Eucharist Lesson: Luke
24:36b-48
I have a neighbor whose grandson cannot get his life
together. Truth be told he seems to see no need to get it together. He was
under parented and at 16 as good as abandoned. His grandparents rescued him then
but his wounds and anger undo everyone. He seems not to notice that his chaos is
aging his grandparents beyond hope. Hard working country folk that they are,
they continually serve as a safety net. Perhaps they are not the wisest safety
net but then I speak from a distance they have no luxury to know.
The lessons today remind me that there are very dry places in
life. Some of us are predisposed it seems to live in dry places. Do we
knowingly chose them? Is it a passage of every life? How do we move beyond
these places that taste of dullness or lack of hope or no future? When and if
we do move past these places, will they return? And if they do, will we be any
better moving through them to a better place by wisdom gained?
Ezekiel writes of a vision of a valley filled with the bones
of his exiled people. He writes of a spiritually dead people who seem beyond
hope, a valley filled with dry dead bones. "Can these bones live?"
That is the question the prophet must ask and answer. Like any prophet he
wisely waits upon God's answer to his question.
"Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones,
hear the word of the LORD. Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause
breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will
cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you,
and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the LORD." Ezekiel 37:
4-6
The prophetic answer is that healing and wholeness come by a
gradual mending. That mending is based on choosing to seek God's vision of our
life and step by step move toward it. Literally we are to breath it into our being.
This seems so distant an answer when our life is in some form
of chaos or when we are trying to help one who is living in chaos. If we are in
chaos, we want an answer now and close up. If one we love is in chaos or
somehow lost in the moment, we want an intervention that will make sense now.
This is not the normal religious experience. This is not the normal
psychological experience either. Life mends by stages and pieces. While some
moment may awaken us to our need of healing, change, remaking, this renewal of
self is step by step. It always involves patience and breathing.
The usual first step is a combination of the crisis of seeing
how desperate or out of kilter we are, and then seeing a vision of hope and
change. Every twelve step program I know is based on this spiritual model for
good reason. Twelve step work grew out of the Christian model of hope from the
Episcopal tradition. The work is never easy but it is well accompanied by
others who have walked toward healing before you. We are
mended as gradually as we came apart. But first we must acknowledge we are in
crisis, take it in, breath it in and then breath hope.
This is why Ezekiel must look at this valley of dryness
first. Then the weaving of Israel begins anew. The weaving is just that, a
weaving. Gradually as the people remember not only God's care, but God's laws
which pattern life, will they be remade. When their exile is over and they
return to the broken ruins of Jerusalem they will slowly rebuild their lives by
rules of order, worship of God together as a people, and the hope that they
re-engender as they share a spiritual journey.
In the portion of Jesus' high priestly prayer from John 15 we
read today we hear these words:
"This is my commandment, that you love one another as I
have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for
one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you." John
15:12-14.
Perhaps this is where we go wrong in our journey to wholeness
or helping others tag their own journey to wholeness: we are love as Jesus
loved. This love always has expectations and a vision of good. Jesus loved by
looking for God's will, sometimes reshaping the interpretation of God's law, but
always with a vision of what is right and good. This "right or good thing" was done with those in need, not just for them.
Sometimes when we are in a place that is dry, feels hopeless
or even lost, we need to stop, sit, look for a vision of good and wonder, "What
here is both the loving thing and the thing which stays close to God's
expectations for wholeness?"
Remember from the valley of dry bones to living bodies there
is a journey, not an overnight passage. According to Jesus it is a journey of
cooperative love. Breath that love and only then breath it out by your actions of care.
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