A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
Easter Sunday, 9th April 2023
Sir
Stanley Spencer, The Resurrection, Cookham 1924–7
I wonder what you think about resurrection?
Not specifically the resurrection of Jesus, although we’ll come to that…
but more I’m thinking of the idea of resurrection.
I mean, as Christians, a belief in resurrection
comes pretty much as part of the territory.
If you’ve ever been part of a Christian tradition
that recites the creed every Sunday,
you might know the Apostles Creed,
which has as its ending the phrase:
I believe in … the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting.
Amen.
Or maybe you’re more familiar with the Nicene Creed, which ends:
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come.
Amen.
But what do we mean by ‘the resurrection of the body’
or ‘the resurrection of the dead’?
What’s going on here?
What are we actually hoping for?
I was talking to someone just last week about funeral traditions,
and we were exploring how in some parts of the world,
it is the Christians that bury people
and other religions that cremate;
whereas here in London most funeral services,
whether Christian or not, involve a cremation.
The origins of this belief go back to the early centuries of Christianity.
The first century Roman practice was to burn the bodies of the dead,
whereas by the fourth century the dominant practice
within the Roman empire had shifted to one of burial. [1]
As the centuries progressed, and certainly by the middle ages,
a theology became attached to burial practice,
which asserted that in order to be assured
of bodily resurrection at the end of days,
you needed not only to have been buried rather than cremated,
but you needed to have been buried in consecrated ground.
There are distressing examples
of unbaptised children, those who died by suicide,
and those who had serious mental health problems
all being denied burial in the consecrated ground of the churchyard.
The vast majority of funerals that I’ve conduced
over the course of my ministry have been cremations,
and yet did you know that cremation was only legalised in the UK in 1902? [2]
In 1960 about 35% of people were cremated,
whereas at the moment it is just under 80% and continuing to rise. [3]
What’s going on here?
Well, the broader social trend may reflect the declining influence of Christianity,
but it’s interesting that Christians also appear
to be embracing cremation without difficulty.
I can only conclude from this that most of us,
whatever we think our resurrection will be,
don’t believe it depends on our bodies
being buried in the ground within a consecrated area.
In fact, despite what the Apostles Creed says,
I have a suspicion that most of us don’t believe in the resurrection of the body
- at least not this body.
On Good Friday we read together the crucifixion story from Matthew’s gospel,
which includes the following intriguing cameo:
Matthew 27.50-53
Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last.[r] 51 At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split. 52 The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. 53 After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.
This strange story is clearly drawing on a verse in the book of Isaiah,
which says to people facing the death of invasion and exile
at the hands of the Babylonians:
Isaiah 26.19
Your dead shall live; their corpse shall rise.
Those who dwell in the dust will awake and shout for joy
And it also has echoes of Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37)
and Daniel’s vision of resurrection to judgment (Daniel 12.2).
Whist scholars are divided on what is actually going on here,
it seems likely that Matthew is telling this story
to try and convey the fact
that the events of the first Easter weekend
- the death and resurrection of Jesus -
in some way challenge the normal presuppositions around death.
Bodies behaving badly
- not doing what they’re supposed to do, which is of course to stay dead -
is for Matthew a sign of something significant.
And so we get Matthew’s wonderfully weird Zombie Apocalypse,
of bodies leaving their tombs, lurching around, and entering the city.
And it’s a story that was influential
on what later Christians expected for their own post-mortem existence.
The idea of people rising from their graves,
breaking out of their tombs, and ascending into heaven
remains, for some Christians at least,
an important part of their faith.
But for those of us who are a little less sure about bodily resurrection,
whose bodies will return to the ground
ashes to ashes and dust to dust,
I wonder what resurrection might mean for us?
Well, if the bodily-resurrection strand of thinking
is rather over-focussed on the physical body,
there is another strand of Christian thought
that over-ignores the body.
I’ve spoke before about Plato,
the great Greek philosopher from about 400 years before the time of Jesus.
His philosophical teaching included something known as ‘dualism’,
which is the belief that the universe can be divided into two aspects.
There is the physical world, and the spiritual world.
The interesting thing about Platonic Dualism,
is that he said that the spiritual world is the ‘real’ world,
and that the physical world we inhabit is merely an echo of the spiritual,
a poor shadow or inadequate copy of it.
This created a worldview where the things of this world,
the things we can see, taste, touch, and smell,
are of less consequence than the things of the spiritual world,
things like truth, beauty, and justice.
It was as part of system of dualistic thinking
that Plato developed the idea of the immortal soul.
He said that each person existed as a dualism:
we are our physical body,
which is temporary, corrupting, and inadequate;
and we are our soul,
which is immortal, perfect, and all-sufficient.
He thought that the soul did not die at the point of the body’s death,
but rather returned to the perfect spiritual world.
And if you’re thinking this sounds rather like
everything you think you’ve ever been told about life after death,
you’re right - because the Jewish world of the first century
was a world deeply influenced by Greek thought,
and as the Jewish sect of Christianity
grew into a gentile faith
it expanded into a world dominated by Platonic Dualism.
I’m going to put this quite bluntly:
popular Christian thinking about heaven
owes more to Plato than it does to either Jesus’ teaching
or his Jewish heritage. [4]
Most Christians think in terms of heaven
as a separate place where one goes after death,
and I think this is deeply problematic,
because it leads to people devaluing the world that they actually live in,
or the body that God has created them to be.
There was a hymn popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries
written by the Congregational Minister from Sheffield,
Thomas Rawson Taylor
which starts with the following verse:
I'm but a stranger here,
Heaven is my home;
Earth is a desert drear;
Heaven is my home:
Danger and sorrow stand
Round me on every hand;
Heaven is my fatherland,
Heaven is my home.
