B Easter 3 OL UCB
2018 (Resurrection)
I Thessalonians
4:13-18; I Corinthians 15:1-9
April 15, 2018
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All of the king’s horses and all of
the king’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
Educator
and author Frank McCourt read this nursery rhyme to his students and then asked
them what was going on in this story.
His students respond that there is this egg on the wall, and it falls,
and, well, you know because if you know the laws of physics and biology, you
really can’t put a cracked egg back together again. McCourt asks them, “Who says it’s an egg?’
The
students respond with, “Of course it’s an egg.
Everyone knows it’s an egg.”
Pressing,
McCourt asks, “Where does it say it’s an egg?”
He
can see their minds whirring and ticking, looking for any mention of an egg in
the nursery rhyme. They’ve never had
anyone tell them anything else. Every
student in the class seems to be comfortable with the idea that it’s an
egg. Why do teachers have to come along
and mess everything up by looking more closely at things?
McCourt
assures them that he is not trying to destroy or mess anything up, he just
wants to know where they got the idea of an egg. Because, Mr. McCourt, it’s all in the pictures
and the people who drew the pictures must have known the guy who first came up
with the poem, and that person must have known it was an egg.
McCourt
relents, a little. He tells them he will
let it go, but that the future lawyers in the class will never accept the idea
that it was an egg when there is no evidence anywhere for it being an egg.[1]
Humpty
Dumpty illustrates the situation the church faces with the resurrection of
Christ. Once a tradition becomes fixed,
it gets repeated in such a way that we know what the standards are and what the
variations are, and they become the lens through which we see everything. The tradition becomes common sense. Even as we look at the evidence, we may pass
over it in favor of the traditional tale that has been repeated so often that
it makes sense.[2]
We
do this with other Biblical stories as well.
Some of you have heard this Biblical criticism. How many Magi or Wise Ones brought Jesus
gifts at his birth? Many of you might
say “three” because that is the way it has been portrayed in every Christmas
play or pageant since our birth or because we know that the Magi brought three
gifts—gold, frankincense, and myrrh. So,
naturally, through common sense, we assume Three Wise Ones, right? Well, we don’t know. The Bible doesn’t really say.
So
it is with resurrection. We read into
the Bible a tradition that has become so common place we assume it makes common sense.
Writing
out of his own tradition, Paul calls into question the physical resurrection of
Jesus in one of his letters to the church in Corinth. That seems odd because our Christian
tradition and creed has come to affirm the physical resurrection. If the egg truly is not there, how do we say
the nursery rhyme without seeing it as an egg?
If there is no evidence for physical, bodily resurrection, how do we
keep it out of view so that we can see what the apostle Paul truly says about
it—resurrection in general and the resurrection.
We begin with the apostle Paul because his
letters are probably some of the earliest source material we have in the New
Testament. Scholars place Paul’s letter,
1 Thessalonians, in about the year 50 C.E., probably 20 years earlier than the
Gospel of Mark who makes reference to the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70 C.E.
That’s where we begin to ask, “What does the resurrection and the resurrection
of Christ mean to Paul and his letter readers and listeners?”
Even
though surrounding cultures readily used resurrection as part of their
theology, Jewish theologians and teachers resisted it for thousands of years. God’s favor was communicated by a long and
fruitful life. When foreign empire after
foreign empire killed the most faithful Jews, however, Jewish theologians and
teachers have a God problem. If a long
life shows God’s favor, and it appears that the most faithful and good die
young, then is God sitting back on the couch, eating bon-bons, and binge
watching “Stranger Things” on Netflix as the people undergo tremendous
persecution and death? Jesus echoed the
cry of so many Jews through the centuries when quoting from Psalm 22, “My God,
my God, why have you abandoned me?” So Jewish thinkers borrow from other
religious faiths to detail the activity of God as the truly good die young. The Greek word used for resurrection, anastasis, literally means to stand up
again. In the face of persecution and
oppression, God stands up again just, righteous, and faithful Jews.
Understand
that this is not about going in or getting to heaven. The Jewish people are trying to rectify a
just, good, and loving God with just, good, and loving people executed by
empires which demand loyalty by ending the practicing of the Jewish faith. When a faithful Jew continues to practice
their faith, edict, order, and command demand that they be executed. The problem of God in Jewish martyrdom
creates the need for resurrection. This
ain’t no bon-bon eatin’, binge watchin’ God.
