April 27, 2025
• Rev. Rob Fuquay
St. Luke’s UMC
April 27, 2025
Confirmation
Graves into Gardens
“The Story You Tell Yourself”
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Last Sunday on Easter we celebrated Jesus rising from a grave in a garden. Today, we consider the story we just heard, the greatest Graves Into Gardens’ story in the Old Testament. As we get ready for the message this morning, let us pray.
O Lord, help us to listen as if our lives not only depend upon what we hear, but the lives everyone in the world as well. Amen.
What is the most important story that has influenced your life so far? My guess is it is something you read for a school assignment. When I was the age of our confirmands, it was The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. I had an associate pastor one time who said the most important story he read that even shaped his desire to go into ministry was The Count of Monte Cristo. So be careful what you read!
Pastor Jen said…
What is your most important story? Actually, I can answer that. Without even knowing what you’ve read I can tell you what your most important story is. Ready? Your most important story is the one you tell yourself.
For instance, if you tell yourself a story that says the world is an unfair place, chances are you will go looking for unfairness everywhere, which means you will probably see it all the time. You will be skeptical of total strangers. Every time you meet a new person you will not see a potential friend but someone to watch out for.
If the story you tell yourself is that some people are better than others, or at least, not everyone is equal, then there will probably be a lot of things you don’t see. You might not see it when people are treated differently, when some don’t have the same privileges as others. In fact, you may even get defensive when someone suggests that inequities occur.
The story you tell yourself is important. What’s the story you tell yourself?
This morning I have prepared a special sermon just for the confirmands. That’s not to say the rest of the congregation is left out. You are welcome to listen and maybe get something out of this sermon, too. In fact, I recommend that, but my focus today is the confirmands as they come to this service after spending the last 8 months in preparation for making their first public profession of faith and becoming full members of Christ’s church.
What I want to do is tell you a couple of stories. The first one is very old, then the second is much more recent. And I hope both of them will help us think about our own stories and God’s story as well.
It is about a dream the prophet Ezekiel had. It was about a valley full of bones. He shared this dream with his fellow Israelites who had been carried away from their homeland as prisoners of war. To appreciate this story, we have to know something about that context.
So think of the middle east in the 6th and 7th centuries as being like a playground ruled by two bullies. Just like most bullies they were mean, had bad haircuts, and took your lunch money. The bullies were Assyria and Babylon. Assyria ruled the playground first. They used to pick on Israel a lot. One day Israel got tired of it and
stopped handing over their lunch money, and well, it didn’t turn out well for them. Assyria conquered Israel. All that was left was the tribe of Judah where Jerusalem was located. They probably would have been beaten up as well, except, the other bully, Babylon, started taking over the playground and they sent Assyria packing.
Now that sounds like good news, except Babylon acted like all bullies do and started demanding that Judah hand over their money or get a knuckle sandwich for lunch. So someone told the king of Judah, you have to stand up to this bully, even though the prophets were saying, “You better be quiet before its too late.” Well, too late. The king stood up to the bully, for oh, about 2 minutes. Babylon sat on Judah until they cried uncle, then carried them all away to Babylon to serve as prisoners. They would gather every day and sing sad songs about the way things used to be. They felt defeated and miserable.
This is when the prophet Ezekiel came along. He told him about a vision he had, how God showed him a valley full of dry bones, and God said to ‘ol Zeke, “Do you think these bones can live again?” And Zeke said, “Lord, only you know.” And in this vision God did something interesting. He told Zeke to preach to the bones and tell them that God is going to breathe on them and cause the bones to come to life. So ‘ol Zeke did just that. He started preaching, and suddenly there was a rattling noise. Bones started clanking against each other, and flesh started coming over the bones, then muscle and skin, and then the bodies stood up right. But they weren’t living yet.
God told Zeke to preach again. Tell the wind to come and breathe God’s Spirit into them, and the win did, and now all this huge number of bodies came to life! Then Zeke finished his dream and said to the people living, “Folks, that’s us. We are dem bones! We feel all dead and worthless because things are in a mess, but God has a story for us. God’s not finished with us. God can do the impossible. God can make dead things alive.
Something happened to the people. They started to believe! 10 times in this story it mentions the word for “bones.” And ten times it mentions the word for “breath.” But the last word mentioned is God saying, “I will put my spirit within you.” “I will breathe in you.” God gets the last word, and the last word is the lasting word.
That reminded the people of other stories they knew. Like the one told in the book of Genesis where God created the first person who wasn’t fully alive until it says, “And God breathed into him.” And it reminded them of other stories, like the time the people were trapped by the Red Sea and Pharoah’s armies were about to destroy them but God blew his breath over the water and created a path for the people to escape. Or the time when God met Gideon and called him to lead his people but Gideon felt weak and afraid and God put his breath, his Spirit, on Gideon to do mighty things.
