|
|
The Resurrection Chapter Revisited |
I Corinthians 15: 1-2, 12-26, 35-35, 51-58
|
© John Ewing Roberts |
 |
|
|
|
INTRODUCTION Two Sundays ago we revisited the Love Chapter, I Corinthians 13. Today in a remarkable convergence of the life of our church and the flow of the ecumenical lectionary we revisit the Resurrection Chapter, I Corinthians 15. Last night around 10:00 p.m. Sarah Lee Atkins died. She was a tremendously important person in the life of this church and in so many of our individual lives. She first joined the Eutaw Place-Woodbrook Baptist Church in 1928, because her uncle and aunt, Dr. and Mrs. Joseph T. Watts, were members here. Later she rejoined in 1930 when her late husband, Dr. W. Clyde Atkins, came to be Assistant Pastor of our church. She served splendidly, side by side with him, first when he was Assistant (1930-1935), thenwhen he was Pastor (1936-1970), then when he was Pastor Emeritus (1970-1984). Her ministry among us continued with grace and strength after his death in 1984. Her last conversation with me on Thursday was an act of ministry on her part to me, and I believe, to you, since I am sure she wanted me to report our conversation. After our prayer she took hold of my knee and said, "Now, John, I am very tired, tired of taking medicine, tired of getting up, tired even of eating, and tired of being tired. Soon I will die, and when I do, I want there to be no lamentations." She raised both arms and shook them in a gesture of artificial lamentations. Her voice grew even stronger as she continued: "No lamentations! Let there be celebration and thanksgiving because I will not be tired; I will be where I wanted to be; I will be with people I want to be with. No lamentations!" She had raised her arms again, but she put them down quickly and firmly grasped my knee again. "Do you understand me?" "Yes, ma'am," I said. In the spirit of "No lamentations," let us revisit on this remarkable day the Resurrection Chapter. THE RESURRECTION I believe in the resurrection for two reasons. (1) It is at the heart of what the New Testament teaches. Paul says that if Christ be not risen then our preaching and our faith are in vain. (1 Corinthians 15: 14). The New Testament portrays the disciples as men who often misunderstood Jesus and who, after his death, were scattered and dispirited. It is not wishful thinking or a group hallucination that transformed them into bold, centered, empowered, urgent people who turned the world upside down. (Acts 17: 6). It was the presence and power of the risen Christ. To put it another way, I believe in the resurrection because of the reality of the Church. On a stroll through Mea Shearim, the ultra-orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem which looks for all the world like an Eastern European ghetto a century ago, my guide, a rabbi, pointed to a synagogue and said, "Their rabbi died, but they never replaced him; they proclaimed that his presence among them was so lively that he would continue to lead them." With a smile of friendly challenge he asked, "Sound familiar?" "Yes," I answered, "but I have to tell you that from my perspective there is a great difference. Have the followers of that rabbi launched a worldwide missionary movement and changed the course of history?" The presence and power of Jesus to create and continue to empower the Church bears witness to his resurrection. (2) We have already sung the other reason I believe in the resurrection. "You ask me how I know he lives; He lives within my heart!" (Alfred H. Ackley, "He Lives," Wesley L. Forbis, editor, Baptist Hymnal [Nashville: Convention Press] 1991, No. 533) He lives in my heart and my head as no other person does. Other persons from the past and their words may be powerfully present to us, but not in the way Jesus is alive for me. His words are preserved in the New Testament, often printed in handsomely bound leather volumes with pages of India paper with gilded edges. I have seen copies of the words of other still potent personalities from antiquity published also on India paper with gilded edges and leather bound. A Homeric scholar pointe out that his gorgeously bound copy of the Iliad looked like a Bible. I conceded that it did, but had to observe that although many people still read and studied Homer, they did not gather around the world on the first day of the week in communities numbering in the millions through twenty centuries. The way Jesus speaks to us from the pages of the New Testament is qualitatively different from the way Homer speaks to our age. Jesus lives in the heads and hearts of Christians. WHAT IS THE RESURRECTION? No one this side of eternity can answer all of our questions about the resurrection. Paul anticipated one of them, "But someone will