Can These Bones Live? A Sermon on Ezekiel 37:1-14

CHILDREN'S SERMON: The Breath of God

Gather the children and hold up a deflated balloon. Ask them: "What is this? Does it do anything? Is it beautiful?" Then slowly blow it up and tie it. "What happened? What did I add to it?" Let them answer: air, breath.

 

Tell them: "In our Bible story today, God does something like this — but with people! There were people who had lost all their hope and felt flat — like this empty balloon — and God breathed new life into them. That is what God does. God is always breathing new life into things that seem finished."

 

Optional art extension: Give each child a small paper figure or outline of a person that they can color or decorate. Tell them: "Every time you look at this person, remember — God's breath is in you. You are filled up by God." Send them back to their seats with their figure.

 

Prayer for children: "God, thank you for filling us with your breath and your Spirit. Help us remember that you can bring life to anything. Amen."

 

 

RESPONSIVE PRAYER OF CONFESSION

 

(Leader's lines in regular text; Congregation's response in bold)

 

Lord, we confess that there are places in our lives that have grown dry and lifeless —

Breathe on us, Lord. Bring us back to life.

 

We confess that we have looked at the valleys of our world — the broken relationships, the exhausted communities, the people who have been discarded — and we have said, "These bones are too dry. There is no hope here."

Forgive us, Lord, for the limits we place on your power.

 

We confess that we have sometimes gone through the motions of faith — the outward form without the breath of your Spirit —

Breathe on us, Lord. Fill us again.

 

We confess that we have been afraid to speak your word over hopeless places — afraid to look foolish, afraid to be disappointed —

Give us the courage of the prophet, Lord. Let us prophesy.

 

Hear us now as we offer our silent confession to you… (silence)

 

(Together): God of resurrection and renewal, we believe that you are not finished with us. We believe that what looks dead in our lives, in our church, in our world — is not beyond your reach. Breathe on us. Raise us up. Send us out. Amen.

 

 

SERMON

 

Can These Bones Live?

 

There is a question at the center of our passage this morning that I think God keeps asking us, too. Ezekiel is standing in the middle of a valley — and the valley is full of bones. Not a battlefield fresh from the fight, but old bones. Dry bones. Bones that have been lying there so long that even the memory of what they once were has faded. And God turns to the prophet and asks: "Mortal — can these bones live?"

 

I love that God asks the question. God, who knows all things, who holds all things, puts the question to Ezekiel. Maybe to us.

 

Can these bones live?

 

I think about the people who first heard this vision. The exiles in Babylon had not just lost their land — they had lost their story. They had lost the temple. They had lost the monarchy. They had lost the very framework by which they understood who they were and who God was. And so they said what exiles say when everything is gone: "Our bones are dried up. Our hope is lost. We are cut off completely."

 

That is not ancient despair. I have heard those words — maybe you have spoken them. In a hospital room. In a marriage. In a church that is trying to figure out what it means to be alive. Our bones are dried up. Our hope is lost.

 

But here is what I want you to notice. God does not fix it from a distance. God brings Ezekiel into the valley. God leads him all the way around, through the valley, past all the bones — as if to say, I want you to see exactly how bad this is. I am not asking you to pretend this is fine. I am not asking you to put on a happy face. I am asking you to walk right into the middle of the impossible and ask: can these bones live?

 

And Ezekiel — wise prophet that he is — gives the only honest answer available to a person of faith: "O Lord God, you know."

 

I have always loved that answer. It is not denial. It is not despair either. It is the posture of someone who has decided to hold the question open rather than close it too quickly in either direction. You know, Lord. I don't. But you do.

 

Then God tells Ezekiel to do something that I imagine felt slightly absurd. Prophesy to the bones. Speak to them. Say: "O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord."

 

I'm reminded of something I read years ago by Oliver Sacks — the neurologist who wrote the book behind the film "Awakenings." He studied patients with severe neurological conditions who had lost the ability to recognize everyday objects, lost the ability to initiate basic tasks — and yet, when they sang the instructions to themselves, something unlocked. The musical mind, Sacks observed, often survives long after other cognitive functions have gone quiet. My grandmother had Alzheimer's, and in the last years of her life — when so much of her was already fading — she could still sit down at the piano and play. The last time I heard her play, maybe two years before she died, she played Amazing Grace and added a little comedic flourish at the end. A little bit of her was still there, alive in the music.

