Draw your own box — Jenny Warner

I was 10 years old the year Prince Charles and Princess Diana got married and fell in love with the royal family. When my family and I visited London the following year, I went to a hairdresser and got my haircut Princess Diana style. All these years, many of us have followed the royals through the joys and traumas of their lives. And so, what fun to see Prince Harry marry Meghan Markle yesterday!

Someone shared with me an article that Meghan, now the Duchess of Sussex, wrote a few years ago for Elle magazine in which she described a moment in elementary school where the students were asked to fill in a box on a survey of whether they were white, black, Hispanic or Asian. Meghan didn’t know which one to fill in. Her teacher told her to just fill in the white box because that was what she looked like. Instead she left it blank because to fill in one or the other would be to “choose one parent over the other.”

When she got home that night, she told her dad what had happened. She could see him getting angry and he finally said, “If that happens again, you draw your own box.”

“You draw your own box.”

What a perfect phrase to adopt for Pentecost!

Because on Pentecost, we don’t celebrate the birth of the institutional church or the start of a religion – we celebrate a God who draws a new box.

The day of Pentecost was not the first, only or last time that God drew a new box. In fact, God is always in the business of drawing new boxes and always inviting us to join in the drawing!

This story in Ezekiel is one of the most powerful and haunting stories in Scripture.

God leads Ezekiel out into a valley full of bones and Ezekiel walks around them.

“There were many lying in the valley, and they were very dry.”

Ezekiel is writing while in exile in Babylon. He and his people have left their homeland of Israel and are far away. In the struggle for possession of their homeland, there were battles, and as was the custom then, the bodies were just left on the battlefield, as the final insult and reminder to the conquerors.

We can imagine that Ezekiel is seeing the bones of such a battle – his fellow countrymen, maybe even friends and family – their bones now dry months and years after battle. The battles have been lost and now he and his countrymen are displaced people.

Ezekiel takes a long walk around these bones – the text indicates that he walked around and around them, noting how dry they were, how hopeless it seemed.

And I wonder, when you look around our world, where are the valleys of dry bones? What places, issues, struggles seem to be places of hopeless death?

So in that valley of dry bones, God asks Ezekiel a question:

“Mortal, can these bones live?”

It’s interesting that God addresses Ezekiel as “mortal” – a reminder that Ezekiel’s capacity is limited to a specific context and set of years.

“Mortal, can these bones live?”

How often do you find yourself saying:

“It will never change.”

“It’s beyond hope.”

“Things have gone too far.”

Ezekiel would have been feeling all of this.

And he turns to God… I imagine with tears and heartbreak and fear in his eyes and utters as much faith as he can muster.

“Oh Lord God, you know.”

Ezekiel refuses to stay in despair but also doesn’t choose blind positivity. In this moment, Ezekiel surrenders his perspective, surrenders his hopelessness, surrenders even his suffering… you know, God.

God, you know how much this hurts. You know how far we have gone without you. You know how hopeless it seems. You know how long it has been. You know.

And then, God starts to draws a new box and invites Ezekiel to draw too.

God says that Ezekiel should command the bones to live – and the sinews and flesh and skin begin to grow back. It is a flash of resurrection but it is not complete – for what is flesh and bone without breath?

There is a hesitant pause.

“I looked and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them.”

Then God said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.”

Prophesy to the breath. This word for breath is the same word for spirit. Ruach. The breath of God that lives within us. In this passage, that breath is animated – it can be spoken to, it can respond.

God doesn’t act alone but works with Ezekiel. “Speak to the breath – prophesy – tell it what is possible– tell it there is more than is visible - tell it to draw a new box.”

Our call as followers of this God is to prophesy to the breath and to draw new boxes.

It was unimaginable that Ezekiel’s people would ever return to their homeland, but they did. It was beyond imagining that people who spoke different languages would begin to understand each other on that Jerusalem street 2000 years ago but they did. It was incredible to think that a marginalized Jewish prophet would spark a revolution of justice and love but it happened.

And back to the royal wedding yesterday – could the slaves who were carted away from their homeland in Africa ever imagine that one of their descendants would be standing in the Queen of England’s chapel preaching yesterday? Could they ever have imagined that the bishop of the Episcopal church would be a black man who would invoke their songs and their story in that place to declare to call the world to an ethic of love?

The Most Rev. Michael Curry preaching at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle

And yet, there he was… Bishop Michael Curry preaching to an estimated two BILLION people around the world. He was prophesying to the breath.

And so God draws a new box.

And so, we, the church, empowered by the Spirit, are invited to keep drawing new boxes.

Amen.