Flourishing In Our Bones: The YCWI 2024 Conference Closing Sermon

Post Author: Rev. Kate Mackereth Fulton

As a pastor and hospital chaplain, I have spent a fair amount of time with the dead. At a previous church, which had an underground columbarium, we could only inurn remains during a stretch of warm, dry weather, which are hard to come by in Maryland except during the summer. My office, then, became the officially designated “holding place” for those waiting their turn for inurnment. I often had four or five sets of cremains in my office, and there was a designated shelf on my bookcase for them, from which they could see the goings-on and continue, in their still, silent way, to participate in the life of our church. 

My brother-in-law has his own version of this practice. He is an insatiable antique hunter, and he rarely leaves a store without picking up a postcard or an antique photo portrait. To be clear, these are not people he knows or people who are famous in any way; often all we know about them are the notes hand-printed on the backs by the original owners. Patrick brings them home, lovingly frames them, and hangs them around the house, calling them his “instant ancestors”. Since our generation of the family is mostly childless, my hope is that one day, when all of us are gone, we too might be salvaged by some compassionate or curious hand and become instant ancestors ourselves.

Ezekiel, in this heavenly vision, is transported to a field of “instant ancestors”, but these have not been lovingly cared for. Instead, these bones have bleached in the sun, “left to rot unburied in the open field.”¹ It is a dead end, literally and figuratively. And Ezekiel instinctively understands that these dead bones are the nation of Israel, now scattered by the Babylonian occupation. It is not just his ancestors, but his own living community, that he sees reflected in this graveyard. His own generation has already given up on the possibility of new life. They are, in other words, bone-tired.

We are all familiar with that soul-level exhaustion on some level, aren’t we?  And for some of us, bone-tired isn’t a feeling so much as it is a state of being.  To those with chronic illness (be it mental, physical or both) or long-term caregivers, as well as to those struggling with family or work dysfunctions or financial problems, or carrying the burden of generations or racism or homophobia, the struggle isn’t to remember the weariness so much as it is to remember what it feels like NOT to be ground down by everyday life.

To Ezekiel and Isaiah (and, I suspect, so many of us), the great promise of God appears dead on arrival. Is it ever going to get easier?  And if not, what reason do we have to keep going? And most importantly: what the heck are we supposed to do now?

Ezekiel does three simple, brilliant things over the course of this scripture, and the first is this: he does not flinch. He sees the valley and the corpses for what they are, and does not minimize, explain away, or lose himself in the emotion of what he has seen. He also acknowledges what he does not know: when God asks if the bones can live, Ezekiel returns the question to God, trusting that even in the midst of this desolation and loss, despite his own shock at the vision, God may yet be at work.

Religion reporter Krista Tippett wrote a great article for Orion magazine a while back on hope, and here’s what she had to say: Hope is a “a muscle, a practice, a choice: to live open-eyed and wholehearted in the world as it is and not as we wish it to be [pause]…but hope calls me to attend, too, to the world that wants to be born.”  Back in Isaiah 66:8, God says “Shall a land be born in one day?  Shall a nation be delivered in one moment? Yet as soon as Zion was in labor she delivered her children.” This is a reminder both that 1) God’s time is not ours – possibly the most annoying sentence I have ever uttered – and 2) God WILL deliver us; our deliverance has already begun!  

In fact, God keeps urging the people to rejoice and be glad, four times in Isaiah 66:10 alone, even though they are far from feeling any joy.  Their gladness is being born, but it is born out of the suffering and pain of generations of devastation and exile. Comfort will not come easily – or quickly – but it is, indeed, coming.

I want to stop here for a moment to think about what, exactly, comfort means in Scripture. When you and I think about comfort we are probably thinking mostly about a state of physical ease. Sliding into a freshly made bed, sitting down for a rest in your favorite armchair or even putting on a particularly beloved pair of sweatpants or slippers would all fall under this idea of comfort – and don’t get me wrong, those little comforts are wonderful and can even help sustain us to a point. But that’s not the kind of comfort Isaiah is talking about here. The prophet is talking about a larger, almost existential kind of comfort, one that can only be had in the complete and total absence of pain or restraint. This comfort is vested in liberation, authenticity, and deep joy, and it is this kind of freedom and relationship God is calling us into.

Which brings us to Ezekiel’s second simple, brilliant action: he listens. Specifically, he listens for God and to God, which sound like the same thing, but are actually two different skill sets. Listening for a toddler as they move around the house – and specifically those periods of eerie silence which usually indicate they’re doing something they shouldn’t – is different than listening to your friend talk about their day over the dinner table. Listening to requires short-term, total focus; listening for is a constant state of low-level awareness. Both are necessary if we want to discern what God is up to in the dead ends of our lives.

