So, it was Girl Scout Sunday...and I've preached on last Sunday's gospel passage before...so this was the sermon...

Ezekiel 37:1-14

By any measure, hers was a difficult childhood.Her father was usually away drying out in a sanitarium. Her mother, never the most affectionate of people, called her “Granny” because, as she told little Ellie, she was "ugly as" her father’s mother. Orphaned by the age of 10, she went away to boarding school in Europe before too long. She went away from family and all she knew…she came into her own…through her education…an education she used to, in her words, make herself useful. She dedicated herself to a number of causes and worked for the betterment of the world…she argued for women to get the right to vote and celebrated when that finally came to pass. Eventually, she married her fifth cousin once removed and then dedicated the next part of her life to raising her children…and to assisting him in his chosen profession…politics. She was invaluable to him…as he was stricken with polio.

As his legs and often his voice, the one her mother considered an 'ugly duckling,' Eleanor Roosevelt, blossomed in her role of public servant as she accompanied her husband Franklin from the state house in New York, to the governor’s mansion, to the White House. She helped lead the nation out of the depression and became the nation’s mother as she visited the troops at hospitals and on bases around the globe during World War II. And hers was not simply a behind the scenes role….many have asserted that while the President tended to the war, she was responsible for much domestic policy—social, health care and education reforms of the time are often considered at least partially her handiwork.

And then…suddenly, without much warning…It was over. The President died…and she was adrift. Her children were grown…her country was healing…and she felt her story was over….In fact, that's what she said…interviewed just two months after she became a widow…Mrs. Roosevelt said point blank…”My story is over.” And she retreated to the couple’s home in upstate New York…tired…her life dried up…over….

Ezekiel was a prophet who knew about what it was like to think life was over…he had been a prophet in the temple in Jerusalem when King Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah and forced most of the people into exile hundreds of miles away in Babylon, what is now Modern Iraq…They were taken from all that they knew…their homes, their families, their land, their temple…Life, as far as they knew it, was over. Their lives were little more than dry bones…they had lost everything that defined them…and to say they were sad…dejected…forlorn…would be the grossest of understatements…

They are without hope…and then Ezekiel brings them this vision…this dream of life returning to lifeless bones...of breath and vitality returning to those who have been wiped out...this reminder from God that they are not forgotten…that God will be with them even so far from home…even though they have nothing…even though the live as little more than prisoners…they will yet live…they will breath free again…And, while it will take many years…Ezekiel’s promise will indeed come to pass…the people of Jerusalem will go home again…God’s people will see their homeland again…they have a future that will once again be in their hands…

In 1946, the Sprit blew through Eleanor Roosevelt’s life again…President Harry S. Truman appointed her as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly. She played an instrumental role in drafting perhaps the most important document for freedom since the American Constitution…the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She went on to serve as the first chairperson of the UN Human Rights Commission. On the night of September 28, 1948, Roosevelt spoke on behalf of the Declaration calling it "the international Magna Carta of all humankind" The Declaration was adopted by the UN General Assembly just weeks later. That same year, she was approached by some in the leadership about becoming Harry Truman’s running mate for the Vice-Presidency. As landmark as Senator Clinton’s candidacy is now, imagine what it would have been for a woman to be vice-president 60 years ago…but she declined…saying she had more important work to do…for the whole world.

Just about that time, in an interview, she said “the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” Like Ezekiel’s dream where there is new life coming, Eleanor Roosevelt believed in the power of dreaming…of hoping…of envisioning the future that we want and the future we hope for…and then working to make it so….It is the same hope and promise that was lifted up for those frightened people who had been captured and taken from their homes.

Ezekiel’s message rings out for us today as well…the same God who promised deliverance to the Hebrew people in exile and kept that promise, is the same God who came to earth in the person of Jesus Christ and encountered a world once again oppressed and in exile—in the exile of hopelessness and slavery to sin and death. In his death and resurrection we find deliverance as well…from every oppression that still clings to us.

And we find an invitation to dream…to dream dreams of hope and restoration…of justice and peace…these were central to Ezekiel’s dream…and to Mrs. Roosevelt’s dream….and in a way…all of you young ladies…you are part of that dream as well…for you are the hope of the generations…you are their dreams…you are our dreams…and you are God’s dream for the future as well…in you, the dry bones of our lives will live on…and you are the hope, too, of Mrs. Roosevelt I think…the woman who served longer as the honorary President of the Girl Scouts longer than any person in history…

So let us dream…confident that the spirit will be present in our desert times…giving us life, giving us hope…giving us today…to believe in the beauty of dreams…and to live into them…today, tomorrow and forevermore. Amen.