Bones, Sinew, Breath: Center for Sustainable Justice Tenth Anniversary
“Can these bones live?”
God sure likes to ask the easy questions, huh?
Poor Ezekiel. There he is, this fresh-faced young priest who’s been held captive now for five years in Babylon along with thousands of his people, far away from their homeland. They’re all feeling despondent and humiliated because their captors have not only deported a swath of the Judeans from Jerusalem and left thousands of their family members behind in occupied territory, they’ve also destroyed the temple – which the people understand as not only the destruction of their most sacred space, but of the sacred itself. For these Children of Israel, everything they are going through tells them that their God is defeated – diminished – maybe even dead.
This 2,600 year old story resonates pretty hard here in Minneapolis after these past several months we’ve had, doesn’t it? A war-mongering tyrant occupies a vibrant city, deporting thousands and leaving the survivors to deal with the devastation. With both the figurative and the metaphorical death that’s everywhere they look.
It’s really a little on the nose.
But as I’ve wrestled with this text over the past couple of weeks, the thing that keeps grabbing my attention is how time is operating in it. How past and present and future all seem to be alive all at once.
The vision begins with a jarring rupture: Ezekiel is just minding his own prophetic business when “The hand of [God] came upon me and […] brought me out by the spirit of the [Holy One] and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.”
In the way that our senses heighten and time feels like it just stops still when something shocking happens to us, for a minute that feels like it lasts an eternity Ezekiel stands there, trying to orient himself. I imagine him breathing hard, his pupils dilating, his muscles tensed, his hands shaking with adrenaline. He takes in the towering mountains surrounding him; feels the arid air fill his nostrils; finally focusing his gaze on a field of bones, disarticulated and strewn about haphazardly, bleached white and glaring in the sun, stretching out before him as far as the eye can see.
But as Ezekiel stands there, frozen like a scared little animal, God challenges him: “Mortal, can these bones live?”
And all of a sudden, it’s like we can hear the great wheel of time creak into motion again. “Mortal,” God calls him, reminding Ezekiel of his own birth and death with this word that weaves together past, present, and future in a single breath. The bones – who were they, once? What were their lives, and how did they encounter their deaths? And can something – someone – a people – who were alive in the past and now are dead in the present be brought to life again in the future?
What was, what is, what might be. All alive at once.
I actually think, as wild as what he is witnessing is, Ezekiel is having an extremely human experience in this passage. There have been many moments in my life that I look back on later and can see clearly as liminal moments – events so momentous that in retrospect, they both stand on their own and build a bridge between the two distinct shores of “before” and “after.” I think of the morning before my first day of college, when we woke up to live news coverage of planes flying into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Each of the two times my miraculous body labored and pushed and brought a tiny, perfect human screaming into this world. Most recently, the morning of January 7, when I abandoned a Zoom meeting to tail the ICE vehicles that had just screamed past my house, following them around the corner to discover the growing blockade of SUVs and armed agents along Portland Avenue, where my neighbors told me they had heard a gunshot moments ago, and they thought maybe someone had just been killed.
But in the thick of those moments, most of us cannot see a linear arc of past – present – future. We are flooded with them each, all at once, as time collapses on itself and we find ourselves caught up in the swirls and eddies, just trying to keep our heads above water.
I don’t know about you, but the difference between me and Ezekiel is if I had just been scooped up by the hand of God and plunked down into a valley of skeletal remains and asked to make meaning of it all – to tap into my most faithful self in the midst of all this and use my gifts and my life force to breathe life into the looming face of death, I might have said, “With all due respect, O Holy One – are you freaking kidding me?”
This is why I am not a prophet. But more importantly, it’s why I don’t think any of us are.
In the Hebrew scriptures, the ability to hold all of this with courage and grace even in the face of overwhelm and fear is what defines the great Prophets. And when God conscripts them into action in these stories, they somehow get it together and, like Ezekiel, prophesy as they have been commanded. And by either admonishing the people (oooh, those Prophets love to do that!) or speaking aloud what they have been told shall come to pass, God’s will is done.
But I want to suggest that the reading of Ezekiel and the other Prophets that will lead you and me and him and her and them and US to more courageous, more faithful living is not one that views the prophets as leaders set apart from the people and somehow given rare and special abilities to hear and speak the “Word of the Lord.” In the scriptures – both the Hebrew and Christian ones – we’re shown over and over again that a prophet is someone who possesses three things: hindsight, or an ability to parse and draw wisdom from the past; insight, or a sharp analysis that understands clearly what is happening in the present; and foresight, or the ability to imagine what the future could – maybe even should – hold.
