Fourth Sunday of Eastertide, yeah, absolutely.
And we're in the third reflection in First
Corinthians 15, working our way through the chapter
and we're almost there, we're almost there.
And this is Paul's most comprehensive chapter on
the subject of the resurrection of the dead.
So today we're going to jump into the
section verses 35 through 49, where Paul seeks
to describe what the stuff of the resurrection
is.
He's going to resurrect our stuff, our bodies,
we're made out of stuff, you guys.
Yeah, right.
It's just materiality.
Paul's going to talk about what type of
stuff is this that's going to be raised,
the stuff of the resurrection, like new materiality,
the final harvest of the dead.
Have you ever heard the resurrection described as
the final harvest of the dead?
Unless a grain of wheat falls into the
ground and dies, it cannot bear fruit.
And he's talking about himself, sowing himself into
death.
And he invites us all, the Christian life
is a sowing of death.
I die daily, Paul says, every day I'm
dying so that life may work in you.
Right.
And what does he mean by that?
He's going through hardship, sleepless nights, persecutions to
get the gospel out to the nations of
the world.
Right.
And that is an utter death process.
It's no picnic.
It's no vacation.
If you read about what he put up
with, oh, gosh, in order for us to
be sitting here this morning, in order for
us to have, you know, a vast majority
of the New Testament that he wrote.
Thank God for St. Paul.
Suffering produces stuff.
Yes.
And this is why he could do it.
Suffering produces perseverance.
Right.
Romans 5, perseverance produces character and character produces
hope.
You know that hope is not optimism.
Optimism won't see us through.
Hope is a spiritual thing.
Optimism is of the flesh.
It's not bad.
It will give up at some point where
hope has to kick in because faith, hope
and love, these three things abide.
Not optimism, but hope, Christ in you, the
hope, that's what it's all about.
And so we're going to talk about this
final harvest of the dead.
And he's going to run through various analogies
just to get just to make that point.
He talks about plant life, you know, he's
saying, and as for what you sow, you
don't sow the body that is to be
that is.
You know, I was out here yesterday morning,
there was a gal working in the raised
beds over here and I was walking out
and she says, hey, you want some kale?
And I said, yeah, absolutely.
You guys are not into it, but I
am.
I'm into kale, right?
Everybody in the kale.
I mean, some of you in the kale.
Come on.
Yeah, it's good.
And so she gave me, you know, we
were talking and I'm looking at this and
I'm going like, you know, this is not
what it looked like in seed form.
You know, it just this is not kale.
This is not what I planted.
Right.
And this is where Paul's going with all
of this.
You know, you're planting seeds, perhaps wheat or
some other grain or kale.
But God gives it a body.
God gives it a form and it transforms
that seed, which has to go into the
ground and what really has to die.
This is such an analogy for our lives.
Death is good because death, the final enemy
for now, death will be destroyed at some
point where it will not exist anymore.
But for now, until the final enemy death
is destroyed, it's been made a servant.
It's been made a doorway into life eternal.
Right.
That was last week's sermon.
But so death is being used.
Jesus had to suffer death and we must
suffer death.
And death becomes a paradigm for our daily
lives in Christ, laying down our lives.
Our suki is the word there for life.
Got a lot of different words in Greek
for life.
Right.
You got zoe, suke and bios.
Those are three big words.
Biology, zoe, zoology, suke, psychology, the study of
the soul.
But the Greek word that you get psychology
from the study of the soul is suke.
And, you know, when you break it down,
you guys.
It's that part of our will that I
want, I think, I feel.
Think about that.
That's that's the vast majority of how we
live our lives.
We operate by what I want, my desires,
I think, my thoughts and my feelings, my
emotions that makes up the soul.
And that's principally what psychology deals with, you
know.
And so there's something in that soul apart
from the spirit that must be submitted.
It must be surrendered.
Right.
In order to live the risen life in
Christ Jesus, to put off the old nature
and to put on the new nature.
So all of that is behind all of
this that we're talking about this morning.
God gives it a body as he has
chosen and to each kind of seed, its
own body or its own form.
He's using the word Soma here, though.
Not all flesh is alike, but there is
one flesh for human beings, another flesh for
animals, another for birds and another for fish.
There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies,
but the glory of the heavenly is one
thing and that of the earthly is another.
