Last weekend I went up to the Twin Cities to attend a bible conference. The
conference was two days of lectures on various aspects of the bible and
religion. I presented a paper on Exodus 16 in an Old Testament seminar. One of
my Marquette students was invited to present the paper that she had written for
my class last semester.
Michelle and Emma also went with me. Not to the conference, mind you. They went
to the largest shopping mall in the US, the Mall of America. Did you know there
are five Victoria’s Secret stores in that mall? Because, as you know, you can’t
just muddle along with only four of them.
But I digress. One other incentive to go there is that I have a cousin on my
mother’s side who lives there. While we were there they offered to take us out
to dinner. Over Emma’s objections we decided to go to Red Lobster. One of my
favorite places.
I ordered a plate that included shrimp scampi and fried shrimp. They were paying
so I laid off the lobster. It was delicious. It was nice to connect with my
cousin and her family. And the weather was actually pretty nice up there.
So this week when I was thinking about this passage where Ezekiel has a vision
of a valley of dry bones, the corpses of a discarded people, I wondered to
myself, “Are there people in our day who are just discarded by society the way
these dead bones were in Ezekiel’s vision?
That’s where the shrimp part comes in. I remember when shrimp was a delicacy,
something special for a special occasion. Now you can get it in the freezer
section at Aldi. How did that happen?
Part of the explanation is that these days the practice of using child or slave
labor to harvest and clean shrimp has increased rapidly. As you might expect,
these children are not only unfairly compensated for their work, but they are
also beaten, sexually abused, and then discarded like the people in Ezekiel’s
vision when they are no longer productive.
Back in 2007 a Reuters reporter visited a barn-like facility in Thailand where
200 teens and pre-teens worked shelling shrimp. One girl, a refugee from Burma,
wouldn’t you know, was an 11 year old who had worked there for three years.
She was unable to go to school, but she was happy to be paid $9 a day, which was
more than the minimum wage. She lived in a concrete hut next to the factory with
her mother, father and three siblings.
This sounds pretty bad, but this is actually one of the better facilities. In
other places the people who clean shrimp are imprisoned, raped, humiliated and
forced to buy rotten food from the owner of the factory with the meager wages
they earn.
This situation is all in the service of the $2 billion a year shrimp industry.
Half of Thailand’s shrimp exports go to, you guessed it, the US. The upshot is
that in order for me to enjoy that shrimp last week, someone else probably had
to be treated as a disposable person.
If you can imagine that, then you can imagine how the people of Judah felt
during the time when Ezekiel was both a priest and a prophet. Ezekiel’s ministry
was during a time when the people of Judah were in the process of being invaded
and later annihilated by the reigning power in their part of the world, the
Babylonians.
Their neighbors and fellow Israelites in the north had been conquered and
dispersed over 100 years earlier by the Assyrians. The people of Judah generally
thought that they had been spared by the Assyrians because God considered them
more righteous than the Israelites.
But prophets like Ezekiel and Jeremiah told them otherwise. Ezekiel pointed out
that abuse was rampant in Judah. In chapter 22 he accuses them of a long list of
habitual sins: Disrespect of their elders, extortion, abuse of widows, orphans
and immigrants, failure to observe the Sabbath, slander, murder, adultery, and
loan fraud.
And these were the people who thought God was happy with them. Ezekiel warned
that if they didn’t stop, God would choose not to protect them from the
Babylonians. And sure enough, they got walloped.
In 597 The Babylonians invaded and killed King Jehoiakim, who was generally
regarded as a pretty good king. His son Jehoiachin surrendered to the
Babylonians and was taken as an exile to Babylon, along with a bunch of other
leaders, including Ezekiel.
The Babylonians installed a puppet king named Zedekiah, but Zedekiah tried to
rebel against the Babylonians. When he did that, the Babylonians came back in,
killed Zedekiah and his family, destroyed the temple, and marched everyone
except the peasants into exile in Babylon for almost 50 years.
Now if you as a people have gone through that kind of an experience, you
understand that it makes you feel like you have less value than other people.
The folks who keep you in exile don’t treat you like equals. They don’t care
much about your dignity.
To be fair, the Babylonians didn’t enslave the Jews. They didn’t keep them from
worshipping God, and they allowed the Jews to run their own businesses in some
cases. In fact, some of them were so successful that when the Jews were freed
from their exile, some didn’t even return.
But this vision of the dry bones comes early on in their captivity. People were
of the mindset that since they were dragged forcibly from their land, they were
no longer really a people. A people without a territory are not really a people.