This is a God who is meeting with the midwife every day to work out the
transformation of this good earth.
Going
on in I Thessalonians, in chapter 4 we read for today, a new problem emerges as
the Jewish people try to understand resurrection. What happens to those good, faithful, and
just Jews who are already dead when Jesus (referred to as the Anointed—the
literal meaning of Christ or Messiah), what will happen to the already dead
when Jesus returns? Are the dead somehow
at a disadvantage? Paul seeks to calm
the anxiety of the living over their dead loved-ones.
In
contrast to the immortality of the soul, the Greek understanding that death
never happens, Paul relates that these dead are buried in the earth, again
asleep, already becoming dust, when God raises them first, before you the
living. Never fear. Your loved-ones are
resurrected because they belong to the Anointed. It hearkens back to the creation story when
humankind is created from nothing but the dust of the earth.[3] “Resurrection is the restoration of creation
to the state in which God intends it.”[4]
This
return of Jesus uses the Greek term that is commonly employed to describe the
entrance of a king or an emperor into a city.
The city prepares and welcomes the king or emperor as if he were a god. But in this Scripture passage, it is not
Caesar, not Herod, not Pilate, but Jesus, the Anointed, shall come to the city
seeking out those who are asleep.
We begin
to see how Paul is working out the universe.
Resurrection, this waking up from sleep, is not so much used to indicate
heaven and an afterlife, but to grant hope to a people who experience the
persecution and death of empire. The
language, the vocabulary, used by Paul suggests that God works in a realm which
empire cannot reach. And God and God’s Anointed
begin a general resurrection that signals the end of empire and the beginning
of the transformation of the earth.
In the
letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes about the Anointed following through
with God’s plan in two parallel phrases.
“Anointed
died for our sins . . . in accordance
with the writings.”
“That he
was buried, that he was raised up on the third day . . . in accordance with the
writings.”
Not unlike
resurrection, I think we have heard about Jesus dying for our sins so much that
we scarcely know that phrase’s real context and meaning. Remember that the Jewish people largely
believed that their sin, often seen as idolatry, and spoken by the prophets as
violence and injustice, resulted in God placing them under the subject rule of
these empires. So if the Jewish people
were to be free to pursue their own liberation, the sin that landed them under
the foot of empire would somehow have to be resolved. Jesus dies at the hand of the people’s sins
of violence and injustice. In the
forgiveness of those sins, the relationship with God is restored and the people
are now free from their sins and free for moving on the violence and injustice
of Rome. That Jesus dies and is raised
up by God in accordance with the writings makes all of Israel’s story available
to those loyal to the Anointed. Those
loyal to the Anointed can see Israel’s long story in their story, and they can
begin to see their story in the story of Israel.[5] Paul wants the communities he writes to . . .
to see their lives as part of the ancient story and to see the ancient stories
as their lives .
Let me
give you an example. Good politicians
know what Paul is trying to do here.
When Barack Obama first announced he was running for president some time
ago, where did he go to make that announcement?
Springfield, Illinois. Why? As an Illinois native with a son named
“Abraham” you better believe I knew why.
Obama had no political base nor history in downstate Illinois. But the State of Illinois and the American
people do. Springfield is considered the
common place for Abraham Lincoln’s
home and burial place. President Obama
wanted the general public to see his story in the long line of stories we tell
about Abraham Lincoln and our story as a nation. He also wanted the story of Abraham Lincoln
seen in his run for the president—an Illinois boy, something historic about it
all, the Civil War, Civil Rights, and an African-American man running for
president. Obama wanted all of us to
make the connection with Lincoln as common sense.
In the
same manner, Paul wants Jesus’s story to read in the long line of Jewish
history. He also wants the long line of
Jewish history to be read into Jesus’ story.
Man, that is what I so hope I am
doing every week here. I hope and pray I
am helping you to see your lives in the story and the story in your lives.
This
language and metaphor, “for our sins”, on our behalf, is found also in the
martyr stories from the 2nd Century BCE within the Maccabean books
contained in the Apocrypha, a set of books in many Roman Catholic Bibles just
making their way into mainline Protestant Bibles.[6] Twenty-five years ago, when I was in seminary,
we were just beginning to study these books to interpret the New Testament
gospels in a much broader context. . Some of that context comes from concepts like
“noble death” and “martyrdom” at the hands of the Syrian Empire and Antiochus
Epiphanes, Epiphanes literally meaning God-Manifest.
