“We Believe in the Resurrection of the Dead. . . . Wait . . . Do We?”

Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40

I Cor. 15:35-38, 42-50

Consider for a moment the poem in your bulletins: “The Resurrection of the Body,” by Eric Pankey

Do all who lie down expect to awake?

Long ago the worms abandoned this trough.

All they have left is a patch of leather

Where the skull hollows.  Each vertebra,

Like an ancient fish with open mouth

And rigged fin, hold its place in line.

The pelvis could be a worn mortar

And the scattered finger bones, gimcrack.

But these are the remains of a woman

Buried in the gesture of sleep –

Her knees drawn up, one had as a pillow.

Behold the kingdome that comes,

The earth the meek will inherit.

 

The poet Pankey apparently has some questions about the resurrection of the body.  The poem’s opening question - “Do all who lie down expect to awake?”- is set against the description of a woman who died a very long time ago; so long ago that there is not much of her left.  “How will this work?” the poet seems to be asking.

When we confess the Apostle's Creed - an ancient summary of Scripture - we affirm that Jesus Christ "rose again from the dead" and we affirm our hope in "the resurrection of the body."  What do we mean when we say those things?  And why do we say them?

Some of you may be thinking, “Well, we say that stuff because you put it in the liturgy.  We’re not really sure we buy all that!”  You know what – our congregation is no different than some of the earliest followers of Jesus.  Life with God is an ongoing sorting, sifting, filtering, and arguing about what matters and about what we can hope for.

As someone who preaches, I always consider it a miracle of God’s grace if anyone remembers the sermon past Sunday lunch.  I usually edit my sermon down to about four pages (18 minutes or so), and I’m happy if anyone just takes away a single line or phrase that they found helpful and true.  In our reading this week, the Apostle Paul addresses some at Corinth who say – in spite of all his preaching - that there is no resurrection of the dead (15:12).  Others are simply confused or curious, asking "How are the dead raised" or "With what kind of body do they come?" (15:35).

All these questions about "resurrection" invite us to reflect together on our own bodies, their past, present, and future.  Do our bodies have a future in the great resurrection?  And if so, does it make any difference in how we live our lives now?

One of Stephanie’s fellow teachers in Connecticut knew that I was a pastor.  And he knew that my family was in the funeral home business.  And so, at a party once, he wanted to talk about death and dying.  He told me about his mother’s death.  He was very close to his mother.  And she died when he was not at home with her.  She had died six hours or so before he found her.  And in fact she was lying on the floor when he found her.  He was clearly bothered by that image of his mother lying on the floor.  And then he said to me, “But that wasn’t her.  That was just her body.” 

Just her body.  On one hand, he clearly revered and honored her body.  He had cared for her dying body, and was bothered that her body was unattended when she died.  On the other hand, he solved that dilemma by telling himself that the body didn’t really matter.  He was conflicted, as many of us are, about bodies.

Bodies matter in all kinds of ways.  We’re also facing public questions about how to live responsibly with the sexuality of our own bodies and the bodies of others.  The #metoo movement is drawing our attention to the predatory behavior of powerful men.  The Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Church are in the news recently over allegations of sexual abuse by priests, clergy, and youth leaders.  The Methodist Church is gathering at the General Conference as we speak to decide, among other things, on whether to welcome gay and lesbian and transgender people into the leadership of the church.  Nadia Bolz Webber’s new book, Shameless, is drawing attention to the ways that the purity culture fostered by many conservative churches harms young people and creates shame that can last a lifetime. What are we teaching our young people about sexual development and discovery and pleasure and responsibility?  And what does all this teach them about the beauty and wonder of their God-given bodies?

Many of our political differences concern the ways public policies affect the bodies of others.  We Americans are, in general, personally kind.  That is, we are kind and generous in face to face situations.  But we are increasingly unkind when it comes to public policy.  We don’t do a very good job of thinking hard about how our political commitments affect the bodies of others: the bodies of the sick, of the poor, bodies in refugee camps, bodies of children, brown and black bodies, and the bodies of those who live in rural places.

I’ve mentioned before the love story between Teddy and Emily in John Updike’s novel, In the Beauty of the Lillies.  Their honeymoon is erotic primarily because for the first time in their courtship, Emily allows Teddy to see her misshapen foot.  Her club foot had been a source of deep shame for her whole life. Our body’s defects and imperfections and wounds can be sources of powerful shame and embarrassment.  Sickness and disability create questions for us about the future of our bodies.  We spend so much of our lives wrestling with our own bodies that sometimes it is difficult to imagine that these bodies have any kind of future.

