In Columbia, Maryland, the Methodist church my wife and I attend shares a building with a Unitarian congregation. They have a superb choir, and every spring they have a music service. Non-members are invited to join the choir for that one event. My wife and I like to sing and we joined them.

This year the focus was on African-American spirituals. One that we rehearsed, familiar to many of you, is called "Dem bones." The words are repetitious so I won't share them all, but it starts out,

"Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones--

Now hear the word of the Lord.

Ezekiel connected dem dry bones

Now hear the word of the Lord.

Then we have the part the kids love to sing:

The toe bone connected to the foot bone

The foot bone connected to the ankle bone

and so on from ankle to leg, to knee, to thigh, to hip, to back, shoulder, neck, and head.

The song then reverses and the head bone is disconnected from the shoulder bone, and all the other bones are disconnected, at which point the song concludes,

Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around--

Now hear the word of the Lord.

For a lot of people, this song was just a nonsense song about dancing bones, so I volunteered to look up and provide some background. I found this morning's Ezekiel passage and read some commentaries and realized what we had here was really like archaeology-the deeper you dig, the more you find.

1. On the surface, a pretty meaningless nonsense song.

2. Dig the surface soil away and at the level of 200 years ago, we have a song about African Americans who had been taken from their native land, who felt disconnected from everything of importance, and who desperately needed something to believe in and hope for. They literally felt like bones left lying around, very dry bones, with no life left in them, whose very flesh was no longer theirs but the property of someone else. Their freedom to walk around had been taken away from them. When they sang this song, it was not a nonsense song, but a song expressing their feeling for how they felt now, and their hope for a day when God would bring them freedom to walk around once more.

3. Keep digging, deeper, deeper, and at the level of 3500 years we come to the Jewish people in the time of Ezekiel. Jerusalem having been conquered and destroyed, they were living in exile in Babylon. Now, for the Jewish people, identity was totally tied to geography. When they were in their own country, they were in what they called "the land of the living." Outside of it, they were- in Ezekiel's imagery - dry bones.

The whole field of dry bones - very dry bones, Ezekiel emphasizes - represented the whole Jewish people in exile, and the imagery of bringing the bones back to gether, clothing them with flesh, and breathing life into them, was a vision of hope for the future, when God would create the conditions in which the Jewish people could come back to Jerusalem and surrounding villages and once again be in the land of the living.

Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones - a song that turns out to be about dislocation, about suffering-and about hope and trust in a future that brings freedom and wholeness.

Both the African American and the Ezekiel layers of this archeology show people pretty much same. We don't want to be dry bones, we want to be flesh and blood. We don't want to be in exile, we want to be in the land of the living.

Other stories convey the same message. The European fairy tale of Pinnochio is understandable, because of course, a puppet made of wood would prefer to be a real flesh and blood human if only given the chance.

These thoughts were in my mind when I was asked to speak here this morning. And immediately parallels with families, family history, genealogy, began to show up.

When I wrote my book on the descendants of James Day, a lot of it was a cataloguing of descendants. Name, spouse, children. Birth dates, marriage dates, death dates. Maybe a word of occupation. But in terms of conveying anything about real human beings? No, dry names and dates; dry bones. I had information on 2352 descendants of my great-great grandfather. Can these bones live? I had space for a few of them, so I tried to clothe the dry bones of James Day himself, and the 16 children who survived to adulthood, with as much other information as I could find, something to give them flesh and blood, something to make them human. Can these bones live, Ezekiel asked? As a genealogist, it was my duty to try.

Dennis Siepmann has experienced the same challenge. If you look at the new draft edition three of "I am of Ireland" you'll see the pages of names and dates which makes it a genealogy, but you'll also see his efforts to put flesh and blood on them by the wonderful narratives explaining the Scanlons'Irish origin and the terrible circumstances in Ireland which led to their emigration.

When we gather here for this Scanlon-Walker reunion, we are putting flesh on dry bones. Names that appeared lifelessly in books and computers take on meaning when we meet and become friends with the owner of the names. And for those who are gone, it is important to tell stories, to keep the flesh that makes people real.

The Scanlons tell stories of Thomas Scanlon and his sister Ellen who came to these shores from Ireland by sailing vessel in 1849, just before Irish immigration reached its peak in 1852. Ireland had been laid waste by the potato blight in the 1840's; in 1846 alone, over half a million Irish starved to death. For Thomas and Ellen Scanlon, the trip here was a trip for life itself, and this farm here at Three Churches, West Virginia promised opportunity, where none existed any longer in the land of his birth.

The Walkers tell stories of Francis Walker and his wife Catherine who came to America in 1732. As some of the stories go, they came from Holland, where the Walkers had been banished in the sixteenth century due to religious and political disturbances. They came here as people who had been exiles and now looked for a place of their own, people who had been persecuted for their religion and wished a place where they could worship God in peace. Francis Walker's son George was a teenager, 17 or 18, when the Revolutionary War took place. He volunteered. He was in the battle of Germantown. He served under Captain John Drawbridge at Valley Forge.

With these stories, the early Scanlons and early Walkers have flesh and blood; they are more than just names and dates in a dusty book. They are more than just dry bones.

But if all they have are stories of daring, perseverence, virtue and heroism, you can be sure they do not have all their flesh. Real humans have warts and blemishes.

When I mentioned this sermon title to my father, he immediately remembered the story of a man who hired a lawyer for $1000 to research his family tree. When the results came back, he paid the lawyer another $1000 to keep it quiet!

