Ezekiel 37:1-14 page 1

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'Ello. I wish to register a complaint.

Anyone who ever followed Monty Python's Flying Circus will soon recognise those words. They are the opening words of the famous Dead Parrot Sketch [script here; video here]. John Cleese's character Mr Praline has bought a Norwegian Blue parrot from a pet shop but it proves to be dead. The pet shop owner says, "He's not dead, he's resting." Exasperated, Mr Praline eventually declares the animal to be "an ex-parrot".

This famous sketch was virtually acted out in real life last year. According to Boing Boing, quoting from the Toronto Globe and Mail,

An indignant Israeli is suing a pet shop that he says sold him a dying parrot, reports the Ma'ariv newspaper. Itzik Simowitz of the southern city of Beersheba contends the shop cheated him because the Galerita-type cockatoo not only failed to utter a word when he got it home, but was also extremely ill. Mr. Simowitz adds that the shop owner assured him the parrot was not ill but merely needed time to adjust to its new environment.

The Dead Parrot sketch came back into my mind as I prepared for this Pentecost from Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones. For it made me remember how a college friend rewrote it as The Dead Church Sketch. So for the part of the sketch where Mr Praline complains that the parrot is not moving and he is told that the parrot has been nailed to its perch, we instead hear the excuse that the congregation has been nailed to the pews.

One thing is for sure in Ezekiel 37: the prophet encounters a vision of a 'Dead Church'. Well, a Dead Israel to be a little more particular. A Dead People Of God, anyway. He is taken back and forth among the bones to make it abundantly clear with no room for misunderstanding that the people of God in exile in Babylon are 'dead' - spiritually dead, that is.

And it's a vision that is meant to appal and offend him. To leave dead bones out in the air was offensive to Jewish tradition: the custom was (and still is) to bury the dead as soon as possible. That would be within a day or two of the death. But contact with dead bodies made a Jew ritually unclean, and to leave them out like this for so long increased the number of people who would be made unclean by coming near them.

This vision, which we have jollied up by jauntily singing, 'Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones', is shocking. This vision, which is so familiar to us, is meant to be offensive.

And more offensive than the implications for Jewish ritual law is the message of the vision: the people of God are dead.

And somewhere among our struggles for the future of Church is a similar fear. We look at declining church numbers - at least in the West. We note the missing generation of under-40s: not only are our numbers shrinking, the rising generations are showing precious little interest. We wonder, in the words of one author, Does The Future Have A Church?

At the same time, we try to pretend things aren't all that bad. We tell people not to talk about bad news, only about good news. We say that it is OK for a church only to reach out to the elderly. Not that there's anything wrong with sharing God's love with the elderly at all, but this among other comments is a way of denying the seriousness of our situation. A few years ago the historian Callum Brown said in his book The Death Of Christian Britain that it was possible to envisage soon the disappearance of Christianity from this nation. In 2001 Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop Cormac Murphy O'Connor spoke of our faith as having been 'almost vanquished'.

We're beginning to look like a pile of dead bones out in the air. In other sermons I might have been positive about seeing the experience of Jewish Exile as helpful for us in knowing how to be church now we are a minority. But at the same time we need to acknowledge the deadness.

So what would God say? What would God do? Might we turn on this Pentecost Sunday to Ezekiel again and see whether God might bring a similar message of hope in the face of devastation to us?

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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration.