Pamela Jean Owens off-line

Write.

I think one of the prophets starts that way. God says, “write,” and Ezekiel responds, “What shall I write?” God gives him a vision and he writes it down. I always thought Ezekiel was pretty scary, except in the Tennesee Ernie Ford song version of it. That song would make a good music video. I should check on youtube and see if someone has made a video of it. I know there must be a Lego version of it, because someone did the entire Bible in Lego. Someone with too much time on his (her?) hands. His, I think. Sounds like a guy thing, all those battles to stage. Very much a Lego-guy thing. So, as Pastor Tom said, if you were thinking of spending your spare time, or your retirement, doing the Bible in Lego, you can cross it off your list. Somebody beat you to it.

I wonder how they made the Lego dry bones? I know how my dry bones have been feeling. Maybe I’m living what Ezekiel’s vision was about. I won’t say “really” about, because my faith persuades me that the Bible means what it means to each generation, indeed, to each person, and it has no “really means” that is for all times and places. You may not agree with me here, but that’s ok, my faith allows for yours, even if yours does not allow for mine.

Ezekiel had a vision of a valley of dry bones, and in the vision the bones begin to take life and reconnect themselves to each other, forming new wholes, new people. I wonder if Paul had that same image in mind when he wrote to people in some of those churches he had started, “you are a new person, the old is left behind and the new is born,” or something like that?

This is the point where I need to stop and get a Bible, or go online perhaps, so I don’t have to go inside and lose my concentration while I read Ezekiel and skim through the letters of Paul. But I think I’ll wait on that. Part of being a mess of dry bones is the lack of concentration it brings. When the head bone isn’t connected to the arm bones and the brain isn’t connected to the leg bones, it is hard to remember what the brain was telling the hands and feet to do. And if the heart bone isn’t connected to anything, how can you know what you feel?

Dry bones.
For Israel, the dry bones represented a life dried up, the vision and hope of a people dried up, the promises God had given their ancestors in time before memory – those were all dried up. All remaining resources appeared useless, for the frameworks of action, belief, reflection, and even memory had all been torn apart. Many people were dead. Hope was dead. Even memory had begun to die. Courage was a thing of the past, for courage requires vision, and vision requires hope. “Where there is no hope, the people perish,” someone famous once said.

Israel was in mourning, and she had been in mourning for a long time, by the time God spoke to Ezekiel. She had begun to assimilate to the ways of Babylon, not forgetting the ways of the Lord, but trying to practice them side by side with the ways of the Babylonian people amongst whom she was living. Her daughters and sons were marrying the daughters and sons of Babylon, and children were being born who had never known Jerusalem. It had been years and years – it seemed like an eternity – since the people had seen their homeland. Some were no longer sure it had ever existed. Some heard it as a pretty story of long ago, but one with no base in reality, or at least not their reality. Some did not even know they were living as dry bones, but the elders knew. Ezekiel knew. And God knew.

And God told Ezekiel to write. Write. What use was that? Israel already had books. Plenty of books. Books filled with the stories of the promises of God to her ancestors, the stories of glorious times, and the stories of her failure and her time of defeat. How could more scrolls help, when what was needed was action?

The children of Israel had been lost before, in the desert of Sinai and, instead of moving them on, God took Moses up on a mountain and told him to write something down.

God seems to have this funny way of addressing people in crisis. God seems to be very fond of saying, “Write.”

And so, I am writing. I never cared for Ezekiel all that much. As I said already, I found it a bit scary, except in Tennessee Ernie Ford’s great song. But writing isn’t scary. And if writing can put my dry bones, and my heart and my brain, back together into a functioning whole, then I will write and write and write, until it happens and beyond.