Lift up the Cup of Salvation

Text: 1 Peter 1:3-9

          Last week we looked at the first two verses of First Peter where the Apostle uses very few words to say a lot about who we are in Christ.  I closed with saying, “we are the chosen ones, chosen by God the Father and made holy by the Holy Spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ in faith and works as we have been given access to God by the sprinkling of Jesus blood so that the purpose of God for his creation can be made known.  The life of the Trinity in us and upon us and our being brought into it makes us strangers, exiles in this world.  Our home is in God, in his coming kingdom, which we taste of now in Christ through the Holy Spirit that the will of the Father may be made known.”  This week Peter adds a bit more to our understanding of who we are in Christ as well as what we do and this of course is in light of who God is as the Triune God of grace and what he has done and is doing for us through Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit.  Today we will touch a bit on worship, faith, God’s protection, and suffering.

          Verse 3 reads: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who in accordance with his great mercy has re-sired us into a living hope by means of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  This verse is probably the most important sentence in the entire letter.  The first thing I would like to highlight in it is worship.  Peter says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord.”  Blessed be God.  In my limited knowledge of the Bible and Christian theology being able to say “Blessed be God the Father” represents the perfection of humanity.  To say those words from the very depth of the entirety of our being, from our soul, is what humans were created to do and the ability to do so is what was most corrupted in us by sin.  

          God created humanity to be the priesthood of his creation.  As such our role is to lift up the cup of the goodness of the vine with thanks and praise for God’s goodness that everywhere surrounds us.  The Jews every Friday with the Sabbath dinner lift up a cup of wine and say, ”Baruch atah Adonai Elohenu, meleck ha’olam…Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe.”  They go on to praise him for choosing them, making them holy with the Commandments, and giving them the Sabbath rest.  God chose and called forth the Jewish people to say this blessing in the midst of his creation, indeed to be this blessing and to teach it to the world.  They did and they do, but the praise was incomplete, not yet perfected, because they had not yet been born or begotten of God the Father of Lord Jesus Christ so that they could say it with the adoration of children as to their Father.  We also are just supposed to give thanks and praise to God for this wonderful gift of life in his creation, but worshipping God seems so foreign to us.  Some in the church even think it is a waste of time.  

          Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of Israel and her worship.  Indeed, he is the perfecting of it.  He fulfills the temple, the Law, the sacrifice, the voice of the prophets, and in him is the Sabbath rest.  In him we lift up the cup of salvation in adoration of the Father because by Jesus Christ he has made us his children and will give us a glorious inheritance.  Paul says in Ephesians 1:13,14, “In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God's own people, to the praise of his glory.”  God’s presence with and in us now as Jesus Christ present through the Holy Spirit is the foretaste of our coming inheritance of salvation.  We’ve really got reason to say, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  The Trinity is with us.  He is here.

          Peter goes on to say that our heavenly Father in accordance with his great mercy has given us a new birth into a living hope.  Our Father is a merciful God.  Yet, what do we mean by mercy?  When I was a child we used to play a game called “Mercy” where two people clasped hands interlocking their fingers and tried to bend one another’s hands back until one person fell to their knees in excruciating pain and cried out “Mercy” to end it.  That’s not what we mean by mercy.  God’s mercy is not that he bends us over in punishment with the pains of life until we submit to his Lordship by begging his mercy on our sins.  God’s mercy is his favour, the blessing of the reality of his love, his very self, poured upon us undeservedly in Christ Jesus through the Holy Spirit.  Our heavenly Father is free to be merciful to whomever he chooses to be and he chooses to be merciful to humanity even when we’ve done nothing to deserve it.  He has simply chosen to pour his favour, his loving presence upon us to cure us of sin and death.

