Lent 5A
St. Dunstan’s
March 22, 2026
The Rev. Patricia Templeton
He calls it “the Dark Time.”
It began on April 17, 1975 – the day the Cambodian government was overthrown by the forces of the Khmer Rouge, led by the revolutionary Pol Pot.
On that day, 12-year-old Rin Vuth and his family were forced by Pol Pot’s army to leave their home. They joined a long stream of people walking out of the city, taking with them what few possessions they could carry.
The procession consisted of all sorts and conditions of humanity. Mothers with nursing babies, toddlers carried on their fathers’ backs, hobbling old men and women, barely able to keep up.
The hospitals were emptied at gunpoint and the patients who were able joined the throng walking to the country. Some were pushed in wheelchairs and hospital beds. Those who couldn’t make it were shot and dumped in a ditch to die.
In fragmented, but oddly poetic English, Rin Vuth describes his family’s life after the evacuation. “We worked in the open air, exposed to the rains and wind. No rest,” he writes. “They used the men to yoke and plow as oxen.
“We worked hard, but ate very little. They only gave us a dipper of porridge each. We scarcely tasted the flavor of any fish. Most people were swollen. Their legs as big as an elephant’s. In a day at least seven to 10 people died. We lived in great misery.”
Like many others, the young Rin Vuth was separated from his family, an added cruelty to the suffering. He began to hear rumors that humanitarian organizations were at the border between Cambodia and Thailand, offering food and asylum to those who could make it across. He decided to escape.
“I walked without food for two days,” he remembers. “When we nearly arrived to the Thai-Cambodian border it was my bad luck. We heard the burst of a bomb!
“Immediately I knew that I stepped on a mine. I lost consciousness…When I awoke I was in bed. I became a handicap.”
He stayed in a refugee camp hospital for three months physically recovering from the loss of his leg.
When I met Rin Vuth he was 18, still living in a refugee camp in Thailand, preparing for a new life in America. He was deeply ashamed of his wounded body and would get up before dawn to hobble on crutches to his classroom while the rest of the camp was still sleeping.
When I asked him what he wanted to do in America, he replied he wanted to be an artist. He liked to draw, he said, but he didn’t have any paper. I gave him a sketch pad and pencils, and within a few days he brought the pad back and presented it as a gift to me.
I opened it and saw page after page of amazing drawings, graphically showing the hell his life had been the last six years.
In one drawing, the ground is littered with skulls and bones. It is strikingly similar to the unforgettable scene I saw years later in the movie about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, The Killing Fields, where the field is covered with thousands upon thousands of human skulls and skeletons.
In one drawing, a bird looks sadly down on the suffering below. “I’m very pity on you, but I can do nothing,” the bird says. To the suffering people of Cambodia, God seemed as impotent as the bird.
“Oh, my beautiful and lovely country, I will never forget you! Will I ever see you again?” Vuth wrote as he prepared to leave for America. And yet he had hope for the future.
“I would like to go to the United States with the intention to meet the brilliant future, peace, and freedom,” he wrote, “and especially to get the good knowledge.”
Rin Vuth’s experiences are not unlike those of the prophet Ezekiel, who also witnessed the fall of his country. When Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians in 587 BC, the Israelites who were not killed, including Ezekiel, were taken into exile and forced to work in the fields.
Being in exile was a crushing experience for the Israelites. Unlike their ancestors, who had also journeyed in the wilderness, they were moving away from – not toward – the Promised Land. Their entire identity and relationship with God had been based on that land of promise.
How could God still be with them if they were not in their land? Did God still care about them? Was it possible for them to still have a relationship with God? Was there any hope for them at all?
It is out of that setting that Ezekiel is called to prophecy. In a vision, God sets him down in a valley filled with bones, a scene not unlike those killing fields of Cambodia.
God says to Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these bones live?”
The answer to God’s question seems obvious. The bones are shattered in pieces, with the marrow dried out of them. It would be hard to imagine anything more hopeless or dead.
