Focusing
Online this week, I received a copy of a piece that appears in the April/May 2023 issue of Broadview, titled “Unquiet in the Land.”
It’s fun to read because it’s written in graphic-novel format – you know, comic-book style.
And it’s inspiring – the story of some Mennonites near Warmark, Saskatchewan, who in the late 1970’s halted the construction of a uranium refinery and the creation of all the related environmental crises in their community. When they started, they were just a bunch of separate farmers minding their own business, not political in any significant way, unorganized, un-knowledgeable about the uranium industry, and un-consulted by both the company and the government planning the purchase of their lands and the construction of the refinery.
Once one or two of them got wind of what the plan was, step by step over a period of years they drew the community together, learned what they needed to know, did what they could – did what their faith and their God inspired them to do, and eventually the company ended up abandoning its plan to build a plans for the uranium refinery anywhere in Saskatchewan.
Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 37:1-14
The reading is from the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel was a prophet of Israel in the 6th century Before the Christian Era. He lived during the time of the Babylonian Captivity with other exiles, in what is now Iraq, and he spoke to the people of God’s desire and promise to restore them as a nation and as God’s people in the world.
The truth of God often came to Ezekiel in fantastic, mystic visions, and the reading today is his telling of one of these visions.
The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry.
He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.”
Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’”
So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.
Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’”
So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.
Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.’ Therefore prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord.’”
Reflection
How can you not love that verse: “there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them”? How do we not start singing, “the hip bone connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone connected to the knee bone, the knee bone connected…and so on”?
And then the coming of the breath, with which all these people once dead and scattered in pieces, “come to life and stand up on their feet – a vast army.” Fantastic!
And to think it all starts with a horrible sight – the valley of dry and dis-connected bones; followed by an overwhelming question – “Mortal, can these bones live?”; met with a faithful responser, “Sovereign Lord, only you know.”
I wonder if the journey towards a hopeful end always begins with the most horrible of visions of what we have come to, and what the world has come to?
I thought about that this week, with a series of daily devotional readings I’ve been getting from one of the devotional sites I subscribe to – “Journey Inward / Journey Outward” posted by the Church of Our Saviour in Washington, D.C. This past week they’ve been featuring a series of quotations from a book by Gayle Bass, called Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing. The title itself, a bit of a warning of what is to come.
Tuesday, the message for meditation was titled “Vanishing Monarchs,” and that’s exactly what it was about – the vanishing of the monarchs, due in large part to the mass eradication of milkweed along their migration routes, through constant overuse by corn and spy farmers of the herbicide glyphosate, marketed as “Roundup.”
Up and down and across the crop rows female monarchs flutter, searching for the home their offspring must have. Some, straying, find a few milkweed stems along unknown roadsides. Just a few. A billion monarchs used to soar to Mexico, most of them rested on Midwestern milkweed. Since the introduction of Roundup, 90% of the bright pilgrims have vanished.”
After I read that, I thought, “This is a Lenten devotional reading? I thought it was going to be inspiring. Comforting. I’m glad at least that I’m not paying for this.”
Wednesday, though, the revelation continued, in a piece called “Laysan Albatross:”
Every cell of an albatross is made from the sea. They trust what it gives them. But the currents of the central Pacific, swirling between California and China, have been made a soup of cast-off plastic – billions of pieces that never completely decompose. Each year Midway’s albatrosses unwittingly feed five tons of these pieces to their little ones. After months of plastic-laced meals, the chick slumps, lethargic. The trash in her stomach is stuck, taking up space. She feels full, but she’s starving.
What a horrible image, and was it just my heart, or was it God I heard asking me, “Mortal, can these bones – these dying creatures and this dis-integrating creation, live and be whole again?”
I was tempted to think “no” and just sink into despair about the fate of Earth and life on it.
Instead, I went into the archive, and re-read the offering from Monday, called “Open Our Eyes.”
The very places Indiana bats trusted to preserve them betrayed them. Cool, dark, and humid, cave air not only holds bats in metabolic equipoise, it also invigorates a fungus new to North America. Brought from Europe on spelunkers’ gear, spores of the fungus multiplied rampantly in caves of the northeastern states, then spread further and faster on the bodies of bats. The tightly packed group-body of the Indiana bats trusted to heat them and hold them through the winter contaminated them….