Ezekiel listens to God, who gives him a strange instruction: God tells him to preach, to prophesy, to the bones that litter the valley. Theologian M Jade Kaiser of enfleshed notes that “God doesn’t let out all the details of how it will work or why it’s worth trying but sends the prophet to keep telling the truth of love and justice and the Sacred anyway. To keep speaking the words that bring life. To keep doing as if [Ezekiel] were surrounded by life instead of death. To keep bringing words of hope to the places and people already handed over to death.”²  I wonder how many of us feel like that last sentence might actually be our job description in this present moment?

Rev. Kate Mackereth Fulton, vice-chair of YCWI, preaches at the closing service of the YCWI 2024 Conference.

It might sting, but I love this instruction – not only for its strangeness, but also for its utter rightness. “The task God sets Ezekiel – [to preach] – is simply and profoundly to do what he [already] is.”³  Had Ezekiel been a piano player, God would have asked him to play a tune. Had he been an artist, God would have asked him to paint. Had Ezekiel been a business analyst, God would have requested the most epic spreadsheet with the very best pivot tables. God isn’t asking Ezekiel to do the impossible. God is merely asking Ezekiel to use the skills and gifts God has already given him – and God will use those to accomplish something far beyond what Ezekiel can imagine.

When we are confronted with a seemingly insurmountable challenge, the temptation is to move immediately into triage mode. “But even as we piece together plans and strategies and all manner of good efforts, the fact of the matter is that we don’t know how we are gonna find our way through this [crisis]. The way is not clear.”⁴

Which brings us to the third simple, brilliant thing Ezekiel does: he trusts God enough to do what God asks, even though he himself doesn’t understand it. 

This goes against every single enneagram 8 instinct I possess – but Ezekiel, thankfully, appears not to have been an 8, and simply does as God asks. And “from the four winds” – from all over the Israelite diaspora, from every corner of creation itself – new life is breathed, literally, into these bones, until they rise up in a “very, very great legion”. 

We want to be careful about who gets the credit here, though. I can see how Ezekiel could have thought this would be the best resume-padding story of all time – “my preaching literally brings back the dead!” But of course, “God is the change agent….God is the only one who can re-create and restore life.” But “by being faithful both to his own identity [as a prophet] and to the call of God, Ezekiel is the catalyst for the reviving of those bones”  and the instigator of the joy and gladness the people will soon experience.⁵ 

Interestingly, even though the book of Isaiah is dominated by kingly, masculine metaphors, in this passage it is maternal imagery that is used to convey comfort. This gender-based distinction between (male) acts of justice and (female) acts of mercy was very much in line with Isaiah’s cultural context, but if we can lay that aside for a moment, it speaks deeply to this non-binary pastor’s heart that BOTH traditionally masculine AND traditionally feminine images are woven together so seamlessly to describe God’s love in action.  It’s almost as if, in order to provide true soul care to the people, God must transcend or overcome their images of gendered divinity and be seen as more than just one thing. For us to be able to see the image of God more fully, we must come to understand that God is much, much bigger than a single gender construct or even a gender binary.  The prophet drives this point home rather insistently by using birthing and nursing metaphors to describe the nurture and comfort God is providing and will continue to provide to the people.  

Theologian Elizabeth Webb summarizes it this way in her Working Preacher commentary: “The home in this world that God provides for us is within the circle of God’s own arms, and in that place the tired old bones of humanity flourish again. Deep within our bones we are weary and broken, and deep within our bones God’s nurturing love reaches in and restores…In the midst of the thundering of condemnation and retribution [of this book of prophecy], it is this quiet passage of maternal care and human delight that [calls us into God’s comforting presence], that [our] bone-tired bodies and spirits might flourish again.” 

As we go forth from these days of nurturing together, we go to many different contexts. Some go to the local church, others to chaplaincy. Some go to the academy or to their own seminary education. Others pursue spiritual entrepreneurship, church planting, or other new visions of the church yet to be. Some of us are still in the valley of bones, unsure of what God is calling us towards in the coming season. Regardless of where we go from here, the instructions are simple:

Don’t flinch. Listen up. Do what God tells you. And watch new life come forth and flourish.

¹ Corrine L. Carvalho, The Book Of Ezekiel: Question By Question, p. 149
² M. Jade Kaiser, “Liturgy That Matters: March 29, 2020”, p. 4
³ Rebecca Abts Wright, Connections: Year A vol. 2, p. 94
⁴ M. Jade Kaiser, “Liturgy That Matters: March 29, 2020”, p. 4
⁵ Wright p. 95