Day of Pentecost
Ohh, Ezekiel. This story from Ezekiel is one of those stories that I've heard and read and dealt with so many times, that I feel like I sort of know it inside and out already. And I've always approached it as being a metaphor of sorts, as being a symbolic story. I've always approached it as being illustrative, somehow, of the relationship between God and Israel.
And yet the events of the past several weeks have brought a new kind of meaning to the story for me. I know some of you know, but I'm not sure how many of you know of the things that I've been dealing with over the past year, or so, with my mom and dad. At the end of January of last year my father had a stroke. Aside from the physical impact it had upon him, the biggest complication was that he was my mom's primary caregiver, and my mother suffers from dementia. So, in those first couple of months while we were waiting to get caregivers into place, we ended up, my sisters and I, being the primary caregivers for my mother.
It was very stressful to be quite honest.
But once we got the caregivers in place, which they could afford thanks to their long-term care insurance, things settled down quite a bit. That is until this past February, when my dad developed a case of pneumonia. The illness left him in too much need to be cared for by the healthcare staff that were in the house. So, we made the decision to find a place for my mom and my dad to be in a nursing home.
It's actually been pretty good for them. We recognize that both of them are now much more engaged, much more alert much more active than they were when they were alone together in the house with just a single caregiver helping to take care of them.
What all this means, however, is that we now need to get the house ready to sell. And that means going through a lot of stuff. My mom and dad lived in the house that I grew up in for 60 years. You accumulate a lot of stuff in the course of sixty years. Especially if you live in a great big brick house that was built in 1900. A great big brick house which has a great big attic sitting on top of it. And not only do we have the things that belong to my mom and dad and of course to us children. We also have all the stuff that they inherited from their respective parental households. So, we're not just going through my mom and dad's things. We're also going through my dad's mom’s and dad's things. And we're going through the things that belong to my mom's family. We've got things going back 2-3 generations in fact. So, there's a lot to be gone through. There's a lot to be sifted. There's a lot of dust to be blown away, silver fish to be scattered, flaking paper and cardboard to be disposed of.
As I was reading the lesson from Ezekiel for today, I felt like I started to understand what the prophet must have felt like as he gazed out over that deserted battlefield filled with nothing more than dried bones. Because I realized that what my sisters and I have been doing over these past several weeks is that we're not just sifting through the remnants of 60 plus years of marriage, four kids, five dogs, innumerable cats both domestic and feral, countless tropical fish, any number of college students in need, dutifully and lovingly cared for by my parents… We are sifting through the dry bones. But what we're doing is more than just a sifting and dusting and discarding.
God promises to breathe life into the dry bones that lie at Ezekiel's feet. And so, Ezekiel prophesized to the bones, and God raises up the bones, and they take up flesh, and God breathes life into them. God's spirit fills them. God takes that multitude of defeated dried bones and by the power of the spirit turns them into something else. God turns them into a symbol of hope and expectation. God makes them the embodiment of God's promise to Israel, that just as the bones have been alive and so too will the people be enlivened by God's amazing powerful spirit.
You see as we were going through all those things; as we were dusting, discarding, sorting, we started breathing life into all these ancient artifacts. Suddenly, all these people who had been distant memories, 2 dimensional imaginings, even our own parents who were still very much alive; they all began taking on a deeper, richer, more nuanced life.
It was one thing to know that my dad started taking piano lessons when he was 8 years old. It was yet another thing to see one of his workbooks from when he was about 10, with his early attempts at notation and composition and his notes to himself. It was another thing to see a picture of him at the same age sitting at the piano in profile, his hands parallel to the keyboard his wrists lifted high, just as he had tried to teach all of us kids when we were little.
It's one thing to carry with me the vague memories of my mother's grandfather whom we called Pop-Pop, a short grouchy old man sitting in the corner of my grandfather's kitchen, swearing and smoking cigarettes. It's another thing to see him in a picture with his wife, cradling my infant mother in his arms, my mom's younger brother, all of two or three years old, standing by his side. It was yet another thing to find his racy postcards! Pictures of young women in their bloomers!! But as Dave Stevens noted, 1919's version of racy is a little different from 2019's version over AC.
But the transformation doesn't end there, with our perception of who these people were and are. Because we, my sisters and me, we have also been transformed by this process. Discovering new depths to who these people are or were has opened up new depths in us as well. The collective experience that we've had over the past year plus a few months; the experience of my dad's stroke, the experience of rallying around my mother,
the shared burden of finding adequate care for them, the savoring of the holidays we experienced with them after that, knowing full well that each one could be the last which, in fact, they were, the disappointment and anxiety raised up by my father's pneumonia... All of those things served to bring us closer together, to create a deeper spirit of love and compassion with and for one another.
And as we sift through all the things in my mom and dad's house; all the things that were saved for them from elementary school onward; all the things that were saved for us from elementary school onward, and by “all the things” I mean apparently EVERYTHING; we are drawn ever closer to one another.
This is not always an easy thing, because as we do so we discover edges, bumps, and bruises that we either didn't know about or that we chose to ignore or simply buried. But it's all good. Through it all we have managed to do so in a spirit of love and grace. And in that regard it is, to me, godly and God filled work. We may be going through a bunch of old stuff, but God's breath moves through us and with us. And through that gracious action we have been and are being transformed. We are being drawn closer and closer together, ever deeper into community with one another. That's what God does! That's what the Holy Spirit does! It draws us together, it connects us with one another, ever more deeply.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted on my Facebook page about an article from the Atlantic written by Derek Thompson, a professed agnostic. (The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust) I'll quote from the opening paragraph of the article. “As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.”
He goes on to point to Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU: Americans are less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their community and social life, and more likely to say they feel lonely. “Clearly more Americans are spending Sunday mornings on their couches, and it’s affected the quality of our collective life,” he said. …Many people, having lost the scaffolding of organized religion, seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community.
Derek Thompson closes with the following: “I’m not advocating that every atheist and agnostic in America immediately choose a world religion and commit themselves to weekly church (or synagogue, or mosque) attendance. But I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it.”
Just last week Anke and I watched an interview with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a self-professed atheist, discussing his new book, The Anxious Generation. He says that there’s a clear line of demarcation, around 2012, when smartphone usage among young people became nearly universal. With it there came a significant increase in reported levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness among that age group.
Interestingly, he points out that among religious young people the increase was slight. Among non-religious young people, the increase was big. Once again, someone who doesn’t believe in God talking about the value of the community provided by religious organizations.
I’ve always said that first and foremost Jesus forges relationships. He creates and sustains community. And that’s what we need to do if we want to save this community. And that, my dear sisters and brothers, is where you come in. The best advertising, the most amazing programming, the splashiest worship services in the world are not going to save this congregation. What will save it is growing this community. And the most effective means by which to grow a congregational community is through personal invitation.
I know. That sounds scary. Except it isn’t. Because you don’t have to convince someone that the story of Ezekiel and the dry bones is a historical event. You don’t have to talk someone into believing that Jesus was raised again. You don’t even have to try and cajole someone into believing that God is real. All you have to do is to talk about the thing that everyone already knows they’re missing! The sense of community, welcome, and loving support that you find here. That’s not anything that’s theoretical or abstract. It’s not anything about which you need to convince someone. It’s real and it’s concrete and they’ll experience it the minute they walk through those glass doors.
You all have a super-power of which many of you are totally unaware. You have the power to change someone else’s life. You don’t have to hit anyone over the head with your bible. You don’t even have to talk to them about God or Jesus, which can be a problem in, say, the workplace. You just have to tell them that there’s a place where they will be accepted, loved, and welcomed.
AMEN