Friday night was Halloween. It is one of those strange and funny dates and celebrations in the calendar that our society marks and has fun with. You may have had trick or treaters come to your door for candy, or you were out trick or treating as a kid or as a parent. It is quite the community event. I have to confess that I have always kind of loved Halloween. As a kid, I enjoyed dressing up, make belief, meeting all the neighbours; As a parent, I loved seeing the joy in my children and often walked about with them in our Kitchener Auditorium neighbourhood – which does Halloween well. For years our neighbour across the street did fun life-sized Pumpkin people, and when you hit Lydia Street there were over 300 kids, and all sorts of neat displays and one house that always had a Dad juggling fire and just this community energy and excitement. Now it is mostly staying at home and handing out candy and greeting everyone coming to the door… and seeing granddaughter Briar in the cutest Dog costume. Growing up, my Dad hated Halloween. He got grumpy and wouldn’t help us much. I think it was all just a bit too wild for him, and he worried about the dark side of Halloween – the whole history of it being a pagan celebration and so connected to death and evil, and all the ghosts and witches and skeletons, even as some have connected it to All Saints Day and a remembrance of those who have died. It was also too much bother for him – us kids trying to figure out home-made costumes, and having to get candy and have people at your door all night.
This week I did become a little more curious about some of our Halloween symbols. I have noticed a kind of recent obsession with skeletons. There are more and more of these huge scary skeletons that are almost as tall as the houses they stand in front of. 12 feet high is common! You’ve seen them right? Towering over the yard. Looking scary. What is this obsession all about? This may be reading something into it, but I wonder if we as a society become more obsessed and consumed by images of skeletons or death and darkness, when our lives and the world itself seem more dark and hopeless, when people feel they have less control and voice and agency in life. Is it a kind of protest to everything going on, or simply a mirror of something people are feeling? At least you can put up a skeleton and have the neighbours take notice. In our culture, there has been a fascination in the last years with skeletons, with death, with zombies and all the zombie movies, and with all the horror and science fiction and dystopian novels and movies of a world that is getting darker and darker, governed by dark forces and mystery and control. It is apocalyptic. This stuff sells. Is it a sign of some of the hopelessness that people feel, or is it just escapism, a way to give your imagination a place to go. Perhaps it speaks to a dryness of spirit and life, a void people feel, and even to some of people’s deepest fears or lack of hope in the future.
So I did laugh a bit at the irony of timing when our Ezekiel passage and all its skeletons and dry bones fell on the same weekend as Halloween. The vision that the prophet Ezekiel describes could match any Halloween display of today. There is a scary valley full of bones everywhere you look, and then a rattling noise of the bones coming together, and sinews and flesh starting to cover these bones, before the breath of life is finally breathed into them and they come alive and stand on their feet – a vast multitude. What a strange vision!
It is not the first strange vision that the prophet Ezekiel has had. He was a strange duck! Ezekiel was a prophet that spoke right out of the tough experience of the exile – he was one of the people taken to Babylon and spoke from that context, from the inside. He follows the threefold pattern too from Richard Rohr that Janet outlined a few weeks ago. The beginning chapters of Ezekiel speak from the anger and dismay of exile and are filled with judgement for the people of Israel – they brought this upon themselves with their evil ways and lack of justice. Early on, he literally eats one of the scrolls. His first dream or vision is of God’s glory, represented by a chariot in the whirlwind of 4 living creatures and a gleaming wheel covered in eyes and this Glory of God leaving Jerusalem and the Temple and coming to Babylon, abandoning where the people thought God was present. There is a vision of the siege of Jerusalem – judgement, disaster, destruction. Then there is this stage of sadness or grief, the way of tears as Janet quoted from Richard Rohr, where one laments the exile. For 390 days Ezekiel was instructed to lie on his one side and eat bread, symbolizing 390 years of Israel’s iniquity and then 40 more on the other side for Judah, and then he is told to use human waste and cow dung to cook his food. It’s not pretty. I told you he was a strange duck.
And then we get to the valley of dry bones. You would think it might just stay in this depressing scene. Is God done with the people of Israel for good? But here we move to that third stage of the prophets of compassion and forgiveness and new hope, of the promise of new live beyond exile, of grace personified. Back to our culture’s obsession with everything from skeletons to zombies to dystopian literature and movies. With these, there is no movement to hope. The world keeps getting darker. The book moves to more and more control of our lives. The movie ends in terror. And for the people in exile in Babylon, that must have been what they thought their life trajectory would be when they heard about this valley of bones that so matched their lived experience.
But here the vision of Ezekiel takes a dramatic unexpected turn. Ezekiel is led around this valley of dry bones and asked ‘Can these bones live?’ ‘O Lord God, you know.’ And then he is told to prophesy to these bones about breath entering them, upon which the sinews and flesh start to cover the bones – still lifeless, and then to be the one to say to come from the 4 winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. Upon which the very breath of God came into them and they stood up on their feet and came back to life. The Lord makes the direct connection, the meaning of the metaphor. ‘Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel who say ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ ‘But I will put my Spirit within you and you shall live.’
