Bearers of God's Breath

“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.” (Ezekiel 37:1)

I read these words and immediately thought of my last visit to the Anglican Cathedral in Sydney. There are people buried there, but it wasn’t “dem bones” I was thinking of. That song did also come to mind—“dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones…”

I won’t sing it, as it may sound like a racial caricature, but I did do some research into the song and found that it’s actually not a traditional spiritual from pre–Civil War America. It was composed by James Weldon Johnson in 1928.

Johnson was a civil rights activist, a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and a key figure in the ‘Harlem Renaissance.’ He and his brother gave Ezekiel’s vision a melody that children could sing and adults could remember—not to entertain, but to proclaim a gospel truth: that God remembers what history has dismembered. In a world where their people had been broken, scattered, and felt dried out and washed up, the Johnsons dared to sing of the breath of God – still moving and still bringing life out of death.

It was a powerful message. Was it Ezekiel’s message?

I think what we often miss in Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones is that we’re looking at the aftermath of a battle. Ezekiel lived through the final days of Israel’s existence as an independent nation. He warned his people. They didn’t listen. He went down with them.

Ezekiel was deported after the Babylonian invasion of 597 BC. Judah revolted again a decade after that, and the nation and its temple were then completely destroyed. Ezekiel lived through all of it and, as far as we know, spent the rest of his life in exile but, from Babylon, he wrote of hope — of rebuilding, both politically and spiritually.

It’s not obvious that Ezekiel’s valley was from a specific battle, but it’s a catastrophic scene. The valley is full of bones — “very dry” bones, we’re told (Ezekiel 37:2). These people had been dead a good while, and there was no one left to bury them.

In Israelite law, burial was sacred. Even a condemned criminal had to be buried the same day. Leaving a corpse exposed not only shamed the dead but defiled the land.

After battle, the worst dishonour imaginable was for there to be no one left to reverently dispose of your body. The prophet sees not just death but abandonment – a people so defeated that no one was left to mourn or bury them. And that’s how Ezekiel’s people saw themselves—cut off, forgotten, beyond dignity and hope.

As I enter Ezekiel’s vision, I cannot help but sense its shadow stretching across our own time. It was a vision born of a world where war had left the dead unburied and the living without hope, and I fear our world is drifting toward that same valley now.

The escalating violence between the modern state of Israel, the United States, and Iran is already generating similar terrible scenes — multiple landscapes where human dignity is being swallowed up by the machinery of war — and while I don’t claim prophetic insight into the situation, I recognise that whenever nations harden themselves for conflict, the bones of the innocent are the first to be scattered.

We’ve seen this already in the murder of the young girls of Minab Elementary, and the reports I’m hearing of American bases being evacuated under fire suggest that the valleys could soon be filled again with bones. Even so, Ezekiel’s vision does not end in the valley – frozen in the horror of human violence. After walking among the bones and facing the despair of the people, God commands the prophet to speak — not to recount past mistakes but to prophesy life into what looks irreversibly dead.

Yes, our world is trembling under the weight of conflict and the threat of escalation, and we seem to be ready to carve out more valleys for bones, yet Ezekiel reminds us that God’s Spirit is not intimidated by the landscapes we create, and the breath that raised Ezekiel’s shattered nation can move through the fault lines of our own age, speaking life, guarding peace, and reminding us that death is not the final word.

The winds of war howl, but they’re not the only force shaping human history. Even in the valley of death another wind is blowing—the ‘ruach’ (meaning breath, wind, and spirit)—and the prophet calls on that other wind to create a different future.

“Prophesy to the breath,” God tells the prophet. Speak to the Spirit that can reach places no army can touch. That is where our hope rests—not in the proclamations of governments or the calculations of generals, but in the God whose breath can cross borders, change hearts, and bring life out of death and devastation.

Ezekiel stood in that valley, and he spoke a word of life because he understood that God’s Spirit was stronger than the forces that had broken his world, and we need to understand that too. We don’t have permission to surrender to despair or let the winds of war be the only forces shaping our imagination. We too are called to be bearers of the breath—people who pray when others panic, reconcile when others divide, and protect the vulnerable when nations rattle their sabres.

In a world that feels increasingly brittle, we remind one another today that God’s Spirit is at work, rebuilding what violence has torn down and gathering together what fear scatters. We do not know exactly what the great nations will do, but we know what our great God can do, and we know who we are called to be — a people who speak words of hope into the valley of despair.