All of us have ideas, usually fairly strong ones, about what is right and what is wrong. And when it comes to our families, we prefer to remember what our ancestors did right, and forget what they did wrong. We may think we're doing our family a favor, but we're stripping our ancestors of their flesh and blood and making them, again, dry bones, skeletons kept hidden in closets.

Several years ago one of my distant cousins in Montgomery County, Maryland called me to ask my advice. She was putting together a family tree for her children, and she didn't know what to do about her great grandmother. "What about the great grandmother," I asked.

Well, as the story came out, over one hundred and fifty years ago in this community, there were two sisters. The older sister married a man and went to live with him on his farm. When she had a baby, the younger sister moved in to help out. Coming in from the field one day, the husband discovered the younger sister alone and raped her. The older sister returned, discovered what was happened, and the force of her fury was so great that the husband went outside and shot himself. From this incident, however, the younger sister had become pregnant, and the baby was my cousin's great-grandmother. What should my cousin write in her family history?

"Tell me about the younger sister," I asked. "What became of her?" "Oh, several years later, she married and had a fine family." "And the younger sister's child, who became the great-grandmother?" "Well, she was raised by an aunt and she too married and had a fine family." Both in their own ways were active in the community and church, and died much beloved by their family and respected by their community.

"Then here's what it looks like to me," I told her. "If you hide the bad part, you won't have a chance to tell the good part. And what difficulties they overcame to live the exemplary lives they did. If you don't tell about the difficulties, you rob them of the achievement."

If we want our ancestors bones to live, we'll have to give them ALL their flesh and blood, let them be whole people, or they'll only be skeletons in our closet.

But that's hard. We have images we want to maintain. We want flesh on our bones-just not all the flesh. Our wishes reflect a perception of how fragile our virtue and moral uprightness and image is. My father's story about the lawyer and the two $1000 payments reflects that. "Poke around too much and your world will come unglued." But is that true? Are our worlds so fragile? Then maybe they need to be unglued and put back together in a more secure fashion!

I haven't come here with a trove of Scanlon and Walker secrets to reveal, but if we keep trying to bring our ancestors back to life as real flesh and blood people, we're bound to find some.

It may be race. The Scanlons hardly had time to own slaves before emancipation, but many of our other ancestors did. One of the skeletons in our closet is the fact that when human beings are treated as property, female humans are treated as sexual property. If we had ancestors who owned slaves, there is a good chance that we have African-American cousins. Shall we let these bones live, accept our ancestors for all they were, warts and all, and maybe find some new cousins-or shall we leave the bones of the past to dry out in their closets?

It may be mental illness. It used to be considered a moral defect of the person or his parents when mental illness struck. Only in the last thirty years have we discovered that mental illness is mostly a biological defect resulting in a chemical imbalance of brain chemistry. One family in four living today will experience one of the big three mental illnesses - depression, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder, in their families. There is a strong genetic component in mental illness. Shall we keep our memories of ancestors in their respective closets, or shall we acknowledge the illnesses that they had, so the living generations can have a better understanding of their own troubles?

A couple of weeks ago I was at the annual convention in San Diego of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and heard story after story of the liberation that family members experienced when they stopped keeping their family's mental illness a secret and brought it out in the open where it could be exposed to love and healing.

Until yesterday I didn't quite know how to end this sermon. Something else needed to be said, but what? I looked over what had been said before. Perhaps I had gone too far out on a limb with that story of the two sisters? No, a voice came back to me, that story itself points to what else needs to be said. In the skeletons of our closets, in the things we try to hide, lie the seeds of healing, and the greatest of these is humanity's skeleton in the closet, the cross.

I've recently taken on a new project related to health and wholeness ministries and have felt impelled to re-read the New Testament to better understand the relationship of our faith and health care. Typically for a sermon I'll take a "micro" approach, studying one text to get all I can from a few verses, as if I were an anthropologist on the ground studying the soil, but this is a "macro" approach as if I were getting a bird's eye view of the terrain from a helicopter.

If you haven't speed-read through the New Testament to try to just absorb the whole thing as quickly as you can, I recommend it to you as one spiritual tool. The whole drama hits you, first, this young man in whom so many hopes and dreams came together, this healer who made a difference to the health of everyone who sought him, this teacher who spoke with passion and insight and conviction and truth, this witness to God's reign in human hearts and human communities - and then the reaction of the humanity he met - the disciples who never really understood, arguing over the best thrones of the new kingdom, the people whose lives were touched but never said thanks, the religious and political leadership who felt threatened and schemed to do something about it, and finally the high moment of the drama on Golgatha, the place of the skull, when humanity said, this one is too good for us, we don't want him, we must kill him.

Hide that skeleton in humanity's closet? Keep it secret? Did ever a shameful act so deserve to be hidden away, admitted only in the most private times, and then only in whispers? But no! St. Paul says, "we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God."⁽¹⁾ The power of the new Christian faith St. Paul spread around the entire Roman empire came precisely from taking a story of great shame and showing it contained a message of God's love and grace. The Christian experience of Resurrection completes Ezekiel's vision of dry bones returned to life.

Dry bones? Ezekiel gives us a hope they will one day be clothed again with flesh and blood, and dem bones, dem bones, gonna walk around. Dry bones? Family reunions give us a chance to put flesh and blood on people who were just names in books. Skeletons? Place them in the presence of God's transforming power. In union with the One on the cross, let us be the people who find freedom, wholeness and new life.

Endnotes:

1. I Corinthians 1:23