Seneca Presbyterian
Church
Seneca, SC
July 27, 2014
New Bodies, New Creation
1 Corinthians 15:50-58
A Disclaimer
Time has quickly passed and I find
myself at week three of a three week series. It doesn’t seem time enough to
contemplate a topic as big as heaven. Yet it was never my intention to exhaust
the subject, but merely to open the door to a deeper understanding. I know my
time with the subject has done that for me. I hope it has for you, but in the
end that is for you to decide.
Because I still care so deeply for
all of you, remember my disclaimer. It is not my intention to diminish or
challenge anyone’s concept of heaven. Heaven is where God is, and where God is,
there is heaven. In the end, heaven and earth will be one. Beyond that all
details are speculation and faith. Your speculation and your faith are just as
valid as mine.
1 Corinthians
15:50-58
The
Kingdom New Testament: A Contemporary Translation
N.T.
Wright
This
is what I’m saying, my dear family. Flesh and blood can’t inherit God’s
kingdom; decay can’t inherit undecaying life. Look! I’m telling you a mystery.
We won’t all sleep; we’re all going to be changed – in a flash, at the blink of
an eye, at the last trumpet. This is how it will be, you see: the trumpet’s
going to sound, the dead will be raised undecaying, and we’re going to be
changed. This decaying body must put on the undecaying one; this dying body
must put on deathlessness.
When
the decaying puts on the undecaying, and the dying puts on the undying, then
the saying that has been written will come true:
Death is
swallowed up in victory!
Death, where is
your victory gone?
Death, where’s
your sting gone?
The
“sting” of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thank God! He
gives us the victory, through our Lord Jesus the Messiah. So, my dear family,
be firmly fixed, unshakeable, always full to overflowing with the Lord’s work.
In the Lord, as you know, the work you’re doing will not be worthless.
In these days, our world has been
fascinated with bodies, has it not? We all watched in sorrow and solemn awe as
bodies from the crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 made their way back to the
Netherlands. After days of suffering the inhumanity of rebels who refused to
honor the dignity of the innocent, forty unidentified bodies were placed in
forty simple caskets which were then placed in forty hearses for a four hour
procession through the Dutch countryside. Thousands stood along the road in
respect. The King and Queen greeted the planes carrying the bodies. Family
members gathered out of shared grief, not knowing if the caskets contained
their loved ones or not. More will follow. Forensic experts will do their best
to give each body a name so a family can know some sense of closure.
Life is known through bodies. It
is why we search for the missing – from earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, and
war. It’s why the search continues thousands of miles away from the Ukraine for
Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. In that profound sorrow of grieving without
bodies, we simply must find some answers. Something to fill an empty heart and
help it to go on.
In days such as these, my heart
has changed. I once had the audacity to say that death is beautiful, but now I
say not. Too often it comes with struggle, fear, and pain. Too often it comes
too early. And far too often, in our world it comes with brutality.
The moment of death certainly can
be peaceful. Thanks to caring ministries like Hospice, it often is. My aunt
died peacefully just a few weeks ago, and I am profoundly grateful to God for
the privilege of being present when she did. She died in a space that had been
her bedroom for almost fifty years. She was surrounded by two nieces and two
nephews along with a caregiver who had been her companion for the last eight
years. Death came as a blessing, for in recent weeks her suffering had
increased.
But it was not beautiful. Her body
bore the evidence of years of suffering. She was not the aunt who cared for me,
welcomed me into her home, and let me get away – regularly – with splitting an
entire cherry pie with my older brother – just my older brother. That night in
her room, my eye was drawn to a picture of her above her bed. It was taken in
her much younger years. It was a reminder of life in a different time, a life
that had been a blessing, a life that was now passing into its promised rest.
For Christians, the last enemy is
death. God never intended that we should know mortality. But ever since the
first humans desired what was not theirs to have more than they desired God, we
have lived with the reality of death in all its incarnations. And ever since
that same moment, God has been at work to conquer death. Do you remember the
words we heard two weeks ago from the very final pages of scripture? God will
wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more.
It is a central truth of our faith
that death will be defeated. Yet we have come to settle for death simply being
re-defined. We
rest content with perishable bodies, immortal souls, and eternal rest. We
simply “go to heaven when we die.” End of story.
Yet in these past weeks, with the help of Professor Wright,
I’ve begun to understand a different story and to claim a different and ancient
hope. In that story, it is not God’s purpose to rescue us from this world. It
is God’s purpose to redeem and re-claim this world and to establish his kingdom
in it.
In that story, when our mortal bodies die, we are welcomed
to a place of restful happiness. It is what Jesus promised the thief on the
cross when he said, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” That paradise is a blissful garden where the
dead are refreshed as they await the dawn of the new day.
