Can These Bones Live?

Below, you will find my sermon, preached July 15, 2007. This sermon was born out of the experience of my journey with our High School delegation to BorderLinks.

Peace in Christ, Shelli Latham
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Can these Bones Live? A Sermon on the Intersection of Ezekiel 37:1-14 and Migration at the Arizona Border.

Two weeks ago, I read this scripture on a hillside, looking down into the valley in Nogales, Mexico. Nogales is a border town, located partially in Arizona and partially in Mexico – halved by a fatigue colored corrugated metal wall, standing on a concrete block, topped with razor wire. I was with the High School delegation that was traveling with an organization called BorderLinks, which studies immigration issues on both sides of the border. On that day we gathered on a narrow set of steps to read from Ezekiel for our morning devotion. We were on the Mexico side of the border – perched on a hill overlooking small cubes of houses lining dirt roads. Power lines ran along the roadside and dipped down to hold hands with the rooflines. Over the solemn quiet of the scripture, the jingle-jangle of the gas and water trucks caught the wind like the sound of the ice cream truck from my childhood.

Before I read the scripture, I asked our group members to listen and to find their place in the story. Were they walking beside the story teller, were they the story teller - the voice prophesying to the four winds to breathe upon these slain, were they the bones? I was perched at the top of the steps. And as my mouth formed Ezekiel’s words, the words seemed to wash over our group. I could almost see them mingle with the memories we’d made in the last few days. I felt like if I stopped reading for just a moment, I could hear them settle into the valley below or shimmy their way into the great uncertainty we’d become so accustomed to.

When I stopped reading, no one said much of anything. A few dared to struggle through finding the words to say where they had seen themselves in the scripture. But as people who had found our stories so unexpectedly entwined with our migrating neighbors, we weren’t entirely certain who we were anymore. Sitting on those steps in our very own skin wearing the same clothes we’d had on two days before, we couldn’t put words around who we were on this day, in this space, and what that meant for who we would be when we made the journey back to US soil. And so mostly, it was quiet. They were looking out onto the dirt colored valley dotted with blue and red and dirt colored houses. But if they were like me, they were seeing miles further.

The valley that was in our line of vision was poor; many places had only had power for a few weeks. The five dollar a day wages that most of the residents in these homes were making working in the maquillas didn’t go very far towards paying for staples like milk which costs roughly $3/gallon, or a dozen eggs, which costs over a dollar or the potable water, that was purchased in 5 gallon containers from the truck that sounded like the ice cream man. A day’s wages might afford a family one gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, and a pound of pinto beans. The valley was poor, but it wasn’t the place where the scripture came to rest in our memories.

“The hand of the LORD came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry” (v.1-2). I had never known dry until I made this journey from Tucson into Mexico. It was so hot we contemplated baking chocolate chip cookies in our van, fondly dubbed, Carmen the Heat Wagon. It was so hot that as we rolled through the dessert, you could see the rising temperature in the air - wiggly and squiggly heat above the gravely sand, twisting between the cactuses. On the day that we went to Altar, which is about 60 miles from the border and a funneling point for migrants who will cross the border at Sasabe, the temperature reached 120 degrees. That day we visited and spent the night in CCAMYN, a migrant shelter. For minutes that seemed like days, we toured the shelter, ducking into doorways and hopping between shadows. In 120 degrees, I could feel my skin tightening its grip on my body like shrink wrap. My eyeballs were warm in their sockets. It was hot and very dry.

I was slathered in sunscreen under a wide brimmed hat, out in the heat for moments while our migrant friends might journey through it for 3-5 days. So, even there in the shelter courtyard, our minds took us to somewhere dryer. Our minds took us on the journey that the migrants we met were getting ready to make or were returning home from, defeated. Our minds were hanging out with the heat waves in the desert tracing the footsteps of the young man who sat beside us at dinner, eyes filled with fear – the one whose mom thought he was already in the
US because he didn’t want to worry her with the reality of what he had already experienced and what was to come. The border wall elbows its way between these North American neighbors with a large gap in the Sonoran desert. Because this is such a treacherous crossing point, the rationale is that no one will cross there and the border will be sealed. But this plan does not take into account desperation.