But if we take the prophets less literally, we can understand them as the embodiment of both the conscience and the moral imagination of the people in any given time. And here in the year of Audre Lorde 2026, I think we need fewer charismatic prophets, and more collectively-held prophesy.
Which brings me, of course, to the Center for Sustainable Justice.
I’ve been one of CSJ’s biggest fans since its inception in 2015. That was right around the time I met our beloved Rev. Dr. Rebecca Voelkel, and at the time I was serving as the Executive Director of the Minnesota Unitarian Universalist Social Justice Alliance, or MUUSJA. Together, with the support of our Little Organizations that Could, Rebecca and I were part of the core team that rebooted and re-branded what had been the long-standing pro-LGBTQ faith roundtable into what became MARCH: Multifaith Anti-Racism, Change, & Healing. Over many years, Rebecca and I (with frequent cameos from other beloved Lyndale leaders past and present, including Rev. Ashley Harness and Rev. T Michael Rock) got to make holy trouble together through a whole series of “dry bones” moments: the early days of the Black Lives Matter movement, the state killings of Jamar Clark and Philando Castile, Standing Rock and the battle against Line 3, just to name a few.
I left MUUSJA in late 2019 to take a job directing Side With Love, the national justice arm of the Unitarian Universalist Association. I continued engaging as much as I could with the multifaith justice work we had been building, but giving birth to a baby three weeks before Covid locked us all down sapped my capacity and I had to prioritize surviving a big new job and keeping two small children alive (talk about your dry bones moments, friends).
So for several years, I grudgingly disengaged from MARCH, which had been my primary connection with the Center for Sustainable Justice. But I took so much of what I had learned in Twin Cities multifaith organizing – particularly from working closely with CSJ – and used the resources I’d been entrusted with at the national setting to institutionalize those lessons in the form of what has now become a 12-person team whose campaigns and training programs reach thousands of faith leaders in hundreds of congregations in every state in the US. Rebecca and I have stayed in touch, of course, and I’ve been an ardent admirer of the work, but from a bit of a distance for the past few years.
Fast forward to the day Renée Good was killed. As I’ve said, I arrived moments after her execution and was quickly standing shoulder to shoulder with beloved clergy colleagues and people of faith who showed up almost immediately to bear witness together. And within days, MARCH leadership issued a national clergy call inviting faith leaders from around the country to come to Minneapolis to walk with us through the valley of dry bones we found ourselves in in January of 2026. Nobody had to twist my arm to come out of “retirement” to support this crucial work during this crisis moment.
So I want you to hear that yes, CSJ’s existence was part of what made it possible for those 600+ clergy from across the country to convene for one of the most powerful gatherings I have ever been a part of. But to pull this massive gathering together in the six days we had to plan it, the MARCH leadership needed to tap into capacity and resources beyond what was locally available. So they called some trusted national strategists to lend their time and expertise to support this local organizing, and I – from my role now at the national setting of the Unitarian Universalist Association, was able to offer back to MARCH my team’s staff capacity and communications support and tech infrastructure and security consulting at a scale that just doesn’t exist locally. It was this beautiful, full circle moment in which the seeds that CSJ and MARCH had planted years and years ago had traveled far beyond the local ecosystem, and had grown into something whose fruits we were able to harvest and feed back to where they had been planted, to make the impossible happen.
Past, present, future. All alive at once.
What I want you to hear me say is that it matters, so very deeply, that the Center for Sustainable Justice has existed – exists right now – and will exist long into the future. If we understand prophesy not as the declarations of one charismatic individual but as the capacity of a particular community in a specific time and place to hold past, present, and future together – to wield hindsight, insight, and foresight to be fully present with this beautiful, broken world as it is and to breathe life into new and different ways of being – CSJ is the very definition of a prophetic institution.
O Mortal, can these bones live? Can all that is dry, barren, arid, and destroyed somehow be knit back together, assembled into coherence? In the face of fascism, climate collapse, white Christian nationalism – is there hope for resurrection? Can we resurrect hope?
It’s really more than can be expected of any of us to be able to hold on to a resounding “yes” to these questions while we’re just trying to keep our heads above water, to orient ourselves when we’re in the swirl of these confluence moments. This is why we need collectives, communities, organizations who are capable of holding that yes across time – institutions like the Center for Sustainable Justice whose purpose is to heal the wounds of the past, prevent violence in the present, and collectively imagine a more just and liberated future for us all.
Thank you, Lyndale, for continuing to invest in and support the profound work of CSJ. Thank you for sustaining this incredible ministry whose prophetic work is a conduit for the Spirit to breathe new life into what might otherwise be barrenness and death.
O Mortals, can these bones live?
Yes, beloved. Together, we can make it so.
Blessed Be, Ashé, and Amen.
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