But Ezekiel does not want to cast aspersions on God’s power. And so instead of answering, “Are you crazy?” he replies, “O Lord God, you know.”
God commands Ezekiel to speak to the bones, to tell them God’s breath will enter them. And as the prophet speaks, he hears a noise, a rattling, and the bones begin to come together and to be covered with flesh.
Then comes a sound like the wind, and God’s breath enters the bones and they come to life.
These dry, dead bones are like the people of Israel, or Cambodia, or Gaza or Ukraine, or any people whose hope is lost, God tells Ezekiel and us.
“Go tell the people I will bring them up from the grave,” God says. “I will put my spirit in them and they will live.”
Out of a situation that seems hopeless, God speaks and brings new life.
The same scenario occurs in today’s gospel story. Lazarus, the brother of Jesus’ good friends Mary and Martha, becomes very ill.
The sisters send word to Jesus to come quickly to heal him, but Jesus tarries. By the time he arrives, Lazarus has been dead for four days.
The sisters greet Jesus with an accusation. “Lord, if you had been here our brother would not have died.” Jesus begins to weep.
Jesus weeping is one of the most poignant scenes in scripture. Jesus feels pain, sorrow and despair. He knows the agony of grief and loss.
And yet he does not let the grief keep him from hope.
He goes to the cave where Lazarus is entombed and orders the stone sealing it to be rolled away. Martha tries to stop him, saying that her brother’s body has already begun to decay.
But Jesus persists. He prays, then orders Lazarus to come out of the tomb. And the dead man, wrapped in cloths like a mummy, rises and comes out.
Coming as it does the week before Palm Sunday, the beginning of the week that sees Jesus’ death and resurrection, the story of Lazarus is a dramatic example of God’s compassion and power even over death.
But to say that this story is only about Jesus’ power in this extraordinary situation limits its meaning. We all have been faced with the death of someone we love, and we know that no matter how hard we pray, Jesus is not going to bring them back to us in this life.
Yet the Lazarus story, like the story of Ezekiel and the dry bones, and of Rin Vuth and the killing fields of Cambodia, is a story about hope in the darkest times of our lives.
We all have been faced with our own valley of dry bones. It may be struggles with illness, or grief over the death of someone we love.
It may be a failed marriage or stalled career; broken relationships with our children or former friends; despair that leads to addiction; or a faith that has gone dry and brittle.
In all of these situations we cry out, “Is there any hope?”
And God’s answer is a resounding yes. God heals what is most broken, most hopelessly beyond repair. For God’s people there is no situation that is totally bereft of hope and life.
This kind of hope is not a synonym for optimism, a false heartiness that denies pain and despair.
True hope in God does not deny the bleak reality of our situation.
True hope requires looking at the dry bones of our lives and admitting that it is beyond our power to bring them to life.
True hope acknowledges our dependence on God, and trusts that God is present in every situation, even amid the driest of bones.
Shallow religion wants us to think that the joy of resurrection simply cancels out all pain.
But Jesus’ resurrection did not cancel out the pain of the cross, or his feeling of abandonment by God, his own valley of dry bones.
Resurrection hope does something better than that: It reveals the truth that God is with us amid our suffering and sorrow and pain; with us even in our darkest and bleakest valleys.
Theologian Paul Tillich understood that when he wrote, “It is the greatness and heart of the Christian message that God, as manifest as Christ on the cross, totally participates in the dying of a child, in the condemnation of a criminal, in the disintegration of a mind, in starvation and famine, and even in the human rejection of himself.
“There is no human condition in which the divine presence does not penetrate. This is what the Cross, the most extreme of all human conditions, tells us.”
I wish that I could tell you that my friend Rin Vuth did meet a brilliant future in the country, but I can’t. I don’t know what happened to him after his arrival in California more than four decades ago.
But I do know that the God who raised Lazarus from the dead, the God who gave life to the valley of dry bones, the God who brings hope to all of God’s children everywhere is with him – and with all of us.
Amen.