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RSSHope in the Dry Bones
by The Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton
Lent V Year A
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45
Psalm 130
The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, "Mortal, can these bones live?" — Ezekiel 37:1-3
Ezekiel searches his imagination for an image of hopelessness, and comes up with the valley of dry bones: heaps of unmatched femurs, skulls, finger bones, none with a match, bleached by the hot sun so that any flesh which might have happened to cling to them is leather now. Now that's what dead is, he says to himself as he writes, satisfied with the image. There is no life to be found in this valley.
The bones are hope: dead hope, hope blasted to smithereens. The bones are despair. It's no use, they whisper. Don't even try to change things. It's just too immense a task. The only rational course is to give up on us. Nobody will blame you.
But we know something about hopeless cases: some of them have turned around. Remember polio? Remember smallpox? Remember the childhood diseases that kept almost every child in bed for weeks, throughout childhoods to whose hazards every old cemetery attests. Sometimes the dry bones of our hope come back to life.
Every three seconds a child under the age of five dies. A disproportionate number of these children live in developing countries, without access to clean water or basic medical care. A child in sub-Saharan Africa is 500 times more likely to die from diarrhea than an American child. The majority of these tragic deaths are easily preventable — through a combination of clean water, sanitation, improved nutrition, and medical treatment.
Millennium Development Goal Four is to reduce the mortality rate by two thirds among children under five. Central to the Episcopal Church's embrace of all the MDGs, Episcopal Relief & Development assists local dioceses in implementing clean water strategies, malaria prevention programs, inoculation plans and providing food security in poor communities and communities in which disaster or war has struck.
The Resurrection is the embodiment of hope when all hope is gone. It teaches us to question our own hopelessness, to suspect it. Who says there's no hope? What gives hopelessness authority over me? Who has the right to counsel despair, and where is it written that we have to listen? Let me listen to the voice of despair and very soon I will subside into inactivity — I won't even try to change things. And I will ignore history: there have been many moments that seemed hopeless and became something other than that. The impossible has become possible many times in human history.
We, of all people, should suspect the questionable authority of that voice. Every time.
