Reanimated Hope

Ezekiel 37:1-14

The Fifth Sunday in Lent 2011

This morning, I invite you to find yourself in Tewksbury. Now, before you think you’ve arrived, you should know that I’m talking about Tewksbury, Massachusetts, in the year 1875. It was there, in a state-run “poorhouse” where the mentally ill, prostitutes, and all manner of charity cases resided, a dungeon existed. Not a medieval torture chamber of your wildest imagining, mind you, but it may as well have been. This is somewhat ironic, considering that beyond its despair stained walls the Civil Rights act of 1875 was passed in our country, entitling every American to the same treatment in public accommodations regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude.

In that Tewksbury dungeon, full of very little light and even less hope, there was a cage. Yes, a cage. And In this cage sat a nine-year old girl. They called her “Little Annie.” Her animal-like behavior of violently attacking people who came near her sentenced her to this prison. The good doctors of the day had determined she was beyond repair. They had no hope of her becoming beneficial to herself or to any community. Hopelessly lost, they said, perhaps even totally insane. And the fact that she’d contracted a disease destined to bring about blindness didn’t help her case. So she was exiled to a cage, in a dungeon, in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, one hundred thirty six years ago.

It was her father who put her in this poor-house hole. Not with any evil intent, thank the Lord. It’s just that he was an alcoholic, immigrant farmer who simply could not maintain a family after his wife, Little Annie’s mother, died. Annie did not go to this place for the displaced alone, he also sent her only sibling, a brother named Thomas. But Thomas died of tuberculosis shortly after they arrived. Dark desolation, the kind we reflect on during this season of Lent, had truly descended across every aspect of this little girl’s life.

One of the professors at Princeton Seminary who has had a significant impact on my faith journey, Dr. Donald Capps, has written that “pastors view hope as a critical issue in their ministry and they often judge their ministry to be effective to the degree that it supports, instills, or inspires hope.” He goes on the state the obvious, that we pastors clearly know that “looming against a hopeful attitude is the hard reality of life … against tough and formidable realities, hope is not invincible.”

So I’m compelled to ask, with so much of Annie’s psychological and social safeguards destroyed, had there been any possibility of a brighter day, a brighter life? Could there possibly have been any fuse of hope to ignite within her heart to create a warming, welcoming love, or would any such flicker just touch down and spread further across the gasoline puddle of her life?

It sure seemed like “Little Annie” had been defeated by tough and formidable reality. It sure seemed any hope for a future full of tender loving care had been snuffed out completely, like a cancelled candle flame at midnight in a dank, chilly cell. Can any of us draw out an honest word of Christian hope as we reflect on this sad situation? Are we able to offer hope in any of the devastating circumstances we hear about today?

Once upon a particular time there was a prophet blessed with the bold faithful insight to pronounce hope was alive despite truly tragic, utterly devastating circumstances. He did not come to the circumstances from outside of them, as some kind of missionary of good will. Significantly, he rose up from within the very heart of the desolation with only the faith God was gracious enough to enlighten him with. And his was not a concern for only one young life. His was for an entire, historic community of faith; a community that had been completely decimated by hope trouncing enemy reality. The community was Israel, and the prophets name was Ezekiel.

This son of a priest was a rather bizarre fellow all around -- what with all the eating of scrolls, lying on his left side for three hundred ninety days, and shaving off all his hair and beard then dividing it all into three piles. Despite this bizarre behavior, however, Ezekiel was settled enough to have married, unlike his contemporary, Jeremiah. And his name certainly indicates stability -- translated, it means “God strengthens.”

What primarily made Ezekiel a prophet for his people was his being in the right place at the right time and having faith enough for God to work through him. Like any legitimate prophet, he was at first reluctant to be used as an instrument of God. But this yielded to his eventually taking on the prophet-priest role God needed him to take. Not an easy job. Not one any of us would envy even for a millisecond. His prophetic calling was to interpret the massive self-inflicted wound Israel was suffering. This wound had resulted in the total destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Empire and the subsequent hauling off of the Israelites into enslaved exile.

Up to that turning point in their historic identity, the Israelites figured God had their backs one hundred and one percent of the time. After all, God had made a covenant promise to protect and love them at all times and in all circumstances, never again to destroy his children. But they were in denial about their collective wound. They had abused God’s graciousness, taken advantage of it by assuming they could live morally corrupt lives and get away with it. They figured God was a nice doormat with the words “welcome” always at full bristle.

