Sermon: You Shall Live

Text: Ezekiel 37:1-14

Date: March 13, 2005

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

“I Will Die.” That’s the title of an intriguing short film now showing at the Seattle Art Museum in the Chinese photography exhibit. I’m sorry I can’t tell you the name of the artist, a Chinese man who introduced himself to dozens of people and asked them to look into his video camera and say three words: “I will die.” Half his subjects were Chinese and half American. The people look into the lens, say the line, and then the camera watches them react to hearing themselves say these words. Some of them laugh, as if they don’t really believe it. Some of them look off to the right or the left. You can see a change come over the faces of some, like a cloud passing over the light in their eyes. In a few cases the camera seems to capture a very intimate moment, the first acknowledgment of personal mortality.

I was reading the gospel of Mark with the confirmation class a few days ago and we stumbled across a verse in which Jesus is quoting the Hebrew scriptures to make a point: “Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.” [Mark 7:10] Hearing that brought the little circle of teenagers up short—from the reaction I’d guess it’s just possible that they have spoken evil of their mothers or fathers in a heated moment. Not that any of us older folks would ever have done that when we were 13, 14, 15 years old! “Is that true?” one student asked. Well, it’s pretty hard to argue with it. You will surely die—whether you “diss” your mom and pop or not.

Try saying those words, “I will die.” Go ahead and say them out loud. Have you said that aloud before? Weird, isn’t it? In truth, we humans spend a lot of energy trying to avoid that reality. One scholar who studies the work of Ernest Becker, author of The Denial of Death, says that the clash between our overwhelming urge to continue living and our awareness of mortality “creates a reservoir of potentially immobilizing, debilitating anxiety.”[1] I could see that reservoir of anxiety bubble up in the faces of some of the people in the art video as they heard themselves say, “I will die.” I even caught a glimpse of it in the confirmation class, though we did not dwell on it. Maybe a wisp of anxiety tickled at you when you said, “I will die.”

We don’t enjoy feeling anxious, and we certainly don’t enjoy dwelling on our own mortality. It might surprise us, then, that St. Benedict, the founder of one of the great monastic movements of the Christian church, gave this advice to Christians: “Keep your own death before you each day.” One wonders why he would say that when he must have known instinctively that keeping our own death before us might immobilize and debilitate us with anxiety. Writer Parker Palmer spent some time thinking about this advice, and I really appreciate what he concluded. “In silence and solitude we are compelled to ask whether there are signs of life in the universe besides our own words, relations, and activities. If we begin to see such signs, we are embarked on a spiritual journey that takes us toward the eternal source from which our own temporary vitality comes. That is why [St. Benedict’s advice], ‘keep your own death before your eyes each day,’ is not a counsel of morbidity but a reminder to keep looking for signs of larger life. In our world, where the forces of death loom so large, Christian renewal depends on our capacity to...[join in] that search [for the eternal source, for signs of larger life].”[2]

There are two insights here. First, I think he’s saying that if we keep our own death before our eyes each day, we might come to realize that our death is not the end of the world. We can put our death in perspective if we keep it conscious in some way. If we banish thoughts of death to the subconscious, that’s when anxiety becomes immobilizing and debilitating; denial paradoxically makes death loom larger on the psychological horizon. Our mortality becomes the monster in the closet if we refuse to deal with it, keeping us frozen in fear, afraid to move.

Secondly and more importantly, the spiritual journey that Palmer speaks of puts our life and death in the context of the larger life that both dwarfs and gives meaning to our own existence. “We are embarked on a spiritual journey that takes us toward the eternal source from which our own temporary vitality comes.” I love that phrase, “temporary vitality.” (Can you imagine a dialogue on a hospital drama, where the worried relative asks the emergency room physician, “Is he alive, doctor?” and the answer comes, “Yes, he is temporarily vital.”) We draw our temporary vitality from God who is eternally vital, larger than life, larger than death. Our lives are like a candle next to the sun. But in the faith story that is our story, being a candle next to the sun shouldn’t make us feel puny but powerful, because we are vessels of that immense energy, that mighty force. Our life force is the same substance as the life force that made us. So when our little candle disappears from view, we are simply rejoining the sun, burning on with unimaginable vigor, throwing light to the furthest reaches of the universe. “Mortal,” God addressed the prophet, “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.” [Ezekiel 37:14]

Ezekiel’s vision puts death, and what feels like death, into perspective in a very dramatic way. As the vision opens the prophet sees himself set down in the middle of a valley full of bones. Dry bones, lying all around, as far as the eye can see. Sounds like the opening scene of a horror movie. Ezekiel’s people probably felt like they were in a horror movie, only for real. They had been forcibly removed from their home and exiled in a foreign land. Everything that they had thought made life worth living had been wrenched away from them. What Ezekiel saw was how they felt.

“Mortal, can these bones live?” Ezekiel is not stupid; it was obvious that bones that far gone couldn’t live. But Ezekiel is not stupid; he’s dealing with God here, so he allows as how God knows better than he does. With the prophet’s help and cooperation, God brings life to those dry bones. The power of God to create life completely overwhelms the power of death to end it. A surprise reversal. Death is unmasked, revealed as nothing but a temporary lack of vitality.

