Message from July 7, 2013 Creating an Ezekiel Place The Cancer Wellness Center of America has a motto: “We all live through hope. What we hope for changes as we travel through life, but hope remains a constant necessity for life. Hope is at the very heart of healing.” Hope is the very heart of healing. We know about faith and we have heard that the greatest of the trinity of belief, faith, hope and love is love. But we can’t have faith without hope. We can’t have love without hope. Hope is an important element to carrying out our lives but it is essential for living a life of abundance. I understand that it might be considered poor form to speak of bones to people who are having surgery on bones this week or have had to live through it in the past. But those of us who have brittle bones know how important bones can be. They are the framework of our bodies. But if you think back over this story of Ezekiel and the bones, it is the breath that breaths back over these bones and brings them to life. That breath is hope. Hope is what Nelson Mandela had – a vision, a dream of a South Africa where people were equal regardless of all of the divides that could and do divide people -=--- Martin Luther King Jr had a dream of a new world order where all people regardless of race worked together, lived side by side and had equal opportunities. Hope through vision is what makes us want to move forward. Hope is the Spirit of God that inspires us. And when we lose hope, we need vision, and without vision, we know what it says. To get to hope we need prophetic movements and prophetic sight and voices. Imagine a sailing vessel lost at sea. A person is at the top of a mast, a person who is on a sailing vessel seeking land from a crow’s nest at the very top. That person has the best view, the vision, the best clarity. Imagine that the crew and those on board are very sick, tired, hungry, thirsty and needing encouragement. That is the role of a Prophet. Ezekiel’s vision is not clear in this scripture. He is the prophet but what he saw was not that clear. Still he was told to prophesy. What can you take from this? If you are called on to bring hope from a bird’s eye view there are two rules: 1) be accurate and 2) don’t keep the good news to yourself. No one on that sailing vessel wants to hear from a person in the crow’s nest that says, “we might make it, dunno. It’s land, but no big deal.” And climbs down. This has been the latest Quaker attitude towards our meetings, our denomination and our faith, and it shows. We need to hear the good news. “I see land!!!” And be accurate – “It’s a bit fuzzy, but it sure looks like land, and I think we can make it.” We have a new generation that is coming to us and we need to stay strong for them to get here. And we need to give them a here to get to. We have to keep proclaiming the good news, encouraging, stating the good things. Prophets paint the picture that says “You can actually do this!!! And this is how!” It might seem impossible to the next guy, but think about it – racism was at its height when Martin Luther King Jr, took the podium and said to people who had been beaten, watched their neighbors hung in trees, had to use different bathrooms and water fountains, back doors and never could get a job or a decent education. Yet Martin Luther King Junior started his speech with “I have a dream” If he had started that speech with “I have a few fears” then we would not have the equality we have in this country. It takes gumption to speak with clarity a faithful message. If you are in the crow’s nest you will see what others cannot, and they might be sick, they might be hungry, they might have given up – and you WILL without a doubt, look like a fool. They will not believe you. They can only see the sides of the ship. Still you have to say, “I see land, and I think we can make it!” You have to be bold enough say to dry bones, get up!!!! God says you can get up out of your graves. You might feel a little under the weather today, but I tell you, you can live again. The word Ezekiel means God will strengthen. According the story that birthed this idea that God brings strength through hope came a story of a man who was a priest, born into that line of priests and lived in the Haight Ashbury section of Babylon for young up and coming Hebrew who were in exile. Ezekiel was an educated and upper class man of middle age, and he lived on the Mound of Deluge. I love the irony written into these Hebrew tales. But Ezekiel had a mission in his home in this place of much water. He turned his home into a place for people to think new things and invite creativity. Is that not the greatest idea? Ezekiel invited people in to see visions and get prophetic insights. His was a place that one of my friends would call, a place without lines or boxes. That is, Ezekiel invited people into his home to imagine living outside of the self-imposed box and to color outside of the lines society had said. What an incredible mission Ezekiel had!! The young Hebrew people were prisoners in the country. This is a story of people who felt cut off, who felt isolated, like people on a boat cut off from sustaining land. They had come to this place of water for a vision of life, for prophetic inspiration. Ezekiel gave them a place for that to happen. By providing the place, and encouraging being different from others, or freeing them from expectations, Ezekiel allowed his home to be the valley of dry bones. These young Jewish people brought their dry bones (their sullenness, their despair) to Ezekiel, and he prophesied to them (offered a place to be creative, to think differently than society, to be outside the Hebrew box at the time). My questions to you are, “What is your valley of dry bones – what place do you have to offer that open to new ways of thinking? What is your mount of deluge? And how do you inspire hope in