“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.
First published on Father Dave’s blog – March 21st, 2026
