Can These Bones Live?

My sermon from the Calvary Memphis Lenten Preaching Series

This week, I had the privilege of speaking as part of the historic Lenten Preaching Series at Calvary Episcopal Church in Memphis, which is now in its 103rd year. I spoke from the text of Ezekiel 37:1-3, inviting us to sit with the question, “can these bones live?” Before we can honestly sit with the question, and begin to live the question, we have to first have an honest reckoning with the bones in the valley. If you have a moment, take a listen! I’ve also included the manuscript of the sermon below.

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This text of Ezekiel 37 is centered around a question: Can these bones live? It’s the question around which I’m inviting us to gather this afternoon. Can these bones live? One thing that has become essential for me over the course of my spiritual journey is to embrace the questions as central to the path of transformation. There’s a reason that the prophetic texts, like Ezekiel, are littered with questions. There’s a reason that poetry is a genre of writing built on questions. There’s a reason that Jesus and so many of the great spiritual teachers across traditions would more often ask a question than provide an answer. It’s because questions are the furnace of the soul’s transformation. It’s because questions open us up—they serve as invitations into the Mystery and beckon us to continue the journey—the journey into the infinite knowability of God. I often return to the words of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke from his book Letters to a Young Poet. The book is a set of correspondence letters between Rilke and a young poet named Franz Kappus who has all sorts of questions for Rilke about life, and love, and writing. Here’s what Rilke says to him:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

The point is to live everything. Live the questions. And so the question comes to us again, can these bones live? But before we can begin to sit with the question, and wrestle with how to live the question, we have to first become conscious of and begin to reckon with the reality of the place where we are and of the moment which we inhabit. The text begins with Ezekiel being caught up in the Spirit and set down in the middle of a valley full of bones. Ezekiel has what we would call a mystical experience; and that is not to say that this is not a real experience. In fact, it’s saying the opposite—that this is the most real experience, an experience of touching the capital R Reality that exists under the surface of our everyday lives. The German theologian and mystic Karl Rahner said that to be a mystic is to occupy the core of human experience. And he said in another place that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all. In other words, if our religious and spiritual practices are not moving us to see, to touch, to experience that which is really Real, if they only lead us to skim the surface of life and existence, if they only serve to reinforce our illusions about ourselves and the world, then all of our religion will all be irrelevant. I think we’re seeing that now—that religion and spirituality that doesn’t lead us into the depths, that doesn’t lead us to ask the real questions, is more or less good for nothing. And I would go further than that to say it is toxic, it is harmful, it is deadly. It’s the kind of religion that leads you to justify the dropping of bombs on the homes and schools of Iranians because you believe it will kickstart the End Times. Listen church, sometimes things need to fall apart, the container needs to crumble, the edifice needs to fall to the ground, in order to see the Real that lies beneath the surface. Sometimes we need to be dropped down in the valley, led by Spirit into the wilderness, in order to get in touch with the Real.

I’ve heard people say many times over the past few years that we are living in apocalyptic times. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I’ve got a book of essays and poems coming out at the beginning of 2027 on this very subject. Some people, when they say that, take it to mean that we are experiencing the end of the world. But when I hear that I hear it in the truest sense of the word—apokalypsis—which means to uncover, unveil, or reveal. Under the surface of our market-driven capitalist economy, under the thin charade of our religious institutions, down into the core of our very own lives that we often live just skimming the surface, what is really going on? How are we? How am I?

This is the pressing question
of every age:

What is it that we cannot see?

Life is hiddenness,
as is God,
and we have been given
the gift of searching.

The unseen works on us, always.

Waves pulsing through our flesh, unfelt.
Forces pulling at our bodies. Forces
putting Black bodies in cells en masse.

Under an opaque veil that we call law.

All that is hidden
is meant to be
revealed.

Revelation cannot be achieved.
It comes when it comes,
when it wants to unearth itself.
Falls from the heavens like light
to those who have insisted it lay itself bare.

It’s important to note in this text that when Ezekiel is caught up in the Spirit, the Spirit does not set Ezekiel down on top of a mountain and tell him to look down into the valley, but the Spirit sets Ezekiel down in the midst of the valley, in the middle of the bones. Because you can’t touch reality from a distance. And the Spirit not only sets Ezekiel down in the midst of the bones but leads Ezekiel to walk through the bones, to feel them rolling over his feet, to hear the bones clinking and clanking off of each other, to see the little clouds of dust collect in the air as he kicks them around. And as he’s walking around he discovers that these bones are not fresh bones, they’ve been here for a while. These bones are dry. Whatever happened in this valley didn’t happen yesterday. This is age-old carnage.

