An Embarrassment of Riches … And Fact
Brian Stratton - June 22, 2008
Romans 6:1-11
In today’s text Paul anchors the very essence of the gospel in the resurrection. Christ’s resurrection is the touchstone proposition of the Christian faith, ensures our own resurrection, and provides the basis for how we are to live our lives. This powerful message energized the early Christians to change the world but many today are less certain of an afterlife than Paul. Many see a scientific understanding of human beings as undermining the idea of an immaterial soul. My discipline of philosophy raises many questions about how a resurrected person can be the same person as the one who lived on earth. And, perhaps even more seriously, some theologians have said the desire for resurrection is a sign of spiritual immaturity, a selfish need to preserve our own egos. This is a sermon, not a philosophical treatise, so I will try to answer these concerns with a parable and show that our lives could be enriched as much as the early Christians if we reclaim Paul’s hope in the centrality of the resurrection.[1]
Scene: Young man and woman – perhaps doomed for a mixed relationship of profound differences (she UNC and Duke?) in the arboretum.
“Stop asking me to marry you!” “Can’t you just enjoy spending time together and appreciate me for who I am?” If I wanted to spend time with a mercenary I would read Soldier of Fortune Magazine.”
Mercenary? It is heaven being with you. Our dates are fun , but it takes all the joy out of it if there is nothing permanent in the end.
Perhaps young women no longer string young men along with pins and needles these days but perhaps last generation’ girl will suffice for this Sunday’s parable. “Stop talking about heaven, says our spiritual, not religious, girl. It’s so mercenary. Isn’t it enough to serve God in this life without getting paid by having your precious self preserved when the world has no more use for your services? We can’t really know if there is a hereafter so why not be content and live decently now?
My precious self! What about other people’s precious selves. I suppose you’ll allow me to care for others even if you object to me caring for you. Don’t you think it makes a difference if we believe the people we loved are happy somewhere? Wouldn’t it be a farce if all human struggle accomplishment and love just vanishes like a bubble popping from that little girl over there’s wand?
Others? You are really worried about yourself. You get a little sick feeling inside when you think of dying. That is what bothers you.
Of course it bothers me! I have a protest march against death beating a drum inside my ribs. That’s how I know how others feel. If my death is an outrage why not other’s?
Thou was not born for death immortal bird[2] – Keats said to the nightingale but he knew he was lying. The late worm eventually gets the early bird and the immortal bard. Nature cries out against death, of course, life is incredibly resiliant and finds a solution, but there are horrible things in nature which happen.
You threw me off mentioning the sick feeling, but humans are special. We are made in the image of God. We can think outside our skins, even taking almost a God’s eye view in physics to understand the order of the universe. Maybe if we can think outside our skins we can be candidates to live outside our skins when, as the old burial service my grandfather used to read, worms destroy this body.
Candidates says the girl do not always get elected. And you better not gloat over Obama over Hilary again!
Well, we have different views on the quality of the voters on the latter but in the case of the afterlife the Electorate is absolutely dependable.
Yes, yes, says she, it is easy to say if God wants us God will keep us and if God didn’t want us why send Christ and give us scripture like Paul to tell us how to live But the real issue is Can God resurrect us?
What do you mean? If God is God, creator of all that is, surely he can do all things?
All things but not nothings, a married bachelor can’t exist even if God wanted to make one. Perhaps a human personality apart from its body is like a square circle, a meaningless idea. God made us through natural processes as God makes all creatures and if I die God or even the cloners could conceivably make another at least almost identical to me but can God make her personally the same girl as me? We can’t demonstrate whether he can or not.
No we don’t and how could we. I am not sure how the new resurrected life emerges from our previous one because we don’t know exactly what the new life will be. But you can’t prove the negative-you can’t show God cannot accomplish a resurrection of a person.
Can’t prove the negative, is a long way from “Should believe the positive.” You can’t prove there isn’t a
She is good, thinks our young Blue Devil, and not seeing a way around this tries another approach. You are straying from the point, he says, I let you get away with your unfair remark about my being mercenary for wanting heaven. Wanting heaven is like wanting you, if I didn’t hope you’d have me in the end, getting to know you wouldn’t be what it is. Of course I know we may split up ,you may be a step on the way to someone else (At this point our young woman demonstrates that a curtsey,even If one is not wearing a skirt) can indeed executed with spot on accuracy and sarcasm),. But God isn’t on the road to somewhere else. And Christianity would be pretty pathetic and worthless, a mere start without a finish, if we couldn’t finally get to God. Who fully knows God, or even himself, or the people he loves most in this life? And it isn’t just frat guys like me who say this, it’s Paul, and incredible mystics and saints who say the more they understand the more they see how far off they are! Mercenary! It’s mercenary to want payment for a job it is not mercenary to want to make a job of a job. But that’s not right. Love and friendship is not a job. You enjoy a person and if that person is God …
His words failed him since he was not up to the subject. He finally said ‘you and your Blue penguins!”
