With our routines and world upended by the Shelter in Place Order earlier this week that affects all of California, we are looking for ways to stay connected during a mandate to physically stay apart from one another. I have been blessed to spend Lent providing pulpit supply to Grace Community Church in North Fork, CA, and this is a continuation of our time together, even though we’re in different spaces.

Holy Scripture

Ezekiel 37:1-14  • Psalm 130  • Romans 8:6-11  • John 11:1-45

Lay Leader: Victoria Thomas
Our many voices keep us in community with one another during this time. If you are interested in recording a reading of next week’s scripture, please email me.

Children’s Time

A reflection on Psalm 130 by Illustrated Ministry. Wonderful for all ages.

Church at Prayer

All are invited to email me prayer requests for next week’s prayer, or to get in touch any time during the week. We are in the midst of an unprecidented global event, and I am available as a compassionate ear if you find you need to talk through what’s going on.

Due to the public nature of worship and prayers online, prayer requests will be vague on the video recording to respect privacy and confidentiality, trusting that God knows our intention.

Sermon

Sermon Transcript

This week, an article from the Harvard Business Review articulated what many of us have been feeling as a result of the worldwide pandemic. Put simply, it is grief. Grieving is not a one size fits all cloak, it looks and feels different from person to person, and even more wily, it can look ad feel different in the same person from one instance of grief to the next. Grief expert David Kessler was the person Harvard Business Review turned to, to walk them (and us) through what might be causing such grief during a time like this. One of his responses was,

“…we’re feeling a number of different griefs. We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different. Just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9/11, things will change and this is the point at which they changed. The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.”

This grief can look like anticipation of waiting out a storm that hasn’t quite hit yet, feeling there will be serious and unpredictable damage afterword. It can look similar to knowing a loved one is about to pass or as broadly as knowing everyone we love will someday die. It is grief that our safety feels as though it has been punctured, and life cannot be the same at the end of shelter in place and quarantines and COVID-19.

During Lent we have been talking a lot about the Wilderness, and what that moving through the barren land has looked and felt like in our own forty days of wandering. It is at once an imprisonment and an exile as we are kept home, kept 6 feet away from one another, and kept apart while at the same time expelled from places we love, find life-giving, or are the places we go to earn a living and provide for ourselves and our families. The impending doom feeling has been heavily weighing on me, personally. Looking at statistics and charts showing cases, recoveries, deaths from around the world. Seeing our own numbers climb locally, and worrying that we are about to be completely overwhelmed within a few weeks. And then I go outside. The world has hardly changed. The juxtaposition of springtime set against impending doom seems almost silly in contrast. How can this be such a time of grief?

The lectionary sometimes has a way of handing texts to us that are uncanny in their appropriateness, and this week, with such heavy themes as reanimated corpses and enfleshment and embodiment, we were dealt a doozy as a people who wake up every morning wondering if it’s just allergies of the start of something worse.  

In our text from Ezekiel, the prophet receives a message in a dream. This message isn’t just his to keep. (and to be honest, after dreaming of bones building themselves back together and watching sinew and muscle knit over the bones, he probably couldn’t have kept it to himself if he tried.) This was a message of hope to all those who were exiled with him, as gory as it may seem. Collective, unmitigated grief must have permeated the very being of the Jews who had been forcefully relocated. This was more than being homesick, this was a crisis of national identity, a crisis of faith. The world still turned, yes. Birds still sang, and flowers were still blooming. The sun didn’t care that the people of Judah’s hearts were broken, it still shone as brightly as before. But everything was wrong. Not only had they been severed from their home, but it felt as though they had fallen into a million pieces. Dry bones scattered where once there was a thriving and robust community life.

Can these bones live?

While we are feeling scattered and apart from our community, unable to worship together, unable to celebrate birthdays or have our brother and his family over for BBQ, unable to comfort our best friend after a bad day, unable to visit grandma for fear of aiding the covert transmission of disease, the dry bones aren’t such a stretch. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say we feel dead inside as a result of our shelter in place quarantines, well, unless you have kids you’re trying to homeschool while still balancing everything else, then yeah, maybe by 7 pm “dead inside” might feel like an accurate descriptor, but all humor aside, there is a spark of interaction and connection that is missing, there’s the fear that we may have many funerals to attend if we don’t keep ourselves in place, that there might be many sick beds of loves ones we won’t be allowed to visit for fear of spread. There’s the knowing we are living through a historic moment, and not feeling too happy about it. This graphic and bizarre dream of the prophet Ezekiel feels right for our time too.

So, can these bones live? God asks this of Ezekiel.

Ezekiel responds, “Oh, Lord God, you know.” It sounds like something cheeky one of my kids might respond as I’m working through their math with them, “Ugh, mom, YOU know, why are you asking me?” But that’s not what the prophet is getting at at all. God knows. Ezekiel can’t control whether the bones reanimate, but God sure can, because God is the giver of all life, the creator of this bafflingly gorgeous world that we love so dearly and that hurts and scares us so. This world that causes great joy and great grief.

God then wants Ezekiel to do the work of putting the bones back together, to call them back to the body. And even with all the tendons, sinew, and flesh, they are still just big, complex sacks of body parts, some ready-made horror film plotline. The Spirit is needed to truly breathe life into the bodies and restore life.

As the individuals of a community, we will come back from this, and someday even in person! Shelter in Place, exile, quarantine, these things are conditions we and the citizens of Jerusalem stuck in Babylon are living under, but they are not sentencing us to dry-boneship. The Spirit of God is here to give life, to keep hope active for us no matter what will transpire. The Spirit can cut through the grief, and help us carry our anticipation, or worry, and our fear. Though we may be scattered and we don’t feel whole as a corporate body, as a community of faith, we are alive in the Spirit.

Can these bones live? They can, and they will continue, with God’s grace.

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This morning’s virtual worship was created for the wonderful folks of Grace Community Church in North Fork, CA. I am providing pulpit supply through Easter, and have completely fallen in love with this church. If you came to this via some other source and received blessing by what was presented here today I would like to ask you to consider sending a donation to Grace. Like everywhere else, churches are being hit hard by this disruption to our usual way of life. Thank you!

Checks can be mailed to:
Grace Community Church
C/O Rene Horton
P.O. Box 368
Auberry, CA 93602