Can These Bones Live?

Rev. Dr. William F. Schulz

August 5, 2007

When I ended my term as President of the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1993, I vowed that I would never preach in the pulpit of any minister who had not been kind to me when I was President. That automatically eliminated about 50% of our congregations. The president of the UU is not always treated with the greatest of respect. When I was President, I once arrived at a small church in western Massachusetts a few minutes before I was to speak at the Sunday service. The church sexton greeted me with a warm welcome. “Dr Schulz,” he said, “I’m about to ring the morning bell and I want to explain to you my philosophy of bell-ringing. I ring the church bell once, you see, when our own minister is preaching. I ring it twice when we have a guest minister. And I ring it three times when the President of the UUA is in the pulpit or when some other natural disaster befalls the community.” So I set limits to the pulpits which I would occupy but Clearwater is not on my negative ledger both because Abhi was not even in our ministry when I was President and hence had no opportunity to offend me and because in recent years Abhi and Lalitha have become dear friends. So I am delighted to be with you this morning.

Now because I am not your minister and you therefore cannot fire me, I have chosen a Biblical text for my sermon this morning, the famous story from the Book of Ezekiel of the Dry Bones. You remember how the passage goes:

“The hand of the Lord was upon me - and he set me down in the midst of the valley; it was full of bones - and they were very dry. And he said to me, “Can these bones live? Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God: “Behold, I will cause my spirit to enter into you and you shall live. And I will lay my sinews upon you and will cause flesh to come upon you and cover you with skin and you shall live.”’”

So I prophesied as I was commanded and as I prophesied there was a noise and behold a rattling and the bones came together, bone unto bone, and there were sinews on them and flesh had come upon them and skin had covered them but there was no breath in them. And the Lord said, “Prophesy to the breath and say, ‘Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” So I prophesied and the breath came into them. And the Lord God said, “These bones are the house of Israel. Tell them I will raise you from your graves and settle you on your soil, place you in your own land, and you shall live.”

Now this strange, if familiar, story, is particularly touching, as you can imagine, to one who has spent the last decade and a half in intimate familiarity with the dry bones of the killing fields of Rwanda and Bosnia and now Darfur. Is there any way in which we can say that those bones live? Any way to say meaningfully that any bones, any lives, transcend the ultimate horizon of death?

Well, when Vaclav Havel was inaugurated as President of what is now the Czech Republic, he addressed this question very directly: "My...program,” he said, “is...to bring spirituality, moral responsibility, humaneness and humility into politics and in that respect to make clear...that our deeds do not disappear into the dark hole of time."

What a remarkable thing for anyone to say, much less a would-be politician. I don’t know about you but I’m more used to politicians saying stupid things than wise ones. Maybe it’s different here in Florida but in Massachusetts a Democratic state senator got on statewide radio one night and proclaimed in a loud and fervent tone, “the Republican octopus is spreading its testicles across the entire Commonwealth.” So Havel’s wise words were a surprise and how fervently I would guess we hope what he said is true: that spirituality, moral responsibility, humility and humaneness might indeed ensure that our deeds not disappear into the dark hole of time. Are we in other words saved through history, through our human acts, as Havel would have it, or beyond it or not at all?

Well, I would not pretend to tell you whether or not you are saved but I think I do know what rescues us from the dark hole of time: "I will put my spirit into you," God says to the Israelites, "And I will settle you on your own soil." There are only two ways to be rescued from the dark hole of time: one is to live a life of attentiveness and radiance; the other is to give one's life to something which transcends it.

Every single one of us, I think, at one time or another asks ourselves what direction our lives will take from here; what passions will seize us; what fidelities will claim us; and whether anything we do will escape the dark hole of time. "Can these bones live?" Now some people of course make a name for themselves, which in and of itself guarantees them transport beyond the dark hole of time. S. J. Perelman once referred to God as "that quaint old subordinate of Douglas MacArthur's." But the vast majority of us are not as famous as Douglas MacArthur and no matter how hard we try, how much we accomplish, how much we be praised, in the last analysis we all go down to dust.

What this means, I think, is that the way to judge the value of a life is not so much by its reputation or its longevity or even its achievements as by its present quality, by the keenness of our sensibilities, the curiosity of our spirits, the engagement of our minds, by how many hearts we've gladdened, by, in other words, the first of the two ways I know to save ourselves from the dark hole of time, namely, by our attentiveness and our radiance. "I will put my spirit in you," says Isaiah.

The ballet provides a metaphor for what I am saying. The choreography of a ballet is not a static thing; every company which performs it, creates it virtually afresh. In this sense dance is always disappearing before our eyes. We know that Nijinsky, for instance, was a great master of the ballet because history tells us so but we can't say exactly why. There exists only one short film of Nijinsky in performance and no record of his steps. Proof of his greatness is as elusive as his reply to the question of how he managed to leap so high: "The secret is this," he said. "Most people, when they jump in the air, come down to earth all at once. The secret is to stay in the air a while before you return." History remembers Nijinsky but the only people who can ever truly understand are those who saw him. Dance is not something you can save for the ages; only celebrate in the moment.