          The Father pours his mercy, his favour upon us in the form of giving us a new birth, regeneration, or a re-siring.  The Greeks had a more complete understanding of the birthing process than we seem to do.  Birth had two moments; first, the birth or begetting that happens at conception and second, the birth that happens when the baby comes forth from the womb.  Humanity was born anew, sired anew, the moment God the Son was conceived in Mary's womb by the Holy Spirit to be Jesus the Christ, was born, lived, died, and raised from the dead.  Jesus' incarnation and resurrection and then the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost brought into existence a new humanity, one born of and desirous of the Father’s will rather than born into and desirous of sin.  When Christ Jesus returns and all are raised from the dead, an event akin to birth from the womb, being born again will be the reality experienced by us all.  

           Peter here carries through on this thinking. The Greek word Peter uses here in verse three for “given a new birth”, anagennao has the same root as the word for begetting or siring, which is gennao.  Gennao has more to do with the paternal side of the birthing process than the maternal side.  New Testament Greek has a word for a mother giving birth, tikto, which Peter does not use here.  He uses anagennao which means again-sired.  We in Christ through the presence and work of the Holy Spirit in us are re-born or re-sired of God.  Peter also means the same when he says later in the letter that we have been born of imperishable seed where seed also connotes lineage more so than semen.  We are born anew into the will and identity of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, into the lineage of the royal priesthood of Jesus Christ and this is the life of living hope.  Another way of saying this is that we have been adopted into a new family.  Our new family identity marked upon us by the Holy Spirit is the faith and obedience of Jesus Christ, God’s Son whom he raised from the dead.  We are the Father’s beloved children in Jesus Christ through the life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit in us.  This is who we, each and every one of us, are.  Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

          Moving on, by means of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead we have all been born again into a living hope.  We live in the hope of receiving the glorious inheritance God the Father promises to the children whom he has chosen and indeed a foretaste of that inheritance, the Holy Spirit, is with us now making us alive so that we can live in that hope and so we rejoice.  Our hope is our faith and our faith is our hope.  Our final outcome is determined by God, our Father who extends to us his favour in love by our union with Jesus by the Holy Spirit dwelling in us.  It is his resurrected life that we receive now in the Holy Spirit who re-sires us and also protects us to that day in our embryonic form.  Our inheritance, the final remaking of each of us in the image of Christ is being kept in heaven for us and Peter says that we are being protected by the power of God through faith until that day.  God is watching over us, he is here with us; he’s marked us with his Spirit.  Have faith.  Entrust yourself to the will and care of the Triune God of grace and mercy.  Blessed be God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

          We are those who have reason to lift up the cup of salvation in praise even in the face of trials, persecution and suffering.  Worship in the face of such things refines our trust in the Father’s love and proves our faith as genuine.  In our sufferings we find that Jesus is present with us, teaching us himself and his way by giving us himself through the Holy Spirit.  When we suffer praising Christ Jesus, the one who suffered for us, helps us to love him all the more even though we cannot see him.  Our heavenly Father does not abandon us, rather he provides for us.  When those closest to us abandon us and betray our friendship, Jesus is with us. Suffering for others and on account of others leads us not only to understand what Jesus has gone through on account of us, he is here.  He is the faithful One we can sense as present with us though we cannot see him.as the faithful one we can’t see.  In the midst of it he finds unique ways to speak to us personally.  He sends Christian friends who understand.  He opens doors and gets us where we need to be.  We truly are born anew into a living hope; hope that is alive.  We truly do receive now the promised outcome of faith.  

