Good Morning. It has been another heavy week in the news of the world. Although, in the Church Year, we are preparing our hearts to celebrate the Resurrection, death is all around us.
Our reading from Ezekiel this morning begins like a scene from a horror movie. Imagine if your journey of following God led you into a valley, and as you looked around, you realized it was a mass grave. I don’t know about you, but if I were Ezekiel, I would feel equal parts heartbroken and terrified.
When God asks Ezekiel if the bones can live, Ezekiel is… impressively diplomatic in his response. If, in that moment, God asked me if I thought these bones could live, I think I might laugh at God or run away in horror. But even though Ezekiel does not say, as I might in that situation, “God, what are you talking about? Are you crazy?” he still cannot imagine it happening, so he responds, “O Lord God, you know.”
Last week, during our Lenten series on the modern saints, I asked a question that I’d like to ask again today: what does it take to imagine a better world? Like Ezekiel, we are called to proclaim hope in the midst of dead things, and that hope requires us to imagine life and restoration even when we are surrounded by so much destruction.
As we explore this possibility of hope in Ezekiel’s valley and in the valleys of our own lives, I want to tell you about a different valley, the Onondaga Valley. It belongs by treaty to the Indigenous Onondaga Nation, but it was stolen from them long ago.[1] For over a century, this land was destroyed by steel and chemical factories. As “greasy, white industrial sludge poured over what was once a grassy green lakeshore,”[2] the valley became like an infected wound in the land. In her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer shares the story of a friend who grew up in the area. As a child, this friend would look at the smoke and toxic waste coming from the factories, and “when [her] preacher talked of fire and brimstone and the sulfurous vents of hell, she was sure he meant”[3] Onondaga Valley. It may not be filled with human skeletons, but if nothing can survive in the lake, and it is slowly poisoning the people who live nearby, is it not, as Kimmerer’s friend described, “the [very] Valley of Death?”[4]
This is what sin does. It turns the living gifts of God into death and toxic waste. Kimmerer explains that “Human beings made this happen… there were no… extenuating circumstances, just business as usual.”[5] New Testament scholar Haley Gabrielle explains that in our reading from Romans, to “set the mind on the flesh”[6] is the choice to objectify someone for our own selfish gain. She connects it to the devastation of war, saying, ‘If I regard a body, whether my own or another person’s, as a commodity, as an object of sacrifice, as collateral damage in war, then I have treated it as [if it were just a piece of] meat.” [7]
But if we focus only on these large-scale evils, we will miss the fact that God is not just calling warmongers and greedy CEOs to repentance. God is calling us to repentance, too.
Who among us has not treated ourselves, one another, and the planet as objects to be used and thrown away? We tell convenient lies at the cost of our integrity. We avoid eye contact with the homeless person begging in the street as if they were an obstacle in our path, no different than a snow bank. We buy more than we need while the planet clogs with trash like arteries getting ready for a heart attack. As Gabrielle paraphrases Paul, “This is not lawful. This does not please God. Christ is not in this.”[8]
When the corporations closed their factories in the Onondaga valley, they covered the wastelands with fast-growing grass meant for lawns. But as soon as the environmental inspectors had come and left, they walked away and let it all die.[9] So often, we try to cover up our sin, to justify it to ourselves, to one another, to God, but it’s only a matter of time before our defenses collapse. Imagine if Ezekiel did this to the bones, propping up skeletons like Halloween decorations. We cannot accomplish true repentance by our own effort, as if it were a self-improvement project. That, too, is treating ourselves as if we were just meat.
Onondaga Valley’s first real restoration efforts came from scientists who planted bushes as a buffer to keep the rain from carrying more toxic waste into the lake. But Kimmerer explains that with just one kind of plant, and nothing to give food or shelter to insects and animals, the land was more like a machine than a living habitat. It’s like the half-resurrected bodies after Ezekiel’s first prophecy: something more than a desolate pile of waste, but there is no breath, no spirit in it. It is still just meat.
