Can these bones live?

Homily preached at Holy Apostles NYC on March 26, 2023. 

It is an honor to be here this morning at the Church of the Holy Apostles. Holy Apostles is a place with a long history of living out Jesus’ call to ministry at the margins and, of course, of feeding the hungry. 

As someone who has lived in New York since 2004, I have had the privilege of visiting Holy Apostles on multiple occasions. Around 2008, I attended Wednesday evening Bible study sessions here led by the Reverend Liz Maxwell. A few years later, during an especially stressful period in my life, I would quietly stop in for the Friday night Shabbat services held by Congregation Beit Simhat Torah, where I listened to the cantor’s beautifully sung prayers and felt the Spirit of God’s peace fill this space. While I haven’t been here in some time, Reverend Hill has shared with me how Holy Apostles’ feeding ministry has grown exponentially since the pandemic.

Truly, Holy Apostles is a special place, a beacon of hope in a city where the number of people living in homeless shelters has very recently reached an all-time high, and where hunger is a daily reality for so many. This ministry is also an inspiration to all of us who are trying to find our way in the Church, and who believe that yes, Christianity does have something to say about income inequality and the poverty that afflict our city and our world. Thank you, then, for inviting me today and for being a place of compassion and life.

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With the work of this parish in mind, I want us to consider today’s readings as they reflect two of the most iconic depictions of God's power to transform a landscape of suffering and death into abundant life. In the Book of Ezekiel, we hear that the prophet is led by God to a valley of dry bones. Ezekiel writes that there were many bones in the valley, and they were exceedingly dry. God asks Ezekiel if he believes that these bones can live, to which Ezekiel replies enigmatically, "O Lord God, you know."

Later in the Gospel of John, we hear Jesus and his disciples learning of their friend Lazarus's death. Jesus sets off to visit Lazarus's sisters, Mary and Martha. When Martha tells Jesus that Lazarus would not have died if he had only been there, Jesus responds by proclaiming himself to be the resurrection and the life. He declares that all who believe in him, even if they have died, will live again. Jesus then asks Martha if she believes this to be true, and she responds with a proclamation of faith: "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah."

In both passages, the stories begin with the finality of death and revolve around the question of God’s ability to summon life from even the deadest of places. Ezekiel proffers the image of a wide valley filled with dry bones, while the Gospel of John emphasizes that Lazarus had been dead for a full four days and there was now even a stench. Both stories go into grotesque detail to underscore the severity and depth of death.

Yet as life begins to stir in the valley of dry bones, with muscles and sinews regrowing on them, we learn that even here God can bring forth new life. Similarly, when Jesus commands Lazarus to "come out" from his tomb, the crowd is stunned to see Lazarus emerge, having been dead for four days and still wrapped in bands of cloth. Through these stories we are assured that even the strongest hold of death is in the end no match for the overwhelming, life-giving power of God.

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Over the past few weeks, I have been reflecting on these stories and, more specifically, have been holding onto these powerful images of God's power to bring forth life even when the landscape seems to be one of death.

Two Sundays ago, on March 12th, I helped lead a group of six seminarians from the Episcopal Divinity School at Union on a pilgrimage to the United States-Mexico borderlands. This was my third trip there with the last visit being in January 2020. We traveled from New York to El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, and visited small towns on both sides of the border like Marfa and Alpine, Texas, as well as Palomas, Mexico and Las Cruces, New Mexico. As we journeyed through the stark and beautiful desert landscape, we learned about the harsh realities of suffering and death experienced by forced migrants who have come seeking a better life in this country.

During our pilgrimage, we stayed and served at St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, a congregation like Holy Apostles which has reconfigured its space and mission into one of serving God’s “least of these” — in their case, those who have just crossed the US-Mexico border. Today St. Christopher’s operates as a short-term shelter for asylum-seekers who have just been released from ICE detention. There we met a very small number of Hondurans and Venezuelans including a young mother and her two children, a man who had ridden on the infamous train called "La Bestia" which runs up the western side of Mexico, and another man who I’ll call Jorge who was in a state of shock. Jorge seemed fine at first but faded in and out of a sorrowful stupor as he tried to figure out what to do next in a country where he had absolutely no one.

None of these people stayed for very long at the shelter - one of the things you learn is just how quickly people must move on - but they were around long enough for us to learn names, a little bit about their journeys, and I have found myself hoping for their safety ever since.

This is because life is incredibly dangerous for forced migrants on both sides of the border. Through conversations with nonprofit leaders, site visits, and presentations, we learned about the overlapping systems underlying this humanitarian crisis. We learned of the criminal networks as well as the laws and policies that are causing - and in many cases are even capitalizing on - forced migrants’ suffering and death.