You see, what ‘Ol Zeke did with that story of the valley of dry bones was remind people of their stories. They remembered that they are part of God’s story. They are never without God’s power and help. Just like God put the members of those dead bodies back together, when we re-member our story, God puts us back together.
And that brings me to the second story I want to share with you. Several months ago I mentioned a Methodist minister I know named Don Davis. He’s a professional storyteller now. He has a talk that it titled, “How the Story Transforms the Teller.” It’s about his life. He grew up in an area where I served nearly 20 years of my ministry, in Waynesville, NC. His dad was named Joe Davis, and because there were three Joe Davises in town at that time, they were identified by what they did. Because his dad was a banker, he was Banker Joe.
One day he was with his dad when leaving the office at the end of the day and an old friend passed him and said, “See you later Crippled Joe.” He got in the car with his dad and said, “I don’t like what that man said to you.” His father replied, “What did he say?” “He called you Crippled Joe! That’s mean!”
His dad said, “Let me tell you a story.” He explained how as a boy he was playing with an ax one day and missed a stump and the ax landed in his leg. Doctors were able to save his leg, but he was never able to walk quite right again. In those days, if you couldn’t work on a farm you didn’t have much chance of making a living. But he learned about this small college that had business degrees. He thought, “Maybe I could learn how to do work that doesn’t require me using my leg so much.” So he saved all the money he could. Went to this school but could only afford one semester. At the end of the semester, administrators told him he needed to go back home. So he did, but while in school one semester, he learned 2 years’ worth of booking-keeping. So he got a job with a company that worked with a local bank.
Then his father died. He had to take care of his younger siblings as well as his mother. SO he just kept working and saving all his money. When he got to be about 40 years old, the owner of the bank retired. He realized he had saved enough money to be able to take out a loan and buy the bank. So that’s what he did. And he told his son, ‘That’s how I came to be Banker Joe. You see, son, if I had never been Crippled Joe, I would have never become Banker Joe.”
Then he told him, “Adversity, if you learn to use it right, will buy you a ticket to a place you couldn’t have gone any other way.”
But this may be the best part. Years later when his dad was in his late 80’s and Don had become a story teller, he asked his dad, “How did you come to tell your story the way you did? Had you ever done that before?” His dad said, “Only about 200 times! You see when I was a boy with a crippled leg, my mama sat me down and said, “Joe, it’s time for you to tell your story.” He said, “I didn’t want to tell my story because I was crippled and it wouldn’t change anything.” She said, “You’re not telling the story to change what happened. You’re telling the story to change you.” So she would have him tell his story over and over and each time she would give him a different focus. She would say, “Now Joe, tell it this time, but tell what you learned by living through that.” Then she would say, “This time tell what you think your daddy and I learned as we went through that.” Then she would say, “Now tell it from the perspectives of the doctors who helped you.”
And this went on and on until she said, “Now Joe, if you don’t tell this story enough, one day you’ll be 50 years old and you will look at your leg and you’ll be pitiful. Because when something happens to you like this, it sits on you like a rock, and if you never tell your story, it sits on you forever. But what your story will do is allow you to climb out from under the rock until you eventually sit on top of it.
Then she said, “Now what do you get to do because of your leg that your brothers don’t get to do?” He thought for a moment, then realized, “I get to stay in the house while they have work on the farm!” Pretty soon he thought, “Chopping his leg was the smartest thing he’d ever done.” And what he realized is that his being crippled was sort of a gift. He had a good story.
This is what ‘Ol Zeke did for those Israelites long ago. He reminded them of their story, that as painful as their time was, as much as they felt like they were a bunch of dry bones with no future. They weren’t through. God was with them and God was breathing on them. God can turn their graves into gardens. They still had a story to tell!
And in a way that’s what we are here to celebrate today with you, our confirmands. You are part of a big Story God is telling, and today you recognize that. You claim that. You choose to take your part in that story. Because there are going to be times when the realities of life are going to feel like a rock sitting on you, and you will need to remember your story, that there is a God who will give you the power to climb out from under that rock.
But even more, God wants to tell God’s story through you. God wants to use you to help others who are being crushed by giant rocks. God will want to use you to preach to them just like Ezekiel.
Think about it for a moment. God brought dead bones back to life, but not until Ezekiel preached. God needed someone to tell the Story, then God worked a miracle. So today, we celebrate that you have a story to tell, and your story is a part of His-story.
Amen.