          Finally, that promised outcome is the salvation of our souls.  What exactly is the soul is a much talked about topic these days as science has begun to understand the human brain.  We tend to think of the human soul as being a whiff of energy that exists the body upon death to go either to heaven or hell.  That view of the soul isn’t really biblical.  The soul is the entirety of who each of us is as individuals.  It includes our emotions, our minds, our bodies…it is the entirety of who we are as a living person.  When we are raised from the dead at the resurrection every bit of who we are will be raised and glorified, most importantly our bodies, which will become imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.  The uniqueness of us as individuals is why the Christian faith has no place for reincarnation.  All this stuff on past life regression is nothing more than a monkey’s diaper.  Why would a loving God keep sending living souls into bodies to suffer again and again until they figure out what they are supposed to learn and ascend to a higher existence.  Those who believe in past life regression and reincarnation truly need to consider that God actually does love them.  Indeed, we are the ones who proclaim that message.  We have the blessing with which to bless this world.  The Lord has chosen us, made us his children, and poured his favour upon us.  He’s placed the cup of salvation into our hands for us to lift up and say, Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe for you have chosen us and made us holy with your Holy Spirit and given to us the rest of faith that we might live in living hope before this broken world and share this cup with it.  The cup of life anew is in our hands.  Don’t keep it to yourself.  Share it.  Rejoice always in front of everyone who sees you.  Invite your friends and family to come and be a part of the worship.  Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.

Meaninglessness vs. the Hidden Life in Christ

Text: Ecclesiastes 1-2; Colossians 3:1-4

          As I thought about all these passages of Scripture that we read this morning, I suddenly imagined myself speaking to a graduating class at a university, a group of young adults just starting out.  What would I say?  “'Meaningless!  Meaningless!  Utterly meaningless!  Everything is meaningless!' says the Teacher" (Ecc. 1:1).  The Teacher in Ecclesiastes has done it all, everything there is to do under the sun, and found it all meaningless.  He's seen it all and had it all and found it all to be meaningless.  He took the route of learning and understanding wisdom, which in his day was what science is to us today.  He found it to be a mere "chasing after the wind", unattainable futility.  He even tried to explore madness and folly and those also turned out to be "chasing after the wind".  He denied himself nothing, indulged himself in all pleasures.  Even more, he says that in his heart he truly enjoyed all his work, but it was all still void of any real meaning.  Why?  Well, he found it doesn't really matter whether you're wise of foolish, the same fate overtakes everyone.  You die.  You pass everything on to someone else and who knows what they will do with it.  Then, (dramatic pause) you are forgotten.  That realization drove the Teacher to the point of hating life.  Why love something that is simply a meaningless waste?  Fortunately he then concludes, the best a person can do is eat and drink and be satisfied with your work realizing that it is all from the hand of God.  Indeed, without God no one can live or find enjoyment.  

          The Teacher, as we know, was King Solomon, son of David.  Solomon is legendary for being the wisest man ever as well as the richest king of Israel and maybe of his day.  He built the Jerusalem Temple and many other important cities in Israel.  He had a fleet of ships that may have gone global.  He knew no war.  His reign was a remarkable feat of what humans can accomplish when there is peace.  How did he accomplish this peace one might ask?  Well, he had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines.  We may fail to see the wisdom in that, but…consider that those wives were the daughters of all the neighbouring kings and warlords.  He simply made all who could be his enemies to be his family.  That’s…brilliant.  Yet, Solomon was not perfect.  He was still a man, a man with many wives, and in order to keep all his wives happy he had to allow their idols into the land and go worship with them as a good husband should.  That was not so brilliant.  That move had its price in the next generation when Israel became divided into two kingdoms, but it kept peace at home.  Solomon was short-sighted when seeing the needs of the next generation.  So anyway, it is Solomon the Wise, who tells us to eat, drink, and be satisfied with our work knowing that it all comes from God.  Our food, our celebration, our work though toilsome all comes from God to be enjoyed even though in the end, sin and death have made it all meaningless.  Without God there is no joy in this life.  

