Bone-Tired

Refrain:  Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us!

            There’s a satisfying tiredness that comes from spending yourself in work that you feel good about.   My grandma Jean was the perfect picture of that.  She would rise well before the sun to feed the chickens and water plants and fix a full breakfast of  eggs, biscuits and gravy and fried chicken.  On their dusty-dry panhandle Texas farm, she fed three meals a day, plus an afternoon snack for their family of five, made their clothes, did their laundry, mowed the lawn, built furniture, chased away skunks, coyotes and feral pigs.  She washed all the dishes in a pan of water that she saved to water the dry plants outside.   That’s just a small portion of what she did on a typical day.  At the end of every day, after doing the dishes, she’d sit in her red armchair and do hand-quilting while they watched television.  Early in the evenings, around 7:30, she’d fall deeply asleep in her chair, with her reading glasses on and a needle and thread in her hand.  There’s satisfying tiredness. . .

            And then there’s bone-tired.  Bone-tired was how she felt after my grandfather’s death of emphysema.  And the tornado that took down the old barn on their property.  And the death of her cousin, whom she cared for, a short time after.    And then her arthritis got so severe that she was unable to quilt or sew anymore, a favorite creative outlet.   And she was estranged from her sister in town.  Bone-tired was the feeling of isolation, depression and looking into the future and seeing things the same, or worse.    The same thing, day by day, or worse. . .

            Have you ever been bone-tired?  There are so many reasons to feel that way:  loss, financial struggles, mental illness, loneliness. . .

            The passage from Ezekiel shows us another vision of bone-weariness.  It was the hopeless exile of Israel.   Babylon had conquered the people, taken its leaders (including Ezekiel, who had been a respected priest), destroyed the temple and taken people from their land.  In the vision Ezekiel is put in the middle of a valley. A barren, parched, dismal place. The valley is full of human bones baked white and dry on the desert floor. Apparently a large army had been defeated here. Buzzards had done their work, and the sun had bleached the bones that remained.

            God showed Ezekiel a vision.  The symbolism of the bones is clear: Israel is dead; she is as dead as all those dry, white bones. In fact, the people in exile said of themselves:   "Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off".   They felt like skeletons picked clean to the bone.

             There is the weariness of the individual, but the vision of  Ezekiel was of the collective despair of the community.  Corruption and war and exile had crushed them.  The vision of the valley of dry bones, was a promise to Israel of better things to come.  Yes, right now the smoke is still rising from the remains of the Temple and the palace.  Yes, Jerusalem’s walls are in ruins.   Yes, you are longing for home and a better time from the past.  Yes, the skeletons of corpses—Israelite corpses—litter the countryside.   Yes, there are too many wars.  Yes, we are aching for loss of people we love.  And yes, it’s difficult to have a budget gap. . . And yes, we are tired of advocating for education and for the homeless and hungry, and the situation just seems to get worse.

            Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on us.

            Recently, journalist Bob Herbert wrote his last column for the NY  Times.  It was entitled  Losing our Way.  He wrote:

“The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.” 

            As a nation, we are bone-tired.

            The gospel reading for today is the passage from John 11, the story of  Jesus’ friend, Lazarus, who died and was buried in the tomb for  four days.  Jesus, who was known for his power to heal, delayed coming to Lazarus for two days.  When he finally did arrive, after Lazarus’ death, his sisters Martha and Mary, grieving, repeat the phrase we so often say,  if only.

  “Lord, if only you’d been here, he wouldn’t have died.”  If only . . .

            And then that famous short passage from scripture:  “Jesus wept.”

            Today, what is the grief, the anxiety, the financial deprivation, the hatred, the resentment, or the lack of faith that has put us in our own tomb of despair?

            Jesus called Lazarus from the tomb, and Lazarus came out into fresh air, and light.  And then Jesus told Mary and Martha to unbind Lazarus, to peel away the funeral cloths, to free him from the binding cloths of the tomb into new life.  In the valley of dry bones Ezekiel witnessed God's creative power at work. What God did there in that valley is exactly the same as what God did on the last day of Creation when God created humanity.

