Dry Bones, Dry Church

5-20-18 (Pentecost Year B)

Ezekiel 37:1-14; Acts 2:1-21

Dry Bones, Dry Church

When you think of Pentecost, what are the things that come to mind?  The word alone can bring up a lot of different ideas, depending on your experience in the church.  For a lot of us, Pentecost is that day where we make sure we wear our red clothes and there are usually balloons and things in the sanctuary.  Cast your mind back far enough and there’s probably some memory of a Sunday School class or two where you talked about Pentecost being the birthday of the church.  We may be more familiar with the term because it’s the basis for the “Pentecostal” traditions that are out there - and so perhaps we come to this day scratching our heads and wondering why we have a Sunday every year for those folks who break out into weird language in worship, meanwhile giving thanks that we don’t have to worry about that kind of interruption and uncomfortable experience in our building.

Regardless of what memories or feeling the word may evoke, Pentecost is an important day - it’s the 50th day after Easter Sunday, the beginning of a festival in the Hebrew calendar that was called Shavuot, or the Feast of Weeks, which celebrated the giving of the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai.  It was a celebration of the end of the Spring Harvest and a festival that called people once more back to Jerusalem and to the temple to give offerings of the first fruits of their crops.  And it’s in the midst of this festival of transition, this changing of seasons and bringing in the harvest, that the Holy Spirit swoops in on an unsuspecting people and turns the world upside down.

The story is a familiar one that we hear every year around this time, but if you’ve been following along this last week with the d365 devotional, you’ll have noticed that it’s been paired with another somewhat familiar passage from Ezekiel - now hear the word of the Lord…

When I first saw this pairing of texts, it caused me to scratch my head - sure, I suppose that there are some immediate connections between the two as Ezekiel is told to prophesy to breath and there’s a lot of wind going around in both the Old and the New Testament readings… but at the same time, there was something that intrigued me about bringing these two stories together.  The stories both have a lot to do with the work of the Spirit, but how often do we think of Ezekiel speaking to a valley of dry bones when we hear of the tongues of flame and the multitude of different languages that were spoken by the disciples in the book of Acts?  How often do we think to even hold these two stories near each other, let alone look at them side by side?

And then it got a little weirder - because I realized something further.  As much as we celebrate the story in Acts, as much as we hail it as this great and glorious thing that rings in the dawning of a new church, a new movement, a new church… how many of us today look at our church and regretfully see more of ourselves in that valley of dry bones than we do in that gathering of people speaking every tongue, every language, and proclaiming the Gospel so that all can hear it clearly?

We find ourselves in a time where it’s easy to feel like dry bones - listen to any amount of reporting on church trends in various denominations, and you’ll hear similar things.  The average age of our church members continues to rise, while the number of young people and young families in our congregations continues to dwindle.  If you’ve been on a nominating committee in the last few years, or if you’ve been contacted by a nominating committee, you’ve heard the sentiment expressed all too well of how tired many of our congregations are feeling, with so many people filling the same spots in rotation and doing the same things over and over again.  We’ve come to far too many Presbytery meetings these last few years and marked the closing of congregations, the transfer of others, the difficulties of churches in being able to call new pastors… we hear that question “Mortal, can these bones live?” and we’ve found ourselves answering just as Ezekiel, though with perhaps more resignation and shoulder shrugging: “O Lord, You know.”  And it’s so easy to be discouraged, to see ourselves as nothing more than “them bones, them bones, them dry bones.”

And yet we also know that the story doesn’t end there.  As Ezekiel is led by the hand of the Lord into that valley of dry bones, God gives him a word to speak - God promises that God will give breath - in Hebrew, ruach - to those bones and that they will take on flesh and sinew, that they will find life even in their dryness.  As the disciples are gathered to worship in the temple, that same ruach rushes through them and gives new life to their proclamations, reaching the ears of over 300 people who would become believers that very day.  Pentecost isn’t just a fresh new beginning for a movement; it’s the continuing fulfillment of a promise made over thousands of years to a people who have felt cut off, to a people who have felt lifeless and hopeless before.  God spoke through Ezekiel to give a promise to the people of Israel that they would find renewal, that they would be filled with God’s Spirit, that they would have life.  God speaks through the disciples, extending and fulfilling that promise beyond Israel and to every corner of the world, in every language and among every people.  And that promise extends even still to us as we gather here today.  As we gather around this table, as we take of the bread and the cup, we renew our faith in that promise and we continue to place our trust in the Spirit to continue guiding us.  We may be tired, we may feel dried out, we may not know what the Spirit could possibly plan to do with us in this place and at this time… and yet God’s promise is still there for us to hear, God’s message is still there for us to carry out into the world.

And so we are called to be reminded of that promise, to find renewed hope and strength, but we are also called to keep listening as well, to “hear the word of the Lord” as the Spirit speaks to each of us.  It may lead us to places where we are uncomfortable, it may lead us to take risks and to do things that we haven’t thought of doing before.  It may lead us to make changes, to look toward places where we have never thought to look where God is giving us words to speak.  But growing new skin, new muscles, new sinews… that can’t really be all that comfortable anyway, can it?  God calls us to life, and God fills us with God’s Spirit that we might live fully.  May we always have ears to hear that word of the Lord, and may it always fill us with excitement, creativity, and hope.  To God be the Glory.  Amen.