There is one glory of the sun and
another glory of the moon, another glory of
the stars.
Indeed, star difference from star in glory.
OK, it's a beautiful thing.
Paul is suggesting that the realities.
To which we apply these terms.
To which we apply these terms may not
be the only realities to which such terms
can be applied just in the natural world.
Right.
He's using analogy.
We've limited our sphere of reality to the
visible material world.
Right.
But creation is both seen and unseen.
You know, angels are created beings.
But they're unseen and there's an unseen realm.
And it's creation.
Only God is uncreated.
We believe in God, the creator of heaven
and earth, things seen and unseen, that's the
heavenly realm.
And then there's a realm beyond the merely
created order, which we've been talking about, and
we can call that now because new creation
is seated at the right hand of the
father in the person of Jesus Christ.
He's the embodiment.
Of it all.
He's the embodiment of it all, he's making
all things new.
That's what new creation is becoming in us.
If anyone is in Christ, new creation.
So God is calling us now what we
shall be in our destiny.
The fullness, the unbroken communion of new creation
in union with Jesus.
Right.
It's where we're headed.
So what is the resurrection body like?
This begins in verse forty two.
So it is with the resurrection of the
dead.
What is sown is perishable, what is raised
is imperishable.
So he's going to he's going to give
present body resurrection body analogies here in John
20.
I thought he was the gardener.
Well, he is.
And he's calling us to sow and reap
the way he sowed ultimately his life for
the life of the world.
What we sow matters, right?
What we sow, we shall reap.
We sow to the flesh, we sow to
the spirit.
We sow to this present order.
We will reap corruption because the ultimate end
of this present order is corruption.
Right.
And we can see that with the ultimate
end of our bodies, our lives.
And so sowing to the spirit is living
in that realm, in that place of new
creation by faith, through grace.
Right.
It's all by faith.
We walk by faith and not by sight.
And so, wow, look at that.
It's sown a perishable, but it's raised an
imperishable.
It's sown in dishonor.
And it's raised in glory.
It's sown in weakness.
That's OK.
If there is no resurrection, we are most
miserable in this life.
So it's OK to embrace weakness, to embrace
death, to embrace the aging process, all of
that.
Because, right, he's saving the best wine to
the end.
And so Paul turns the tables on his
opponents because he's speaking to his opponents here.
Some say there is no resurrection of the
dead.
That was last week.
So he's answering these questions and he's going
towards an end.
And he's speaking to his opponents who accuse
him of some sort of crude literalism.
That is, are you talking about a resuscitation
of a corpse?
No, that's not what the resurrection is.
There were several people that he raised from
the dead in his earthly ministry, but they
died.
That wasn't the resurrection.
That was a foreshadowing of the resurrection.
But Paul is saying that's not it.
Resurrection of the dead is a transformation into
a new and glorious, eternal state in Christ,
completed communion with God.
You know, that hunger and that longing that
you have now for God, my soul pants
for God, David says.
If you don't feel that way at times,
just getting the Psalms, it'll rub off.
If you go through the daily office, you'll
go through the entire book of Psalms in
a year, five times.
It's pretty good.
It's more than any other book.
Oh, OK, so this is not some sort
of resuscitation that can't read it like that.
And so there are places the present body
just cannot go.
You ever tried that?
I have a new car with a sensor
on it.
It has that little sensor.
And so they warned me.
And this car was made for me.
I was going to Chicago and it was
out on the road and I had it
on cruise control.
But this thing starts slowing down.
Oh, yeah, good.
That's good.
We're leasing a car and they said, we
tested this and, you know, there was a
fake wall out there and we were like
doing 60 miles an hour and we're going
straight to the wall, you know, and all
of a sudden the car just stopped before
it hit the wall.
But our resurrected bodies are going to be
better because we can just go through the
wall, we won't have to stop, we can
just go right through it.
Like Jesus, right?
There's just things that our present body cannot
do.
It's susceptible to sickness and coughs, Father, for
the last two weeks.
And we pray for one another and, you
know, we're wiping away every tear from our
eyes in this place, right, in this present
existence.
The entrance of sin, breaking, loving communion with
God prompted the loss of the state of
glory, all of sin and fallen short of
our former glorious trajectory.
