Transcript
Ezekiel: the Valley of Dry Bones
First Baptist Richmond, December 7, 2025
The Second Sunday of Advent
Ezekiel 37:1-14
The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones…and they were very dry.
We’ve been using the Narrative Lectionary for the past few months, working our way through some of the Bible’s best stories from Genesis to Revelation. If I could put them in broad categories I would say we’ve heard about:
1. The Origins of life: how God created every good thing and how we humans pretty much wrecked it.
2. The Founders of Israel: Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebekah; Jacob, Leah, Rachel, and Joseph.
3. The Exodus from Egypt: including the Covenant at Sinai, the wilderness wanderings, and the conquest of Canaan.
4. The Establishment of Israel as a nation: where the period of the Judges was followed by the period of the Kings.
5. And finally, the Exile in Babylon: where God sent his people as a form of punishment, but where, after many years, the prophets started to talk about going home.
So: Origins, Founders, Exodus, Establishment, and Exile. That brings us to the middle of the Bible, where there are a lot of good books—Psalms, Proverbs, most of the prophets—but not a lot of great stories. The ones that are there, however, are
memorable. Like this one from Ezekiel 37 about the Valley of Dry Bones. Let me read it to you word for word so that you don’t miss a single detail:
The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you and will cause flesh to come upon you and cover you with skin and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”
So I prophesied as I had been commanded, and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.
Then he said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ Therefore prophesy and say to them: Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people, and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord when I open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I
will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.”
The word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Sometimes when I read an old familiar passage one word will jump out at me in a new way, and this time around the word that jumped out was very. “The hand of the Lord came upon me,” Ezekiel writes, “and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry.” To say that the bones were very dry is to say that they were beyond all hope of resuscitation because until that time there may have been some hope.
I think about army medics on a battlefield, going from one fallen soldier to another to see if they can be saved. I remember from my first aid training in Boy Scouts that even before they check for breathing they look for bleeding, because a massive hemorrhage can kill you more quickly than anything else. But if they find soldiers who are not bleeding but have stopped breathing the medics try to get those lungs working again, because at that point there’s still hope. But for some of those soldiers there is no hope, and that’s what Ezekiel finds on the battlefield. “There were very many bones,” he writes, “and they were very dry.” No bleeding to be stopped. No breathing to re-start. No skin, no muscle, no sinew. Just a valley full of “very dry” bones.
And that reminded me of John 11, the source of our Call to Worship for today, where Jesus comes to Bethany because his friend Lazarus has died. It’s not in today’s reading, but earlier in that chapter John makes it a point to tell his readers that when Jesus got to Bethany Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. That’s significant, because in Jewish thought the soul lingered near the body for three days, as if waiting
for a chance to return. But on the fourth day, when decay began to set in, even the soul gave up hope.i Lazarus had been dead four days, John tells us, and in case we missed that detail, when Jesus requests that the stone be rolled away from the tomb Martha says, “Lord already there is a stench, because he has been dead four days.” What she’s trying to tell him is that there is no longer any hope of resuscitation. Lazarus is dead—very dead—and hope has died right along with him.
But Jesus isn’t talking about resuscitation; he’s talking about resurrection. He tells Martha, “Your brother will rise again.” And she says, “I know that he will rise again in the Resurrection at the last day.” Because that was also part of Jewish belief, at least for the Pharisees. They took to heart that verse in the Book of Daniel where it says, “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan. 12:2). I’m sure that those priests who had come out from Jerusalem to comfort Mary and Martha had reminded them of that, and assured them that their righteous brother would certainly rise on the last day. But that’s not what Jesus was talking about either. He wasn’t talking about someday, somewhere. He was talking about right then, right there. He told Martha, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” And Martha, because she believed everything Jesus ever said, because he had never lied to her before, said, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”
And that’s when he raised Lazarus.