          Well, I suspect that Solomon was also a skilled writer because there seems to be a bit of a word play going on here with the phrase “chasing after the wind”.  You see, in the Hebrew the phrase is literally “striving after wind”.  The Hebrew word for wind is ruach which is the same word used for breath and for spirit.  So, hold on to your seats.  Genesis 1:1-2 says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  The earth was formless and void, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit (the ruach) of God was hovering over the waters.”  The ruach of God, the Spirit or Breath or Wind of God, was hovering over the waters ready to bring order to chaos.  I think Solomon is making a word play that says, on the one hand, that life is meaningless in the end because of death, a striving after wind or ruach; wind that we cannot contain or control and thus the effort is futile.  Yet, on the other hand, he is prodding the wise among us to remember the beginning of Genesis where the ruach of God hovered over the waters of chaos ready to create.  Therefore, it is after the ruach of God that we should strive.

          Moving on to Colossians, Paul says as much by using an image from the act of Baptism into Christ, the image of taking off the clothes of the old self and stepping into the waters of Baptism to die and be raised with Christ and then putting on the white robe of the new self who will be fully revealed when Christ returns bringing glory with him. Paul writes: “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.  Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.  For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God" (Col. 3:1-4)  The ruach of God the Holy Spirit isn’t just hovering over us now.  He is in us raising us to New Creation life in Jesus own risen and ascended life which is the new humanity that is in Jesus, in him the one in whom the fullness of the Divine nature was pleased to dwell bodily, the one in whom, through whom, by whom, and for whom all things have their being.  We are to seek that which is in and of him.

          The word for seek which some Bibles translate as “set your hearts on” means to zealously seek or strive for with all of one’s passion.  Therefore, if we have been raised with Christ from the meaninglessness of life that is infected by sin and death, then our moral, ethical, religious and even civic best choice is to strive after the higher life in Christ with all earnestness.  Death no longer has hold on us.  We will be raised as Christ Jesus was raised and we will stand with him in glory.  And, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:58, the work we do in the Lord now is not in vain.  It will endure into the New Creation.

          Now, returning to my opening thoughts, if I were to speak to a graduation class of university students and to all in attendance, I would proclaim to them oddly much the same thing I would say at a funeral…in the end you will be raised from the dead.  Whether you have faith in Jesus or not because he was raised from the dead, so also will you.  Whether you know it or not, the Spirit of God is hovering over the chaos of the waters of each of your lives working to open up space in you for Jesus to sit enthroned.  Everything you do with the life that God has entrusted you with will amount to nothing more than vanity unless you realize that everything you eat and drink, all the work you do, and what you work for is from God and is a gift with which it is possible for you to be satisfied.  So, as Solomon the Wise prompts us, strive for the Spirit of God otherwise you are simply chasing after the wind.  As Paul says, seek and be minded towards that which is above where Christ sits as Lord.  Who you are and what you will be is hidden with Christ in God…in the very self of the loving Communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!

          Paul goes on to give a long list of how to do this and all of them deal exclusively with how we relate to God and to one another.  He says, “Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgive each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.  And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.  And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful.  Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.  And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him" (Col. 3:12-17).

          So, whether Jesus has made it so that you know him or not or whether or not you have acknowledged him as your Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ is the Lord of all of Creation and we will all be raised to stand before him in the New Creation because he has saved this entire creation and will make it utterly new.  Therefore, we do best not to make our lives a waste with nothing to show that will endure.  Rather, let us strive to live together in the love that he has poured into our hearts.  Forgive. Forgive.  Forgive!  Be thankful.  Be kind.  Be compassionate, meek, humble.  Do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ not your own or someone else’s.  Show me a better way to live than as a disciple of Jesus Christ.  Show me something better to seek than Jesus Christ.  Apart from him and the new humanity he is making us to be by placing his own ruach in us and in our midst, everything is meaningless.  I tell you good news today.  Jesus is Lord and his way is the Way, the Truth, and the Life that we all seek.  Take it up and walk accordingly and know peace.  Amen.

Who Is This Jesus?

