Practicing Resurrection
Preached at University Worship
Southern
1 Corinthians 15: 12-20
I’d
like to begin my sermon by leading us in an imaginative exercise . Imagine that you are in a cemetery. Yes, that’s right, I said a cemetery. Maybe it is one you have been in before,
maybe it is one you drive by as you go to work, maybe it’s one you have been
curious about. Imagine you are in this
cemetery and there you hear the hoot of an owl.
You turn and see two large eyes blinking at you out of the hollow of a
big oak tree. The tree is old and large
and its branches stretch like fingers out into the night sky….
What thoughts or feelings came up
for you during this visualization? Was
it a spooky scene? A sad scene? Maybe some of you thought I was off my
rocker. Somehow I’d gotten my seasons
mixed up and I thought it was Halloween instead of mid-February. Maybe some of you thought you were in a
Actually, Owls, Oak trees and
cemeteries are symbols of new life!
Scientists are discovering that graveyards that shelter the last of the
big trees with large cavities are life-saving sanctuaries for endangered owls. Cemeteries, it turns out, are terrific places
for animals to live.
The
largest white oak in
Cemeteries teach us that the burial
of human bodies leads not to death but to life—to new life for birds, trees and
other living things.
The
assigned epistle reading in the lectionary for this Sunday in mid-February is
part of the Apostle Paul’s famous chapter on the resurrection. It seems a bit premature in the church
year. Lent is a week and a half away and
we don’t get to Easter until April. But
that is the point. Paul, and maybe the
planners of the Revised Common Lectionary, knew that resurrection is always
with us.
Today
we pick up right in the middle of the chapter and right in the middle of Paul’s
argument. Paul says to the Corinthians,
“Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say
there is no resurrection of the dead? If
there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if
Christ has not been raised then our proclamation has been in vain and your
faith has been in vain.” In other words,
you can’t have your resurrection cake and eat it too.
Evidently
there were some Corinthians who believed in the resurrection of Jesus, but did
not believe in the resurrection of the dead.
Literally, the phrase Paul uses is ‘raising of the corpses.’ This idea of the raising of the corpses was
offensive to some Corinthians. It was
not the stuff of Christian hope, but a scenario for a horror story! It seems that some of them had been
influenced by the philosophy of the day that claimed physical existence was
inferior. The body was a bad thing and
Christians should deny their bodily existence.
Paul
uses Jesus’ resurrection to reaffirm the Christian hope of the resurrection of
the body and bodily existence. He will
go on to argue at the end of this chapter that to proclaim the resurrection of
Christ is to declare the meaningfulness of embodied life—on both sides of the
grave.
I
think we have just the opposite problem as 21st century
Christians. Now, don’t get me wrong, we
still have a lot of work to do around affirming our bodily existence. But as far as the resurrection goes, I think
we are probably more willing than the Corinthians to believe in a bodily
resurrection. The Corinthians were more
willing to live in their present moment with the resurrection, but were
skeptical about how it would all end. We
cling to how we think it will all end at the expense of understanding how
resurrection affects us now.
How
did we come to limit the resurrection to the promise of an afterlife? Some folks call it ‘in the sweet by and by’
theology. When we all get to heaven we
will understand it better by and by.
We’ve got eternity settled, so why bother with now?
For
us resurrection means immortality. But
look at the biblical witness. When Jesus
appears to his disciples after the resurrection they don’t walk away saying to
themselves, “Wow, now we have eternal life.”
No, they said things like, “Were not our hearts burning within us?”
When
Jesus appeared to them in a locked upper room, he didn’t say, “I give you the
promise of life after death.” He breathed
his resurrection spirit upon them. He
set something free in them and let them loose on the world.
The
disciples didn’t walk away from Jesus’ resurrection and into the book of Acts
preaching immortality. They practiced resurrection!
Well,
what does it mean for us to practice
resurrection? American poet Wendell
Berry says, everyday do something that does not compute by the world’s
standards. “Love the Lord. Love the
world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does
not deserve it…. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the
facts.”
Guatemalan
poet Julia Esquivel says we practice resurrection by keeping a vigil of hope in
the face of violence and injustice. “It
is something that doesn’t let us sleep, that doesn’t let us rest, that won’t
stop pounding deep inside….it is the earthquake soon to come that will shake
the world and put everything into place.”
She invites, “Join us in this vigil and you will know what it is to dream! Then you will know how marvelous it is to be
threatened with resurrection.”
Maybe
the way we practice resurrection is to go through our earthly existence always
asking the question, “What does the risen Christ want to set free in me?”
Maybe
there are parts of our lives that look and feel like cemeteries. Owls and Oak trees and Jesus tell us that in
the cemetery times of our lives, new life can emerge and thrive. The mystery of the gospel and the
resurrection is that there is vitality among the tombstones. Sometimes that is hard to see, especially
when the stone markers we face are so lifeless and large and unmovable. It’s difficult to find newness and promise
and hope when we are confronted by the grim granite headstone of a painful
divorce, the loss of a job, a diagnosis of cancer, the death of a loved one, or
the betrayal of a friend.
Practicing
resurrection means looking for the rare and glorious life that is there among
those tombstones.
Episcopal
lay woman, Nora Gallagher, has written a wonderful book about practicing
resurrection. She tells the story of the
way she found new life through her brother’s death from cancer. Like the Owl, it is birds that help her see
new life in the midst of death. She
writes:
“Since
Kit’s death, I have been visited—there is no other word for it—by birds. Driving north on Highway 101, a red-tailed
hawk flies low over the hood of my car, so close I can see the black bead of
his eye. Sitting in a garden of a
retreat house near
When
I got there, the light was turning to evening.
I drove out to one of the dikes, and then pulled over and parked. None of the fancy birds were left: the sandhill cranes were gone as well as the
snow gees. But there were red-winged
blackbirds,
I
was looking out at the bull rushes when I saw something else. I saw, or understood, that Kit was
there. His singular, unique life. He was there somehow, burning in the rushes,
in the light and in the birds. It was as
if his life was exploding into them, and was about to become them, and I had
been given the miraculous luck to catch him just as he dove in. He was traveling at a great speed, it seemed
to me, into the place where all things are alive. I reached toward him, hardly able to believe
it, wanting to hold on to him and to the moment, sheltering my hope in
doubt. I thought, He is alive.”
In
the years ahead that experience sustained her through a difficult time in her
marriage and a struggle with her job.
When she visits the bird refuge three years later she remembers that
feeling of her brother being alive and she says, “Now I think, So am I. This, as it turns out, is my resurrection
story.”
What
will be your resurrection story?