what seems to be a hopeless situation? How do you get bones to get up and know they can have meat on them again, that they can dance again, that they can walk again? What can we do to inspire that kind of creativity—how do we create an Ezekiel’s house here at West Elkton Friends? How do we inspire hope?” In March of 2007 in Japan the scientists gathered to talk about the scientific data associated with hope. Most of these scientists who conducted experiments were faculty members or employed by the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Social Science. The scientists focused on one city, Kamaishi. This is a city in need of hope. It is aging, impoverished, and has a horribly inadequate educational system. Its steel industry had just collapsed in 2005. People were unemployed and those employed were underemployed. Yet like live infants found under rubble of a huge deluge of a tsunami, there was still life living under this debris of a Japanese society, and they wanted to study this hope. More than 76% of the people told the scientists that they had hope that their lives, personal lives, not in the far future and not just for generations to come – but their own lives would improve. Why in the world in the face of so much change in their society and in that city’s hard life did hope still prevail? Only 3.7% of the people said that “hopes are make believe” or that “hope is unnecessary.” Those who were the most hopeful had a better sense of well-being. The origin of hope seemed to start really early in their lives, having been nurtured by the family of the individual. The ones who were the most hopeful were encouraged as children to find their skills and make the most of them. Their family expected them to succeed, but the level of success was something that they could reach. Those who kept a hopeful attitude were most likely to have been encouraged and the idea that others had hope for them in the early part of their lives helped them to have hope during hard times. Another factor is that the number of people who felt isolated due to what they called the breakdown of the family, that is the number of people who lived alone in a household or were children of single parents – these people do not reignite their hopes as well as those who have family who were supportive and hopeful of them to become resilient. What helped these families was when employment was available for single parents so that they could easily care for their families. This not only helped the parent to be more hopeful, but the children scored higher on tests that measured hopefulness. There is a hope-gap when it comes to young people now. The young people in this study were seen as being less hopeful, to feel trapped and feel despair. But what the study showed was that if their support systems were increased and their opportunities were increased, then hopefulness was breathed into them. They were able to thrive even in the worst of circumstances. How do we breathe hope? There are pockets of hopelessness all over – how do we help others to see their potentials, to encourage opportunities, to make way for people to rise to abundance? There are bones all around us. There are valleys of bones, small meetings looking at us for inspiration. It felt so good to be at Salem last week and see swatches of cloth as they are growing, making ends meet, looking for a future as they put together new cushion covers for their meeting house. It was wonderful to be in the office of Colin Saxton as he looked so invigorated talking about turning on the FUM presses again. It was wonderful to sit with the New Association of Friends as they got one piece of good news after another. It was great to see the people from his meeting at the gathering last week at Whitewater Park. Our youth gathered in a room of their own is a sign of dry bones now rising full of life. There are lots of places where we see the bones getting covered again, where we feel the breath of God blowing on us. You have that of God in you. You can breathe God’s breath into situations. When you see bones, breathe into them. Prophesy to the bones around you. If someone feels hopeless, breathe encouragement. If someone needs help finding their footing, help them find their footing. Breathe on these bones so that they get up and dance, so that they have breath in them. Christ came that people might have life and have it more abundantly. We can be about this abundance, this bringing the life to what feels dead. If your life has a dead spot, speak to it, encourage yourself as they say. You can regain hope. We are here to be of help to you in that regard. Tell us where you need hope, where your life needs the breath of God. Create an Ezekiel place for you, a place of much water in the valley of dry bones. What is a place where you feel the movement of God? What prophesies to your bones? Do you have a place to go to that encourages you to think differently and lets you be free to be yourself and think with clarity? That is an Ezekiel place to be. As we go into open worship we will be singing accopella hymn number 144 in the teal hymnal “Spirit of the Living God,” and as we close worship today we will end with the same song. Please be mindful of the queries as you focus on worship. Queries: • What is your valley of dry bones? • What place do you have to offer that open to new ways of thinking? Where do you go to be creative? • How do you inspire hope in what seems to be a hopeless situation? • How do you get bones to get up and know they can have meat on them again, that they can dance again, that they can walk again? • What can we do to inspire that kind of creativity? • How do we create an Ezekiel’s house here at West Elkton Friends? • How do we inspire hope?
Posted on: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 02:23:55 +0000
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