There is a key word here in this passage, as we heard from Sandy – the word in Hebrew is ‘Ruah’ and it appears 10 times – translated first as the Spirit of the Lord, then as literal breath, our breathing, and then as the wind, and then the breath again that fills the bones and makes them live, and then again as the spirit being put within the people. All the same word. All Ruah. Spirit, breath, wind. This word Ruah, and the whole connection of Spirit to breath makes me think of choral singing and all the breath involved. The other celebration for me this weekend, other than Halloween (and the Jays winning/being so close to winning the World Series and watching these games late into the nights) was the 70th Anniversary concert last night with Menno Singers, right here in our sanctuary. It is quite a legacy of singing, begun by Abner Martin, who at one point was one of our SJMC song leaders. I can’t believe I have sung with Menno Singers now for 32 years! It is in singing choral music, that I have become much more aware of my breath, and breath support and the role it plays in singing and life itself. You often start a rehearsal with breath exercises – ‘0oo – sh, sh, Ooo – sh, sh), or deep breaths in on 4 and out on 4. Deep sighs. You learn about your diaphragm and lungs and breathing deeply, and giving you the support you need for long musical phrases. It is said that singers can have lungs as big as or bigger than runners. Your breath totally undergirds your voice and gives it its life and tone and musicality. Without breath, there is no song.
So I paid attention to all this talk about breath and wind and spirit, Ruah, in our passage. What might it mean for God’s breath to blow through our lives? We talk about catching our breath, or someone taking our breath away, or being as close to us as our breath. Can the Spirit of God blow through our lives, and can God be as close to us as our very breath? What would that look like? Sandy began the service by asking us to reflect on times when our lives get dry. When we feel abandoned or desolate, and it feels like God is nowhere to be found. She had us imagine a time of dryness in our lives. Are you there God? I just feel so dry. Breathe into our tired living.
When Sandy and I met, we also talked about the kinds of things that cause us to feel dry. It can be the context around us – whether our jobs, our family situation, the politics of our world, difficult personal circumstances. We talked too about some of the shifts in society we perceive coming out of the recent Covid years – a sense of people being more opinionated, grumpier, cynical, more at odds, and even the reality of hate speech and what all goes on online that seems to feed on each other. We are all aware of the algorithms of our social media feeds that tend to bring us into darker and dryer places before we know it. It becomes an echo chamber. It is like those skeletons that keep getting bigger, or the zombie movies or dystopian novels – those forces that want to draw us down and bring us and our world into darker places – with no movement towards hope. Is this what the valley of dry bones looks like in our contemporary lives? A kind of personal or collective darkness? Last week, Kandace reminded us that the Jeremiah passage – ‘For I know the plans I have for you’ – was not one directed to us as individuals, that catchy slogan or saying for your bedroom wall, as helpful as that may be, but rather they were words spoken to the people as a whole. Ezekiel too is prophesying to the whole people, ‘these bones are the whole people of God.’ We can’t do this alone. We share this dryness as a people.
So we started to ask how we might start to turn those algorithms around, for us individually, but also for us as a collective people of God? Are there practices that work like a positive algorithm – lifting us up rather than bringing us down? How do we catch our breath? Some of these may be done together, and some may be on your own. I think immediately about week to week worship – this time when we gather to pray and sing and hear Scripture and collectively try to discern the will of God. For me it is choral music and singing in a choir – doing this together. But it is also spending time in God’s creation, spending time with family and little ones, exercising, playing games, being with friends, Eating together. You may each have a whole list of activities that lift you up rather than bring you down, that get you going in a positive algorithm. The other Sunday, we met as pastors with some of our young adults in another Meals that Matter. We went around as we do, sharing in a circle – what everyone is up to this Fall, what our gratitudes are, and where we see the red thread of God’s faithfulness and goodness in our lives and in our world. We were so struck as pastors by the positive framework and perspective these young adults expressed – they see what they are doing at school or summer camp or in their work, or even as they support friends who are struggling, as something contributing a positive energy to our world, as something breathing of new life.
Richard Rohr writes of our passage ‘Here we have unearned restoration and renewal given by God to the exiles for the taking… “O my people, I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil.” Our job, too, is to breathe together with God upon the dry bones that are always present throughout the world and make them live, just as God has breathed on ours.’ (Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things, Convergent, New York, 2025, p. 137)
There are overwhelming things going on in our world right now, and in our lives. It can feel dry. But God’s Spirit is with us and our world, gently breathing wind, breath, spirit, into our tired living, putting flesh on dry bones and breathing life into them, bringing them to life. Thanks be to God.
Our song of response and our prayer song are on two pages just opposite to each other – Voices Together 739 and 740. You can turn to them now. The first acknowledges our dryness, our empty hands and invites God to fill them, to breathe in life. After we have sung this, I invite you in the time of silence to open your hands and to see and imagine how God might be wanting to fill them, and blow God’s spirit into your life. We will end the Time of Silence by asking The Spirit of the Living God to fall afresh on me, on us. We will sing it twice.