March 2005 Herald

Can These Bones Live?

By Richard A. Brown

Bones. Dry, barren, dusty, bleached bones—filling the valley for as far as the eye could see. A powerful image of death, of the crushing end to a once mighty people. Ezekiel tried to comprehend what the Lord was showing him in that incredible vision. And then, the question: Can these bones live?

Centuries later two sisters, Mary and Martha, wept in front of the tomb of their brother. If only Jesus had arrived in time, things would have been different. He could have healed Lazarus. But no, now it was too late. Four days had passed. When Jesus did come, they were deep into their grief. There was no hope for any other outcome. If only he had come sooner. Yet there was Jesus—teacher, healer, Son of God—standing in front of the tomb, uttering the command: Lazarus, come forth!

The thirty-seventh chapter of the book of Ezekiel and the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of John have in common life rising from death, hope replacing despair. Christians read both accounts through eyes of faith, and in doing so they catch a glimpse of the greatest mystery of all: the resurrection of Jesus.

The conquered people of Judah in the time of Ezekiel had been in Babylon almost seventy years. The children and grandchildren of the original captives knew little of their homeland, the promised land of their ancestors, except for the stories and traditions passed down to them. Those stories were their link to the past, but what they didn’t realize is that those stories would provide a link to their future as God’s people. Those stories would help pave a highway through the wilderness to go home to a place they had never been before.

Much had changed during their stay in Babylon. It wasn’t a bad place, really. For many it had become a place of prosperity and comfort. It was home now. Many would remain there, even after the Persian emperor Cyrus, whose army had defeated the Babylonians, made it possible for the Jews to return to Judah. In fact, there remained viable Jewish communities in the region (now present-day Iraq and Iran) until the fundamentalist Islamic revolution in Iran in the late 1970s and the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.

Ezekiel, certainly, was baffled by the scene laid out in vision before him. Can these bones live? What an absurd question. They’re bones, just bones. But the Lord didn’t give up, commanding Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones. Well, that was even more absurd. The Lord told Ezekiel he should speak the words that would be given him. And so he did—and the bones began to rattle and come together. Imagine the sound of millions of dry bones mysteriously clicking and clacking, reattaching themselves into human skeletons. After that came muscle and tissue and organs and skin. Yet they were still not living human beings—more like upright cadavers.

“Now,” the Lord said, “prophesy to the wind.” In Hebrew the same word, ruach, can be translated as wind, breath, and spirit. And so, from the four corners of the earth came ruach and filled these bodies and brought them to life. This, Ezekiel came to realize, was the people known variously as Judah, Israel, the Jews. They would live again; they would be restored. The stories of their ancestors would be continued and joined with the stories of their descendants. These stories would be placed within the story of God.

Typically humans want to place God’s story in their own, to use and appropriate God for their own purposes. But that’s not the way God intends for it to work. We are within God’s story, not the other way around. And that makes an enormous difference.

We encounter Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha, elsewhere in the Gospels. They were obviously close friends of Jesus and had opened their home in Bethany to him, including during the last week of his earthly life. The sisters are now models, or metaphors, for the being and doing aspects of the spiritual life. We all know Marys and Marthas in our own time, and their relationship with each other and with Jesus gives us insight today into the idea of spiritual community.

Did Jesus deliberately show up late, after Lazarus was dead and buried, just to demonstrate what was certainly his most dramatic miracle? Maybe, maybe not. That’s probably not important anyway. What is important is that he did show up, and behind his spoken command was the most powerful force on earth or in heaven: God’s ruach. That is what resuscitated Lazarus. Unlike Jesus later on, Lazarus was not resurrected, or transformed, into a new spiritual/physical being. He was just brought back to life—not that that was a minor or simple thing, of course. It was a pretty big deal then and would be today, even with all of our medical and technological expertise.

Death and dying are inevitable parts of human existence. Sometimes they’re silent, creeping up without much notice, other times expected or even anticipated. Once in a while they arrive with great drama, with overwhelmingly powerful force. As I write this at the beginning of a new year, headlines are filled with news of the tsunami that struck the entire Indian Ocean region—Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Indonesia in particular. Today, the grim tally is up to 150,000 human beings killed, with row after row of bodies lined up waiting to be identified and buried. Another half million are injured. Who knows what tomorrow’s headlines will say. The grief, the mourning, the physical devastation are so overwhelming, so incredible, as to be almost unbelievable. This was no terrorist attack but the result of a giant wave created by a 9.0 undersea earthquake traveling 500 miles per hour, striking without warning.

Once again people utter the same question as the one on so many lips on September 11, 2001: Where was God?

Isn’t it amazing that people keep asking that same question? I’m sure the ancient Jews did as Jerusalem and its holy temple were destroyed, while they were carted off to captivity in faraway Babylon, and as the decades of exile tallied up.

Mary and Martha expressed it just a little differently, but it meant the same: Where was Jesus?

It’s almost as if we’re innocent bystanders and it’s God’s job to do everything—to protect and save and heal and raise up. The question arises after sudden tragedy but also after thoughtful consideration of decades-long trends.

