Dealing with the messy bits

LOUISVILLE — Kate Trigger Duffert, who leads General Assembly Planning, stepped away from those duties long enough Wednesday to preach during a Chapel Service that included mid council leaders from across the country receiving their orientation.

Calling her sermon “The Messy Bits,” Duffert preached on Ezekiel 37:1-14, which lays out the prophet’s vision of a valley of dry bones. We can place ourselves in Ezekiel’s shoes, she said.

“We hear the story and imagine how we might be called to be a prophetic witness to those around us,” she said. But “if you’re anything like me, you may be feeling a bit more like you are a part of the multitude of dry bones in the valley.”

We’re living in a time where the world seems intent on wearing us down to the bone, she said. “We carry in our bones the stories of ancestors who were harmed and who harmed. We carry DNA altered by generation after generation surviving times of sickness, hunger, upheaval and violence.”

“We are bone tired,” she said, “and so today I can’t help but find myself in our story laying out in the sun-bleached bones.”

And yet, we’re people of faith and hope. “We have the benefit of knowing what’s on the other side of Ezekiel’s vision and the stories of Bible,” she said. We know God takes “what feels tired and useless” and shapes “life-giving witnesses to the world.”

But unlike the Creation accounts in Genesis, where God “sculpts and forms,” the image given to Ezekiel “is not one where nothing becomes something.” Instead, God “layers the deeply embodied, physical components of a person into bones before the spirit is breathed in.”

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This new creation doesn’t remain bone, “jingling about like a Halloween decoration clanking bone on bone,” she said. Instead, Ezekiel’s vision is centered on a step we hope God might have skipped: It’s “the messy bits, the deeply human parts of encountering the sinews, the muscles, the tendons, the organs and blood and fluids that build upon our bones to make us alive.”

That got Duffert to thinking about the 1999 film “The Mummy,” whose skeleton is enfleshed as the film goes on. “The stuff of humanity builds upon him like scaffolding until he is finally recognizable as his former, living self,” she said. “The scenes are not pleasant. … They are messy, goopy and meant to make the viewer squeamish.”

As one “feeling like dry bones, I have to say that the idea of being alive and made new is incredibly appealing,” Duffert said. While the idea of layering on sinews and flesh “does not seem like an enjoyable way to get there, God-who-can-do-all-things makes it clear that it is a necessary part of the process. God shows us that if we are to be alive, we must engage with the muck and mire of being human.”

There are times in the church “when we are so fixated on becoming what God wants us to be that we forget our embodied humanity,” Duffert said. “We seek to disinfect our stories rather than admitting the painful truths at play. We will ourselves into the cleanliness of sun-bleached bones, forgetting that means we are no better than dead.”

But we’re called “to do the human work of being people in community, with all its mess,” she said. “When we fail to engage with the fullness of our globs of humanity, we choose to stay dry, dead bones.”

The Hebrew word “ruach” means both breath and spirit, “the same breath that is that root of not only respiration but inspiration,” sharing oxygen and carbon dioxide in a cycle back and forth with all of Creation. “It’s when we have taken on the messy work of humanness that we open ourselves up to God’s profound inspiration and the community that is Creation,” Duffert said.

She called General Assembly “a place where we are often called into the messiness of human life in pursuit of God’s newness.” For decades, the Assembly argued “over inclusion of the diverse sexualities created by God. These conversations were painful, often putting into the center of the fray those who were most harmed by exclusionary votes.”

“We spent years debating human dignity,” she said, “when we could have been expressing God’s love as a community.”

No matter how flawed and painful it can feel to debate the worth and value of our neighbors, “that is not the call to messiness that God has put before us,” she said. “We are not called to debate the dignity of neighbors whom God has created, claimed, called and loved.”

What we’re called to do is speak against injustice, “even when it is difficult,” she said. “We are called to open ourselves to the vulnerability of being transformed.”

She said she hears from congregations that are witnessing growth “as they minister through the lens of inclusion. Our churches have been transformed and have become a place where the community can come to be transformed alongside.”

It’s not just the dry bones being covered in flesh to become living. It’s not just the raised-from-the-dead Lazarus and the opening of his tomb. “It is the embodied gift of God as one of us, who knows what it is like to die and become alive again, that reminds us that we are to do this work with its imperfection and its incompletion again and again and again,” she said. “After all, as Presbyterians we are Reformed and always reforming.”

Thanks be to God, she said, that we do this work together, and for instilling our dry bones “with the bravery and capacity to face muck” and “for the inspiration and community that can be found and found again throughout the course of our lives.”

“For all our messiness, our aches and pains, our flaws and flesh, our breath and lives — thanks be to God.”