Second Sunday of Easter
John 20:19-31
April 18, 2009The Resurrection of the Body
Spikey died last Wednesday. You might not know Spikey. He was the Preschool’s guinea pig. He spent most of his time in the fours and fives classroom, but he belonged to the whole school. The children vied for the opportunity to take him home for weekends, making him not only a much loved guinea pig, but also a well-traveled one.
Spikey died in Ms. Stacey’s arms and lay in state in Ms. Andra’s office. On Wednesday night I dug his grave – in the Preschool garden just outside the fence, under the giant holly tree, and on Thursday morning we had his funeral.
Spikey’s coffin was a cardboard box that had once contained offering envelopes. The children and I listed good things about Spikey and then we put the box in the bottom of the hole and each of them got a turn filling the grave with dirt. The teachers took part in the ritual as well. They seemed as eager as everyone else to take a trowel and throw a handful of dirt into Spikey’s grave.
We decided that one of the best things about Spikey is that now he will turn to dirt himself, and help the giant holly tree to grow even bigger. All things considered, that’s a pretty good job for a guinea pig, and, to tell you the truth, that’s just about all I wanted to say on the subject.
On Friday our sister Roberta Folker died. She was 85 years old, and the last five years or so of her life had involved a battle with Parkinson’s disease. She had moved to Westminster Oaks shortly after her husband Hoyt died back in November of 2006. On visits to her room I would often run into one of her former students from her years as Principal at Chaires Elementary School. "She kept us in line," they all said. At least one winked and pointed to his derriere when he said it.
Come Tuesday morning, down in Orlando, I’ll preside at a graveside service. We’ll sing one or two of the hymns Roberta chose. (If we sang them all, we’d be there for hours.) We’ll read some scripture and I’ll preach the gospel. Then we’ll commit her body to the earth. And this is what I’ll say:
In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life,
through our Lord Jesus Christ,
we commend to almighty God our sister Roberta,
and we commit her body to the ground,
earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.While the best thing I can say about Spikey is that he’ll make good dirt for growing things, on the basis of the gospel, I can say something far more wonderful about Roberta. That’s because, as the Creed says, "I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting."
The resurrection of the body. My apologies to those of you who came to church on this second Sunday of Eastertide looking for something "spiritual." The fact is, the Easter faith is carnal, full-bodied, incarnate, and proud of it.
"Christianity is inherently, inescapably material," writes Will Willimon:
We believe in the body. God gave us our bodies, loves us in our bodies, and shall love us forever,
in the body.
When, on Easter, Jesus was resurrected, his body, we believe, was raised. The tomb was empty. He did not leave his crucified self, his bruised and battered self, behind. He was bodily raised. As he sallied forth from the tomb, it wasn’t some disembodied soul, some ethereal phantom. That’s Hollywood, not the Bible. He had a body, a recognizable, touchable body.
To be sure, it wasn’t the exact same body that he once had. He went through closed doors. Some upon first seeing him, thought he was a ghost.
[But] when he showed them his hands and his feet, when they touched that scar in his side, when they heard his voice, there was enough body there to say, "It’s him. This is the one we have known and loved. It is the Lord." (Pulpit Resource, Vol. 31, No. 2).
There’s a good reason why it’s so hard to imagine someone without a body. It’s because God made us creatures, not disembodied souls. When someone you love dies, it’s not some vague entity you miss; it’s some body. It’s her smell, her wavy red hair, her unique tone of voice, the quality of her laugh, the peculiar way she smiled.
God made and loves us in our bodies, and we Christians believe in the resurrection of the body. Nine out of ten Americans (God love their pagan hearts) report that they believe in the immortality of the soul. But not us. We’re Christians, you see. Listen to our Creed: we’re into bodies.
We’re a little vague on the details, but we believe that when we die, we, like Christ, will be raised. Resurrection requires two things: a body and the intervention of Almighty God. We are perfectly comfortable with earth burial or with cremation as means of taking care of our bodies when we die. We reckon that resurrection, being the act of God, will not be thwarted by these little details.