Some describe it as sleep, but it is not meant to be a place
of unconsciousness. It is a blessed place – it has to be, for God, Jesus, and
the Spirit are there. And it is where our loved ones enjoy “mystic sweet
communion” with us, for if Christ is present with us especially in his
sacraments, so too are they.
But paradise is a temporary place, a rest area for a longer
and far better journey. That is what Jesus meant by a “dwelling place.” It is
but a temporary shelter; it is not our final home.
This world is our final home – a home that we will return to
when Christ returns. It is the classic Christian hope that you can find carved
in tombstones in an 8th century church graveyard in England (thanks to Professor Wright):
“Go home dear
friends and leave us here and let us lay till Christ appear. When Christ appears
we hope to have a joyful rising from the grave.”
The rest those saints have known for centuries is not the
end of the story. Jesus is going to return, and when he returns there will be a
resurrection to life on a re-created earth. All the graves in that English
churchyard face east. When Christ returns, he will rise like the sun in the
east, and in that moment, those saints will all stand up to greet him.
We call that moment the Second Coming. The Greek term is parousia and it means appearing. In
Greek the word conveys two ideas. First it referred to a mysterious sense of
divine presence and power, especially during a healing. But it also referred to
the arrival of person of power or nobility. Imagine watching for the doors to
open on the famous balcony of Buckingham Palace after a royal wedding. That’s a
parousia – an appearing with great
power.
Our earliest Christian ancestors believed in the parousia. They believed in the mystical
sense of divine presence and power when Jesus was absent from them in the body.
And they believed he would appear someday as the true Lord of the earth.
Like their Jewish brothers and sisters, they believed God
would come in power to judge between good and evil. But they believed even
more. They believed Jesus would come as the absent but ruling monarch to not
only judge but also to re-create. The same power that brought Jesus back from
death would explode upon the earth, bringing renewed life to that earth and resurrected
life to all believers.
Yet perishable bodies have no place on a re-created earth.
In that moment, we will receive new bodies. What will they be like? Heaven only
knows. But we can imagine they will be like Christ’s resurrected body. Physical
body not spirit. Transformed not replaced. Still recognizable. Still uniquely
you or me. But what we are now is only a shadow of what we shall be.
For what we are now is perishable. What we are now is
decaying. What we are now is powerless against disease, against injury, and
against death. What we shall be conquers all that, for its life force will be
the energizing power of God’s new creation – a creation in which death has been
defeated forever. Imagine bodies devastated by cancer, Parkinson’s,
Alzheimer’s, ALS, war, starvation, and abuse all restored to the beauty of
their youth by the power of God’s love for life.
Our new bodies are meant for that new creation – not for
heaven. For in God’s new creation there will be work for us to do. We will be
granted the privilege of ruling wisely over God’s new world – nurturing its
life and sustaining its purpose. In that work, we will know a deeper sense of satisfaction
and a more profound sense of joy that we can dare to imagine.
The will of God will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
For heaven will have come to earth – to stay.
So what do we do in the meantime – those of us who still
enjoy life in our perishable bodies in God’s good but imperfect world that is
on its way to being re-created?
We embody the vision that has come to touch us even now, for
the hope of that future world came into the present on that first Easter day.
We have already tasted what is to come, so we work faithfully even now for its
arrival. We work for justice, for healing, for reconciliation, for forgiveness,
for compassion – for God’s kingdom. We tell others how the world is meant to be
and will be when God’s way becomes the way of the world. And we rely upon the
abiding and empowering presence of God the Holy Spirit in all that we do.
But, you may say, this world is still an un-re-created mess.
Isn’t all this work futile? What little work we may be able to do seems like
nothing in light of current reality. Why try? Why risk? Why fail?
Paul has an answer. We find it in the last verse we heard
today – one of the most powerful verses in all scripture: Therefore, my
beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord,
because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. (1 Corinthians 15:58)
Professor Wright tells the story of the stonemasons who
worked on the great cathedrals of Europe. The great architects of those cathedrals
crafted the vision of what they would someday be. After drawing up their plans,
they passed on instructions to countless masons, telling them which stones they
were to carve and in what way. Each mason would have been only vaguely aware of
what the others were doing. When he finished with his stones, he handed them
over, relying on others to know where his work would find its ultimate home,
That mason may have had no conception of the architect’s
final vision. He may not have lived to see the completed cathedral with his
work at last where it belonged. But he trusted the architect. The work he had done
would not be wasted. He was not, himself, building the cathedral, but he was building
for the cathedral. And it was enough.
So too with us. We work in our little corner of God’s good but
imperfect world. We do our best to feed hungry bodies and to shelter homeless
bodies. With our new Parish Nurse, we will seek to heal and sustain healthy
bodies. As we do, we offer faithful witness to the way God wants all bodies to
be treated and all life to be preserved. We remain ever more confident partners
with God in the re-creation of this world until it becomes, by the power of
God, the new heaven on earth.
THANKS BE TO GOD
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