Resurrection -- The REAL Christian Hope

Tommy Thompson
24th Sunday after Pentecost
7 November 2010

“Resurrection--the REAL Christian Hope”

Joel Stein of the New York Times said, “Heaven is totally overrated. It seems boring. Clouds, listening to people play the harp. It should be somewhere you can’t wait to go, like a luxury hotel. Maybe blue skies and soft music were enough to keep people in line in the 17th century, but Heaven has to step it up a bit. They're basically getting by because they only have to be better than Hell.” silence...let em sit with that for a bit...

Have you ever stopped to think about our future destiny? Do you avoid the issue altogether so that, along with it, you might avoid the embarrassment of having to discuss things that seem so foreign?

Just what is the Christian’s ultimate hope?

For many years, many of us have sang songs that make a claim as to the what of Christian hope, like: “When we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be...” or “When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation and take me home, what joy shall fill my heart...” or “I’ll fly away oh glory, I’ll fly away...” and yet another, “then he’ll call me some day to my home far away, where his glory forever I’ll share.”

Do you hear the consistent theme of these songs? They all make the claim that the future hope is heaven and that heaven is not here but somewhere far away. They all seem to suggest that the future hope of Christians is to escape or fly away from the world wherein we live.

If we were to continue exploring literature and music about heaven, we’d be able to add other themes to the list as well. Such as heaven is a place of disembodied spiritual bliss. In other words, the body (or physicality for that matter) is bad but the soul, or spirit, is good. Many believe the body is actually the prison of the soul or spirit and that death is good because death frees the soul from the body and allows the eternal soul to go to heaven from whence it came.

Somewhere along the way, heaven also got located. “Where is heaven?”, a child asks. Pointing to the sky, the adult says, “Up there.” Hence the association with clouds...and of course we cannot leave out the harps that come with the clouds.

You know, I wonder if this is why there is so much confusion in the church concerning Easter. I mean it just doesn’t make sense that Easter would be the most important and festive day and season of the year if the body/physicality/matter is the problem. I mean if we are meant to escape the body and enter into spiritual bliss...if the body is simply the jail cell of the soul, then why celebrate its resurrection, right?

So we sing songs about a disembodied spiritual bliss that we call heaven, yet we confess in the Nicene Creed that “we look for the resurrection of the dead” and in the Apostles Creed, that we believe in “the resurrection of the body.”

To confuse matters even more, when we read the New Testament, we hear that the Apostles main purpose was to proclaim that Jesus had risen from the dead. The resurrection is all over the New Testament, as a matter of fact. Not only is it all over the New Testament, but it was the topic of conversation in much religious debate in the first century Jewish world.

If resurrection is what we confess in the creeds, which we had long before we had a bible, and that the hope of resurrection that we confess in the creeds is all over the place in the Bible, then where did this whole idea of disembodiment and escape come from?

It certainly did not come from our story. Our story claims that God created the heavens and the earth and that God saw it is very good. If God has blessed physicality, who are we to suggest that it is evil or that we would need to escape from it?

The Bible doesn’t tell the story of how God gave up on creation in response to human sin. Instead it tells the story of how God has been working toward the creation’s healing and restoration. God has not and will not abandon his project of creation; instead he sent His Son Jesus Christ to redeem it from the evils of sin...to restore it...to beautify it...to fulfill it.
Thus, for Jesus to become human...to take upon himself our physicality...to live as one of us without sin...to give himself over to death and then overcome death through resurrection is to redeem physicality and inaugurate the renewed creation.

You see, resurrection is everything. The Triune God has not given up on us or the physical creation he spoke into existence. The resurrection of Jesus Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost is the proof of this reality! We are not called to escape the world but to receive the world as God intended when he created us in his image and likeness and made us stewards of it.

The bible names Jesus as “the first-born from the dead.” It names his resurrection as the “first-fruits” of the new creation. Both of these phrases suggest that Jesus is not the last to rise from the dead the but the first. “First-born” suggests that more siblings exist. “First-fruits” suggests that more fruits are to come.
Brothers and sisters, we are those siblings! We are that fruit! Christ has risen; therefore we too shall rise. This is the Christian hope. This is the hope of God’s world...not soul flight...not disembodied spiritual bliss up there somewhere....no, that is platonic philosophy...Resurrection is Christian faith.

This hope for resurrection goes way back...as far back as the book of Job where it is exclaimed, “My Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, who I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another.”

Job’s professed hope is firmly grounded in faith in a good Creator who blessed that which he made. Job realizes that there is something wrong with physicality, but he doesn’t throw the baby out with the bath-water. He realizes that his skin will rot...yet he proclaims that, somehow, in his flesh, he shall see God who will stand upon the earth.

Wow! What insight the Holy Spirit gave to Job as he pulled back the curtain just enough to give him a foretaste into the future when God the Son would stand upon this earth that he created in order to redeem it! This foretaste engendered hope in a man who should want to escape as much anyone else--his life was a wreck...yet resurrection and NOT escape is what Job proclaims as he claims that even after his skin rots, he will, in his flesh, see God.

This hope in resurrection from the dead was not new to the New Testament. What was revolutionary in the New Testament wasn’t the idea of resurrection but the reality of resurrection happening in the middle of history to one man who represented all people.

This is the huge difference between the pharisees of the first century and those who believed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Pharisees along with many jewish people believed that the resurrection was the hope of the world but that it would happen at the end of time. Jesus came in the middle of history and fulfilled that hope within Himself on behalf of the world. This belief is what made Christians stand out.

But why the middle of history? Why not just go ahead and complete it? I believe the bible suggests that God has invited human beings to join him in his project of creation from the very beginning by creating us in his image and likeness. It makes sense that he would also invite us to join him in his project of new creation or redemption, doesn’t it? The resurrection occurred in the middle of history that you and I might be called “children of the resurrection” as Jesus calls us in Luke 20.

Note the context of Jesus’ defense of the resurrection in Luke 20. He is speaking to the Sadducees who did not believe in the resurrection. The Sadducees were among the powerful elite in Jesus’ world enjoying wealth, status, and prestige within Judaean society. They didn’t believe in the resurrection... they claimed it to be a newfangled thing, invented by late prophets like Daniel. They claimed you couldn’t find it in the first five books of the bible...but “behind the smokescreens of theological argument and silly stories about women with seven husbands, they knew that the resurrection doctrine was a threat to their own position! They knew it meant that God was turning the world upside down. The Sadducees didn’t know the Bible or God’s power; that’s why they denied the resurrection and supported Rome” (Wright).

Brothers and sisters, we have tasted the future and we will taste it again in a few moments at Christ’s holy table! The Holy Spirit has opened our minds and hearts to the Bible...the baptized know God’s power. Being children of the resurrection, our call is not to live with the world as the world until we die and escape this world but “to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.” (Wright)

You see, “People who believe in the resurrection, in God making a whole new world in which everything will be set right at last, are unstoppably motivated to work for that new world in the present.” (Wright)

So let us sing songs of the new creation. Let us proclaim to the Joel Stein’s of the world that there is something much brighter and much more exciting than even a luxury hotel in store for those who, in faith, become children of the resurrection! We’ve got more than clouds and harps to offer! Alleluia!

So let us come to this holy table where we receive future perspective so that we might take that future out into the world that God has NOT given up on! Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!