And, judging from Jesus’ example, the body we will have in the resurrection will not be exactly the same as we one we have now. Roberta was glad to know that. But it will be us that God shall raise. As Paul says, it doesn’t appear exactly what we shall be. We shall be changed in the twinkling of an eye (I Cor. 15:51-52), but we’ll still be some body.
That pug nose, that mischievous wink, that special look in the eye, we shall see again, and recognize, and take delight in.
You might wonder why I’m making such a big deal of this business of the resurrection of the body. Surely it’s not all that important.
Well, it’s important if we want to live an incarnate faith in what that great modern theologian Madonna points out is a "material world." The Bible glories in materiality, to the great discomfort of those who would separate the soul from the body. Human beings are not souls imprisoned in a body, according to the Bible. We’re a unity; we’re "body-souls." God loves us in the body -- every bit it -- the body God knit together in our mother’s womb, the body God shaped with tender hands from the dust of the earth.
Remember the Song of Songs? Maybe you didn’t read that under the table during Sunday School, but my buddies and I did. We didn’t appreciate the poetry of those ancient Hebrew love poems, but we sure did appreciate the anatomy lesson. Hands. Feet. Legs. Lips. Breasts! There they were, right in the Bible. What does that tell you? That we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and God delights in these bodies of ours. That’s why we find delight in them.
You see, if we didn’t know that from the Bible, we wouldn’t know what offense God takes when people abuse their bodies and the bodies of others. We wouldn’t know how angry God gets seeing a child’s belly bloated from malnutrition. We wouldn’t know what a judgment it is upon our society that adolescents are pushed into anorexia while at the same time morbid obesity is on the rise. We wouldn’t know how interested God is to hear our answer to that ubiquitous question of our culture, "Would you like to super-size that?"
God loves us in the body and wants our bodies to reflect God’s love for us. The Bible tells us we don’t belong to ourselves. We belong to God, every bit of us.
I think it was the writer Lee Smith who told of sitting in church with her friend, at age eight, hearing the preacher say, "Now you are God’s temple."
She and her friend giggled when they heard that -- until they got one of those stern looks from her mother. And from that moment they referred to one another as "Temple One" and "Temple Two."
What a good lesson to learn.
"Would you like to super-size those fries?" No thanks! I’m Temple One.
"What to try a hit off this roach?" Not for me. I’m Temple Two.
Have you been following the instant stardom of Sarah Boyle? She’s the 47-year-old singer from the small town of Blackburn in Scotland. She’s never been married, never been kissed, and spent the last ten years of her life caring for her widowed mother. She is not what most people would call "pretty." "Plain" is more like it – or perhaps "frumpy," and when she walked out onto the stage to audition for the reality show "Britain’s Got Talent," the audience giggled. You could almost see them getting out the rotten tomatoes.
Then Sarah started to sing "I Dream a Dream" from Les Miserables. Within seconds the entire audience was on their feet. The beauty, power, and passion of that voice coming out of that unlikely body flabbergasted everyone.
Of course, this came as no surprise to the folks in Sarah’s church. They already knew what embodied beauty sounds like, for they’d heard Sarah sing many times. Our culture worships bodily perfection, but doesn’t expect beauty to emerge from less-than-perfect bodies. It is said that we worship the body; in fact, we tend to hate our bodies. Nothing could be more unchristian.
We Christians believe God became a person with a body and God loves our bodies enough to raise them from the dead. How we regard our bodies is a good indication of what we really believe about the incarnation as well as the resurrection.
After the risen Jesus showed his disciples his hands and his feet, he went away, leaving them convinced they had seen him in the flesh. Thomas wasn’t there at the time, you will remember. So Jesus came back, apparently just for him.
"Have a look," Jesus tells him. "Go ahead, touch me if you want to. Put your hand here in my side, your fingers in the mark of the nails.
That won’t be necessary, Thomas decides. It’s you, alright. "My Lord and my God."
Christ who lived as some body was raised as some body. We’re some body, too. The same Christ lives today, and with him we shall live, in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.
Thanks be to God.
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