But it’s almost like he didn’t want to do that until everyone was sure that Lazarus was completely dead. There’s that interesting verse at the beginning of Chapter 11 where it says that, “Although Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after
having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was” (John 11:5). We can’t understand why he would do such a thing. Why didn’t he jump up and run to Bethany? This was Lazarus, the one that he loved! But Jesus may have been trying to teach his disciples a lesson about resurrection, and what we know about resurrection is that it’s not the same as resuscitation. Resuscitation is when you bring someone who is nearly dead back to life again. Resurrection is when you bring someone who is all the way dead back to life. And sometimes it’s not a person but a thing.
You may recall that I was Pastor of First Baptist Church in Washington, DC, for nearly eight years, and during that time I did everything I could think of to help that church thrive. But then this new pastor came to town—Amy Butler—who was working just down the street from me at Calvary Baptist Church. And Calvary wasn’t nearly as big as First Baptist. When they called Amy their numbers had dwindled down to almost nothing. But she didn’t let that stop her. She started reaching out into the community, hosting neighborhood meetings at the church and asking Starbucks Coffee and Panera Bread to provide the refreshments—which they did! (turns out Amy is kind of a genius at networking). She invited a community theatre to meet in the building and a program that worked with inner city youth. Before long things were picking up at the church, attendance was picking up. People started coming downtown on Sunday morning just to see what was going on.
I remember complaining to her about that one day, wondering why she was having so much more success than I was, and she said, “Jim, your church isn’t dead enough yet.” I said, “What?” She said, “When I came to Calvary they knew they were on their way out. They were willing to take some risks you wouldn’t take if you thought you might still have a chance of recovery. That’s the problem at First Baptist. There are still enough people there, still enough programs there, still enough life there that some
people are thinking, ‘If we just cross our fingers and hope real hard it will be 1955 again!’ It wasn’t like that at Calvary. We knew we couldn’t go back. The only way to go, for that church, was forward.”
I must have been thinking about that when I wrote the Preparation for Worship statement in the bulletin. I talked about missing John the Baptist, who usually shows up at this time of year, at least in the regular lectionary. It always amazed me that he was out there in the wilderness, eating locusts and wild honey, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and yet people were going out to hear him—crowds of people! In today’s reading from Matthew 3 it says, “Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region around the Jordan were going out to him, and they were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins” (vss. 5-6).
Why? I think it’s that he told them to repent because “the Kingdom of Heaven” was at hand. They took it to mean that God’s anointed was about to appear—the Messiah—who would kick the Romans out of Israel, sit on the throne of his ancestor David, and usher in a whole new era of peace and prosperity. John, in other words, was giving them something to look forward to, so that instead of looking back to the good old days and remembering how things had been when David was king, they could start looking forward to the new thing God was getting ready to do among them. But in order to do that, they had to “turn around,” that is, they had to repent.
This was the message Ezekiel brought to God’s people in exile, the ones who had been conquered and carried into captivity all those years before, the ones who had hoped that they would someday be able to return to Jerusalem, the ones who had now, after all these years, given up on that hope. The Lord illustrates their condition perfectly by showing Ezekiel a valley full of dry bones and saying, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are
cut off completely.’” And I don’t think I’d ever thought of it this way before, but I see it now as good news. Because if their hope of returning to Jerusalem had died, really died, then there was no longer any possibility of resuscitation. The only possibility left was resurrection. And that’s what Ezekiel begins to describe. He says that while he was out there, looking at that valley of dry bones, he heard the Lord say, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you and will cause flesh to come upon you and cover you with skin and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”
So I prophesied as I had been commanded, and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.
Friends, that’s not resuscitation; that’s resurrection. And it’s good news for any of us who have watched something—or someone—die. It means that we can stop looking back, hoping things will get better. Instead we can start looking forward, knowing God is able. That is, we can repent—turn around—and begin to anticipate the miracle God is getting ready to work in our world. We don’t even know what it is yet, but like those exiles who marveled at Ezekiel’s vision, like those people who went out to hear John preach, we can feel it coming. We can listen for the bells on Christmas Day and realize
that the one who is coming into the world is not just the baby Jesus, but for those of us who believe both:
The Resurrection
And the Life.
—Jim Somerville © 202