For people facing a lifetime of trial and toil,
of oppression and enslavement,
the idea of a better future waiting for them beyond death,
is a compelling comfort.
But the problem with this thinking, though,
is that a first-century Jew
would never have found their hope for a better future
in terms of devaluing the Creation of the here-and-now.
Certainly, the Jewish faith of the time of Jesus was divided
in terms of whether they believed in an afterlife,
with groups such as the Sadducees denying any concept of resurrection,
and others such as the Pharisees believing in it.
And the desire for God’s justice to be enacted post-mortem
on those who seemed to get away with evil in this life,
coupled with a desire for reward for those
whose lives were faithful but troubled
was a large part of the development within late Judaism
of a belief in resurrection and an afterlife.
But the Jewish belief in resurrection
was not formulated at the expense of this world.
Their faith in God was a faith in the Creator
the one who lovingly sustained the heavens and the earth.
Such a God would not scrap the earth
in favour of a heaven as a holding tank for migrated souls,
which was what Plato had taught.
The truth is that the view of resurrection that many of us have inherited
owes far more to Plato than it does to either Jesus or Judaism more broadly.
We aren’t just passing through, [5]
and our souls aren’t waiting to fly away [6],
despite the popular songs that assert both of these things.
So where does this leave us in our thinking about resurrection,
as we gather to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.
Well, there are two key convictions that I want us to take away today.
Firstly, there is the conviction shared by all the early Christian witnesses,
that the resurrection of Jesus
renders the power of death over our lives null and void.
Paul expresses this hope in his letter to the Romans:
Romans 8.1-2
Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit[a] of life in Christ Jesus has set you[b] free from the law of sin and of death
And again in his letter to the Corinthians he says:
1 Cor 15.21-22
since death came through a human, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human, 22 for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.
Humans still die, of course,
but the hold that death has over us is broken.
Because of the resurrection of Jesus
we do not need to live each day
under the shadow of the twin powers of sin and death.
There is good news here:
in Christ we can live our lives in the knowledge of our eventual death,
but not in thrall to it, not enslaved by it.
The hold that death has over people,
a hold of fear and compulsion,
is broken because of the resurrection of Jesus.
But Simon, I can almost hear you asking…
that’s fine rhetoric for Easter Sunday.
But what does this actually look like?
And here we get to my second conviction:
which is that our eternal lives
are inextricably interwoven with the physicality of creation,
and eternally interwoven with the reality of God.
I’ll say that again.
Our eternal lives
are inextricably interwoven with the physicality of creation,
and eternally interwoven with the reality of God.
I do not accept that our souls are trapped in this vale of tears, [7]
waiting to shuffle off this mortal coil
as we make our way to somewhere better. [8]
Rather, I believe that each moment of our lives carries eternal value,
that each second that we live is precious to the God who is beyond time.
If Christ is raised, then Christ is alive to all people, in all places, at all times,
and therefore, our whole lives, from birth to death,
are held forever within God’s eternal love.
I believe that God embraces the creativity of our lives,
gathering into eternity everything we are, everything we do,
everyone we love, every thought we have.
All of us - our bodies, our actions, our prayers, our relationships,
all these are part of who we are in God’s undying care.
So for me, it’s not a question of where we go when we die,
rather, it’s a deep conviction of God’s eternal love
which is real for us in the here-and-now.
In opposition to Plato,
this world is not something to escape,
but a reality to embrace.
All that ever is, is contained within God’s love,
all that exists is redeemed by the cross of Christ,
every act of evil is judged, found wanting, and banished,
and every act of love is valued and held eternally.
This is resurrection.
So when we pray, ‘your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.’
we are expressing our hope, the hope given to us by Christ,
that that heaven comes to us on earth, not that we go to heaven.
Heaven is the unseen dimension of Creation where God’s will resides,
it is the antithesis of Plato’s spiritual realm which is beyond creation.
And when we pray for God’s will to be done,
we are praying for heaven to merge with earth and bring it to fulfilment,
and we are holding before God the whole of the created order.
In a world of environmental catastrophe and climate crisis,
we cannot afford the luxury of escapist theologies
which devalue the earth in favour of a heavenly home.
This is our home, it is the stage on which eternity is shaped,
and all of this world, all of us, each part of us,
is loved by God and is part of God eternally.
This is resurrection, this is the hope of eternity,
and it is our hope for the here-and-now.
Let us sing the hymn:
Nothing is lost on the breath of God,
nothing is lost forever;
God's breath is love, and that love will remain,
holding the world forever.
No feather too light, no hair too fine,
no flower too brief in its glory,
no drop in the ocean, no dust in the air,
but is counted and told in God's story.
Nothing is lost to the eyes of God,
nothing is lost forever;
God sees with love, and that love will remain,
holding the world forever.
No journey too far, no distance too great,
no valley of darkness too blinding,
no creature too humble, no child too small
for God to be seeking and finding.
Nothing is lost to the heart of God,
nothing is lost forever;
God's heart is love, and that love will remain,
holding the world forever.
No impulse of love, no office of care,
no moment of life in its fullness,
no beginning too late, no ending too soon,
but is gathered and known in its goodness.
Colin Gibson
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/30/burning-question-how-cremation-became-last-great-act-self-determination-thomas-laqueur
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cremation_Act_1902
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cremation_rate
[4] See http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/easter-a/
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ndMZqT6i4I
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BPoMIQHwpo
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vale_of_tears
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_coil
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