They are just foreigners in someone else’s land.
They wondered if their entire race would die out. They wondered what happened to
God’s promise to Abraham that his race would last forever. Did God decide not to
honor that promise because of what they had done? They couldn’t make sense of
what God was doing here.
That’s the situation Ezekiel’s speaking to in chapter 37. He has a vision where
he is transported to a place where the bones of a people have been discarded in
a valley. Obviously these people are of no consequence to anyone, just thrown
out like carcasses.
God asks Ezekiel if these dead bones can live. It sounds like a trick question.
No, dead people don’t come back to life. They didn’t believe in the resurrection
of the dead at that time. Ezekiel probably thought to himself, “Hey, if anyone
knows the answer, God it’s got to be you.”
God tells Ezekiel to start prophesying to the dead bones. God tells him to tell
the dead bones that God would bring them back to life, that God would replace
the flesh that used to be on those bones and cover them with skin and breathe
life back into them.
Now if I’m Ezekiel, I’m thinking to myself, “Oh this is going to be a tough
crowd today. I’m sure I’m really going to get through to them. They’ll be so
enraptured with what I have to say that there will be “dead silence”.
I had a similar experience when I used to teach a three hour class on Monday
nights at Carroll. The room at Rankin Hall was kept at 85 degrees for some
inexplicable reason. I tried to keep things lively, but you have to lecture
quite a bit to cover all the material you need to cover.
After about an hour the students’ eyes began to droop. I would give them a short
break to try and keep their attention span, but after two hours they were just
dying. By the end of the class it was almost like speaking to the valley of dry
bones.
But unlike my students, these bones were revitalized by an outside force,
instead of by the fear of getting an F on the exam. Ezekiel suddenly saw the
bones being put together like Lincoln Logs. Muscles appeared on them. Tendons
and ligaments held everything together. Skin began to cover the reconstituted
bodies.
Their rebirth was almost complete. But there was still one thing they lacked.
They had no breath in them. They were still lifeless corpses.
God told Ezekiel to prophesy to the wind, commanding the wind to fill the lungs
of these corpses with breath. As he spoke, the wind blew into these corpses and
caused them to start breathing. Before he knew it, this slain, discarded group
of people stood in front of him as a huge crowd.
God explained to Ezekiel that this group of resuscitated corpses was a metaphor
for the people of Judah. The Jews considered themselves no better off than a
pile of corpses. They had been taken from their land, their identity, and from
everything they held holy.
But God was not going to let them die off like the corpses in Ezekiel’s vision.
God would put them back together, bind up their national wounds, and breathe
life into them as a chosen people. God promised to get them back to their land.
They were not forgotten. They were not thrown away like refuse in a landfill.
They were not defeated. Their God was not overpowered by other gods. Their God
would remember them, restore them, and rebuild them.
As I said before, we live in a world with hundreds of millions of people whose
potential, dignity and rights have been discarded for any number of reasons.
Sometimes they are discarded by the economic realities of their situation. They
are born or sold into a situation where the only opportunity they have is to do
demeaning work in ghastly conditions for little or no pay with little or no
opportunity for advancement or education.
Others have been discarded because they have fallen prey to the consequences of
their own choices. They have chosen poorly in their relationships, they have
squandered their own future with drugs or alcohol or gambling or some other
addiction.
The problem is that the world’s economic system is absolutely incredible at
mobilizing goods and money and capital into the process of production. What it’s
not so good at is honoring the dignity of all the people involved in that
process, the human capital.
The system we have in place elevates some people by design; but in order to do
that, others must live through the experience of being used and discarded like a
coffee cup.
People in our own society, one of the wealthiest in the world, are easily
discarded, especially with the kind of job market we have now. Waukesha, like
any other US town, is filled with damaged people, addicted people, abused
people, and sick people.
And if those people cannot prove their worth to the free market, then they are
thrown away into the metaphorical valley of dry bones. Sometimes we throw them
away by placing them in jail.
The US comprises 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the people in jail in
the world are in our jails. In other words, people are five times more likely to
be put in jail in the US than they are in other countries. And we like to think
that our court system is so much more impartial than those of other countries.
That’s probably not the case.
We throw people away by cutting the funding for programs that help them beat
addictions, train them to work, help them find jobs, and care for their kids
when they get them.
Part of the reason why the daycare that we used to house in our church is
closing is because it’s a W2 daycare that helps unemployed people find work.