Most Mexican workers are not making the $5 per day that the maquillas pay. Their farming jobs are in the US, which continues to subsidize its farmers, while Mexico is not able to do so. People are hungry and tired. They are unable to provide basic food and healthcare for their children and their families. As part of our education, we watched a documentary called Crossing Arizona. In one portion of the documentary, a Native American man, named Mike Wilson, was refilling water stations on the Tohono O’Odham Nation, near Tucson. It is the deadliest stretch of the border as the nation will not provide access to humanitarian organizations for water stations, so Mike Wilson does it himself. While out checking water stations, Mike ran into a migrant who was wandering, lost and afraid. The coyote, he had contracted with to carry him across the border had abandoned their group, and they had scattered. This man was alone and lost in the desert with no food and no water. Mike, who could be arrested for transporting the migrant, convinced him to turn himself into Border Patrol who has a responsibility to provide food and water, at least minimally.

What we did not see in the documentary, Mike shared with us at a later meeting. He asked if the man would try to cross again, and the man said, “yes.” He knew first hand the possibility of death in the desert, but he said he couldn’t go home. He had three choices (1) he could make it to the US and provide for the basic human needs of his family (2) he could die in the desert. The third didn’t seem like a choice to him – to return home where he did not have access to the resources to care for children or his mother who could not afford her treatment for diabetes.

“The hand of the LORD came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry.” (v. 1-2) And so as we hear this scripture, this is the valley we find ourselves in – a valley filled with hunger and thirst and fear and hope, a valley filled carved out by need and quite literally filled with bones. In 2006, the death count on the US/Mexican border tallied 205, in Arizona alone.[1] (That is about half of the national death toll.) That was a good year due to unusually cool temperatures. Nearly half of those are unknown, many found literally as bones. Each year a worship service is held where the names of the dead are read from white crosses. The list from a year ago this week includes Eliseo Hernandez, male 16; Antonio Hernandez, Male 69; Martha Palomino Velarde, female 56; Olivia Elizabeth Luna Nogueda, female 11, and four unknowns.

And the valley is so big, and the valley is so dry. I sit on that hill and can hear it at my back in growling stomachs and dutiful footsteps heading from home. And I know the secret that those footsteps are going to lead through a dryer valley, which even navigated successfully only leads to exile. I asked the youth to think about where they find themselves in this scripture. As I was reading, I found myself standing in the valley, and God was telling me to prophesy, to say, “O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.” (v. 4-5) I saw myself standing there, called to speak a word of hope, called to say, “You are not alone.” When the darkness swallows you and the sun beats you down, “You are not alone.” But no words come out. My mouth forms an O but either nothing comes out or the valley is so deep it swallows my sounds before even I can hear them.

This scripture is one of redemption for a broken and exiled community. It is fitting to read it in this space where people come to press their ears against the border wall listening for whisper of hope that is harder to hear at home. I have wrestled with the words to put around all I have learned and experienced. I ache not to be the mute prophet standing in the valley afraid or unable to speak of the redemptive power of God. God walks Ezekiel around the valley, showing him the expanse of the bones, and God asks, “"Mortal, can these bones live?" [He] answered, "O Lord GOD, you know." (v. 3) I like how Ezekiel is evasive, “O Lord God, you know,” sounds and awful lot better than “Why are you asking me, this is a big mess?”