I am not quite sure why Paul calls the Corinthians “fools” for raising questions about resurrection and bodies.  Count me among the fools, I suppose.  Clearly he wants to communicate that we miss something about the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ if we give up on hope for the resurrection of our bodies. 

Paul teaches that there is a “natural” body and a “spiritual” body (v. 44).  Right now we experience our “natural” bodies.  But when God raises the dead, God will raise us with “spiritual” bodies. 

Notice that I printed the greek words for these terms in brackets – soma psychikon and soma pneumatikon.  (Not physical/spiritual, but natural/spiritual).  These are not distinctions between physical and non-physical bodies.  Both Adam and Jesus were embodied, of course.  The distinction is between a body caught in webs of sin, tied in knots, living far beneath what God makes possible (that’s Adam); and then on the other hand there is Jesus, whose embodied life was “spiritual,” that is, completely in tune with the movement of God’s Spirit.  What we hope for is the resurrection of bodies that express a Spirit-shaped life.

So when Paul argues that “flesh and blood cannot inherit” God’s new kingdom (v. 50), the problem is not with bodies or embodiment.  The problem is a sinful life lived at cross-purposes to God’s desires.  The problem is a life lived in contradiction to the good news.  Our sin cannot enter heaven, says Paul.  But our bodies can.

Consider the enormous difference between a little seed and the plant/bush/tree that it becomes.  (Paul believes that if you pay attention to the how the world works, you can receive help imagining how God might keep promises to bless and heal the world into wholeness.)  A seed can’t flourish into its full potential until it is planted into the ground and “dies.”  Likewise, resurrection bodies are difficult to imagine right now.  You could never predict, just by looking at a seed, what its full flowering will look like.  So too, what God plans for the great resurrection is unpredictable.

Actually, for thoughtful Christians – young and old – there is something wonderful here.  Paul denies any naïve and simplistic trust that decaying corpses will be directly resurrected.  God isn’t going to scoop up the molecules that formed your body and reanimate them.  Belief in resurrection doesn’t require you to believe anything silly like that.  On the other hand, Paul refuses to give up on the importance of bodies and embodiment.  The future will be a bodied future.  Creation will be renewed and not burned up, escaped, or abandoned.  We are taught to pray for God’s kingdom to come “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr thought that Christians – and preachers especially – ought to be modest about how much they think they know about heaven and hell and life after death.  “It is unwise for Christians to claim any knowledge of either the furniture of heaven or the temperature of hell,” said Niebuhr (Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 2).

I share Niebuhr’s reservations about saying more about heaven and resurrection than we should.  I tend not go on in great detail about what heaven will be like.  For much of my life, “heaven” was simply a story about individual outcomes.  You believe in Jesus Christ so that you, as an individual, can “go to heaven.”  There was little sense that resurrection is a story about the renewal of all creation, of all people, of the earth itself.  For much of my life, “heaven” was a story about escape from the earth and escape from our bodies.  And in that sense, it provided cover for a laziness and indifference when it comes to our care for the bodies of others, not to mention our care for the health of the earth and our environment.

If God chose to love us by drawing near to us in the life of Jesus from Nazareth, then we can assume that God loves creation.  God loves physicality.  God loves materiality.  God loves the vulnerable body of Jesus and God loves your body and mine.  God loves black bodies and Asian bodies and Middle-Eastern bodies and white bodies.  God loves healthy bodies and sick bodies, the bodies of small children and the bodies of those nearing death.  Our bodies – with their needs and desires, their fragility and limitations, their pleasure and joy – these bodies are God’s delight.

If we believe that God raised up the crucified Jesus from the dead in a glorified body, then we can assume that there is a future for our own wounded bodies, and for the wounded bodies of all others.  And so when we are summoned to respond to God with faith, hope, and love, these are the practices of embodied people.

Faith is the trust lived out by physical bodies in the concrete situations of life.

Hope is hope for the blessing of all bodies, including the earth’s body.

Love is always love for the actual bodies of others.

So I’ll end with Paul’s passionate plea to his readers, “Glorify God in your body” (6:20).