Instead of keeping that program going and helping people find meaningful work,
we’ve allowed the funding for W2 programs to be sliced to the bone.
You don’t help beleaguered, damaged people by making it even harder for them to
rise above the mess they’ve gotten themselves into. You help them by making it a
little easier for them without giving it to them. What we’ve done is the
equivalent of discarding them.
Many of these parents will lose their jobs because they can’t afford daycare
without the W2 program. Then they’ll go back on welfare, maybe lose their
apartments, and eventually come to the conclusion that it didn’t really make any
difference when they tried to stay clean and rebuild their lives.
We do the same thing with sick people. The way the system works in our country,
those employees whose value to the free market is greatest are the ones who are
the most likely to receive health insurance. Because of that, they pay less for
their health expenses than those who can’t get health insurance.
So, the more money you make, the less you have to pay for your medical care.
Conversely, the less money you make, and the less value your work is to the free
market, the less likely you are to receive insurance to cover your health
expenses.
So, the less money you make, the more you have to pay for your health expenses.
It’s the most backwards system you can imagine in that respect. And if you have
insurance but get sick and can’t come to work, you can very easily lose your
insurance, in which case you’ll be forced to pay all of your health expenses,
even though you’re sick and can’t work.
And in a system like that, millions and millions of sick people are just
discarded because they’ve ceased to be of value. They go bankrupt, they lose
their homes, they lose their savings, and when this becomes a problem for them,
the message society has for them is, “Don’t expect any help from the rest of us.
You should have tried harder not to get sick.”
The power of this passage is that God doesn’t discriminate between those whom
society has deemed valuable and those who have been discarded among the Jews in
Ezekiel’s vision. Everyone who has been discarded is raised.
This resurrection wasn’t just for the good people or the valuable people or the
healthy people. No one is seen as disposable. Their ailments were healed. Their
cancer, their bone disease, whatever was wrong with them, God made it right.
One of the challenges for the church in our time is to carry on this message:
there are no throw away people in this world. People have dignity not because of
what they can do or how much money they can make for someone else.
They have dignity just because of who they are. They have dignity because God
has given them the breath of life. And if everyone has dignity, regardless of
who they are, simply because they are God’s creation, then our whole approach to
life, to people, to foreign and domestic policy, to public health, and to
religion has to be reconsidered.
I want to end by showing you all a few pictures. These pictures are by local
artists. Slide. This first one is by an artist who recently passed away here in
Waukesha. One of the things about this piece of art that doesn’t necessarily
come through in the images is the texture.
The surface of this art amplifies the lines. This artist’s work is for sale here
in town. But what if I told you that this artist was both autistic, and that he
suffered from Downs Syndrome?
Can you imagine how much more difficult it must be to create art for someone
with those disabilities? It costs money, tax money and private grants, for our
county and city to create and support programs that give an artist like this man
a chance to express himself.
We could just as easily have said, “Hey, we don’t have the cash. If he can’t
make a living selling his own art, why should the rest of us support a program
like this?” The reason is because we recognize the God given dignity and breath
of life in every human being, even those who are severely disabled.
Let’s look at another. Slide. Again, look at the way the brush strokes hit the
canvas. I couldn’t produce something like this even if I tried. The artist who
created this painting has severely restricted control over her arms. It’s all
she can do to get the brush to hit the canvas in the place she wants.
The artist is dyslexic and probably has some form of Parkinson’s disease or
something. But look at the color, the perspective. Can you see the human dignity
represented here?
Let’s look at one more. Slide. This is actually a composite image from a number
of different local artists who collaborated. I can’t imagine how they
coordinated each of their pictures to line up they way they did. It’s amazing
from an artistic point of view.
Again, all of these artists are severely disabled people who have very little
value to the free market in our society. They’re not going to make someone else
a lot of money. They are unable to support themselves. Many are wheeled into
their studio in a wheelchair.
But each of them has the same humanity that you and I do. God has breathed the
breath of life into them just as much as you and I. They are not throwaway
people. And the thing that makes me exited about this wonderful art is that it
was all produced here in our own building.
People who would be considered disposable in other contexts are given respect
and are valued as human beings, just like the discarded Jews who are resurrected
in Ezekiel’s vision.
My hope is for a day when there is no one else on the earth who sees him or
herself as little more than a set of dry bones. But until that day comes, we
must be the ones who speak to the bones, the ones who prophesy to the spirit,
the ones who say to people, because Jesus lives, you will also live.