All Saints’, Dorval
May 19, 2024
Baptism baby Ben with his friends Sarah and Talia on Sunday!
Five years ago on Pentecost, I stood in this pulpit and said:
We all know the feeling of hearing, in the midst of a random babble of languages that we understand imperfectly or not at all, a sudden phrase or sentence in our own mother tongue. How can we, as a faith community, translate God’s story to those who have never heard it – or heard it only in ugly and damaging ways – in a way that gives them that feeling of deep-down relief of hearing words in their native language?
This still feels deeply true to me – the sense of hearing one’s own language as a relief, as reassurance, as a feeling of coming home. Juxtaposed with the story of the dry bones from Ezekiel, that sense is only amplified. Ezekiel’s text is permeated with a profound longing for home. Ezekiel is a priest of a destroyed temple, prophesying to a people in exile, wondering if God has abandoned them and there is any reason to keep going. The vision of the dry bones is a vision of a hope almost too painful to name, that the dead bones can live, that the people can be brought home, that God can still be their God.
A language can be home. A place can be home. Other people can be home. But most of all, God can be home.
In fact, those other things can only truly be our homes if we understand that God is our ultimate home.
We live in Quebec; we know what it looks like when the concept of language as home, as culture, as touchstone, becomes an idol to which other goods are sacrificed. And the soil to which Ezekiel’s people longed to return is currently being soaked with the blood that is spilled when more than one group of people is willing to stake its claim to a particular physical home with weapons.
So we must use our knowledge of what it feels like to long for home and to arrive home, and our knowledge of what it feels like to hear and speak a language fluently after struggling to understand and communication – we must use this knowledge to seek, and listen to, and long for God with just as much urgency.
In his time on earth, Jesus – this itinerant preacher who called his followers away from their families and livelihoods and who had nowhere to lay his head – became home for his disciples. And when he left them behind to return to his home in eternity with God the Creator, they were bereft. He promised them the gift of God’s Spirit, and he promised that a home with many dwelling places awaited them, and he promised them that they would abide with and in him forever, as branches abide in the vine.
And when the Spirit did come, on this day of Pentecost two millennia ago, it did feel like coming home. It felt like speaking a language one had been longing to hear. It felt like the fulfilment of a prophecy for which one had almost given up hope.
The change in the disciples – from scared, hesitant, uncertain; to on fire with the Spirit and the news of resurrection – is unmistakable. They have glimpsed their home on the horizon; they have found the language they need to speak; nothing will stop them from getting there, and they will spread the word to as many people as they can find to accompany them on the journey.
God is our ultimate destination, and our priorities get out of whack if we forget that and start to treat language or homeland as ends instead of means. But after God, the next most important thing is always, always our community. The people and other creatures who accompany us on the journey.
Other people are essential to our conversations with God and to our journey toward God. As the writer and teacher Ram Dass put it, “We’re all just walking each other home.”
We see this in the Acts reading, where God could simply have rent the heavens open and spoken from the clouds in some universally understandable God-speak, but instead chose to speak to the crowds through the mouths of the apostles, their fellow humans, in all the languages they were longing to hear when they were so far from home.
And in Ezekiel, God could have just waved a hand and raised the dry bones from the floor of the valley, but instead, as Corinne Carvalho remarks in her commentary on this passage, “the reintegration of the bodies happens through the prophetic speech.” God works through Ezekiel, and God can work through the words and actions of each and every one of us. God apparently needs, or at least chooses overwhelmingly to use, human translators.
Another commentator, Rolf Jacobson, pointed out something else that I’d never thought of about the Ezekiel passage: that “the reference to ‘bones’ here is an idiomatic way of referring to one’s deepest self, or, in the case of ‘our bones,’ a way for the community to refer to its most essential self.” Jacobson cites parallel language from the lament psalms: bones wasting away, shaking with terror, burning like a furnace. When the prophet describes the bones lying about on the valley floor, dead and dry, he is expressing an agony that goes to the very heart of the people, both as individuals and as a collective.
But even when our most vulnerable, deepest self is thus laid bare, when there seems to be absolutely no hope for restoration, God is working. God is speaking to the prophet, telling him in turn to tell the breath, “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.”
It is that same Spirit in whose name, in just a moment, we will baptize Ben, Tenny, Ire, and Adunni. They will become part of the people, joining that “vast multitude” who are walking each other home.
Can these bones – these deepest, most essential parts of us, where our most fundamental longings lie – can they live? O Lord God, you know. And you give us the language to speak about you to each other and to the world. May we learn that language of the Spirit and rejoice in it together, finding our home in each other until we reach the ultimate home that is God. And may we learn to translate our longing for God to others, so that they too may find their home in God’s family, where the dry bones can live.
Amen.
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