This moment in time that we are all collectively traversing through is a time in which the foundations of the religious and political institutions on which our society has been built are crumbling, and as the foundations crumble the bones that have been buried are starting to surface. And as they surface we’re starting to recognize that these aren’t fresh bones, they’ve been here for a while. And it’s a clarifying moment because as we reckon with the ways that these institutions have pulverized us personally, we’re starting to see with clearer eyes that these institutions have been doing bone-burying work for generations. And though our stories are personal to us, they are not new, and they are not unique. Those of us who identify with the bones scattered across the valley are starting to see that we are connected to a lineage. We are connected to a larger story of people throughout the years, throughout the centuries, throughout the generations who have been bruised, battered, and left for dead on the side of the road. And like Dr. Martin Luther King said in his sermon on the Good Samaritan, there comes a point when, after having seen body after body after body left for dead on the side of the road, we have to start examining the conditions of the road. It’s not enough, after a while, to just keep tending to the wounded person on the road; at some point we have to start asking why this keeps happening. What is it about the road that keeps leaving people in this condition? What is it about the institutions, and systems, and structures that we have trusted in, that keep crushing people and casting their bones in the valley. It’s not enough to just ask, “what happened to me?” As we look around the valley and see all the bones, we extend that question and ask, “what happened to us?” There’s a reason why the Spirit didn’t show Ezekiel a singular set of dry bones. There’s a reason why the Spirit didn’t say, “Mortal one, these are your bones, and I will breathe on them and raise them up.” The pain that you and I experience. The crushing that you and I experience. The exile that you and I experience is not just a me story. It’s not just a you story. It’s an us story.

Fr. Richard Rohr often says that there are 2 primary doorways to transformation, great love and great suffering. And one of the ways that our suffering begins to transform us is that it moves us out from ourselves into solidarity with those whom James Cone called the crucified peoples of the world. One of the things that we need to leave back up on the mountain when the Spirit drops us down into the valley is our Western rugged individualism. The capital R reality is that our suffering is one. And so is our resurrection. There’s a reason why Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the mothers of the Civil Rights Movement, after being brutally beaten and left for dead in a tiny Mississippi jail, could stand up and say, “no one is free until all of us are free. I’m not free until we’re all free.” Can these bones live?

The foundation is starting to crumble. Some are doing everything they can right now to keep the foundation from crumbling, and to keep those bones buried, because the way that things have been has, to this point, served them well. But there is a rising tide of voices saying, “let it crumble, and let’s unearth the bones.”

What’s interesting to me about this text of Ezekiel 37 is that as Ezekiel is reckoning with the bones scattered across the valley, it is not him who asks the question, “can these bones live,” it’s the Spirit who asks the question of Ezekiel. This struck me when I first read it, but as I sat with it I said to myself, “this feels right to me.” I don’t know about you, but when I consider the centuries of bone-crushing oppression inflicted by the American empire, and by a church that has served as the chaplain of the empire rather than as the conscience of the state, my first thought is not about resurrection. When I consider how despairing my own soul has been, my first thought is not resurrection. When I think about the totality of the wilderness, I’m not thinking about resurrection, I often have no words. Ezekiel is dropped down in the valley, walks around in the bones, and doesn’t say a word. It’s the Spirit who breaks the silence and says, “Mortal, can these bones live?” There’s something here that I’ve been sitting with. It’s really easy, and I’ll speak for myself here, to be in the valley, to begin to reckon with the bones, and to forget that the Spirit is present. I mean, how could God be here? The church did this to me. How could God be here? The person I gave all my love and trust to did this to me. How could God be here? You were supposed to be for us, God, and yet we find ourselves in exile. How could God be here? That’s a legitimate question. And yet I hear the invitation in this text to listen—to listen for the voice of the Spirit in the midst of the carnage. To listen for how the Spirit is hovering over the bones. One thing about the biblical accounts of wilderness, or the biblical metaphors of the valley, is that the wilderness or the valley never mean the absence of God. Before a word is uttered about resurrection, the Spirit is present. I’m reminded of the Book of Revelation where John the Seer, as he’s writing to the church living through its own apocalyptic moment, experiencing all sorts of evil at the hands of the Roman empire, says again and again, “those who have ears, listen to what the Spirit is saying.” Because if we’re not learning to listen in the midst of the chaos, we’ll never hear the question come to us, “can these bones live?” This learning to listen in the midst of chaos and crisis is what Dr. Barbara Holmes talks about in her latest book Crisis Contemplation. She says this,

“Contemplation…can arise during the most intense aspects of the [crisis]. When bodies are being tortured, when minds are pushed to the breaking point, the human spirit falls through the cracks of the crisis into the center of contemplation. When the ordinary isn’t ordinary anymore and the crisis is upon us, the self can center in this refuge that I am calling “crisis contemplation,” a space that is neither the result of spiritual seeking nor the voluntary entry into meditative spaces. It is a cracking open, the rupture and shattering of self, community, expectations, and presumptions about how the world works. . . . When we let go, the only constants are God’s love and God’s promise that we will never be left alone.”

