The Rev. Josephine Robertson
All Saints, Bellevue
Epiphany 7C, Feb 20 2022
1 Corinthians 15:35-38,42-50
I desperately wish we had the letters that Paul is responding to. Because I suspect the struggles and questions from those early communities would look a lot like the struggles and questions of our current communities. I suspect, reading Paul’s response, that not a lot has changed.
This resurrection thing matters to Paul, and it definitely matters to us. And the Corinthians aren’t unique among Christians for having trouble with resurrection. We talk about it a lot, enough that you’d think we’d have it down but the church still consistently misses the mark when it comes to living it.
Because, we’re afraid of death. We don’t like endings, we’re scared of change.
Maybe a major part of the reason that we rehearse Holy Week every year, that we have fifty days of Easter every year is because we remain human, we continue to hate endings. I once served a church where the ECW (Episcopal Church Women) was down to a handful of women all over 70. They were tired, younger folks should have taken over long ago, they should have been in the role of wise advisors. But when the other clergy and I suggested, gently that maybe we could let the ECW end with thanks for all it had given to the women of the parish they didn’t respond with relief and gladness, but with anger and bitterness. They couldn’t see that a season had ended.
The root of that anger was really fear. We fear death. And we deny it with all the power of our little mortal souls. But death comes regardless. In the case of that church the ECW limped on, its members angry and hurt that younger women didn’t want to join them. The younger women didn’t live lives in which the ECW made sense anymore, and a wedge was driven between the generations of women in that place. Finally the ECW died without fanfare or recognition when its last members died. It wasn’t the end that it, or they, deserved.
But, in its place, eventually something new has flowered. The ECW had to die first. And as a leader I learned a lesson in that place, death is inevitable, we have a choice about whether or not that death will be good.
Paul knows this. He knows that death isn’t the end, just an end. And that from the ashes of the old something new is raised. Both he and Jesus use the image of a seed for a reason. Most of us can understand that the seed has to cease to be a seed to become something new. The idea of clinging to a seed and not allowing it to be planted, well that just seems silly.
And yet, it is what humans do over and over again. We fail to see the ways in which our lives are full of seeds because they don’t start out that way. Human life is strange. We plant something, and a whole new thing grows from it, it bears fruit that feeds and delights us, it gives us shade and shelter. And then, at some point, all that remains of it is a seed; the seed of the next new thing. But we often can’t see it as a seed. We still see the fruit of years past, the shade of its youth.
And so we deny the next new thing, we fail to plant the seed, to let go of what was. And we deny ourselves the gift of what could be. Paul deals with this in the churches he planted. Sure he’s talking about the theology of bodily resurrection here, but that’s not all he’s talking about.
As he does in so many other places in his letters he is trying to get a bunch of humans to see that the old ways they have known need to be released and let go, to be remade and reshaped by God into something new. This idea is everywhere in Paul’s work, from his instructions on how the community should eat together, to how they should study and worship. It reaches all the way to their identity in his famous teachings on the way God has wiped away our old identities, and given us knew ones in Christ.
“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28)
Who we were before baptism was just a seed, a seed that was planted in the tomb with Christ, a seed that has grown into who we each are now. We have been through the waters of death and emerged transformed, but for most of us it happened so young we cannot remember becoming a seed, falling to earth, dying, and being reborn as something other. Perhaps that is why we find death and resurrection so hard, so frightening.
The things we cling to are all too often the things of this world, beloved yes, good, certainly. But passing away. Paul points us to what remains, to the truth of the Body of Christ, to something that cannot die. This is the good news wrapped up in the hard moments of our lives, when change feels frightening, even devastating.
The Body of Christ remains, the Kingdom of God does not fade. All else might be utterly transformed, unrecognizable. The works of God in our lives remain. The love of God which catches us and will not let us go, remains.
Paul entreats us to remember that our earthly bodies may fail, God will not lose us. That our earthly institutions (even the church) may fade away, God will not lose us. That change and death are but seeds. That endings are never the last word. And that we must practice our trust in the resurrection each and every day of our lives.