And so it is sown a natural body
and it's raised a spiritual body.
Some translations, though, say that it's sown, our
bodies are sown a physical body and it's
raised a spiritual body.
And that sounds right because we have physical
bodies.
That's not what Paul's getting at.
The word, as I said earlier on, for
soul is psuche in the Greek language, and
we're just so familiar with it, we use
it so much.
And this word is psuchikon, and it's not
physical.
That's not what that means.
It's derived from the word soul, psuche, and
then it's raised a spiritual body.
Pneuma is the word there, pneumatikon, it's raised
a pneumatikon, it's raised a spiritual body, a
body of the breath, of the wind, of
the spirit, a convergence of the material and
the spirit come together and you get a
new materiality.
Verse 44, this is Jerusalem Bible, and this
is what Richard Hayes chooses.
But he says this gets the idea when
when it is sown, it embodies the soul
instead of it is sown a physical body.
He says the better the idea there is
when it is sown, it embodies the soul
and when it is raised, it embodies the
spirit.
If the soul in its earthly existence has
its own embodiment, so does the spirit in
its risen existence have its own embodiment.
And yet at this point, we just must
clasp our hands over our mouth and go,
oh, my God, the mystery, you know, that's
where it stops right there.
Words cannot describe it from this point on.
And so this is Paul's point.
Our mortal bodies embody the soul, the animating
force of our present existence, but the resurrection
body will embody the divinely given spirit.
Where the body itself has been transformed.
Not just the temple of the spirit, but
the temple is, in a sense, transformed into
new materiality.
It is to be a spiritual body, not
in the sense that it is somehow made
out of vapor.
You know, that would be more of a
Gnostic view, and this is what Paul is
fighting against.
He's trying to get away from that idea.
I'm reminded of Philippians 320 where it says,
But our citizenship is in heaven and from
it we await a savior, the Lord Jesus
Christ, who will transform our lowly bodies to
be like his glorious body.
And that's all we can say.
We can't go any farther than we're going
to be like his glorious body by the
power that enables him even to subject all
things to himself.
And then he starts using Adam, the first
Adam, and the second Adam to drive home
the point.
And what's interesting about this, you guys, is
that many of you know that Genesis 1
and Genesis 2, there's two creation stories describing
the same event.
There's two different creation stories.
Genesis 1, God made man in the image
and likeness of God, so he made him.
And then in Genesis 2, there's another creation
story of man, but he's reaching down like
the potter and making man out of the
clay of the ground, and then he blows
in him the breath of life.
There's all kinds of ways of looking at
this, but the first account created in the
image and likeness of God is the ultimate
intent.
That's the ultimate intent of creation.
But before the fall, even in Genesis 2,
it shows how we're created and how we
actually are.
We actually are clay.
We actually are dust.
We actually will return to the ground.
But the ultimate intention is for us to
be in the image and likeness of God,
which got very marred in Genesis 3.
And so Jesus comes on the scene as
the second Adam he's being described as.
And he does what Adam could never do.
In the beginning, God created materiality, the word
created materiality, the word became materiality, the word
became flesh, the word himself who created materiality,
united himself with his creation and he became
crucified and risen in new materiality, new creation,
and therefore shall restore materiality back to its
ultimate intention.
That would be like an image of Genesis
127 in that perfect image and likeness, which
the Christian life is a trajectory as we
pray, as we fast, as we give ourselves
to him and take up our cross daily,
that image is being restored in us until
we see him in the final eschaton and
we shall be like him in the twinkling
of an eye.
And so that final touch, there it is,
you know, here's what you've been longing for.
Blink, surprise, welcome to heaven or welcome to
the new earth or wherever we're going to
be.
I just want to be with Jesus, but
I know heaven's coming down.
So this is the final state of our
great salvation, complete and perfect deliverance from this
present evil age where now we struggle with
spiritual forces in high places and suffer in
numerous ways as we plant churches, form communities
of hope and reconciliation, shining as stars in
the midst of in the midst of depraved
generation.
He uses those terms, holding out the word
of life.
That's it.
That's our mission.
And may we continue to go forth into
Kansas City in the power and presence of
this risen Lord, who is making all things
new.
In the name of the Father and the
Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Let's stand together and we will confess the
resurrection of the body in the Apostles Creed.
Page six.