During the past forty years there’s been a significant exodus of people from what’s now called the Community of Christ. Why didn’t God stop them? There were those who marched defiantly out the front door, upset over dogma, beliefs, practices, rituals, ordinations. They got most of the notice, naturally, but what about all the others who slipped quietly away, tired of the fighting, the patient waiting for change, the slowness of the institution to respond to upheavals in cultures and generations? And now, something totally unexpected: a sadness has settled upon us with the resignation of our prophet-president.

Why doesn’t God just fix the problems, soothe the pain, heal the wounds, calm everybody down, and make us all live in peace again? Of course, we know (at least at some level) that God doesn’t work that way. God’s ruach blows as it will, but some choose not to feel the movement, or perhaps they misinterpret its direction. And so for decades we’ve been a divided people, families torn apart by the one thing—the church—that they held in common. In one way or another, we utter those familiar questions:

Can these bones live?

Where was God?

Why hasn’t Jesus come?

I believe we will find the answers to those questions somewhere within that Hebrew word, ruach—wind, breath, spirit, Spirit. The path ahead will be like nothing we’ve ever seen before—like a highway appearing in the wilderness, like the sound of parched and brittle bones rattling as they come together, like the forming of a spiritual body, like standing in a cemetery and shouting, “Come forth!”

There’s no step-by-step instruction book, no one-size-fits-all pattern for creating spiritual community. It’s a matter of spiritual discipline and Mystery. It may appear to us like a crazy quilt—a jumble of fabric pieces stitched together with no discernable pattern or color theme whatsoever. But from God’s perspective that same quilt will have the precision, order, and color coordination of the finest Amish hand-stitched masterpiece.

We will survive, and yes, I believe we will thrive, too. To do so we will tell the stories of our spiritual ancestors in North America and in dozens of countries throughout the world where God’s ruach has blown with increasing force. We will continue to write new stories to add to the old—all of it within God’s story. We begin and end with the story of Jesus—born in humble circumstances, a healer and teacher and miracle worker and troublemaker, who suffered and died and was raised to a new and transformed existence by the power of God. In between we share our stories, live our faith, raise our children, welcome strangers into our midst, seek justice and peace, and discover ruach within and around us.

We walk in the Light, for we are a people of God. No, we’re not the only people of God. But we are a people of God! Make no mistake about that. We are called, like Mary and Martha, to be and to do. We are challenged, like ancient Judah, to return from exile as a new and transformed people on a wilderness highway yet to be built.

I hear the rattling of bones, the unwrapping of burial cloths. You cannot see ruach, only feel its touch and see its effects. Yes, indeed, these bones can live!
__________________

November 2005 Herald

The End of Ordinary Time

By Richard A. Brown

“Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?” …And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” –Matthew 25:37, 40 NRSV

My daughter, Beth, and I were about fifty miles into what would eventually be an 800-mile round trip for me last August. With summer ending it was time for her to begin her third year of college. Beth was at the wheel of our Jeep, crammed inside (and in the car top carrier) with school “essentials.” Suddenly the car ahead of us erupted in blue-black smoke, as if its entire front end had caught fire. Beth pulled into the left lane as the other car veered toward the shoulder.

I looked to my right and saw the driver—a young woman about Beth’s age—and a car packed as full as ours. Probably headed to college, too, I thought. I told Beth to pull over. Here were two young women headed off to college, but with one glaring difference: the driver to my right didn’t have a dad sitting next to her. Without stopping to think about it I simply knew I would be “that dad.”

Once we’d pulled to the shoulder ourselves I ran back to the other car. Fortunately, it was not on fire, but an eight-foot section of truck tire was firmly lodged in the driver’s side tire well. I made sure the driver was all right. Her name was Elizabeth and, sure enough, she was headed for Columbia, Missouri, to start her second year of college. With heavy traffic whizzing dangerously nearby I jacked up the car, removed the wheel, and yanked out the doubled-up tire tread. The car tire was damaged slightly from friction but otherwise appeared to be in workable condition.

Soon we were all under way. Beth and I followed Elizabeth for sixty miles until she reached her exit. That was about when I began to wonder if this might have been more than just a random “good Samaritan” act. For in the back of my mind that Saturday morning was this very Herald article. It was long overdue (as mine usually are), and my half-completed first draft was not coming together well at all.

Jesus’ strange story of the Son of Man coming in glory to judge the nations features a king acting like a shepherd separating his sheep and goats. It’s a tough passage to get a handle on, with a complicated mix of those who act mercifully and others who don’t. All of it comes with an overlay of rewards and punishment, salvation and damnation. To top it all off, the king explains that those “sheep and goats” actually were—or were not—showing mercy to him.

The temptation is to conclude that helping the needy is a sure way to get into heaven and maybe even get a good seat at the banquet table. Of course, that would mean tossing the whole idea of salvation by grace out the window. Well, back to the drawing board.