Some remnant populations, rather than waking once every thirteen nights of their hibernation, are rousing each night – briefly, without burning much fat. Warming together more often, the colony keeps the cold-loving plague at bay. Though it seemed to destroy them, the bats have found deep within the group-body a force that answers death with resurrection.
How wonderful! Yes, they are a species threatened with extinction. And yes, one by one they are dying by the hundreds and thousands. But in their coming and committing to being together, out of what Bass calls “the group-body of the bats” and what we might also call the evolutionary wisdom of their collective life, the bats begin to be guided to a different way of being, a different way of acting day by day that answers the betrayal of their habitat with creative new habits of their own, and answers the fate of their death as a species with the power of a new way of living.
It makes me think of the people of Israel in the time of Ezekiel. Their old habitat – their kingdom in the land of Canaan, is long-gone – polluted, corrupted, ruined beyond repair by their own spiritual sickness and disorder. Now in Babylon, they are a long-defeated, displaced people, drying out in exile and in imminent danger of dying out forever.
Until the prophet preaches to them – reminds them they are not alone, because God is still with them. That the big picture they see that is making them despair, is not the whole of it. That the bigger picture they need to remember is that over, above, beyond and through the bad news that they see, there is the unending good news of God’s presence and God’s desire and promise for the good of all, still at work in the world. That eternal God in the end is not undone by the powers of the day, no matter how overpowering they may seem.
It's enough to make them come together again. To re-connect. To be a body once more.
They know how to do it. As much as into the Indiana bats, God has breathed into our DNA the capacity to gather and commit to being a functioning group – something God can actually breathe wisdom into, can guide with the Spirit, and can put to good use in the doing of God’s will in the world.
And that is what happens – for the Indiana bats, for the people of Israel in the time of Ezekiel, and, for the Mennonites of Warmark, Saskatchewan … why not for us?
There are all kinds of things we rightly worry about.
In the world’s ecology: disintegration of the natural order of life, disappearance of species, and disruption of Earth’s life systems by climate change.
In world politics: violently aggressive nations and empires, massive inequalities in the distribution of food and wealth, and continuing systems of oppression and injustice.
In our own backyard: increasing use of local food banks; overwhelmed health-care and elder-care institutions; planned urban sprawl into the Green Belt; and continuing crises in opioid use, and public mental health.
In our own bailiwick: the decline of the church in society; the rise of alt-right and prosperity theologies that distort the Gospel and misrepresent faith in God; the aging and apparent shrinking of congregations.
Take your pick. Pick your poison. Any one of these things prompts the question, “Mortal, can these bones live?”
The answer we are tempted to, is a simple and despairing judgement of “No, there’s no hope.”
But when we have faith – not certainty, not answers, not a fix, but faith – when we remember what the bigger picture really is, we say instead, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.”
And with that, we have a reason to regather, to find and to maintain our group-body, to become and to remain a functional body that God can make use of, and then in our communion with one another, to invite as best we can whatever spirit of wisdom, of love, of hope God will bring to us from the four corners of the world, and whatever new kinds of action and new ways of being God will lead us into, to be part of God’s desire and God’s love for the good of the world in our time.
Like the Mennonites of Warmark, Saskatchewan in the late 1970’s, and like faithful communities of holy salt and light anywhere and anytime.
I heard a word of wisdom once that when you’re facing a huge, unending task – a huge set of problems and crises that will never really come to an end, the best thing to do is don’t look up, keep your head down, and just keep working at the thing right in front of you.
I wonder if an even deeper wisdom is to look up – but in such a way that you are looking beyond and through the big picture of the seemingly unending challenge you’re facing, to see the whole big picture – the truly bigger picture that includes, and is shaped by the unending presence and eternal purpose and promise of God. Maybe then, when we put our head back down to work at what’s in front of us, we have a better chance of actually working in a good direction.
Then it might be that the hip bone connects to the thigh bone, the thigh bone connects to the knee bone, the knee bone connects to the shin bone, and … and so on, and so on … and the body that we are, and are part of, will live and move and have its being as part of the good working of God in the world as it is.