            Like the valley of bones; like Lazarus in the tomb, our world is aching for new life.  What these stories show is that God wants to breathe new life into us!  Ruah, the Hebrew word for wind, breath and spirit,  is connected to God’s creativity, and to our creativity.   We need  ruah, the breath of God.  We need  the creativity, to address the deep needs of our community and world:  creativity to address budget problems, creativity to address educational needs and hunger and conflict. 

            Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on us.

            It’s difficult, isn’t it—not to be pessimistic?

Psychologist Otto Rank wrote that :  “Pessimism comes from the repression of creativity”

            And there is a profound connection between our creativity and compassion.

            In the book, The Politics of Creativity,  Finley Eversole reported that:  “In our society, at age 5, 90% of people measure “high creativity.”  That number drops to 10% by age 7.  Adults drop to only 2%.”   Only 2%, yet our world  aches for creativity and thinking outside the box.

            Did you ever see the carton “School is Hell” by Matt Groenig?  The picture showed a group of kids in the  classroom, being lectured by their teacher.  He’s saying:

“The sooner you all face up to the fact that you are lazy, untalented losers, unfit to kiss the feet of a genius like Friedrich Nietzsche, the better off you’ll be.”

            Is it any wonder we’re afraid to take risks to think outside the box?    As a culture, we  emphasize competitiveness, compartmentalization, consumption, and self-protection.  Those values repress creativity.  But there is a strong connection between creativity and compassion.  Between awesome beauty and justice.

            One of the ways we’ve seen creativity blossom in our community has been through our Westminster Cloisters arts ministry.  And I believe that an important part of awakening and renewing our souls is often through the creative arts.  But that’s not all I mean by creativity:  it is the way we open ourselves to God’s spirit in approaching problems, challenges and decisions.

            Artist Brenda Ueland wrote:  “Why should we all use our creative power?  Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and power than using our own creative power.”

            Decades ago, a street priest in Harlem, Robert Fox, said, “The only way outsiders can help the poorest of the poor is to awaken their creativity.”

            Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on us.

            In the valley of dry bones, maybe, just maybe, by our own efforts we could manage to reassemble the bones, and maybe even lay on flesh, sinew and technique.  But it is the love of God, breathed into us,  our loving response to one another that brings life!

            Artist Julia Cameron, who wrote  The Artists’ Way, said that   “The single most important factor in artists’ sustained productivity is not independent income, solitude or childcare, but a “believing mirror”—a friend who believes in your creativity. . .Envy, back-biting and criticism have no place in our midst—nor do ill temper, hostility, sarcasm, vying for position.  These attitudes are common in the world, but they don’t belong among us in our place as artists.. . .”

            That’s what we can be, as church, together:  a believing mirror that fosters creativity and new life.

            Our theme this Lent has been “leading questions” and so I have some more for us:

What does the world tell us about "real life" and how does that contrast with a gospel vision of being truly alive?

            Can the dry bones live?

            What is God speaking to us today, in the tears of Jesus?

            Early in my ministry, I had a dream that  I was climbing a tall mountain peak.  As I climbed, bones poked through the thin soil.  I finally realized that I was on a huge pile of unseen Mastodon bones.  It was a graveyard of giants—and I was now well on top of the mound.  I was scared, and also fascinated.  Then, I saw on the valley below me, a field of starving people:  lost, alienated and ill.  How was I to get off the mountain?  How was I to help?

            I woke from the dream, weeping.  Weeping and wondering:  how do I use my gifts to feed those people?  How can God work through me?

            What makes you cry?

            Jesus stood outside the tomb and called, "Lazarus, come out!" God is still speaking to us today, calling us out from our tombs of despair, denial, and death to new life, right now, right here.       Are we standing around and watching, judging  and deciding what we’ll believe and how much we’ll believe it?

            Are we calculating the costs of giving ourselves over to the power of God, even to healing and new life?   Or are we moving to the center of what's happening, pulling back the "stuff" of death, and releasing the new life that God has granted?

            The new life that lies just beneath the surface of what appears bleak and beyond hope?

            Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us.

            Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us.

            Melt us, mold us, fill us, use us.  

             Spirit of the living God,  fall afresh on us.