Text: Matthew 21:1-11

“Who is this?” or rather “Who is this Jesus?”  In my not so humble opinion this is the most important question anyone/everyone must answer and especially us for we are the ones who for now he has called here to meet him.  Who is this Jesus? I must say right off the bat that I’m not talking about knowing things about Jesus.  Rather, I’m talking about knowing Jesus, indeed who he reveals himself to be by means of the work of the Holy Spirit in our midst.  Who is Jesus revealing himself to be to us here especially today as we are gathered around his table sharing a meal which he has shared with his disciples since the night of his arrest, the meal in which he says “this my body given for you.  Eat this in remembrance of meal.”  And, "This is the cup of the new covenant sealed in my blood shed for the forgiveness of sins.  Drink this in remembrance of me.”  Jesus is here and by this meal he is saying to us “this is who I am”.  At this point we have to be clear, this meal isn’t just something about Jesus.  It is Jesus and as it is a meal, knowing him therefore involves our consuming him – eating his body, drinking his blood.  That’s something we may find barbaric and offensive.  In fact in the earliest days of the church Christians were accused of practicing some bizarre form of cannibalism.  Nevertheless, he is really here for us to really consume him.  But, let me shy away from that and just say it would be helpful if we understood eating his body as participation in him in Christian fellowship and drinking his blood as imbibing of him in his life being poured into us by the gift of the Holy Spirit who bonds us to Jesus so that we participate in his life giving relationship with God the Father so that we know the steadfast love and faithfulness of God the Father for Jesus and we know Jesus’ adoration for the Father and desire to do his will as Jesus did.  To know the steadfast love and faithfulness of God the Father for God the Son and God the Son’s adoration of the Father and desire to do his will, to know this for yourself is what it is to know who Jesus is.  To know him is a gift of the Holy Spirit who gives us a relationship which we must work at as we do all other relationships in our lives.

Knowing Jesus is relational and goes beyond just knowing things about him. I know things about my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, stories and so forth.  Those stories are full of laughs, joys, hurts, and disappointments and by these accounts I learn that the people who reared me are only human.  But it’s not the stories and the things I know about them that have had such a profound effect on who I am.  Rather, it’s actually having been in relationship with them that has done nothing less than been the foundation of who I am.  Similarly, I know things about my wife, but it’s who she is in the relationship that we share that profoundly affects who I am.  I don’t know Dana as in who she is in her very self by some sort of psychic link.  I know Dana by the effect she has on me that has wrought changes in me; changes that have come about as the direct result of who she is in her very self.  Dana and I have two small kids.  Some day they will figure it out that their mother and I after all are just people, but…that’s not what scares me about being a parent.  What scares me and keeps me humble is knowing the profound effect that who I am in the right now of the every moment of our ongoing relationship will have on them.  Who I am is sin-sick and I don’t want to pass on to them the disease of my brokenness.  Therefore, I strive to foster a relationship with Jesus Christ the Lord of Creation who by his incarnation into fallen human being, his living faithfully, his dying, and his being raised has and is healing humanity and all of creation from its sin-sickness that culminates in the futility of death.  I strive to know Jesus and the healing power of his resurrection so that by my affection and by my actions towards my children I pass on the who I am that's healing.  I want to be conducive to and a conduit for them coming to know the steadfast love and faithfulness of God the Father and the adoration and willingness to do the will of God the Father that Jesus had.  I strive to be conducive to their coming to know Jesus by the work of the Holy Spirit.

Getting back to knowing Jesus, I have a trail of papers that say I know a lot of things about Jesus, but it’s those glimpses of him that I have caught in the relationship that I have with him that profoundly changes me.  A few years back I took up the task of memorizing the Sermon on the Mount.  I took a verse a day, memorized it, and then throughout the day particularly on my run I just said it over and over again to myself.  It took just over 120 days but when I was done (and I still couldn't recite the whole thing from memory) I found that Jesus had impressed it upon me, for lack of a better way of saying it, just how open to me and non-judgemental and forgiving he is.  The gospels themselves tell us as much about Jesus, but it is entirely another to have Jesus impress upon us his unconditional love so that we know this is who he is and are changed by that.  When Jesus reveals his gracious and loving self to us personally we need to keep in mind that this is truly how God is.  There is no God hidden behind Jesus who is other than who Jesus is.  God the Father is not some angry, old man, judge with a long white beard whom Jesus has to buy off with his death to get him to love us.  God the Father is just as graciously open to us and for us as Jesus is.  Sermon for another day. Moving on.