The world trembles, the nations rage, and the future feels horribly uncertain, but the Spirit of God that raised dem dry bones is on the move and is calling out a people who can carry hope into the strongholds of fear.

It is our mission to speak our word of life to the bones lying dormant in our cathedrals and in our churches and on our battlefields and even in our cemeteries. For we put our faith in the breath and not in the battle, the Spirit rather than the sword, and the promises of God rather than our all too earthly fears.

May the breath of God that breathes life into the dry bones breathe on us and make us emissaries of hope. Amen.

Our Sunday Eucharist

We had another wonderful Sunday Eucharist last weekend. Thank you, Rev. John Queripel and Dr Andrew Madry, for your wonderful company on the panel, and thank you to everybody who joined us.

If you missed the broadcast, you might not have heard that John has published another book. It’s a deep but accessible examination of the Easter story. If you’re interested in this or any of John’s books, try contacting him through his Substack. He did suggest sharing his email address, but I’m reluctant to do that here, as published email addresses are harvested by spambots. Use the contact form on his Substack.

You’ll find our discussion on 1 Samuel 16—”God Looks at the Heart and Not at Appearances”—at the end of today’s post. Our most popular shorts of the week are published below. As usual, you can see all our shorts on the Sunday Eucharist Instagram page and all our content—long and short—on YouTube.

This coming Sunday we have a new brother joining us on the panel – documentary filmmaker and human rights advocate, Topher Field. Most of us in the freedom movement would be familiar with Topher’s work. If you’re not, check out his website.

You may remember that I did a video interview with Topher about Iran a few weeks ago. It was Gigi Foster who put Topher onto me, and it’s Gigi’s husband, Andrew Logan, who will be my other partner on the panel this Sunday. Don’t miss it!

Join us at noon on Sunday and bring a friend. You’ll find us on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Faithia, Streamyard and TheSundayEucharist.com. Invite your friends by directing them to the Facebook event, the YouTube link, or the Streamyard registration page.

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What’s On?

Sunday, March 22nd – Our Eucharist from noon @thesundayeucharist.com, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Faithia or Streamyard
Tuesday, March 24th – Boxing at the Mundine Gym in Redfern from 7 pm
Thursday, March 26th – Online Bible study group meeting from noon @ www.thesundayeucharist.com/bible
Thursday, March 26th – Boxing at the Mundine Gym in Redfern from 7 pm
Friday to Sunday (March 27th to 29th) @ Binacrombi. Please join us.

It’s been a dramatic week worldwide, and it would be hard to overestimate the global impact of the ongoing US and Israeli war against Iran. As well as strikes on military targets, we’ve seen schoolgirls murdered and extensive damage done to civilian infrastructure – oil fields and desalination plants. Where will it end?

Unless a miracle happens, I expect we’ll all start to experience the consequences of this latest act of US adventurism over the next few weeks. Gas prices will continue to rise until fuel becomes unavailable. followed by food scarcity and other critical shortages. The miracle I’m praying for is that Mr Trump will be arrested for crimes revealed in the Epstein Files and that the new US government will then go cap-in-hand to the new Ayatollah and apologise. Short of that, I see no clear off-ramp.

It was disappointing that there weren’t tens of thousands of us at the rally against the war last Saturday. There seems to be lots of political division in the anti-war coalition, and not everyone supporting Palestine is opposed to this war against Iran. I find that confusing as well as disappointing, and it doesn’t bode well for the future.

I think our ‘Prayers for Iran‘ webinar last Monday went really well. It was great to have 1,500 people tuning in from X (Twitter) alone, though that’s entirely due to the following our friend, Dr Susli, brings with her. I’ll include a couple of shorts from the webinar below. You can watch the complete broadcast (one hour long) here.

In less important news, Tony Abbott has not responded to my challenge for a boxing match. He didn’t reply to my email, and he must have seen my video by now.

On the plus side, this coming Thursday I’m doing some filming at the Mundine Gym with a crew from SBS. They’re doing a documentary on bare-knuckle boxing in Australia, and they want me as a counterbalance – someone who supports boxing but not the bare-knuckle variety.

If you’ve been meaning to get back into training, why not show up at the Mundine Gym this Thursday and be part of the documentary as well? I’m trusting it will be a good experience for all of us, and maybe they’ll let me call out Tony Abbott (and perhaps a few other would-be opponents) on camera?

Stay strong. Stay hopeful. Remember that the Spirit of the God who raises dry bones to life is living and moving among us.

Your brother in the Good Fight,