Bernard
Brandon Scott writes,
In
the martyr tradition burial in the earth is an important aspect of the martyr’s
being raised up from the earth, from the dead.
It demonstrates that God’s enemies will not triumph by killing the
martyr. The amount of time in the earth
is unimportant; having been in the earth, among the dead, is what counts. Burial in the earth accents God’s creative
power, the ability to create from nothing, a notion that, as we saw, arose in
Judaism in connection with being raised from the dead.[7]
Scott goes on to say that Paul uses
the past tense for the verbs dead and buried, in the letter to the churches in
Corinth, indicating a completed action.
But that Paul uses a verb tense for “He was raised up” that indicates a
past action with continuing effect. God
had Jesus stand up and that standing up continues to move on the world.
The
appearances of Jesus to this list of people Paul details in his letter all
indicate that the appearances happened “for” or “on behalf of” the person or
persons: “for Cephas”, “for the twelve”,
“for James”, “for all the apostles.” The
meaning is that God is causing Jesus to appear for this person or these
persons.
God
causes Jesus to appear for these people so that they might have hope that the
empire cannot kill who and what the Anointed was and is. Over and over again, Paul makes it clear that
resurrection is not about heaven, not about the afterlife, not even and only about
Jesus as the Anointed. For Paul, the
resurrection was a part of a long line of struggle by God to transform the
world. Resurrection affirmed and
vindicated who Jesus was in life, what he preached and taught, the way he moved
and ministered in keeping with a long line of Jewish tradition that interprets
God’s primary value as social justice.
Rome did its absolute worst
to Jesus the Anointed and sought to proclaim what he said and did as over and
done with, that the Jewish God’s justice could be executed and buried. Oh but, sisters and brothers, siblings and
cousins, have hope, the long line of writings and scriptures tell us, because
according to the writings and Scriptures, God has other plans. God can raise up justice from the dust.
At
the beginning of this sermon, I related that after years and years of tradition
and re-telling, the resurrection has become only about Jesus, affirming his
bodily resurrection and about getting our individual souls into heaven. As if Jesus always pointed to himself. But no matter how many times we read Humpty
Dumpty, there is no egg there. For Paul,
there is no evidence that Jesus’ resurrection had anything to do with believing
in the physically improbably and an afterlife.
Through Bible study, in looking at Paul’s letters, we see that the
resurrection was about countering imperial power, death, and violence. Paul used the martyr’s story found within his
Jewish tradition to reflect upon the life of Jesus and proclaim that God had
raised him. Even those dead belonging to
the Anointed would go with him in resurrection when the Anointed one, as
opposed to some Roman ruler, returned to the city. In fact, as a way to comfort those who worry
about their dead loved ones, Paul states that they will be taken up first by
Jesus. Rome did its worst, could do its
worst. God would raise the faithful up
from the dust.
These
resurrection stories put a critical question before us. Are we so invested in our individual
salvation and getting to heaven, in believing credal formulations, that we
ignore the plain meaning Paul gives to the resurrection? Are we willing to confront the power,
violence, and death of empire believing that God will raise us up? May God have Jesus appear for us, individually,
and also as a community, Billings First Congregational Church, so that we might
have hope, and continue the life, ministry, and mission of Jesus. May we be part of the long tradition in which
Paul placed Jesus. Let it be known that
no empire can execute and bury the justice found in the people and program of Billings
First Congregational Church. Rome did
its worst to Jesus, and God raised him up.
In the same manner, sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins, God will
awaken and quicken us too. Out of dust,
we will be raised. Out of dust, we will
be raised. Alleluia. Amen.
[1] Frank McCourt, ‘Tis.
(New York: Scribner,
1999), pp. 353-354, found in Bernard Brandon Scott, The Trouble with Resurrection: From Paul to the Fourth Gospel (Salem ,
Oregon
[3] Scott, “The Trouble,” pp. 39-45, p. 89.
[5] Ibid, p. 88-89.
[6] Ibid, p. 89. 4 Maccabees 17:22.
[7] Ibid, p. 89.
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