Prophets in the valley of dry bones: some thoughts on Ezekiel and the Floyd George protests

“He made me walk up and down

and all around among them…

they were completely dry…”

--Isaiah 37:2

A prophet is someone called to speak the truth for God.  Being a prophet isn’t about being particularly brave or especially good or even worthy.  Remember Jonah.  It is about responding to a call to witness to the truth.

And prophets are often called to act in strange and troubling ways.  Think about Jeremiah and the linen girdle (Jer 13), or the wooden yoke (27), Hosea and Gomer, or Ezekiel called to lie for 390 days on his left side and then 40 more on his right, all the time staring at an iron plate and cooking his bread on dung (Ezekiel 4), or to dig a hole in the wall of the city and climb through it with a rucksack on his back (Ez 12).  Strange behaviors, and probably very troubling to some of their fellow citizens.  Even somewhat destructive at times.  Prophets are never easy to live with, to listen to... And being a prophet must be a terrible, a fearful calling... like joining in a protest march.

The protestors who march the streets each day, each night here in our city, in our land, they are prophets.  They are witnesses to the truth. The truth about George Floyd, the truth about black lives, and the truth about America.  A horrifying truth about our system, our way of life.   Reading Ezekiel this morning, the famous passage of the valley of dry bones, I realized something.  This vision of the prophet walking up and down among the dry bones suddenly revealed a new truth. A truth about our world today and about these protests. That vision of Ezekiel wandering among the dry bones, that is exactly what is happening here, on the streets of this country each day, each night.  The protestors, who our president wants to call anarchists and even terrorists, are nothing more and nothing less than prophets walking among the dry bones.  The dry bones of our society; bones that once promised life, liberty, justice, freedom but have given so many of our brothers and sisters only injustice, brutality, racism, and death.

Late into the night these prophets walk through empty streets, through a valley of bones, up and down and all among them, a valley barren of hope.  These towering buildings, our “high places,” to so many of us they have become signs of commerce, success, abundance, pleasure and ease, economic growth. But seen through the witness of the prophets, they are finally revealed to be nothing more than white-washed tombs full of dry bones.  They stink of the dead promise they symbolize; comfort, freedom, justice, security, equality, all nothing more than dry bones.

Like the prophet of old, these protestors walk among the dry bones of a society that has died. A society that still gathers in the valley of its own undoing, unaware even that it has nothing left but the dry bones of what it once hoped to be. The dry bones are gathered in piles, brick by brick, in store fronts and offices, shining steel and glistening glass piled high, looming towers of commerce and business rising to the clouds, and yet all of it empty of life, filled with nothing but dry bones, the dead dreams and promises of what was hoped or planned and finally what was settled for…  All of it dry bones.

And each night the protestors, these prophets, come out and wander (like Ezekiel) among the dry bones and the white-washed tombs, wander the valley of death, calling, calling out to the bones:

Dry bones, dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! 

Wake up!