Sermon for May 1st (The Resurrection of the Body)

I was asked once in a church interview whether or not I believed in the Resurrection. Yes, I replied. I believe in the Resurrection. I mean, as a Christian (and especially as a pastor!) how could I give any other answer? Yet, I was told that in previous call committee interviews there had been hesitation or even waffling by not just one but two pastoral candidates on this very subject.
Which brings me to the question: Do YOU believe in the resurrection? Do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead? Do you believe that through faith in Jesus YOU will rise from the dead? While I’d like to believe that this is a simple answer for all of you to respond to as Christians, I have found that, in fact, many of you would have a difficult time answering it and being sure of your answer.

At the end of this last year in confirmation, I asked the kids what happens after someone dies. Here is a sampling of their responses: we lay in the ground, we go to heaven or hell, our spirit goes up to heaven while our body rots, we become ghosts, we walk up a stairway to heaven and, my favorite, there is a train that comes and picks us up to take us to heaven! I’d like to believe that it’s only the confirmation students that are confused, but what answer would you have given if I asked you what happens after you die? Would you say that your soul goes to a better place, but your body stays down here to disintegrate? That you become an angel? Or maybe you’d honestly say that you just don’t know? Well, as a Christian, it’s time that you start knowing. I want you to be able and ready to give an accounting of the hope that you have in Christ Jesus. Is there really a resurrection from the dead and does it really matter?

Where do we start? With Jesus’ resurrection or the promise of our own resurrection from the dead? Well, the two are intrinsically related. Saint Paul explains in his first letter to the Corinthians in chapter 15, “But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” And again a few verses later, “If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either.” It’s not either-or. It’s both or none! If Jesus really did rise from the dead, then you have hope that one day you will be resurrected as well. But you are not going anywhere if he stayed dead. The same holds true going the other way. If you don’t believe that there will be life after death for yourself, then you won’t be able to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead either. It’s not either-or. It’s all or nothing.

But do people just believe in one resurrection and not the other? Yes, I think so. For instance, there are many religious people who believe that they will “live on” in some transcendental way apart from their bodies. They believe in some kind of personal resurrection, but certainly don’t believe in Jesus Christ. But Jesus says you will NOT “live on” in any spiritual, bodily or transcendental way apart from faith in him. Jesus makes this point very clearly, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” And again, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for
God’s wrath remains on him.” (John 3:36)

But there have always been skeptics about Jesus’ resurrection. In fact, it’s written right into the Bible in the gospel of Matthew, “When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, ‘You are to say His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.” And yet, even though we were not there, we trust in the disciples’ witness as Christians that Jesus actually did die and was met again, but this time, alive! The Resurrection cannot be explained. It is meant to be miraculous! And, despite what that call committee experienced, I think that most Christians, and pastors, do believe in Jesus’ resurrection. The hard part, however, is understanding what Jesus’ resurrection means for us.

“If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” Yes, that’s right. If we didn’t believe that there was more to this life than what we see and experience here on earth, we shouldn’t even bother being Christians. Being a Christian is NOT about teaching your children to have good morals. It’s teaching your children to know that when they die they will be raised from the dead. Now, yes, that will create much more difficult discussions maybe, but it’s still the truth. We can’t be ashamed about this! Our faith relies on the resurrection. Without Jesus being raised from the dead, we are all here for no good reason at all! We should just be out enjoying ourselves until the bell tolls for us and we sleep the eternal sleep.

“But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” Now, that’s the question that everybody asks. Did you know that the answer is in the Bible? I mean, so many people come up with all these weird ideas about ghosts, and spirits floating up out of the body and so on and so on as if we have to come up with the answer to this great mystery of life on our own. But It is answered right here! Chapter 15 of 1st Corinthians. Mark it! Underline it in your Bibles and when you wonder again you’ll be able to read it again. How ARE the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?”

Here’s Paul’s answer, “How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.” That’s the beginning of his answer at least.

It’s not that it’s a foolish question, but simply a very weird and foolish idea that we get in our heads when we start thinking of dead bodies getting up and walking around. We ask questions like, “What about Uncle Fred who died from gangrene? How’s he gonna walk around on that leg in the resurrection?” What about people who died in an explosion? What about when someone is cremated? How can there be a body?” We all get so crazy in our minds with questions like this. Paul says that of course those pictures are foolish because just like farmers don’t plant cornstalks in their fields in the spring, our new spiritual bodies are not planted on this earth before death. Something changes.

God decided to make our bodies on this earth glorious but also able change, to decay and to perish. Some of you ladies out there may not like to believe it, but those wrinkles in your smile make you beautiful in a way that an 18 year old beauty queen cannot hope to emulate. Age can also bring bodily decay as well as much sadness and suffering but, the point is, after death, that kind of “au natural” look will not be possible. That’s old, but God says he will make all things new. So, yes, if you go out to the graveyard and dig up ol Great Grandma Helga right now after service, she’ll just be a pile of bones by now; however, in the resurrection of the dead, she will have a new spiritual body. Those old bones will be brought back to life in a way blessed Helga could never imagine. Remember , the tomb was empty when Jesus was raised. Do we really expect our own resurrection to be different than his?

We have hope to rise again because Jesus rose again. And how did Jesus rise? As a spirit? As a wisp of pure sparkling energy? As a ghost? No! Jesus came to see his disciples in the upper room and said this, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” Jesus had hands and feet and a stomach it appears because he ate fish. Every week we confess in the Apostles Creed that we believe in the resurrection of the body and yet most Christians believe that they’ll look more like Caspar the friendly ghost than Jesus.

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

This concept of a spiritual resurrection, rather than a bodily one, comes from the misunderstanding that somehow our bodies and our spirits are opposed to one another. By the 4th century, a heresy called Gnosticism had taken over Christianity. The gnostics believed that this world with all its disease, earthquakes and slugs was gross, sinful and evil and that a Christian was supposed to escape this world and these yucky bodies of ours to become glorious, angelic and spiritual beings. Bodies were bad. Spirits were good! So, in the resurrection of the dead, of course, they just conveniently forgot that Jesus came back WITH HIS OWN BODY! With wounds still on his hands and feet! That he didn’t drop off his skin like a bodybag as he ascended into heaven but that he was raised into heaven IN HIS BODY! And, do you know what that means, God created you (spirit AND body) for a purpose. He made you good. Inside and out. And when you are raised, you will have a body. You will still be you. Different? Yes. Imperishable? Yes. Spiritual? Yes. But a spiritual body that is still a recognizable you.

Do you believe in the resurrection of the dead? Do you believe in the resurrection of the body? There are many things that we can’t know until the other side of eternity. But God tells us that we can know some things. As a believer in Jesus Christ, he promises you that because he died and now lives and reigns for all eternity, you shall also live again even though you die. “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead.” And praise be to God that, one day, you will be raised too. Amen.