God’s words to and through the prophet are intended to comfort those whose hope was lost in the looming shadow of death. “Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people…And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.” I know Yahweh was speaking to the Israelites about bringing them home out of exile. But those words speak to me today of a comforting confidence that the grave is not a dead end. Yes, we’re all going to wind up in a grave. But God will open up those graves, and bring us up from them. The grave need not inspire immobilizing anxiety for us; there’s a door in the floor, and God’s holding the key.

“I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.” We don’t have to wait for the grave to see that promise fulfilled. There is a quality of life that becomes possible when we realize that we need not fear the passageway of death. You shall live! Live, not just pass time. The life that has cast off the immobilizing anxiety over death shines with a different kind of light.

I was poking around in some books the other day and found a reference to Fannie Lou Hamer. Theologian Letty Russell spoke of her admiration for civil rights activist Hamer because she lived through the worst that could be done to her and emerged from that low place knowing that she couldn’t be touched any more. She was beaten in body but not in spirit.

Let me tell you a bit about Fannie Lou Hamer.

Fannie Lou Hamer was born on October 6, 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi. Her parents were sharecroppers and farmed land on a plantation. Fannie was the last child of twenty children, six girls and fourteen boys. She contracted polio as a child and because there no vaccine for polio at the time, she was left with a limp. Although she was short and had a limp, her mother always told her to "stand up no matter what the odds."

At the age of six, she began picking cotton to help the family. She said, "By the time I was thirteen I was picking two and three hundred pounds." Fannie only attended school after the harvest, which wasn't for very long, she said, "My parents tried so hard to do what they could to keep us in school, but school [for black children] didn't last but four months out of the year and most of the time we didn't have clothes to wear. I dropped out of school and cut cornstalks to help the family." She dropped out of school after the sixth grade. Even though she did not obtain a formal education, she became a dynamic speaker and civil rights worker.

In 1944, Fannie married Perry "Pap" Hamer. They moved to the Marlow plantation in Ruleville, Mississippi and became sharecroppers. During the 1960's Fannie became interested in the civil rights movement. She became involved in voter registration when members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) came to Mississippi. During this time, African-Americans were deterred from voting in the South. When Hamer and others from her city went to register to vote, they were asked to interpret the state's constitution. So, naturally, being unable to do so, Hamer flunked and was not allowed to register to vote. On the return trip home, the bus in which she and the others were riding was stopped for being "the wrong color." She and the others were jailed and later released. This sort of harassment was a typical experience for blacks in the South.

In 1963, after her third attempt, Hamer passed the test and became a registered voter. In order to assist other African-Americans in registering to vote, Hamer became a field secretary for SNCC and traveled across the South. On June 9, 1963, during one of the trips to South Carolina, the bus in which she and other SNCC workers was riding was stopped in Winona, Mississippi. When some of the workers went into the "white only" waiting room, the whole group was arrested. While in custody, Hamer and other workers were beaten unmercifully. Hamer suffered extreme injuries, which bothered her throughout the rest of her life. She said of the incident:

"Three white men came into my room. One was a state highway policeman…They said they were going to make me wish I was dead. They made me lay down on my face and they ordered two Negro prisoners to beat me with a blackjack. That was unbearable. The first prisoner beat me until he was exhausted, then the second Negro began to beat me….They beat me until I was hard, 'til I couldn't bend my fingers or get up when they told me to. That's how I got this blood clot in my eye--the sight's nearly gone now. My kidney was injured from the blows they gave me on the back."

SNCC lawyers bailed her and the others out and filed suit against the Winona police. All the white men who were charged were found not guilty. This injustice made Hamer more determined to fight for equal rights in Mississippi. She is famous for the words she said when she awoke in the mornings, "I am sick and tired of being sick and tired."

Fannie Lou Hamer went on after that beating to speak all over the country for civil rights. She challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation to the Democratic convention in 1964. She worked tirelessly to end injustice against her people. She was very clear about the source of her power, saying, “Christ was a revolutionary person. That's what God is all about, and that's where I get my strength." Her favorite song to sing was “This Little Light of Mine.”

One of the things she said along the way makes me think she had her life and death in the right perspective. She was threatened with death many times, and nearly beaten to death once. But she said, “What was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.” What was the point of being scared? The only they could do to me was kill me. Now that’s a grave that has been opened up wide. God’s spirit was within her, and she was alive.

We tell the truth when we say those words, “I will die.” But God has another truth to tell: “You shall live.” Whether we live or whether we die we belong to God, source and keeper of our vitality. If you are buried in fear about the end of your own story, let God open up that grave. Step out from that shadowy place, step out with your little light into the brilliance of never-ending day to take up with courage the work to which you are called. The end of your story is something God alone can see; but we’ve been given the gift of seeing even from this bone-littered valley that we shall live.

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[1] Liechty, Daniel “Mortality, Denial and Truth: Diffusing the Rancor in Conflicting Cultural Worldviews”

[2] Palmer, Parker “Borne Again: The Monastic Way to Church Renewal” Weavings, Vol. 1, No. 1