This relationship with Jesus isn’t just a “Jesus and me” thing.  My relationship, and indeed your own relationships with the Trinity involves a host of other people.  When we talk about spirituality, about the relationship that we have with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit we just have to accept the given that it’s going to involve the totality of the relationship networks we are in and particularly those in our Christian fellowship.  The Triune God of grace meets us not only in times of devotion, in mystical experience that we have been trained by our culture to call crazy, but also if not more so in the people we encounter throughout the day.  Coming to know Jesus in the midst of not just a relationship with him on our own but through our relationships with others is why the church is so important in our lives.  

Thus, this question of "who is this Jesus" really cannot be answered apart from active participation in a group of other Christians.  To put it mildly, if we want to know who Jesus is we need the church and by that I do not mean the institution of the church.  Rather, we need Christian fellowship.  We need Bible Study in which we engage each other's lives not just learn things about the Bible.  We need to share our lives and pray together.  When our Lord moves in our lives we need to share that with one another.   We come to learn who Jesus by how he is with our family in Christ.

Back when I lived in West Virginia I had a good friend, Dwight.  He had at one time been a pastor but then and still he conducted an evangelistic/pastoral ministry by means of bringing people to his whom for banjo and fiddle camps.  Dwight periodically would ask me "How goes it with the Lord?"  Now that's a very powerful and very intimate question and definitely not one anyone of us fine, upstanding Presbyterians would feel comfortable answering.  But, I would answer.  It involved some confession, some reflection on my ministry and relationships and where I sensed Jesus was leading me.   During those moments Dwight didn't do much more than stare off into space and listen.  He listened to me and he was also listening for a word from Jesus for me.  In those moments the body and blood of Jesus became a very present reality.  The Holy Spirit was there creating a union between Dwight and I in Jesus.  Dwight's friendship was one that I will always cherish because its foundation was Jesus Christ.  The Jesus I met in my meditation on the Sermon on the Mount is the same Jesus who met Dwight and I when he sat me down to see where I was at with the Lord.
Friends, the body and blood of Jesus are at this table we share them in this meal.  May he who gave his body and let his blood be shed for us that we may live in him and be healed on our sin-sickness, may Jesus become a reality in your Christian fellowship through the work of the Holy Spirit to the glory of the Father who smiles over you saying "My beloved children with you I am well pleased.  Amen.

What Happens after Death

Text: Romans 8:6-11

          I would like to share an old classic hymn with you folks and I would like you to just listen to it and when I’m done we’ll talk about how it diverges from Biblical faith.  Unfortunately, it is Fanny Crosby’s All the way my Savior Leads Me.  I’ll sing the way the contemporary Christian artist, Rich Mullins, sang it.

All the way my Saviour leads me what have I to ask beside?


Can I doubt His tender mercy, who through life has been my Guide?


Heavenly peace, divinest comfort, here by faith in Him to dwell!


For I know, whate'er befall me, Jesus doeth all things well.

All the way my Savior leads me cheers each winding path I tread.

Gives me grace for every trial.  Feeds me with the living Bread.


Though my weary steps may falter and my soul athirst may be,


Gushing from the Rock before me, Lo! A spring of joy I see.

All the way my Savior leads me, O the fullness of His love!


Perfect rest to me is promised in my Father's house above.


When my spirit, clothed immortal, wings its flight to realms of day


this my song through endless ages: Jesus led me all the way.

