burn so fiercely, for our anger at ourselves and one another. On this day – do you need permission to be exhausted, to weep, to lay down in this valley feeling one with its burnout and dryness? Do you need to pause in the valley and breathe the hope of the prophet and See the sprouts of the fresh verdant forest that can be good news beyond our lifetimes? This week with blooming cross – ignore the box labels. Take a bloom for your feelings of valleys of bones and burnt outness, and/or take one for someone else and plant it in the cross.
Jesus doesn’t go into the tomb and bring the body of Lazarus out. He calls to him, calls to him from the life of the community. What or who is calling you out of a tomb? I am always struck by how Jesus and this family loved one another. Did the uttering of Lazarus’ name on the lips of his Lord, did it sing like a new day? Did it move him beyond the fear and confusion? Did he get up on nothing but hope? Did he follow the voice of a promise he didn’t understand?
We are dwelling in a living forest, One that is both alive and threatened. And here where we stand or sit or lay down there is a network of prayer and possibility that will not leave us. Nothing is the way it was and there is a prophetic possibility waiting to be cherished as God cherishes all of us. Just outside the tombs we have carved for ourselves, that voice of Jesus is calling us to lay down our grudges and failures and losses. Calling us to come out on nothing but the holiness of truth and hope, following promises, we don’t deserve, cannot earn, and don’t understand. Come out – put your very selves into the work of resurrection wherever you are. Calamity happens. The hardwood of the cross, Calamity itself, which we don’t understand and don’t deserve, does change everything.