“More than watchmen for the morning”

Our society does whatever it can to keep death at a distance. In our world, it’s not that hard to live your whole life without seeing a dead body. But it wasn’t that way in the ancient world. Death was present in a way it seldom is for us today. Many people died young. And they died at home. Family members prepared bodies for burial. And burial happened quickly. Because it had to.

The edge of a tomb can be a hard place to talk about hope.

In our reading from Ezekiel this morning, the prophet finds himself not just at a graveside, but looking out on a valley full of bones. The passage is probably meant to evoke the Kidron Valley, which runs alongside the old city walls of Jerusalem, and which even to this day is filled with tombs.

The people buried in the valley aren’t recently dead. The bones are very dry. It’s a place where death has held sway for a long time. A place where grief has come and gone, and nothing has changed.

And God asks Ezekiel a question. “Mortal, can these bones live?”

What would you say to that question? The obvious answer is no. Dry bones can’t live again. Of course they can’t. But when God asks an impossible question, there just might be a good reason. And so Ezekiel replies, “O Lord God, you know.” It’s not a yes. It’s not a no. It’s: I can’t see how that’s possible, but you’re God and I’m not, and I’m not going to try to tell you what you can and can’t do.

And then God tells Ezekiel to do something that seems foolish. God says, “speak to the bones, prophesy to them.” Stand in this valley where nothing is alive, where no one can hear you, and speak.

Ezekiel does. He speaks the words God gives him to speak. And the bones start coming together. Sinew and flesh appear. And then Ezekiel calls to the breath, and the bones stand up.

Ezekiel spoke to dry bones, but he also spoke to his own people, to a people in exile, to a people struggling to find hope. Jerusalem had fallen. The Temple had been destroyed. Everything that held their lives together was gone. “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost.” Those words were their words too.

And God promises hope. Hope in the midst of death. Hope when all hope seems lost. Hope even at the grave.

In today’s Gospel we get another grave. A tomb cut into rock outside a village called Bethany. Not too far, actually, from the valley of graves that Ezekiel describes. Inside this tomb is a man named Lazarus who has been dead for four days.

Lazarus was Jesus’s friend, and the brother of Martha and Mary.

Martha comes to meet Jesus on the road, before he even reaches the house. And she says what she’s been thinking all week: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

There’s grief there, and also an accusation. “Where were you? You could have come. And you didn’t.” If you ever find yourself saying words like that in prayer, you’re in good company. Jesus doesn’t argue. He weeps.

He weeps. But he also says, “Your brother will rise again.”

Martha gives the correct theological answer: “I know he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”

That promise is a real comfort, of course. But the last day can feel very far away when you’ve just buried someone you love.

They go to the tomb. And Jesus says, “Take away the stone.” And Martha—practical, faithful, grieving Martha—says, “Lord, already there is a stench. He’s been dead four days.”

Martha believes that Jesus is the Messiah. But she also knows what a dead body smells like after four days in a sealed cave.

Jesus doesn’t argue with her. He doesn’t condemn her lack of faith. He just says, “Lazarus, come out.”

And Lazarus comes out. Still wrapped in burial cloths, bound and blinking and needing help. But he comes out.

Most of us won’t see Lazarus rise from a tomb. But Lazarus’s story tells us both that death is real, and that God is more real.

Our own sorrows are more often like the psalm we read this morning. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.”

The psalm doesn’t describe bones reassembling or dead men walking into the sunlight. It describes waiting.

“My soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen for the morning.”

I love that image. A watchman waiting for the sun to come up. Standing in the dark, hour after hour, trusting that morning will come. Not because he can see it yet. But because that’s what morning does.

A lot of faith looks like that. Not a dramatic moment at a tomb. Not a valley of dry bones rattling into life. Just the quiet, stubborn act of standing watch in the dark, and refusing to believe that the dark is all there is.

In the Gospel, Jesus asks Martha a question. “Do you believe this?” And she says yes. Standing on the road, with her brother’s body in a tomb, she says yes. Not because she’s stopped grieving. Not because death has become unimportant. But because she’s looking at the one who says, “I am the resurrection and the life,” and she trusts him even more than she trusts the facts on the ground.

That’s why the Church continues through the centuries to say these words beside open graves: “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life…”

Not because death doesn’t matter. You can’t stand beside a grave without understanding that death is real. But because we trust the God who meets us in valleys full of bones. A God who stands beside a tomb, and weeps before he speaks. A God who hears cries that come up from the depths.

“My soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen for the morning.” More than watchmen for the morning.

Cover image: Part of a photograph of the Kidron Valley taken by the Rev. Margaret McGhee, 2018-03-17.