John Kennedy shared a vision of a human being walking on the moon and in not too many years, there we were, taking that one great step for humankind... Martin Luther King had a vision he called it a dream and it was a vision of an end to racism and the poverty that springs forth from it, he articulated that dream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and although there is a long way to go, equality is no longer simply a dream... And it seems like our communities right now is singularly lacking in vision, singularly short on dreams... we ve got monetary woes, our economy is shaky, we re beset on all sides by problems... And we seem unable to come up with solutions, much less dream heroic dreams... maybe we re just too economically strapped these days after all, when people think only of survival, only of how they re gonna pay the bills, and make it through one more Wednesday Soup Night, we don t have the energy to dream, it can be mighty difficult to en-vision. That was the problem in Ezekiel s time, only the Israelites had it in spades... they weren t just worried about the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage industry, or undocumented workers along their borders, their entire country had collapsed, they d been literally wiped out as a nation, their beloved Jerusalem sacked, their temple where they believed God dwell, the Holy Temple reduced to rubble. Not for nothing that the first vision Ezekiel had was of God leaving the land... and he was commissioned by God to be God s mouthpiece, to preach and demonstrate God s word from exile, he was a prophet in exile himself, with his people, while they were held
captive in Babylon...How could they sing songs, how could they dream dreams, how could they get vision while they were struggling to survive in a foreign land? How indeed? Well... in our passage, we find out... Ezekiel is speaking, and he tells us of a dream: the hand of the Lord came upon him, he says, and he brought him out by the Spirit of the Lord God s animating force on the earth, pulling him out into his dream-state and set him down in the middle of a valley... and in his vision he saw that the valley was full of bones, of bones dry and brittle, bones bleached white by the Palestine sun, and there were very many of them, they filled the valley, and they were very, very dry... And the Lord asks him Mortal, can these bones live? and what a question that was, if God didn t know, who would? And Ezekiel says as much, O Lord God, you know, and then God tells him what to do... but he doesn t say Pick em up and put em together, start a new program or worship service or outreach plan, he doesn t tell them about a sure-fire, step-by-step procedure to put them back together, he tells them to prophesy to the bones, to preach to them, to tell them a story. God gives Ezekiel a vision and commands him to tell it to the bones. We know who the bones represent, we know that the bones are a vision of Israel, dead and lifeless in the valley of the rivers of Babylon, cold... and dry... and gray, O dry bones, O brittle husk of Israel, now hear the word of the Lord... and God tells them what is going to happen, God gives them this vision in poetic form, which is after all the metaphoric language of dreams, of vision, God says that God will cause breath to enter them, and that they shall live...
Now the Lord fleshes out the vision, and it s a very vivid image, an image of creeping sinews and slinking flesh, slithering up the lifeless bones, coalescing around them and encapsulating them, until they look like the visible person, or that movie where the crazy scientists appears one organ at a time... skin, hair, teeth, eyeballs, fingernails and vessels full of blood, until there is a perfect body lying there, a perfect, beautiful corpse, but it does not move. For you see... it takes more than flesh to make a people, it takes more than material things, more than armies and treasuries and departments of state... it takes spirit, it takes heart, it takes breath, and so God says prophesy to the breath, speak to it, call it down upon the lifeless, cold body, say Come from the four winds, O breath, O Spirit, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live, and Ezekiel does, he articulates the vision, he animates it, calling down breath into the corpse and at first it seems not to work, the body is silent and still, and suddenly with a great convulsive shudder it comes alive, it s alive! Filled with the spirit, quick with God s mission, a living breathing people once again... And we should stop and take our breath, and note that it just as takes more than flesh to make a person, so it takes more than bricks to make a church, more than organs and pews, it takes the Spirit of God to animate a church, to enliven a local expression of the Body of Christ... you can have all the fine drawing rooms, all the fine sanctuaries and Sunday School rooms and fellowship halls you want, but if the Spirit of God doesn t quicken it, if the Holy Spirit doesn t stalk its halls and flirt among its rafters and beams, then it s nothing but a beautiful corpse. It is the Spirit, called down from the four corners
of the earth, that wind that makes all others blow, that enables a church to fulfill its mission, which is nothing less than to be an outpost of the Kingdom of God. But come on, now, what really happened with Ezekiel s vision? How did it become reality, how did it go from being just a weird dream of a half-crazed dreamer to being reality for an entire nation? Well, along with the vision came concrete realities, along with the dream came a material plan for their restoration in Jerusalem. You can read it for yourselves if you go a little further along in the Book Ezekiel than today s lection, a plan for the temple s restoration, and when Ezekiel transmitted the vision and plans to the people, they began to buzz with excitement, they began to talk about the vision, to offer amendments and modifications, to debate the details. Folks disagreed with one another, with Ezekiel, even, and in the discussion, in the fussin and feudin and fightin, a funny and wholly marvelous thing happened the vision of the valley of the living, breathing children of God became inevitable. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, they knew what was going to happen, they were just arguing over the details. God gave them a vision, and in the wrangling over it, in the discussion of it and how to achieve it, it became a foregone conclusion, an incipient reality, a done deal. Within fifty years, the unsinkable Babylonian Empire had sunk, the Israelites had been released, and the restoration of the temple had begun. And God did it all beginning with a vision. Friends God has given us a vision, just as sure as God gave one to those Babylonian captives... remember our annual meeting in January? We saw visions of the direction this community is moving. The Rector together with Vestry and Staff pent a weekend of visioning. A weekend of dreaming what God is calling us to call out in each other.
I invite you to take this vision and live with it, turn it around in your minds, pick it apart in your heads... talk about it, gripe about it, discuss it among yourselves, pray about it, play around with it, and as you do, you can rest assured that we are just at the beginning...biblical scholar Walter Wink summed up the process: That is how history is made, he said: by envisioning... new alternative possibilities and acting on them as if they were inevitable. That is how despair is overcome... by prophesying a course of action God is conspiring to bring to pass. And friends, I am convinced that we are doing just that, that we have been given a vision as vital and important and integral to our community, and I am equally sure that working within God s powerful grace and providence, it will come to pass. We say these things in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.