Sunday March 26 - De Profundis

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Lectionary A – Fifth Sunday in Lent

Psalm 130 - Out of the depths

Ezekial 37:1-14 – Shall these dry bones live

Romans 8:61-11 – with the spirit there is peace

John 11:1-45 – Jesus wept

               Out of the depths I call. This is not mere skeletons in the closet or the attic. It is a valley of dry bones. As if Gettysburg left the dead uncovered and unburied and became a desert. Hard grass and wind and bones. The wound of our nation stitched up wrong or not at all. What Wendell Berry named as our hidden wound.

               Why go back this far? Well, it is the only war fought on U.S. soil. It spawned US terrorism which continues today. With the compromise of 1876, the efforts for what some historians call the second revolution were suspended and unfulfilled. They call it that because it culminated in efforts to make true in law what was the aspirations of the declaration of independence. The north had what Robert Penn Warren calls the “treasury of virtue” and with the northern armies leading the reconstruction in the south, the north was never reconstructed at all.

Shall these dry bones live?

            Son of man, these bones are like the people of the United States. For “our bones have dried up and our hope is gone.” Among the ruin, among the dry husks of conversation and dialogue. Public discourse that is loud and outrageous, but also newspaper words, quickly turning into dry leaves rustling in the grass, into paper for boxing the china for storage or wrapping fish.

               Lord, can these words live? Can they bring life? Build a bridge to life? Or only a series of detonations, destroying all sense of connection. Until our history is lost or flattened to the embossed letters of a meme. Replaced by streaming service.

               Oh Mary, must you weep twice? Your brother is dead. He is tomb rolled. We know you cry for him. Cry so much or so genuine that Jesus will join you in weeping. And then later, the angels will catch you weeping again about another who is tomb rolled. Weeping is the text sometimes. It is weeping that leads to dreaming and new mornings. Please God.

               Dare we believe? Dare we have faith like Martha? She who in her faith mines us another “I AM” gems? “I am the resurrection and the life.” But who can believe it? And if we don’t, where is our hope among the dry bones? Among the din of paper wasp leader?

               “If our thinking is with the spirit then there is life and peace.”

               Out of the depths. Have mercy. Redeem the united states from all of our sins.

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