But God speaks to Ezekiel again, saying, “Prophesy to the breath… say to the breath: Come… and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” At Ezekiel’s words, the bones come back to life. And in the Onondaga Valley, by the mercy of God, the forces of nature and time have been at work. Kimmerer writes about how a few types of plants have begun to come back to the lakeshore: over the years, the wind scattered weeds across the ruined land. And like a very patient miracle, they have brought nutrients and insects back to the soil. Now, in Ezekiel, the Hebrew word used for breath is the same word as “wind.” And so as God’s grace-filled breath restores the bones in the valley, as the breath of Jesus when he says, “Lazarus, come out!” brings a dead man from his tomb, as God’s breath restores us and forgives our sins even though we could not fix them ourselves, God’s own breath is restoring the ruined land of the Onondaga Valley. Slowly, fruit bushes and wildflowers, and a handful of trees have begun their journey back from exile.
But humans have a role to play in the resurrection of this landscape. Local ecologists have begun to collaborate with God’s grace, reintroducing native plants to the environment. God could have resurrected the dry bones without asking Ezekiel to participate, and yet it was Ezekiel’s words that brought them back to life. As Kimmerer puts it, “Restoration is an opportunity for partnership… Our part of the work is not complete.”[10] We are called to participate in God’s restoring work in the world because as we help the world heal, it helps us heal, too. The Onondaga Nation has begun a project of biocultural restoration. This means that they are trying to restore the plant and animal life to its original, pre-colonial state, but they are trying to restore a pre-colonial relationship to the land. If we want to create sustainable change, we must learn to stop objectifying the land––and ourselves and one another, too. We can no longer be pieces of meat. We cannot treat people––or the natural world as flesh. Instead, we must allow “the Spirit of [God] who raised Jesus from the dead, [to dwell] in [us]… [and] give life to [our] mortal bodies also through [God’s breath] that dwells in us.”
God brought Ezekiel into the valley to teach him about hope. The people have been crying that “[their] bones are dried up, and [their] hope is lost.” But God responds with a promise: “I am going to open your graves, and bring you up… 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.” In the Onondaga Valley, Kimmerer offers a vision of hope: someday, children will swim in the lake, the fish and the birds will return, families will eat picnics on the once-ruined shore. She writes that hopeful “stories are piling up all around [about] scraps of land being restored… It’s true that the victories are small and fragile… but their power moves as inspiration… These are antidotes to the poison of despair.”
I want to return to the question I asked at the beginning of this sermon: What does it take to imagine a better world? I think that to have hope, we need to be able to see. We need to see our own failures and to see God’s grace at work in our broken lives and our broken world. We need to see Lazarus walk out of the tomb and know that God is also raising us to life. We need to see God’s gracious wind spreading weeds that will bring dead soil back to life. We need to see a mass grave become a promise of restoration. And we need to see the signs of hope that we can only find when we move beyond objectification, the signs of hope that appear when we participate in the work of restoration.
As Lent comes to a close, I want to invite you to examine your hearts, to examine the streets, to examine the newspaper. Before we celebrate the Resurrection of Christ, I want you to find one small way to work against the forces of objectification and sin. God is restoring the world. Let us participate in the work, and in doing so, bear witness to the hope of Resurrection. Amen.
[1] The valley, its lake, and the surrounding countryside are stolen Treaty lands that rightfully belong to the Indigenous Onondaga Nation, one of the six nations that make up the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Another Haudenosaunee member is the Kanien’kehà:ka, on whose land we are worshipping today.
[2] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013, p. 329
[3] Kimmerer, p. 329
[4] Kimmerer, p. 337
[5] Kimmerer, p. 325
[6] Haley Gabrielle, “Rejecting Death: Bodies are not Commodities” https://politicaltheology.com/rejecting-death-bodies-are-not-commodities/?fbclid=IwY2xjawQsQwBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFhMTVWb3dVRXBzZ0hoYVJnc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHmppTlM8rFGtkioJ1mxrWdpgq8U4cJuiZSEcBK_VJL-TQdWQsWJOKuyC8RE4_aem_ovEVjdtNEhZgggCaAj-mWg
[7] Gabrielle
[8] Gabrielle
[9] Kimmerer, p. 339
[10] Kimmerer, p. 333