One day we drove out to Alpine, TX. Along the drive I noticed that the signal from the cell phone towers had diminished to nothing and so for the rest of the drive I settled into that increasingly rare experience of being completely unreachable. We were in the desert, after all. No texts. No emails. No phone calls. Nothing could come through. It was only later, when listening to an advocate who is working to help families locate their missing loved ones, did I realize just how deadly this lack of signal was. This was the vast Texas desert where immigrants often became lost and dehydrated, eventually dying of thirst. A literal valley of bones.

In this brutal landscape, there are humanitarian groups that set water out to help those who are thirsty. But there are also other groups – self-organized, white-supremacist militias – that kick those jugs over and turn over the barrels, seemingly relishing in removing people’s last chance and hope.

There is much more to say about the power of death in this region. I could go on about trailer of migrants found suffocating in Uvalde just yesterday, or about how we visited the Wal-Mart where, in 2019, there was a mass shooting motivated by racial hatred. But suffice to say, there were many moments in the pilgrimage in which the death-dealing forces became overwhelming and I found myself confronted with that image of the valley of bones. The questions found in today’s scripture passages haunted me. "Where was God in all of this? Would Lazarus have died if Jesus was here?" “Can these bones live?"

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The first two times I visited the US-Mexico borderlands I’ll confess that I was shaken and disturbed to the point of hopelessness. But this third time I was able to see something I’d not noticed before - namely, a network of friendships flourishing in the desert landscape.

The theme and importance of friendship can also be found in today's Gospel passage from John. Lazarus was not, in fact, just a random stranger whom Jesus brought back to life to demonstrate his divine power. No, long before this miracle took place, we know that Jesus was first a friend to Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. In fact, there is an ancient Christian tradition that speculates that Lazarus was Jesus's beloved disciple.

Therefore when Jesus rushed to Lazarus's home, when he wept at his tomb, and when he commanded Lazarus to “come out” and rise from the dead, his actions were in part motivated by friendship. Friendship was a significant theme in Jesus's life and once you recognize this, you begin to see the importance of friendship throughout the New Testament. Jesus and his disciples certainly act and sound like a group of friends, and the early church described itself as assemblies connected by "fellowship" or "koinonia." Later, in John 15, Jesus tells his disciples, "I no longer call you servants, but I have called you friends."

In the face of the harsh landscape of the US-Mexico borderlands, I was struck by the power of friendship to bring hope and healing even in a landscape of suffering and death. And at times, it truly felt miraculous.

For instance, at the last minute, one student fell ill and couldn't attend, which meant that we were left with an empty seat in our passenger van. That empty seat became a kind of ticket into a network of friends and colleagues, each of whom were responding to this humanitarian crisis in a different way.

In Juarez, we met a woman named Colleen who was researching the impact of the Biden administration's Remain in Mexico policy. She joined us for a few stops, and we shared a communion meal of gorditas along the side of the road. In El Paso, Anex, a Fulbright scholar from Brazil, hopped into the van for multiple presentations and then somehow rejoined us while on a tour in Las Cruces, Mexico. Then there was Alma and Brinkley, experts and long-time volunteers in the region, who helped broaden our understanding at critical moments in the pilgrimage.

God kept sending deeply faithful, deeply committed, profoundly joyful people as if to say, “This desert is alive with hope and life.”

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The Latin American theologian Gustavo Gutierrez describes friendship as perhaps the most important form of solidarity with the poor. He says that when Christians seek to live a life of solidarity with the marginalized, this cannot be an abstract or ideological endeavor. To become a friend of immigrants, the hungry, the poor involves learning people's names and stories. Friendship suggests an equality that is occasionally lacking in many charitable and philanthropic approaches. Friendship means genuinely joining in the joys and sorrows of a community, and staying closely-connected over time.

In the valley of bones, God asks Ezekiel, “Can these bones live?” Yes, and new life means entering into friendship with the hungry and the immigrant and bearing witness to the unexpected ways God calls forth life even in the harshest of landscapes. Personally, I left this trip more convinced than ever that the most important thing we can do as a church is strengthen friendship ties between places like Holy Apostles in NYC and St. Christopher’s in El Paso, as well as between EDS at Union and the Diocese of Rio Grande. This is long-term work, the work of building trust and approaching this issue together as committed friends. We are called to learn names and stories, and to share in joys and sorrows as it is this love and friendship will render the impossible possible.

“Can these bones live?” “Oh God, you know.”