ask, `How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?'" (1 Corinthians 15: 35) His answer is to offer an analogy, a comparison which will help us understand the resurrection up to a point, if not completely. The key words for understanding what Paul says after verse 35 are transformation and continuity. A grain of wheat, after it is "buried" in the soil is eventually transformed into a sheaf of wheat. The dry brown seed looks nothing like the green moist stalk, but there is continuity between them. So will it be with the resurrected body. There will be transformation of our present bodies, but continuity with the fullness of who we are. I can't prove it but my hunch is that Paul boldly borrowed and "baptized" this analogy from something he was probably exposed to when he travelled from Athens to Corinth (Acts 18: 1). On the way he had to pass through the village of Eleusis, the center of a secret religious group which taught the secret of immortality by drawing on the story of Demeter, goddess of grain, and her beloved daughter, Persephone, who was so beautiful that Hades carried her off to his dark domain. With the help of Zeus Demeter rought it about that for three quarter of the year Persephone would be alive and back on earth. These comings and goings symbolized the death of the land during the summer drought and its rebirth in the fall. Demeter taught the people of Eleusis an annual ritual to be performed there and gave a commission to a local boy named Triptolemus to go around the world and teach people how to cultivate grain. (William Harlan Hale,editor, The Horizon Book of Ancient Greece [New York: American eritage Publishing Co.] 1965, p. 69) Around 1900 near Syracuse in Sicily three ears of wheat made of fine, rolled and sheet gold were found in a tomb, buried with someone who longed for immortality and grasped this beautiful symbol as a votive to invoke Demeter, goddess of wheat and of regeneration. (The Search for Alexander, J. Carter Brown, editor [New York Graphic Society] 1980, Plate 10, pp. 135-6) I am not saying that Paul was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, but I suspect he knew every bit as much if not a great deal more about them than I do. I am not saying that those who were buried holding golden sheaves of wheat were "pre-Christian Christians." I am saying that Paul probably took an analogy from contemporary longings for life after death and adapted them to help Christians understand how there is transformation and continuity between our earthly bodies and our resurrected odies. MORE QUESTIONS I know there are lots more questions. I do not pretend to have all the answers. For example, I have no idea what to make of Paul's talk about a trumpet sounding and the dead being raised. (v. 52). Does this mean that coffins will burst open and bodies jump up, that the doors of the columbarium cells will fall off and we'll pop out? I don't know, and I'm not worried about the mechanics of all that sort of thing. I am perfectly content to leave such matters where they are n fact, that is, in the hands of God. And as to when all this will happen....2000? I've never placed much faith in the 2000 calculation which was made five centuries after the New Testament was written and was the work of someone named Dionysius the Short. I am drawn to what Jesus said to the man we call the "Penitent Thief," the one who said a good word for Jesus when the other thief was railing against him from his cross. "Today, you will be with me in Paradise," Jesus said (Luke 23: 43). I believe Jesus kept that promise to that man who ad "followed" him or "believed" in him for only a short time. I am sure Jesus keeps his promises. I am sure that Sarah Lee Atkins who followed Jesus, believed in Jesus, loved Jesus, and served Jesus all her days is with him this day in Paradise. Whether we will be with Jesus immediately in Paradise or whether we will rest until a trumpet sounds, I am sure that wherever we are and whatever our state, it will be in the loving presence of the One who inspired his servant Paul to write, "nothing will ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus." (Romans 8: 39) That same love that holds Sarah Lee and Clyde Atkins perfectly in eternity, holds us in our time. We are united with them through the same love which loves us all, a love from which we can never be separated. CONCLUSION I close with a fragment of poetry with which Clyde Atkins often concluded funerals. "Yet Love will dream, and Faith will trust, (Since He who knows our needs is just,) That somehow, somewhere, meet we must. Alas for him who never sees,... Who hath not learned in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown That Life is ever Lord of Death, And Love can never lose its own." |