Oh all right. Why improbable?
Ill tell you why. Penguins don’t come
Correct, says our young man, but it doesn’t apply. How could nature appear set towards resurrection? Resurrection is beyond nature. If anything will produce resurrection it will have to be God.
You aren’t very good at finishing your own arguments, she says. You should have said God’s dealing with humans in Christ is set in the direction of resurrecting them. Your argument is the whole process points that way.
That’s it! And since you said it so well and scored for my side we can leave it at that.
Of course I am on your side she says softening a bit. I only wanted you to stop being so mercenary.
Mercenary, says he, and so it goes in these conversations, let us leave them to it and list a few principles which can be taken from their debate.
1. To hope there is a heaven is not selfish; no one ever thought he could keep it all to himself.
2. Heaven is not a “payoff” for following God; it is where the road goes.
3. Heaven isn’t an optional extra – Christianity is nonsense without it.
4. Our reason for believing it is not that nature points to it; it is that the idea follows its own sound logic to itself.
Let me develop that last point. Heaven and the resurrection which makes it possible, is nothing produced by nature but a new creation. As such, we don’t need to waste our times trying to isolate from nature something which will make it possible. God alone can give us a future. That is why we speak of resurrection of the body and not the immortality of the soul. Belief in the resurrection is not belief in ourselves but in God who raises us. It is in many ways the acid test of whether we believe in God or not. A god who raises the dead is area power not just a fancy name for the order of nature, whether physical or moral. A god who raises the dead alters the whole picture. We are bound to be sucked down in the quicksand of decay unless God rescues us; it is faith in the resurrection which makes faith in God really mean something.
Second, if God, not nature, guarantees the afterlife it must be understood in relationship to God but also consistent with what we are as the relational creatures God made. But what will the afterlife look like?
Augustine thought the resurrected body would not be mere flesh and blood.[3] Our bodies will transmute into something rich and strange, the very substance of glory. But what of organs for which we have no use, say digestion? Will we still have them? Augustine borders on easy parody by the crudest bodily humor, but wisely stops short. Nature, he says makes all our parts serve a double purpose – use and beauty. Beauty endures when use ends. Our personal physical imperfections will be changed but not to the extent that we lose our personal identities.
Augustine’s speculations are good, but limited. Our future self must bear some relation to our present self. However, too literal an understanding can lead to absurdity.
It is silly to say How wonderful to be in heaven. Gas is under a dollar a gallon!
It is not silly to say, How wonderful to be in heaven! Here wrongs are made right and the injustices of the world have been redeemed by God’s justice.. Or How wonderful to be in heaven! I see God’s will in all God is doing as plainly as I read my friend’s feelings from their gestures. How wonderful to be in heaven! I had glimpses of how God acted in Christ to redeem the world but now I actually see the man in whom God dwelled. Or How wonderful to be in heaven! This person I loved so dearly and thought I had lost is here alive and well, no better than well, now filled with the love of God and is even, if possible, more precious than before!
Why believe in life to come?
1. What humans are – imago dei-(made in image of God0 which is to enter creative and loving relationships, these can only be fulfilled if resurrected
2. Person and teaching of X--taught it, risked his life for it, was vindicated
3. Relationship with living X – we do interact with him however imperfectly points to more
Paul would have us live with the hope of resurrected people. He wants to empower us to live with his pure glimpse of the joy that is in God.
Oh and our couple, what happened to them? Well each of us should write our own ending. For me they marry, experience all the joys and struggles that entails, especially during basketball season, and grow old together until he dies. She thinks, despite all his flaws, our love gave us a shared life I treasure with all my heart.
Years later, she follows him. And finds that he, though less clever than she, was right all along and she was wrong. And she is delighted.
[1] The idea for treating objections to the resurrection as a dialogue between a young couple is drawn in part by remarks of Austin Farrer in Saving Belief: A Discussion of Essentials (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1964).
[2] Keats, Ode to a Nightingale http://www.bartleby.com/126/40.html . Accessed
[3] Many discussions, see City of
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