But what did all that have to do with my good deed on a summer morning anyway? Had I, in fact, stopped to help out of a sense of Christian duty to act mercifully (for whatever purpose or reward)? Did I think I was really helping Jesus by helping Elizabeth? Well, no—not at all, actually. I finally concluded that I was just being a dad.

That’s all. It was a “dad thing”—part of some unspoken code among dads to simply step up when the moment arises. In a broader sense, it’s a “family thing,” too. This is what families do, without thinking about it, or without judging the potential risks or how far it might throw off a tight schedule.

It’s not about personal worthiness (on the part of the doer or the receiver), nor does it have anything to do with the content of the actions. In Matthew’s account Jesus focuses on the way the family of God functions: not what but who and, even more importantly, whose we are. It’s not something that we even realize is taking place. Often overlooked in Jesus’ story is the curious fact that both those who acted mercifully and those who didn’t responded the same way: “Lord, when did we…?” Neither group had any idea what they were—or were not—doing, much less why.

Matthew doesn’t tell us but I suspect Jesus had Ezekiel in mind. That prophet had taken to task Israel’s long, sad string of kings for failing to live up to their divine calling:

Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. –Ezekiel 34:2-4 NRSV

Ezekiel 34 is paired with Matthew 25 on the last Sunday of the church year. Many churches refer to it as “Christ the King” Sunday, and it brings to a close the long period after Pentecost known as Ordinary Time. Before we get too caught up in Advent and the rush to Christmas, we’re confronted with judgment—final judgment at that. It’s not a happy day, and it appears far removed from the hope, peace, joy, and love of Advent. But it’s a necessary day, nonetheless, for God has expectations for God’s “family.”

Matthew 25 may naturally start us wondering who’s a sheep and who’s a goat. It’s a slippery slope before we begin deciding who belongs where. Of course, in Jesus’ story the sheep and the goats don’t self-select themselves or others to go to the right or the left. That’s the shepherd’s job. There are practical reasons why sheep and goats need to be separated, and to dwell on that probably leads down another dead end in trying to understand what’s going on here. What I can’t get out of my mind, though, is that these folks acted compassionately without even realizing what they were doing. Likewise, the others were equally clueless. And that’s what brings me back to Interstate 70 in mid-Missouri.

At this point I should mention I don’t generally stop along busy highways to help motorists in trouble. Nor do I pick up hitchhikers, for that matter. Most people don’t because of the danger. Life is complicated enough without looking for trouble.

We’re all busy, distracted, preoccupied people. We have obligations to do things, be places, meet people. Sure, the story of the good Samaritan is a fine model for disciples of Jesus. Yet sometimes there really are valid reasons to stop and think about what we’re getting into, as well as other times when we don’t.

There’s a song in the Broadway musical Aida I’ve been unable to get out of my mind lately. The two leading characters sing, “We all live such elaborate lives. We don’t know whose words are true…. Too many choices tear us apart…. I don’t want to live that like…. I don’t want to love like that.”

The setting may be ancient Egypt, but their words speak to us:

We all live in extravagant times

Playing games we can’t all win

Unintended emotional crimes

Take some out, take others in

Who among us does not have a life filled with obligations, duties, anxieties, and challenges? We’ve come to consider this to be normal, business as usual, ordinary. We exhaust ourselves in a fruitless attempt to be and do more: elaborate lives in extravagant times. Could Jesus be telling us in his odd little story that we’re simply trying too hard to live worthwhile lives? Somewhere in all this the psalmist chimes in: “Be still, and know that I am God.”

What, then, is the point of it all? What does God want from us—as individual disciples and as a church community? Better yet, what does God want for us?

Over the years we’ve answered that in differing ways: believe the right way, do the right things, build Zion, preach the fullness of the gospel, practice good stewardship, aim for celestial glory.

Those aren’t wrong answers by any means, but are we so preoccupied with the details of it all that we overlook what is both the foundation and compelling vision of life in God’s family: the peace of Jesus Christ?

Yes, we will act with compassion. We will respond as faithful stewards. We will be open to the leadings of the Spirit. We will develop programs and ministries in our congregations. We will construct buildings to house them. We will worship together, study together, play together, eat together. And all of it arises from the peace of Jesus Christ. That’s our starting point.

Throughout history God’s people have thought God wanted rituals and practices, plans and procedures, organizations and hierarchies. That quickly gets quite complicated, yet we can’t continually be reinventing ourselves. We need standards, default settings from which to operate. We crave this “ordinariness,” whether for comfort or ease. But comfort zones are not always a good thing. The Old Testament prophet Amos brought God’s word to people who thought they had it all figured out:

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them, and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. –Amos 5:21-23

Having said that, Amos then tells them what God does want: “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” In another time and place a different prophet put it this way: “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8 NRSV).

To walk humbly with our God is to know the peace of Jesus Christ. As a result we will act compassionately, but not because it’s the right thing to do—although it is, of course! We will act, as individual disciples and as gathered communities, simply because that’s who we are and whose we are. And we probably won’t even know we’re doing it. It’s a family of God thing.