And so here we are, in the midst of the valley of bones, standing at the foot of a hill they call the Place of the Skull on this Lenten journey, and the question comes to us from the mouth of the Spirit, “Can these bones live?” This isn’t a question about whether institutions can be saved. This isn’t a question about whether the American empire can be restored. This isn’t a question about what the next church planting strategy should be. This is a question about whether or not there can be life here again. It’s a big social question, and it’s a personal, intimate question. A question that goes down deep to the level of the soul. Can you hear it?

Ezekiel’s response to this question is the realest that it gets. He doesn’t say, “Of course they can, God, you can do anything.” He’s left the religious platitudes back up on the mountain. He says, “God, you know.” Which can also be translated, “I don’t know.” This is what happens when we’re brought down into the valley of dry bones, all of our certainty gets stripped away. We’re brought to a place of unknowing because we’re undone. The easy answers that worked for us up on the mountain don’t work down here. The answers that we clung to, the institutions that made us feel stable and secure for a while, all of that is gone, and all we have left is the presence of the Spirit. The terror is real, but so is the beauty. The devastation is real, but so is the Presence. This is when we begin to live the question, when we can begin to embrace the uncertainty, when we can learn to live in the tension without the need for resolution. This is the essence of the life of faith. Hear this meditation from Fr. Richard Rohr:

If we are to live on this Earth, we cannot bypass the necessary tension of holding contraries and inconsistencies together…I am talking about just holding the tension, not necessarily finding a resolution or closure to paradox…This is very difficult for most people, largely because we have not been taught how to do this mentally or emotionally…I think opening to this holding pattern is the very name and description of faith…We need contemplative practices to loosen our egoic attachment to certainty and retrain our minds to understand the wisdom of paradox. Contemplative prayer is largely just being present: holding the tension instead of even talking it through, offering the moment to God instead of fixing it by words and ideas, loving reality as it is instead of understanding it fully. In our daily lives, this prayer is most commonly articulated as a willingness to say, “I don’t know.” We must not push the river, we must just trust that we are already in the river, and God is the certain flow and current.

I intentionally chose not to preach on the rest of this text, which I would encourage you to read. But I chose not to preach on it because I don’t want us to move too quickly through the valley of the bones. I don’t want us to move too quickly to the promise of resurrection without honestly wrestling with the question of resurrection. Because as I said earlier, questions are the furnace of the soul’s transformation. Something begins to happen in us when we struggle with the question, when we can begin to know the presence of the Spirit and hear the voice of the Spirit in the midst of the valley, surrounded by the bones.

As I bring this to a close I want to leave you with a poem from one of the great poets of our time, Lucille Clifton. In her poem “slaveships” she comes into conversation with this text of Ezekiel 37. With all that she’s doing in this poem, she adds another element to what I think it means for us to live the questions. Standing in the valley of bones, reckoning with the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade propped up by white supremacist Christian theological justifications, she says these words:

loaded like spoons

into the belly of Jesus

where we lay for weeks for months

in the sweat and stink

of our own breathing

Jesus

why do you not protect us

chained to the heart of the Angel

where the prayers we never tell

and hot and red

as our bloody ankles

Jesus

Angel

can these be men

who vomit us out from ships

called Jesus Angel Grace of God

onto a heathen country

Jesus

Angel

ever again

can this tongue speak

can these bones walk

Grace Of God

can this sin live

In the hold of a slaveship named Jesus, in the midst of the valley of bones, the speaker of the poem acknowledges the presence of the Spirit. But it’s as if the speaker of the poem, hearing in the background the question from God, “can these bones live,” begins to talk back. “I hear your question, God, but I’ve got a question for you.” Standing in the midst of a history of white supremacist Christianity, standing in the midst of a history of anti-blackness that has pulverized her people, the speaker of the poem says, “God, can this sin live? Can this go on?” See, living the question sometimes means wrestling with the question, wrestling with the God who asks us the question. Like the Psalmist who said, “why do the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper?” Can this sin live? Something happens in us when we begin to wrestle. And I would argue that in the wrestling is where we begin to see the early signs of life.

I don’t know what the invitation is for you today. Maybe you’re being invited to reckon with the dry bones in the valley. Maybe you’re being invited to listen to the voice and become aware of the presence of the Spirit in the midst of the crisis. Maybe you’re being invited to let go of your need for an answer and embrace the uncertainty and the wisdom of paradox. Maybe you’re being invited to wrestle. But wherever we are, the Spirit is speaking and the question is hovering over this place, “can these bones live?” Let us take the journey of living the question together.