Dry Line

Photo of the Rev. Canon Sue Sommer by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

Before we moved to Kansas City, I thought I knew what wind felt like. After all, I’d witnessed firsthand the November gales on Lake Superior piling up 15-foot waves. I’d faced the dust-filled blast swooping across the southern Minnesota prairie in April after a dry winter. I’d regularly walked along Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

Turns out, I didn’t know real wind until we moved to Missouri. Last Sunday night, we engaged that familiar springtime ritual of the Heartland: watching the trees writhe in the wind, scanning the sky for cloud rotation, and growing solemn as the computer weather maps showed blobs of deep magenta moving rapidly our way.

We understand now that strong winds occur when cool dry air masses from the north collide with warm moist air masses from the Gulf. The dry line – the point of intersection between two radically different dew points – is the place where powerful storms are spawned. Thanks to Doppler technology, we can predict it, we can map it, if we’re crazy we can chase it, but we can neither cause the wind to blow nor make it stop.

I was thinking about the awesome power of the dry line in our Old Testament reading for today. Ezekiel is a dark and disturbing prophetic book, and the image we are presented with at the beginning of the reading is equally dark and disturbing. The valley of dry bones that God shows Ezekiel is a terrifying image of death heaped upon death. It is a vision, and so of course we are not to understand it literally, as though Ezekiel had somehow stumbled upon some ancient battlefield. It is instead, we learn, a symbol for the whole house of Israel. Little wonder. Ezekiel prophesied to the captive Judeans in Babylon. Jerusalem had been destroyed after a long siege, and the Temple – the epicenter of religious life – was utterly ruined. Those who were not slaughtered wholesale were taken captive. The Covenant God had made with their ancestor Abraham was shattered. They had no land, they had no future, and without a Temple and far from the Promised Land, they weren’t entirely sure they had a God. They had survived. And yet, in all the ways that mattered, they were as good as dead.

And in that visionary dry line, death collides with God – whose will for God’s people is as different from death as cool dry air is different from warm moist air. And in that collision of opposing realities, God’s redemptive power is unleashed, and new life is given.

Happy ending, right? Well, it depends on your definition. Ezekiel’s vision is remembered and read in part because the people of God ultimately did return to the Land of Israel from exile, though not until long after Ezekiel himself was dead. They rebuilt the temple, though with far less grandeur than Solomon had centuries before. They engaged the Covenant with God with renewed vigor that ultimately would give birth to the Pharisaic movement.

But they came back a changed people, and let’s face it, for many of us happy endings are inconsistent with the concept of change. As much as they no doubt wanted to erase the three generations of Exile from their collective memories and go back to what they had been, they could not. No one can, except perhaps in a make-believe world. Ask anyone who has lived through a tragedy. Ask anyone who has gained a hard-won sobriety from addiction. Ask anyone who begins to unearth long-held and deeply buried family secrets. Ask anyone who survives a trauma of any sort.

The people to whom Ezekiel prophesied were suffering and they understandably wanted that suffering to end. But if an end to suffering meant simply a return to business as usual before all hell broke loose with Babylonian invasion, God’s people were, indeed, little more than a valley of dry bones. The enduring truth of this passage is that we humans cling to the stuff of death, counterintuitive though that is. We cling to what is dead as surely as the People of God clung to their myth of greatness long after they were conquered, as surely as the mourners clung to the grave of Lazarus in our Gospel reading for today. We hang on to a beautiful past because those lovely memories have shaped our present and we can’t or won’t envision a future that looks different.  Often, we don’t believe we’re ready to let go. Sometimes we’re not.

And sometimes, we’re long past ready. We’re simply unwilling.

Which brings me back to that image of the dry line.  In that symbolic dry line, death collides with God whose will for God’s people is as different from death as cool dry air is different from warm moist air. And in that collision of opposing realities, God’s redemptive power is unleashed, and new life is given. We kid ourselves if we think that process comes as gently as a cool breeze on a warm summer day.

Our Lenten journey leads us inexorably to the Paschal Mystery. God is all about new and transformed life and there is no better news than that, though it often bears no resemblance to the happy ending we naively crave instead. God is bound and determined to put new flesh on dead bones, to open the grave and unbind those held captive by death, both literal and figurative. The catch? For new life, new blessing, resurrection to happen, death has to happen first. The thing from which we most want to avert our gaze is the one thing we cannot. The God whom Jesus revealed steadfastly in his miracles, in his teachings, and ultimately in his death on the cross, is a God who refuses to do it our way. The God who spoke through Ezekiel, the God whom Jesus reveals in the gospel, refuses to prevent our deaths either literal or metaphorical and insists instead on meeting us at the dry line. What we have is a God who takes the dry bones and rotting flesh of failure and pain and loss in our lives and breathes newness back into us. What we have is a God for whom death is never the final word.

In the name of this God. Amen.