Now if I were to walk away from this pulpit right now having sung that hymn and said this hymn is the sum total of the Christian faith go forth and live it, you would not be remiss in having Presbytery charge me with teaching other than Biblical faith.  You may be saying to yourself right now, “What could possibly be ‘heretical’ about that hymn?  It’s one of my favourites, one of the ole faithful's.  It's even in the new hymnals.”  I would agree with your sympathies.  It is one of my favourites.  It says volumes about Jesus’ presence with us, his guidance, tender mercy, and provision, the grace for every trial, and the undeserved joy he gives to us.  It is a poetic treasure trove on the topic of Christian experience.  Yet, for all this hymn says about Jesus’ faithfulness to us, it falls away from the faith on the point of what happens to us when we die.  Our spirits will not be clothed immortal and wing flight to realms of day and there spend eternity.  That is actually Greek Paganism and definitely not what the Bible teaches.  

          The Bible teaches bodily resurrection.  The Apostle Paul writes, “Listen, I will tell you a mystery!  We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.  For, the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.  For, this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.  When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’  ‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’" That was 1 Corinthians 15:51-55.   A few verses earlier in that same chapter Paul writes, “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.  For, since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.  For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.”  Then again from our reading in Romans this morning, “But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.  If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.”  Then again, Paul says at 2 Corinthians 4:14, “…because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will bring us with you into his presence.”  Even Isaiah in the Old Testament attests, “But your dead will live; their bodies will rise. You, who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy. Your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead” (26:19).

          Bodily resurrection at the time of the New Creation when heaven and earth will be recreated anew as one (Rev. 21,22) and the knowing of God covers the earth as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:19) is our hope as Christians.  I can belabour this point, bodily resurrection) with passage after passage.  But, what I cannot do with Scripture is find anywhere where it says we have an immortal soul or spirit that leaves our body when we die and goes to spend eternity in a spiritual realm called Heaven never to have to deal with the physical again.  As I said, that belief is Greek Paganism and it has been a tenacious boil on the bottom of the Church since the 2nd century.  

          In the Bible, the human soul or spirit is the totality of one’s being, one's personhood, in relationship to God.  Our being or personhood is inclusive of our bodies.  Indeed, we would not be who we are apart from the unique characteristics imbued upon us by our physical bodies - our unique abilities, our unique brain chemistries, our physical sufferings or lack there of, our appearance, etc.  We each would not be who we are nor could we be in relationship with each other without bodies!  Therefore, my spirit Is not some abstract part of me through which I relate to the Trinity.  There is no spirit/body dualism.  My spirit is me in my entirety in relationship to God, a relationship without which I could not exist.  I am not immortal.  Therefore, my soul or spirit is not immortal.  The finality of death is not simply that our bodies die.  It is that the relationship with God dies...unless the Triune God of grace chooses to remember me.  

          Our hope for surviving death does not rest in an immortality of something inherent in us.  Rather, it rests solely upon Jesus and his immortality as God the Son incarnate not only simply in human flesh but we must note in physical matter as well.  The only hope the creation has of surviving the futility of death is that Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God, sanctified physical matter by himself becoming it.  The One through whom, by whom, and for whom all things were created and in whom all things hold together (Col. 1:15-20) did indeed in the Incarnation become not just a human but created existence as well.  The physicality of creation is not bad as most spirit/body dualists would have us to believe.  Rather, the Trinity created it and called it very good and then sanctified it by becoming it at the Incarnation.  

