This is a good convo.

The valley of the dry bones and the word regeneration got me thinking. When I visited Berlin last semester, I went to the Jewish history museum (by the way, Berlin is amazing and Germany is great for knowing how to deal with its past). At a couple of points in the museum there were installations that were really moving. One was a room tucked away and dark and its floor was covered in metal screaming faces about the size of your hand. You were supposed to walk on it and when you did it was like the sound of chains clanking--all the faces were trying to scream but the only sound was heavy metal with every step. Thinking of the valley of dry bones, I wonder if God made a path for Ezekiel or if Ezekiel was clambering through the bones, crushing skulls perhaps--the installation in Berlin makes me think about this. There are all kinds of ideas that come out of this--hope, despair, silence, imprisonment...etc.

I think a lot of Old Testament scenes are like this. When we think about symbols for or involved with regeneration there are a lot in the NT that are like word pictures (new life, a cross, a dove) that can be summed up in an image and are either showing the occurance of regeneration or talk about an agent of regeneration. The OT tends to be more story oriented. When I was reading Ezekiel about a year ago it struck me that he's a lot like a performance artist sometimes--God makes him lay down a certain way to illustrate a point to the Israelites, makes him walk through a hole in the wall every day or something like that. One way to be able to talk about our work on regeneration is to think of our works (which are naturally limited--although explosions engage a lot of the senses but still limited in time) as elements and subjects of stories, not just the story of Jesus saving the world but the stories within that story--Ezekiel going out of Jerusalem through a hole in the wall showed how God was angered and wanted to leave the Israelites because of their idolatry. I think we tend to want to sum the whole thing up in one symbol like the cross, but we should be satisfied with taking parts of it all--art builds our lexicon of the gospel by fleshing out the story in just a little bit more detail than what we told it to ourselves the first time. Like one rainfall doesn't make a huge difference to the growth of a redwood tree but it does matter and does make the tree grow.

Sorry for the overload, but this is a great conversation. I'll try and get more details on Ezekiel that I thought of and on John which I've been reading lately.