 

I believe God sings creation into being. And I believe that the word God speaks to those dry bones in Ezekiel is not merely a command — it is something more like a song. A call. Come back. Come home. Come out.

 

This is the same voice that will one day stand outside a tomb in Bethany and cry out: "Lazarus, come out!" The same voice that on Easter morning speaks into the silence of a sealed cave and calls someone back from the place beyond calling. In the raising of Lazarus, and in Ezekiel's valley, and at the empty tomb — we are hearing the same thing: the voice of the God who specializes in the place where hope runs out.

 

But notice what happens when Ezekiel prophesies. There is noise. There is rattling. The bones come together — bone to bone — and sinew and flesh appear, and skin covers them. But. And this is the detail I don't want us to miss. There was no breath in them.

 

Form without breath is not life. You can have all the right pieces in all the right places and still be a body without animation, a church without Spirit, a faith without fire. God tells Ezekiel to prophesy again — this time not to the bones, but to the wind. To the ruach. To the breath that was there at the beginning, hovering over the waters. Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.

 

I've been reading George Saunders' new novel, Vigil, and I keep finding Ezekiel in it. The story centers on a man named K.J. Boone — an oil tycoon on his deathbed, 87 years old, dying of cancer. He is visited through the night by a kind of death doula named Jill Blaine, who has crossed over herself and whose job is to comfort the dying as they make the passage. She has done it 343 times. But Boone is different. He will not be comforted because, as far as he is concerned, he has nothing to repent. He lived a big, bold life. The world is better for it. Isn't it?

 

There is your valley of dry bones — only Boone doesn't know he's in it. That is the more frightening version, perhaps. The exiles in Babylon at least knew something was wrong. They said it plainly: our hope is lost, we are cut off completely. Boone has the bones, the sinew, the skin — the full outward form of a life — but something essential is missing. There is no breath in him. And Jill keeps showing up anyway, night after night, charge after charge, offering what she calls "elevation." That word stopped me. Elevation beyond oneself. That is not a bad description of what the ruach does.

 

Saunders asks the deepest question about a man like Boone: could he have been otherwise? One reviewer put it this way — the novel wonders whether we can hold people accountable when, in some sense, we are all shaped by forces beyond our choosing. That is a question for another sermon. But what struck me theologically is that Jill shows up anyway. She prophesies to him anyway. Even when everything in her wants to give up, wants to let the Frenchman have his reckoning, wants to say these bones are too dry — she keeps going back. Saunders calls it compassion. I want to call it something even older than that. I want to call it grace.

 

And the breath came. And they lived. And they stood on their feet — an exceedingly great multitude.

 

There are two movements in resurrection, in other words. The gathering of what was scattered. And the breathing of what was lifeless. God does both. And sometimes God calls us to be part of one or the other — the gathering work of justice and mercy that brings scattered people back together, and the Spirit work of prayer and proclamation that breathes life into what the world has written off.

 

What is the valley in your life right now? What are the bones you have been walking around, telling yourself are too dry? What relationship, what dream, what corner of your faith, has been lying there so long you've stopped asking whether it can live?

 

God is still asking the question. Can these bones live?

 

And the only answer that keeps the door open is the one Ezekiel gave. O Lord God — you know.

 

The exiles in Babylon received God's word through a prophet standing in a valley of bones, and it changed everything. They did return. The temple was rebuilt. The story continued. Not because they were strong, but because the God who made them from dust and breathed life into them at the beginning had not lost the habit.

 

At my grandmother's funeral, I shared my belief that she has been made new in the Kingdom of God — that she has received a new body that is complete, physically and spiritually as God intended it to be. That the piano-playing, joke-telling, loving woman we knew has not been lost but transformed. The resurrection is not a distant doctrine. It is a present reality that we are invited to live toward, right now, every day, in every valley.

 

God says to those exiles, and to us: "I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live." Not someday only. Now. I will open your graves. I will bring you up. I will put my spirit in you.

 

Can these bones live?

 

They already are.