Can These Bones Live? Faith & Mental Health, Part 4 Ezekiel 37:1 14 Rev. Abigail Henderson November 22, 2015

Transcription

1 Can These Bones Live? Faith & Mental Health, Part 4 Ezekiel 37:1 14 Rev. Abigail Henderson November 22, 2015 The valley is full of dry bones, and the bones are crying that they are clean cut off, and God asks Ezekiel if they can live. Now, Ezekiel is a prophet. Prophets are not known for being hesitant, reticent, shy, or tactful. In fact, if you read the entire Book of Ezekiel, you d know that this prophet in particular has just spent 36 chapters proclaiming doom and judgment against virtually everyone in the ancient Near East. But now, all of a sudden, this very tough prophet has an attack of humility, or at least prudence. Son of Man, can these bones live? Ezekiel says, O Lord God, you know. What he probably means here is, O Lord God, is this a trick question? Of course these bones can t live. Can t you see they re dead? But he wouldn t dream of saying that to God. And since God is God and Ezekiel is not, and maybe God knows something Ezekiel cannot possibly know, he s not taking any chances with his answer.

2 Have you ever been set down in the midst of a valley, and it was full of dry bones? Have you ever faced a situation that has just felt utterly hopeless? Have you ever felt stuck and paralyzed and just plain helpless? I m sure most, if not all, of you have. I know I have. And in these days especially, I think it s virtually impossible to feel any other way if you re following world events. Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off. Such feelings are a given for anyone struggling with mental illness, their own or that of a loved one. If you are in that group, I bet you have found yourselves asking questions that echo God s question to Ezekiel: Will I ever feel better? Does the pain ever go away? Is change even possible? Mortal, can these bones live?

3 If you are asking those questions, then today s text was written for you. This is a text for people who are NOT full of hope. This is a text for people who feel stuck. This is a text for people who come to the word of God yearning for new life, and are not at all sure that they will find it. This is a text for people who, like Ezekiel, need to be convinced, to be shown, that even though some things look impossible to us, by the grace of God, they are not. Here s the important thing about this text: this story isn t a documentary of something that has already happened. The people hearing it weren t meant to reminisce about that time in their past when God saved and restored them. The people to whom Ezekiel prophesied were captives in exile, their homeland taken over by the Babylonians. The only lives they had ever known had been ruptured, clean cut off. They were actually worse off than their ancestors who wandered in the wilderness. At least the people in the wilderness were on their way home. The exiles were moving farther and farther from home as the years passed, and their memories of it were fading.

4 Is that us, feeling ourselves swept along with a world that s farther and farther from where it belongs? A world where people hurt each other in ways that defy comprehension? Where the exile and the refugee are scapegoated and vilified? Where more people with mental illness are in jail than in treatment? I could go on listing the terrible things about the world. I could go on listing the terrible things about mental illness. This is where my supervisor from my first pastoral internship would stop me and say, Abby, you ve gone down the rabbit hole. You re supposed to be a messenger of the Gospel. Gospel means good news. So where is it? Where s the Good News? I don t mean to dwell too long in Bad News. But if I ve learned anything about the Good News, it s that you can t rush through Good Friday to get to Easter. And you can t have resurrection without death. You have to hear yourselves saying, Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely, before you can really appreciate the prophetic words, I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live. What does that mean, You shall live? What could be contained in that promise that we can take in, right now, in our real life struggles?

5 What does healing look like, really, when we know for a fact that the dead are dead? Perhaps we must begin with the realization that Ezekiel s vision is not meant to be taken literally. Even God says it! Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. In other words, these bones aren t individual people; they re symbols of a nation. Likewise, perhaps we need a more nuanced understanding of what resurrection healing, wholeness, restoration looks like in the case of mental illness. Rarely will it be so literal as someone suddenly being cured. I think resurrection, more often than not, will be more subtle and complex and grace filled. I was talking with a friend the other day. When she was in her early twenties, she had major depression and engaged in self harm and suicidal ideation. She was hospitalized for a period of time and then did many years of therapy and medication and got a lot better. She now thinks of herself as someone who used to struggle with mental illness. But lately, things have been hard. She s a mother and a professional and her stress level is through the roof. It was affecting her marriage and her parenting. She was feeling frustrated with

6 herself, wondering why couldn t she snap out of it; after all, she s a long way from being that college student in the psychiatric ward. And then she finally realized: her depression is still part of her. It s less monstrous and more manageable, but it s real, and difficult, and it will always be a part of her story. And with that realization came the insight that she doesn t have to be OK all the time. She gave herself permission to say, I need help. I still deserve help. That sounds like a glimpse of resurrection to me. Healing isn t about erasing wounds. It isn t about death being replaced with life. It s about death and life coexisting, and life asserting itself in the midst of death in ways small and large. Healing might look like a woman with major depression finally getting out of bed, if only to feed the cat, and so makes it to a doctor s appointment on time. Healing might look like a the family of a man with schizophrenia having a relationship with his child, and taking her out for ice cream every week, even if he can t have custody of her.

7 Healing might look like a veteran with PTSD finding the right cocktail of medications to help manage his symptoms so that his nightmares don t wake him up several times a night. Healing might also come in the form of unexpected outcomes and dubious blessings. For example, perhaps some kind of healing is found in the ending of a relationship that could not sustain the stress and pain that existed between two people. Or perhaps a small but necessary healing is known in the setting of boundaries between two siblings, when one is sober and the other is not. Or maybe healing can be discovered by the adult child of a parent who died by suicide when he was young, and who has managed to carve out a life he loves and values despite growing up in the shadow of such a loss. In other words, there are as many versions of healing as there are wounds. There are as many stories of resurrection as there are stories of death. Is up to everyone to notice how resurrection is at work in their own lives, however obviously or quietly. And one thing that we

8 can do in church, as a community, is collect all those big and little resurrection stories and tell them and retell them until they become strong enough, powerful enough, to breathe new life into our collective dry bones where there was once only death. And then we may just be convinced, like Ezekiel, that God can do the impossible, that death does not have the final word. We may discover that wholeness is possible, not in spite of our brokenness but because of it. Because perhaps God can t find us and begin to heal us until we ourselves are out in the dry valley, looking for God, asking if these bones can live and really listening for an answer. May it be so. Amen.