That is the magnitude of what faced Ezekiel some
twenty-six hundred years ago. This was
a time of anxiety, fear and apathy as the people struggled to make sense of
what had happened to them. Not unlike
what we are dealing with today. Severna and I struggled to find photos of 2022,
and there weren’t a lot. It’s hard to
remember but this time last year we were still wearing masks, still recording
who came to church in case of an outbreak, still struggling with health
measures and precautions. Palm Sunday I
preached from the Manse as Tim had tested positive. We didn’t have coffee time after church at
all and served communion in the pews with tongs. Some United Church congregations are still
serving communion that way and still enforce masks every Sunday and are not
having coffee time yet. So there weren’t
a lot of events to take pictures of.
We still worshiped. We still prayed. We still had book study and we still met for
council and committee meetings. We had an amazing donation of $14,000 gifted to
us because of our affirming work. We
still started a youth group and gradually added coffee time.
All these things happened because we worked
together. A church is not one Ezekiel
doing everything. A church is a valley
of people coming together, remembering when they were dry bones and rejoicing
that they can stand up again, they can move again, they can breathe again. Why?
Because they heard and felt God’s breath blowing in and through them,
God’s spirit clothing their dry bones and reenergizing them, helping them,
helping us to remember to thank God for our lives.
These past few years have been hard and have taken
their tole on us. We wonder when the
stress of all the change will be done with.
When will things go back to normal?
And the answer is we really don’t know.
How do we adjust to that reality, that uncertainty?
Two images come to mind. One is from the Pirates of the Caribbean,
where Johnny Depp’s pirate ship is being chased down by faster boats and his
capture is likely. Depp takes a huge
risk – he throws out his anchor and snags it on a rock. The boat pivots around
the anchor, like a yoyo someone spins around their head, and the other ships
sail right past him. But it puts a
tremendous strain on the ship, puts it in range of the pursuing ships and
almost pulls the bottom off his boat!
The chasing ships can’t turn around in time and he escapes once again. We could try something drastic like that to
adjust to the times we are in.
The other image that comes to mind is when two years
ago, I had a bad wart on my foot that wouldn’t go away. I tried everything I could, even went to the
doctor to get it burnt off, which the nurse was not impressed with. She didn’t want to be burning a wart on a toe
when people were struggling with Covid.
So I bit the bullet, and became obsessively diligent on using the Dr.
Scholl’s wart freezing stuff to the point where it hurt more than I liked, but
that was what the nurse had done. I
never thought I would get to the bottom of that wart, but persistence,
consistence and patience made the difference.
What does God call us to do now? What will breathe new life into our dry
bones? Do we need to resort to drastic
methods like a risky toss of an anchor that stresses everything, or smaller
methods like a can of freezing wart solution?
I remember when we first went into lockdown three years ago this very
month, my motto became “5% better”. It
helped us remember to take small steps every week to improve how we worshipped
and how we did church together. It kept
us calm and hopeful. Now we can ask it
again, what would help us as a church to be 5% more faithful, 5% more
prayerful, 5% more generous, 5% more courageous? Now is a time for deep faithful courage and
deep love of God and our neighbors. May
we find the courage to work towards a healthier future. Amen.
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