          Only Jesus Christ, God the Son incarnate, the first fruits of the resurrection and new creation, is immortal (see 1 Timothy 6:13-16).  We who are in Christ gain immortality by our union with him in the Holy Spirit.  Therefore, because we partake of his Spirit - his relationship to the Father in the Holy Spirit who is given to dwell in us - when we die, we go to be with him (cf. Phil. 1:23) sharing his immortality in a place which he himself called Paradise when speaking to the thief dying on the cross next to him who saw Jesus to be the Messiah (cf. Lk. 23:43; 2 Cor. 12:4, Rev. 2:7) until the Resurrection.  The Bible is vague on what this Paradise is and on what we will be like.  N.T. Wright says “it is a state in which the dead are held firmly within the conscious love of God and the conscious presence of Jesus Christ while they await that day” (Wright, N.T.; Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church; HarperOne; 2008; 172).  I would go further and say that the presence of the LORD that we feel present with us in worship which is so rich at times and the love that we feel from God that grows into love for one another, well, when you die expect that in its fullness.  

          After Paradise, there will be the resurrection and the final judgment which all people will face even those in Christ.  For those in Christ there will be reward for how well one kept the faith and walked the walk in this life.  There is enough talk of “the first will be last and the last will be first” in the Bible to substantiate this.  One does not put the hand to the plough and look back.  We need to ask what about those who are not in Christ and have made it a point to reject him, to reject God’s love in this life and next; who are so wrapped in the idolatry of worshipping such things as power, money, sex, and even the Satanic and so dehumanize themselves and everyone they come in contact with to the point that we can see no hope for them nor feel pity for them (see Wright; Ibid, 175-183)?  What about them?  Well, they will be raised too and face judgment as we will.  Will they spend an eternity in Hell?  There is certainly provision for that in Scripture which we cannot disregard no matter how uncomfortable it makes us feel.  Yet, we must ask what exactly Paul meant by the word “all” in Romans 11:32; “For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all” and elsewhere.  I do not wish to end sounding universalistic for universalism just isn’t in the Scripture and there will be those in the end who do reject God’s mercy.  I must add that it is also unbiblical to say that everyone will be given a post-death/resurrection choice to accept Christ.  We must humbly admit that the ultimate fate of those who in this life are not in Christ either by their own choice or by ignorance (not hearing God's self-revelation which is entirely up to the Trinity in his grace) is a mystery.  We must step back and allow the Triune God of grace his freedom to be God in this matter.  Yet, this we do know: we who are in Christ now have the explicit task of living faithfully in the steadfast love and faithfulness of God as the living proof of the resurrection of the dead and Jesus' defeat of sin and death.

          I wish I had more time this morning to discuss the relevance that the future resurrection has for our lives now.  I will try to do that in the weeks following Easter.  I will end today saying the Christian faith ultimately is not about a system of individual salvation by which it is determined who in the end lives and who does not.  That way of talking about our faith is ultimately unbiblical and results in the self-decapitation of the church’s mission as we are now observing in Europe and North America.  The Bible is the revelation and historical testimony to how God is “redeeming and renewing his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all” (Ibid, 185).  The hope of the resurrection established in the fact of Jesus’ own resurrection and the real presence of the Holy Spirit compelled the early church to proclaim the gospel message that Jesus is LORD and to live in a new form of community that was rooted in the love of God.  They proclaimed the message and lived this new life fearlessly because they knew that resurrection and new creation was their end.  Death was made powerless to them.  They indeed had reason to fear and to hide.  In the Roman world Caesar was declared to be Lord and Saviour and to proclaim someone else to be such was treason.  More over, to live in voluntary association with others sharing the same treasonous claims was most certainly a death wish.  Yet, the early Church grew and grew and grew.  

          If I were to get on the stump about things we the church believe today that affect us adversely, one of my top three would be that we have lost the hope of bodily resurrection lived in a New Creation and have supplanted it with a privatized faith and system of sin management that just wants Jesus to be faithful to me until my spirit clothed immortal wings its flight to realms of day.  We the church have work to do; the work of proclaiming that Jesus is LORD in this very idolatrous world and struggling to live together in the midst of the old humanity as the new humanity embodying the love of Jesus Christ in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit to the Father’s glory.  This is the only work in this world that will endure into the next.  As Paul closed out 1 Corinthians, “Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (15:58).  Amen.