Fashioning New Life

Sermon by Carrie Eikler
John 11:1-45, Ezekiel 37:1-14
Lent 5

[on the worship center, 29 stones are lined up, marking the 29 miners killed in the Upper Big Branch mine explosion]

Gary Quarles kneels on his living room carpet and unrolls the 4-foot-long map that he's studied so many times,
trying to understand why his son died in the Upper Big Branch mine…
On the map he sees where his 33-year-old son Gary Wayne Quarles was working with crewmates Grover Skeens and Joel Price, and their supervisor, Rick Lane.
They are identified on paper as Victims 9-12.
And they're not where they were supposed to be.

They were, Gary Quarles believes, running for their lives, trying to escape after something went wrong near the end of their 10 1/2-hour shift.

Gary Wayne was [Gary, Sr’s] best friend and his only child, conceived when Gary's wife, Patty, was just 15.

"He made us grow up really fast, and he turned us into who we are," she says.

Patty, a homemaker, still keeps an immaculate house. But she's just going through the motions.

She rocks slightly in a recliner, dark hair still wet from a shower she didn't bother getting until midafternoon,
and describes her life now: "You go to bed and you get up and you go back to bed."

Gary nods. He recalls the day a relative told him to pull himself together, to get out and have a little fun.
"There's no fun to be done now," he says, eyes filling with tears.
"It's like the life been sucked right out of me." [i]

This week the valley of dried bones are laid aside the mountains of Montcoal, WV where 29 miners lost their lives in an explosion one year ago.
Since I was reflecting on Ezekiel’s story of dry bones this week,
I experienced a certain chill added to the sadness:
29 white crosses with miner’s helmets balanced a loft, their lights beaming through the darkness.
Straight white crosses. Bone-like.

I wanted to see them fashioning themselves, clacking together, somehow causing a resurrection.

And what’s clear is that, like any tragedy, any death,
it is not just the dead who have been affected.
It is a transformation for those who remain, who loved them, who bore them and raised them.
They have the hard duty of living in the midst of death.
People going through the motions, having the life sucked out of them by grief and absence.

Living in a Martha-like agony
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
These are the painful, raw, words of Martha.
Martha, who did something.
Who ran out to meet Jesus in the dark of night while her sister Mary stayed home. Martha, who earlier, Jesus seems to have chastised for doing too much,
while favoring Mary’s quiet stillness.

Now, she does just the right thing.
She leaves Mary at home, and in Martha’s grief, her anger—
perhaps a bit of the righteous anger we saw when Mary didn’t help her host Jesus, she runs to Jesus, puts him to the test, asks him where he was.
He doesn’t rebuke her this time.
This time, he says ‘I am the resurrection and the life.
Those who believe in me, even though they die will live” and Lazarus lives.

Thank God for Martha. We don’t often hear that, do we?

In the field of dry bones, the LORD asks Ezekiel a question.
A simple one. Perhaps rhetorical.
“Mortal, can this bones live?”
And can’t you almost hear the exasperation in Ezekiel’s voice:
“O Lord God, you know.”
And then it comes. Dem bones scene.
Clickity-clack, it’s almost humorous as we think of the ankle bone connecting to the leg bones.
But it’s not humorous. It’s horrific.

And if we take it on its own, like we often do, without regarding the rest of Ezekiel’s story, we don’t quite get the significance of it all.
We may be tempted to see it as merely a metaphor, a lesson.
It can seem a-- nice prelude to the Easter story which is only two weeks away.

David Garber reflects on this tendency to cut the dry bones story out of the rest of Ezekiel’s story.

He says, “Because we so often do not read the rest of the book leading up to this grand scene, we have a myopic view of the prophet's own desperation and the plight of the community to which this story attempts to give hope. We forget that Ezekiel himself was taken into exile…. that he heard reports of his religious institution being corrupted and that his status had been reduced from a prominent position as a future priest in Jerusalem to that of a temple-less priest in exile.
We forget the death of his wife and God's command for him not to mourn her as an example for the exilic community not to mourn the loss of the Temple (24:16-24).”

“More importantly,” he continues, “we forget the historical trauma that accompanied this exile. We forget that the Babylonians tortured the inhabitants of Jerusalem with siege warfare that lasted almost two years, leading to famine, disease, and despair (2 Kings 25:3).

We forget how they destroyed the city of Jerusalem, razed the temple to the ground, killed many of its inhabitants, and forced the rest to migrate to Babylon. Over and over again, in the texts we refuse to read from the book of Ezekiel, the prophet offers imagery that testifies to the multiple traumas that the community faced under the realities of ancient Near Eastern warfare.”[ii]

The reality of death.
So often we focus on the death, don’t we, and not the realities that cause death.

Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggeman talks about Ezeikiel, and I would say, the Lazarus story too, as texts that do not accept the reality as the final outcome.
The death is what is real. But it is not all there is.

It’s a great message of hope for people of faith.
It’s a wonderful concept for people moving through loss.
But how helpful it is, I wonder, for people in the throes of grief.
If you have ever grieved the death of a loved one, have these sorts of stories been helpful to you? Stories of bodily resurrection?

And as I gazed on a photo of a woman bending down at a loved one’s graveside in Raleigh county,
with the ravaged hills behind her,
I struggle to think how can we tell her—that there ARE stories of hope.
but...
His bones won’t be gathered up.
Jesus won’t be coming to raise his body.
[pause]
But I don’t know if that is what Ezekiel is saying. I don’t even know if that is what the Lazarus story is conveying.
And here is where we have to understand the Bible as stories not just of historical truth, but emotional ones.

Maybe the hope in this story for today doesn’t rest in the gathering up of the that miner’s bones,
but the gathering up of the one who bends over him in grief.
Maybe the hope in this story is in giving the slow steady breath of the spirit to Patty and Gary Quarles, who mourn the death of their son.

And as Garber said about Ezekiel, we forget what led us to this.
We forget the history of coal companies in West Virginia.
We forget about the struggle miners have in demanding establishing safe working conditions.
We forget that the tragedies we deplore are sadly, are connected to the luxuries we believe we cannot live without.

On Tuesday, when the memorials were taking place for the miners,
when politicians were saying these men did not die in vain and that things must change,
I admit, I felt something other than sadness.
I felt exhaustion. I felt cynicism.
I felt a bit of what has been coined “compassion fatigue.”

It was as if, the tragedy of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster held my compassion captive for the day
and then Wednesday came and it was Japan that called for my compassion because there was another earthquake.
And then when I turn on the radio on Thursday it was federal employees like my friend Barbara who may lose their jobs because of the threat of government shutdown.
And on Friday was for the eleven school children in Brazil who were part of mass school shooting.
And Saturday, oh right. Libya. My goodness-Libya.

Some may say we should just stop feeling connected to the world.
Others may say, just turn off your radio.
And I don’t know what to say back. It just feels wrong to me to think that way and yet,
All these valleys and mountains and plains of dry bones
and we don’t even need a dream where the Lord takes us there.
Just go on the internet, turn on the tv, open the paper and have your choice.
And that’ doesn’t even include the places in my own immediate life that pull at my grief,
my loved ones I feel desperately for, fear for…

And then things stop shocking me.
The horror of death becomes a simple song, like Ezekiel and dem bones
Our compassion is dried up.
We see, but we can’t quite feel anymore because what does all that feeling really do, anyway?
How are we to be responsive and help God breathe in the spirit when we know of all the pain and death around us?
And it wasn’t just a solo act by God, was it?
God used Ezekiel. Martha was an integral part of the raising of her brother.
We are called to help give hope and life, breathing in the spirit.

And yet, when we can’t think of how to breathe,
or if we don’t have enough breath to breathe in all the places of pain and death in the world, which really, none of us does,
God works in spite of our fatigue and cynicism.
It’s not too big for life to find its way.
As Paul Bellan-Boyer says, “God’s work does not stop when human beings have done their worst.”[iii]

[pause]

When we are too dry to go on, God’s breath will come.
And I don’t know how.
I can’t dissect it, or lay out the logical and systematic way it will happen.
I can just feel it.
In my bones. In my dried up, clicky-clackity bones.

[following the sermon we enter into silence/Waiting Worship, while the old coal miner's song "Dark as a Dungeon, sung by Kathy Mattea, is played. These are the words...

Oh come all you young fellers so young and so fine
Seek not your fortune in a dark dreary mine
It'll form as a habit and seep in your soul
Till the stream of your blood runs as black as the coal

Where it's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew
Where the danger is double and pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls the sun never shines
It's a dark as a dungeon way down in the mine

Well it's many a man that I've seen in my day
Who lived just to labor his whole life away
Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard his wine
A man will have lust for the lure of the mine

Where it's dark as a dungeon ....

And pray when I'm dead and my ages shall roll
That my body would blacken and turn into coal
Then I'll look from the door of my heavenly home
and pity the miner digging my bones

Where it's dark as a dungeon...

--
“Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster, A Year Later: Family Can’t Move On” Huffington Post
David Garber, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=4/10/2011
Paul Bellan-Boyer