And that’s what we find ourselves in with our current immigration policy – a big mess. While we were across the border, the senate voted to put the immigration bill to rest. Most likely, it will not resurface until the 2008 elections are over as it is territory too dangerous for politicians to tread on while campaigning. In the meantime our hungry and poor neighbors continue to tread on the dangerous territory of the Sonoran desert. I thought initially that my inability to speak was because I couldn’t offer a solution – like I had to single handedly unravel this tangle of US immigration tragedy. But that was bunk. I realized that the words not coming wasn’t confusion but fear. And the words didn’t come because it was easier to just let them lie and hope they became as silent in my heart as they were on my lips. It was easier because to speak of the poverty of our neighbors south of the border meant I had to admit I had a part to play in their plight.

And then I realize that maybe I am the prophet who can’t get her words together, but maybe that is not where I am in the story at all. Maybe I’m one of the zombie bodies, not really alive. The sinews and flesh had come upon them, but there was no breath in them. And maybe I am the bones. Maybe the words don’t come because I have been dried up. Fear and consumption and excess and comfort have wilted my compassion and my resolve that who we are and how we live matters. Maybe I am the bones. And the valley looks different, now. It looks more like the manicured lawns that I walk my dog past each day – many of which are cut by migrant labor. It looks like the land where more is better regardless of the human cost to make things cheap. It looks like a desire for low taxes. It sounds like the word illegal being used as a noun. And this valley is scarier than the other – the one that I saw down in Mexico, the one that I left at the border - because in this valley I have more to lose.

And I am afraid . . . I am afraid to be the bones, afraid that if I just lie here and dry out, I will be nothing more to the earth than a pile of dust. And I am afraid to not be the bones . . . afraid that when the redemptive power of God gets a hold of me and rattles me to the core I will be forced out of this valley and this valley is pretty comfy. I am afraid that when the Spirit of God puts my broken self back together, I might live, and speak, and love as though God is at work in me. And so while I want to be faithful, while I want to be the neighbor like we see in the good Samaritan and not the one who passes on the other side of the ditch pretending that if I don’t see it, it isn’t happening, while I want to be merciful, I am afraid that when these old bones start to really live, what I’ve equated with life might have to change. I am afraid that once I start breathing the breath of God and my lungs are all filled up with the Spirit; those pent up words might come tumbling out.

I know you may be thinking, for a girl with no words, she has an awful lot to say. But the talking is just surface, the real prophesy is the living. While I pray for and fear the breath in my life, I will leave you with some borrowed words. This poem, titled “The Right to Live in Peace,” by Othon Perez, is engraved outside the CAMMYN shelter in Altar. It was translated by our former Moderator of the General Assembly, Rick Ufford-Chase, and is accompanied by a disclaimer, “Here's my rough translation of the poem (unofficial, unauthorized and unchecked by use of a dictionary).”[2]

TO THE FALLEN IN THE DESERTS OF DEATH:
In memory of those who, when seeking a better life,found only death,
In memory of those who risked everything and lost it,
Who went with hope in their eyes and challenge in their souls.

The sun calcified them, the desert devoured them,
and the dust erased their name and their face.

In memory of those who will never return
we offer these flowers . . .
To them, with respect, we say:
Your thirst, is our thirst.
Your hunger, is our hunger.
Your pain, is our pain.
Your discomfort, your bitterness, your agony
Are also ours.

We are a shout that demands justice. . .
In order that No One, ever again, will have toAbandon their lands, their beliefs, their dead, their childrentheir parents, their family, their race, their culture, their identity. . .

We are a silence that has a voice . . .
In order that no one will have to look for their destiny in other lands.
In order that no one will have to go to the desert and be consumed by loneliness.

We are a voice in the desert that cries out:
Education for all!
Opportunity for all!
Work for all!
Bread for all!
Liberty for all!
Justice for all!. . .

We are a voice that the desert cannot drown.

The hand of the LORD came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, "Mortal, can these bones live?" I answered, "O Lord GOD, you know." (v. 1-3)

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[1] See the death count on http://www.samaritanpatrol.org.
[2] http://what-i-see.blogspot.com/2005_04_01_archive.html