A way forward where there is no way

There is this joke sometimes that preachers only ever have one sermon and they give it every week just wrapping it up in different passages of scripture. Of course it's not entireeeeely true but I'm sure you've been in churches before where you sit in the pews week after week and think: Hmm.. I think I've heard this one before.

A pastor's one sermon might sound something like "God is always with you, in the good and the bad, always God is right beside you."

Or it might be like uhh "There is nothing you can do to earn God's love, you have always and will always have it."

Or perhaps the classic sermon that you can never hear enough: "How we treat the least among us, the poor the oppressed the downtrodden, is what matters more than anything." I think we could hear that every week and never really quite have heard it enough.

Of course these preachers who have their one sermon they preach over and over, myself included, aren't just making these things up. Preachers repeat themselves because the bible repeats itself, and this story we hear from Ezekiel is one instance in a long line of scripture that says "When do you think you've reached the end of the road, God can make a way forward."

In Genesis 1, God takes a look at void, and imagines in it and creates out of it, this world. God saw a blank canvas and saw in it, you and me and all of us and all of this. From a void, God saw the way forward. This world.

In Exodus, Moses has lead his people out of Egypt but the army is chasing behind, and pinched between the edge of the Red Sea and the encroaching Egyptian chariots, Moses might imagine that they are cooked. But God looks at the vast expanse of the sea, and sees a road through it.

In Daniel, God looks at this furnace that is so hot is it melting people who are outside of it, and says Shadrach, Meschach, Abednego, there is life for you on the other side of this furnace.

In Ezekiel, God surveys a valley full of dry old bones -- bones that are not just bones but are an image of the fallen Israelite people, the same people that Moses led across the Red Sea, the people who were cast out of Jerusalem when it was destroyed by King Nebuchadnezzar, the same Nebuchadnezzar who threw the men in the furnace. God sees these bones of God's people and says, a little prophesying, a little breath, and this is not the end of the line for these people.

And we all know it's the same story yet again in the Gospel when God looks at the cross and the tomb and says "I've got a little trick up my sleeve." If this was the only sermon we ever heard, I think it would still be hard to internalize, still hard to wrap our minds around. Sometimes, when it seems like there is no way forward for us, there is a way that you cannot imagine, there is an outcome you cannot imagine, there is possibility that you really just cannot believe. There can be a way forward.

There are of course the biblical cases that this sermon can speak into- there is the way out of the void, the tomb, there is a way across the sea or out of the valley. There are smaller or individual circumstances this sermon can speak into: maybe,

I don't know how I'm going to make it through finals week,

This week at work is gonna kill me

There is simply too much to get done before Christmas.

I have a conflict with someone and I don't know how we're gonna fix it.

From this pulpit I can't make those things go away, I can't make them smaller, I would never try to tell you that they don't feel as big as they feel because I've got situations like that too. All I'm saying is that maybe, we hold the stress, the anxiety, the uncertainty, the anger, the confoundedness we feel in one hand, and in the other, we hold the possibility that everything will be okay and in a way that we cannot plan for, that we cannot expect, and that we have no control over, just like Shad rach, just like Moses, just like Ezekiel.

The uhhh, the big example that I have has kinda been on my mind for months, months and months, years and years, even and I wonder if you are holding the same quiet thought to yourself. We find ourselves in quiet a political pickle in America don't we. It feels like we have never been more divided, more in disagreement, and more and more unwilling to listen, and I've found more and more lately that I am lacking the imagination for what our collective future holds. People are just so, so angry and most of the projections for what our collective political future holds involves some variation of like, everybody I disagree with magically disappearing,

or having a total conversion of heart that I had nothing to do with.

I don't know what will happen, but I do know there's really nowhere to hide 100,000,000 people, and whatever happens we will all be stuck with each other, and have to figure out how to live together, one way or another, eventually. I don't know what it'll look like, and on my least imaginative days it feels like I'm staring down The Void or The Edge of the Red Sea or The Valley Full of Bones.

I do not see how we are going to reconcile all of what has been broken, but I read this passage - one story in a long lineage of stories that we are even still living today - and I wonder if what it's saying is that we do not have to know what to do, or figure it out ourselves. We simply have to believe that there is a way forward, and when God presents it, we take it.

Maybe this passage is a reminder that our own imaginations are but a sliver of the hopeful, reconciled, true future that God has planned for us. The bones can live. The sea can be crossed. The furnace can be survived. We don't have to leave anybody behind or cast anybody aside. If the future seems like opaque, just remember what God can make out of a void, or some bones. Amen.