I was born during
a time of great hope:
the Assyrian
menace was receding.
King Josiah
brought Judah
back to the ways of God.
He even “found”
the book of Deuteronomy,
So we could know
more fully how to be God’s people.
My priestly
family was overjoyed.
But, that didn’t last. By the time I
was a man, a new Empire arose and annexed Assyria
and threatened us all. The Babylonians butted up against the walls of Jerusalem, and eventually
we submitted.
The royal family
and the priestly houses, including my own, were taken away, kidnapped…
At the age of 25
I was kidnapped, taken from the temple along with its wealth, taken as
Ransom—taken away to Babylon.
Babylon.
Babylon,
that mighty city.
That mighty city where our captors
tormented us
Asking us to play them a song:
“Sing us one of those songs of your mighty Zion,” they’d say to us.
How could we sing the Lord’s song in a
foreign land?
Could we even remember Jerusalem?
Could we speak of the Joy of the LORD,
so far off?
And after a time, these taunts and our
responses to them, grew darker—new Exiles came to join us,
They told of the
complete destruction of Jerusalem,
and the destruction of God’s house,
my Home,
the Temple
—destroyed.
When our captors laughed, “Sing us a
song.”
All we could do was remember the pain
of Jerusalem’s
destruction.
How it was torn down,
That the walls fell
The devastation by Babylon was total.
All we could do was seek revenge,
Yearn for pay back
Even as we were captive in Babylon
Locked away in the belly of the beast.
We captives couldn’t sleep, it cut us
so deeply, cut us to the core. We fought amongst ourselves, the first group of
captives and the second, blaming one another, calling each other apostates.
We’d wake up numb, or in cold sweats, from
dreams of the death and destruction, hearts racing.
The fetters they’d bound us with for
the journey from our home to this hell never really left us, there was iron in
our soul and we felt the captivity in our bones.
We felt
the captivity in our bones and believed God could not cross the desert to be
with us.
Then
God responded.
Let us pray.
When we first entered Babylon we were overawed by the giant Lamassus that guard the gates—a giant
clay figure, a mix of Bull, Lion, Eagle, and Man, a sort of Babylonian Sphinx—it
made us cower at our captor’s power.
God responded by giving me a
vision—Four Lamassus came in the
night—tethered with invisible tethers.
Tethered as we
were tethered on our trek from Jerusalem to Babylon,
as we were still
tethered, our psychological bondage
—they were
tethered like horses to a chariot—
What a chariot!
—the Temple itself,
my temple
—the place where
God’s fullness, God’s heaviness, God’s glory resides
—the temple was
the chariot—God followed us—on His inexpressible throne, followed us from Jerusalem to Babylon—God
was with us, even then. God’s glory was mobile,
God’s throne had
wheels.
And that vision began a new chapter in
my life—
God took those
feverish dreams of destruction and
replaced them with visions from heaven!
And
I want to tell you about one of them today.
I was plucked up by the hand of God
and put down amongst the slaughtered masses of our sisters and brothers—those
killed by the Babylonians—the wrecked remains of our nation—mass graves.
I saw the dusty remains of uncles and
aunts, all picked clean by birds and by time—by the decades since our
separation.
They were so dry—they’d been dead for so
long
—we’d been
separated from the Promised Land and the Temple of God
for so long.
“Can these bones live?” Asked God.
“You know,” I responded.
“Prophecy to them.”
Imagine that
—say what you
never got to say
—speak to the
dead,
speak to the
horror we experienced,
speak to the
loss.
And I spoke.
A rattling so loud it spoke to the
wideness of our anguish came up echoing in that valley. They were united
together again, bone to bone, then muscle to muscle, tendon to tendon, flesh
and skin together all of it.
There they were.
A mass of our relatives
—the very people
of God
—there in front
of me.
Yet they just stood there
—inanimate,
unanimated,
without spirit.
It was then it hit me, they were us too
—here in Babylon, separated, a
mass of men with eyes gone dead,
the wholesome
spark of life snuffed out by sorrow.
just standing,
but cut off from the breath of God.
We’d become just
like them here in Babylon,
tired inanimate corpses.
But then I prophesied again, to the
wind from every time and place,
To the breath of
God that has been with us from the beginning,
To the Spirit
that hovered over the deep
I prophesied saying,
“breathe upon these slain, that they may live, that we may live.”
And the LORD God said to me,
“This is the
whole house of Israel—the
people of God
They may say
that their innermost being is dried up and has went away
They may say
that their hope is lost,
They may say
that they are cut off from the land and from my promises
Well Mortal, say
this to them:
“I’m going to open your graves,
I’m going to bring you up from your
graves.
You are my people!
My people, I will bring you back to
the land that appears lost.
And you shall know that I am the
LORD,
Because I, and I alone, am the one
who opens graves
I, and I alone, bring up from Sheol
O my people.
My people, I will put my spirit
within you.
My people I will enliven you.
My people I will plant you back in
your native soil
Then, my people, you shall know that
I, the LORD, have spoken
And that I, the LORD, shall act.” Amen.
