As humans, we’re not too good about living with mysteries. We are programmed to figure things out, to understand, to take things apart and discover how they work. From the time we are infants, we want to figure out where that face goes when it disappears from sight, where that morsel goes when we pitch it off the tray of our high chair. About the time we’re 4, we’re asking “Why” about everything, at least two or three times every waking hour. And soon, we’re disassembling something, perhaps a toaster or doorknob, to figure out how it works.
Today is Mother’s Day, and I will take this moment to thank my mom for allowing me to disassemble the nightlight, my bike, a clock, one of the kitchen cabinets, and assorted other household items, under the guise of fixing them! And forgiving me in some cases when she or Dad had to, well, “Re-Fix” them!! Perhaps my handiwork didn’t lead to a practical vocation, but it certainly did give me patience when our son went through the same stage!
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So, it’s not surprising to me that humans require structure to organize our world. We create patterns to explain how our lives should work, how the world and the cosmos function. Humans have mapped their own genome, and more than a decade ago, Google’s Eric Schmidt famously noted we create more information every two days than civilization did through Year 2003 – and who knows how exponentially that’s grown in 12 years!
We know about galaxies more than 90 billion light years away, and we’ve discovered subatomic particles that are detectable only by their effects on other invisible blips! Blips – that’s a highly scientific term!
And we know people die. Inescapable fact. We may have 60, 80, even 102 years on this earth like our dear friend Betty Hecht celebrates this week, but one day, all of us will change from matter to memory.
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And maybe it’s the certainty of that knowledge that Paul was addressing in today’s text. Paul was speaking to the church at Corinth, people that he had lived among for a year and a half as he taught them about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Now, here is Paul, writing to these Christ-followers, some of whom are stuck in what they know to be true.
People die.
People don’t rise from the dead.
"Look," Paul wrote, "I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye … Death has been swallowed up in victory.”
But we’ve seen death. People die. Jesus died. We’ve never seen anyone escape the finality of death. How can we understand this resurrection of the dead?
Paul, who was trained in the art of rhetoric, persuasive writing and speaking, is making an argument for the resurrection in Chapter 15.
How can you say there is no resurrection of the dead?
If there is no resurrection, then Christ hasn’t been raised from the dead, then we’re proclaiming a false gospel, and everything we’re doing is empty, just lies. We’re actually misrepresenting God! And without the resurrection, you’re still dwelling in sin. And this proclamation we’re making – well, it’s pretty darn foolish.
But …
But, Paul says, Christ HAS been raised from the dead. Our gospel proclamation IS NOT false. Through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, our sin IS gone. In his rising from the dead, Jesus has destroyed the last enemy, death itself. And because Jesus has risen, we too will be resurrected. Our bodies will be changed from bodies that will perish to new bodies for eternity.
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In the decade before we left for seminary, the church Mike and I attended usually used the slightly longer communion preface from the Cranberry hymnal. In those words each Sunday, the pastor would invite the congregation to proclaim the “Mystery of Faith.” Join me in those words if you’ve heard them:
Christ has died.
Christ is risen
Christ will come again.
And almost every Sunday, here at Trinity and at Christian churches all over the world, we proclaim more of that mystery:
We believe that on the Third Day he rose again.
And we believe in the Resurrection of the Body.
My friends, I was born into a Christian family. I was baptized. I was raised Lutheran since I was 8. I’ve been through four years of seminary. And I can’t tell you the specifics of how Jesus rose from the dead. I can’t tell you what our new bodies will look like. I can’t tell you when it will happen.
And in total honesty, there have been, and will be days that I struggle with this Resurrection belief.
I take comfort in the communities that have surrounded me on those days, proclaiming this mystery, holding me in their beliefs, accompanying me to this table to join together in the presence of Christ, remembering in bread and wine, and in love for each other, that the Risen Christ is and continues to be in our midst.
There is no shame in that truth. Hiding our very human doubts doesn’t make us better Christians. Acknowledging our doubts doesn’t make our faith invalid. Just as the Christians at Corinth struggled with the mystery, so have Christians through the ages.
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Martin Luther doubted. At one point, he wrote: “For more than a week I was close to the gates of death and hell. I trembled in all my members. Christ was wholly lost. I was shaken by desperation and blasphemy of God.”
Pope Francis, the bastion of faithfulness for millions of Roman Catholic believers, said it this way:
Who among us—everybody, everybody!—who among us has not experienced insecurity, loss and even doubts on their journey of faith? Everyone! We’ve all experienced this. Me too. It is part of the journey of faith, it is part of our lives. This should not surprise us, because we are human beings, marked by fragility and limitations. We are all weak, we all have limits: do not panic. We all have them.
Doubt means we are human, wrestling with meaning, with taking apart our faith and reassembling it, trying to make sense of it all. Coming to peace with the mystery of faith, and then losing that peace again, perhaps at a new stage of our lives or at the loss of someone we love. Our tides rolling from certainty to doubt, until the day that we, ourselves, die, and return to the earth.
But,
But,
But, Paul says, “Christ has been raised from the dead.” “Death has been swallowed up in victory!”
“Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed. In a moment. In the twinkling of an eye. At the last trumpet.”
And we are being changed. This walk of faith and doubt changes us, day by day, moment by moment. We learn to lean in to community. We learn that there are no us and them, only beloved children of our faithful God. We learn that we were put here to serve and to love. In the end, all of that complex theology falls away and we learn to die daily to our selves. I see it in the beautiful honesty of our preschoolers, in the moving faith statements of our newly confirmed teens, in the wisdom and serenity of our elders. We are being changed.
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Then, Paul closes the chapter, “Therefore, my beloved brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” OK, be steadfast and immovable in believing and living and loving into the mystery of our faith. On the days when your faith is unshakeable, and on the days when your faith grows through your doubts. Hold each other even in your doubts and live in the love of our Risen Christ.
On this last Sunday of Easter, I invite you to proclaim this Resurrection mystery once again, as we did on Easter Sunday morning:
Christ is Risen!
He is Risen Indeed, Alleluia!
Do you know what a “mystery” is?
That’s right, it’s something we don’t know.
I have a paper bag with something in it. I know what it is, but to you, it’s a mystery. I’m going to show it to _________. Now she knows, but it’s still a mystery to the rest of you.
_________, why don’t you tell them the mystery?
Yes! It’s an egg. But it’s still kind of a mystery, because you don’t know what’s in the egg. Is it a raw egg? A hard-boiled egg? Or maybe there’s a baby chick in that egg?
I’m going to put it back in the bag. It’s going to stay a mystery for now. It’s OK to have questions and not always know the answers.
At Easter, we celebrated that Jesus was alive, even though he died on the cross. And I don’t know how he rose from the dead. That’s a mystery! And even though I don’t understand the Resurrection, the big word for the way Jesus rose from the dead, I can trust that it happened, because many men and women saw Jesus alive after he died and told others. It’s OK to have questions about it and still believe in Jesus’ Resurrection.
In today’s lesson, lots of people in a place called Corinth had questions about the Resurrection, too. And a teacher named Paul wrote them a letter, telling them that Jesus did rise from the dead. And he was just the first one. All of us will die some day, Paul said, but here’s another mystery – we believe that we will live again too. We’ll have new bodies that won’t die and we’ll be with Jesus. We don’t have to understand what those new bodies will look like or when that will happen to trust that it’s true. It’s a mystery, but it’s the best mystery ever, that one day, even though we will die, we will rise again and be with Jesus.
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