April 6, 2008
Ezekiel 37:1-14

I’m a firm believer in visual aids – and I don’t mean PowerPoint slides! When people can actually see something, it becomes part of their experience; if they merely hear about it, it’s someone else’s experience.

So I would try to find a local doctor, chiropractor, nurse practitioner, or physiotherapist who has a skeleton they use for teaching purposes. I would borrow it if possible. Even part of a plastic skeleton – a spine, a knee, a pelvis – would be better than nothing.

Lacking bones, I would bring a funeral urn, containing someone’s ashes.

Then I would invite the congregation to imagine piles of these bones. Like the mass graves in Iraq or Bosnia. Or the deep sludge of bone ash left by the crematoria in Nazi death camps.

To that setting, God asks Ezekiel: “Can these bones live?”

I would re-tell Ezekiel’s story.

I would point out that both Greek and Hebrew used the same word for wind, breath, and spirit: pneuma in Greek, ruach in Hebrew. So when God’s breath enters the bones, so does God’s spirit.

It’s worth connecting some similar instances. In Genesis 2, God’s breath/spirit gives life to clay figures. In John 20, after his resurrection, Jesus breathed on his disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Just so, God tells Ezekiel, “I will put my spirit within you, and you will live.”

For the early church, this was a story of resurrection. Dead bones can live again.

I would invite people to feel some of their own bones – in arms, hands, skulls.

The question is not whether God’s spirit could restore life to Ezekiel’s valley full of dry bones. It’s whether new life can come to these bones –our bones.

If Ezekiel’s bones can be given life, then so can ours!

At some point (although probably not during the sermon!) I would have the congregation sing the old camp song, “Oh, dem bones dem bones, dem dry bones... The toe bone connected to the foot bone... Now hear the word of the Lord!”

JIm's full List of suggestions for preaching these stories