What Ezekiel came to know, however, was that some kind of breaking point in divine patience had been reached, and it was Ezekiel’s task to explain that it was the contemptible persistence of the Israelite’s sin that compelled God to allow the leveling of Jerusalem.

There, in Babylonia, the remnant that had survived the enemy siege felt that hope had been crushed, smothered by their own inability to love God rightly by following divine law. They saw no way out of the dungeon of despair, no return back to being God’s chosen people, a mighty nation. So stripped of this identity, they considered themselves, in effect, dead.

But also there in Babylonia, Ezekiel of their exile was privileged to receive an amazing glimpse of hope from God. Despite the seemingly permanent self-inflicted wound of sinful life, despite the deadly destruction, despite the forced relocation, despite the dissolution of all previously held belief about living under divine privilege … all was not dead. Ezekiel had it on supremely good authority that these children of God were going to be fully restored to life. Their battered bones and their broken hope were going to be reanimated. God was going to put all the members of the household of faith back together again. They were going to rise up out of the desolating darkness and be a mighty people under God once again.

The gift of Ezekiel’s glimpse was read to us today from the 37th chapter -- The Valley of Dry Bones. For most of us, this apocalyptic vision may seem spooky and strange. It most certainly may seem hard to figure out -- hence our needing to place it in its historical context. Symbolically, then, a quick review --

The dried up bones represent the dried up, inanimate faith of the Israelites.

The mysterious, foreign valley they lay in represents Jerusalem’s fall and their exile in Babylonia.

Ezekiel, the prophet-priest God raised up from deadly destruction with an amazing, undeserved word of hope, is the one who brought the Good News of salvation.

This prophetic word about complete restoration came most fully true many years later. Can you venture a guess as to when? In the hallowed time of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This is one reason Ezekiel’s well-known vision is commonly preached on this, the Sunday before Palm Sunday. If we have been diligent in prayerfully walking with Jesus toward Jerusalem through these past five weeks of Lent, we should be feeling the desolating wound of our sin against God. We should be ever more aware of the hopeless dungeons sin tries to keep us in. We should be looking about our lives and realizing we are in the valley of the shadow of death. This shadow will lengthen once we hit the gates of Jerusalem next week and we join all the other people fanatical about welcoming home the Davidic king of our dreams. Once that fanfare ends, however, and Jesus starts doing all we think him a fool with a death wish for doing, we just may find ourselves questioning whether or not our faith in the power of God has dried up and flaked off a façade of what we profess to believe and live by. And come the sorrowful uncertainty of Good Friday, we’ll need some kind of powerful sign from God to reanimate our hope.

I pray you have or have had an Ezekiel in your life. Someone whose radical vision and reanimated hope is a rejuvenating reminder that God’s love is greater than self-inflicted sinful wounds and that there is life beyond any and all dungeons of despair this world presents.

You may be wondering about Little Annie. About the answer to the questions concerning hope I asked a few minutes ago. Glory be to God, I have an answer. There had been a nurse nearing retirement who lived with an incredibly animated belief – she believed there is always hope for all God’s children. So strong was this faithful conviction that she began taking her lunches down to the dungeon and sitting alongside Little Annie. When she was finished eating, she’d leave a brownie in the cage. For her part, Annie showed no signs of acknowledging the presence of the compassionate (dare I say, prophetic?) nurse, save for the fact that the brownie would always be gone the next day.

Yet God had clearly called this Ezekiel to Annie’s life. One day after who knows how many lunches, the Massachusetts state board of charities chairman, Frank Sanborn, visited the Tewksbury poor-house. To everyone’s amazement, the former animal-child with the tragic life destined for complete insanity, threw herself at the administrator’s mercy, saying, “Mr. Sanborn, I want to go to school.”

While enduring many surgeries to slow the blindness causing disease she was afflicted with, Little Annie eventually attended Perkins Institute for the Blind. In 1886, she graduated as valedictorian. That’s when she God called her to be an Ezekiel for a seven year old, highly undisciplined blind girl enduring her own desolating realities. Yes, glory be to God, that’s when Anne “Little Annie” Sullivan became Helen Keller’s teacher. Amen.