JOB 19:23-27a

PSALM 17:1-8

2 THESSALONIANS 2:13-3:5

LUKE 20:27-38

Sermon – 11/11/01

The Resurrection of the Body

Two years ago last Spring, I attended my 25^th College reunion. The 25^th reunion is a significant watershed; it’s not like early reunions, which people go to perhaps to show off what they’ve been doing since graduation, or like the 50^th and later reunions, which people go to perhaps to show that they are still around. At the 25^th, it’s more like, “This is me, this is my life; what’s your life like?”

When I arrived on campus, I looked around and said to myself, “What are all those gray-haired and/or balding people doing near the Class of ’74 banner? … Oh. Oh, yeah. That’s us.”

It looked like “Rogaine” and “Grecian formula” had very few customers among my classmates. It was a bit startling to recognize people with twenty-five more years tacked onto them – and we wore photocopies of our yearbook pictures stuck onto our nametags just to make identification easier. After awhile, though, I really enjoyed it. None of us were trying to look the way we did when we graduated. That wasn’t important. It was more like “This is how I look at the age I really am. If you’re not interested in the real me, the inner me, anyway, that’s your loss.”

It was rather refreshing, and a big change from the attitudes which advertising tries to instill in us. Advertising tells us that “If you aren’t as prosperous as you want to be when you’re fifty, as wise as you want to be when you’re sixty-five, and as athletic and good-looking as you wish you were at twenty-five all at the same time then you’re a failure. To be less of a failure, buy our product.”

Now, nobody really is likely to “peak” in all those different areas at once. (Well, maybe Alexander the Great did, but he “peaked” at 33, which was when he died, which I doubt would be a life script anyone here wants to sign up for.)

If your prosperity and wisdom peak when you’re young and athletic, you get to watch everything decline instead of just how many “reps” you can do in the gym. And that would probably mean that you weren’t working on “wisdom” very effectively.

Most commonly, some people try to recover youthful physiques when they have the prosperity to do so, thus showing themselves to be more deficient in wisdom than in looks. Billions of dollars are spent in this country on plastic surgery unrelated to real health issues, and on less drastic things like hair growers, all because of the worship of youthful appearance, which some pursued instead of the spiritual, diet and exercise disciplines which could help a person to be healthier, better looking and more fit for their chronological ages.

The really sad part is that as long as there are people in power positions – like employers – evaluating people based on looks instead of ability, a lot of this will continue out of desperation instead of desire on the part of those looking for “quick fixes.”

And yes, sad to say, churches can get seduced by this kind of thinking too; there are churches who seem to want “a 35 year old pastor with 36 years of experience.” You can get one or the other, but not both.

Sometimes, of course, the worship of one’s own appearance becomes truly pathetic. I remember reading an article about Mae West, the famous 1930’s movie star and “sexy leading lady”, who at 80 was still trying to pretend she was 30. Instead of trying to be a healthy and attractive 80-year-old, she looked ridiculous and pathetic. Perhaps she was afraid that she herself did not really exist, but only the image of what she looked like at 30.

A very funny and ultimately poignant Hollywood treatment of this issue is the movie, “Death Becomes Her”, starring Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn as two glamorous and competitive young women who sell their souls to the devil in return for immortality – in the bodies they have. At first, it seems delicious, as their bodies are “improved” in accordance with their wishes, and then as (initially) they fail to age normally and they are unable to be destroyed despite a spectacular “cat fight” between them. However, they slowly learn that they really have received

what is worse than a death sentence: no matter how badly broken and repaired their bodies are, no matter how many of their contemporaries grow old and die, they can't die.

There is a very poignant scene near the end at which they attend, heavily veiled and in the back row, the church funeral of the ex-husband of one of them, who had lived out a full life, surrounded by grandchildren and a loving family, and had died peacefully while looking forward to new life by the power of God.

The ladies leave church after crying for more than one reason, trip on the steps and then (with wonderful trick photography) break in pieces – but still “live”. They have “sold their souls” indeed; they are condemned to immortality in these bodies and are unable to hope for new ones.

Christians, on the other hand, do hope for new ones. Immortality is not achieved through tummy tucks, face-lifts or magic pills. It is achieved if it is achieved at all as a gift of God, achieved by grace through faith. In recognition of the awesome gift that God offers, faithful people express their faith in right living and good works done as thank-offerings to God, not as attempts to earn God’s love, because God already loves us.

The gifts that God offers us in this life are truly awesome and wondrous, including forgiveness, healing, new starts, guidance, steadfast love, faith communities which challenge and care for us, our own personal gifts and abilities, the opportunity to use rightly God’s beautiful and abundant creation and the wondrous potential which comes with being human.

On top of all that and much else, however, we have before us the transforming reality of hope for new life beyond this life. As St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:19, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied,” and moreover, if Christ has not been raised from the dead, “Then those also who have died in Christ have perished.”

Moreover, Paul adds that the atonement is tied not only to Christ’s death but also to his resurrection: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.”

So here it is: a reminder of EASTER, here in the midst of November after the glorious golden Fall has faded and before the holidays, here when we see the cold, the dark and the drab advancing with the rapidly aging year, here when we also see death and the threat of death dominate our news and our consciousness more than in at least a generation.

EASTER is the great reality, the sun that shines no matter what the landscape of the woods or of our world or of our lives looks like. We could have started today’s service by saying “Alleluia! Christ is risen”/”The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!” because that is the cornerstone of our faith all through the year.

“Every Sunday is a little Easter” my liturgics professor taught us in Seminary. Indeed, Easter is the reason Christians gather for worship on Sunday and not on Friday night or Saturday, as the first Christians grew up doing.

Easter also governs our approach to life after death. We talk about “the resurrection of the body” in the creeds, and by it, according to the Catechism, BCP p.862, “we mean that God will raise us from death in the fullness of our beings, that we may live with Christ in the communion of saints.” And “by everlasting life, we mean a new existence, in which we are united with all the people of God, in the joy of fully knowing and loving God and each other.”

God is the one who is in charge of raising those whom God saves to this new, full, glorious life. We do not have to have our bodies freeze-dried until better technology is available; God is perfectly able now to raise people to new life perfectly, with or without our current bodies or any part thereof.

There were people in the World Trade Center at the exact point of impact of the airplanes, people who died instantaneously and whose bodies probably were also incinerated instantaneously. The temperatures were, after all, high enough to turn steel into taffy, about 1500 degrees F. Those people have just as much hope of having their bodies resurrected by God as any other people who have ever lived. Nothing is impossible for God. God does not need a mortal body in order to raise up an immortal body.

If we understand and believe that, it is abundantly clear that it is also possible for God to raise up a person to new life with a perfect, new body after he or she has donated one or more organs or tissues after his or her death so that others may live and live better here and now.

As the bumper sticker says, “Don’t take your organs with you to heaven; God knows they’re needed here.” The facts are, though, that we can’t take our organs with us to heaven anyway and that we don’t need to. Our choices are to have them buried or cremated with us and do no one else any good – or to sign up ahead of time, with our next of kin’s knowledge, to be donors of life after our deaths.

Many of you have met the Rev. Peter Stimpson, who has often “pinch-hit” for me on Sundays, most recently on October 28^th. His wife, Nicky, was dying of an incurable liver disease. He had to watch her slowly, month by month, sink closer to death while she waited for a donor. She moved up the waiting list for organs – as the people ahead of her on the list died.

On July 14, she received a transplant. Now, she is well enough to drive again, and life and health are slowly growing in her, reversing the grim decline of the previous year. All because someone decided to give away what that person no longer needed.

But others died waiting. And more will die waiting. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Christians who believe God created the universe out of nothing, and believe God can raise the dead to new life in new bodies, are candidates to be, life-givers, to others. When we have died in the hope of new life, we can still save or transform lives.

Please take the information which will be available after the service, talk to Carol Arnold or Tom Romine about how, in the event of your death, your thoughtfulness and generosity could make possible for other people the greatest Thanksgiving Day of their lives.

All because we can say, “Alleluia! Christ is risen!” “The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia.”

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church