False
hopes. I have this hope that one day I
will be a “winner” especially this time of year. It’s February. It’s cold.
It’s always cloudy. There’s
dirty, dingy snow everywhere. There are
no signs of life. There are no leaves on
the trees except for those stalwart, dead Klingons that have managed to hold on
through those brutal 80k+ wind gusts that come up every time another winter
storm blows through. There’s no green
grass. The birds don’t sing. There’s as much of a chance of seeing the sun
as there is of seeing a squirrel or a groundhog. Everywhere you look its just
death, death, and more death.
And
so, it is in this most depressing time of year that Tim Horton’s has decided to
unleash that bastion of false hope – the Roll Up The Rim cup. Daily we shovel out to make the pilgrimage to
the nearest Tim’s drive-thru to take a chance at being a “winner”. Whether it’s a car, a trip, a microwave, a
donut, or just a second cup of coffee, we don’t care. In the middle of February, we just want to be
winners. We drink our coffee’s a little
too fast and java-jived up we follow the arrow to the rim of the cup and start
the arduous task of rolling back the rim, but with winter-cracked thumbs we
resort to using our teeth. We see our
first glimmer of lettering and sooo typically its in French and it makes no
sense. It seems we have to write an
essay (reessayez) and we wonder if SVP is some sort of insult. Rolling up a little further to the left, it’s
“Please try again” and we all know what that means – “Loser!” It’s our daily reminder that we are “losers”
and it is so ironic that we paid a Loonie to find that out. What fools we are.
Well,
enough of the light-hearted humour.
Taking a look at our passage from 1 Corinthians Paul is rhetorically
slamming the Corinthians over the topic of the resurrection of the dead. The event of the resurrection of the dead at
the end of this age evidenced by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead (a
fact witnessed by more than 500 people) was at the heart of what was called
hope in the early church. Paul was
arguing against a faction among the Corinthian Christians who said there was no
resurrection of the dead. We don’t know
exactly who these people were or what exactly they believed, but it was
entirely likely that they just couldn’t let go of the Greco-Roman belief that
the dead don’t raise and, moreover, why would anybody want to hope for
that. A major philosophical idea that
affected religious belief back then and even now was that spirit is good and physical
matter is bad. And so, they believed
that humans are just spirits or souls, whiffs of eternal energy trapped inside
of mortal bodies, bodies that feel pain and get diseased; bodies that
suffer. Death, then, was good because it
freed us from these smelly, diseased mortal bodies so that we can go on to a
higher plain of existence that is better where we don’t suffer. So, why anybody want to have a body again? That’s just foolishness.
This
resurrection denying faction in Corinth likely believed that the Jesus Way –
the Holy Spirit-filled community of believers in which the rule of self-denying
love was the manner of living – that this was a superior way to live in the
present, in this life. They liked the
idea that the Spirit of God had made human beings his temple, the place on
earth where the one true God resides.
They could accept this hyper spiritualized existence because spirit is
good and matter is bad. Yet, they still
clung to the idea death frees us from matter and delivers us to the glorious
realm where all is spirit.
To
these folks Paul says, “If it is only for the time span of this life that we
are hopers in Christ, then we are the most pitiable of all people.” Paul suffered greatly for being a
Christian. He was often beaten, jailed,
stoned, ridiculed. For Christians all
over the Roman Empire there was always the constant threat of being called
treasonous because they worshipped and served Jesus as Son God and Lord and
Saviour rather than Caesar. Being a
follower of Jesus was not a hyper-spiritual, superior existence in the
present. It was the way of the cross and
meant suffering. You’re a fool, if being
faithful to Jesus is only for this life.
Why choose more suffering than what you would already experience by
simply being human.
The
way of the Christian was and still is the way of cross-shaped discipleship. As followers of Jesus we are not glorified,
super-spiritual beings. Rather, we
strive to embody the life of the crucified one.
Instead of living a life of vainglorious falsehood and lying, we speak
and live the truth in love. We don’t say
hurtful things to others, rather we strive to build others up and empower them
to be all that God created them to be. Instead of running around in a rage at
injustice and especially the injustices done to poor, pitiful me, we rather don’t
let the sun go down on our anger so that we don’t develop grudges. We don’t grow rich by growing wealthy off of
gambling on the sweat and blood of others (checked your investments lately),
rather we work hard and honest, not in order to be wealthy, but that we might
be able to share with others. We abstain
from being contentious, slandering, and doing malice, and rather make every
effort to be kind, tender-hearted, and forgiving.
The
Jesus Way of cross-shaped discipleship is indeed a superior way of life in this
corrupted and broken world, but it is problematically counter-cultural. Those involved in counter-cultural movements
suffer mainly because they are a threat to the status quo. Such was Paul, such was the Christian Church
in his day. So, ought the church be
today, but we’re not.
Go
in to what’s left of any big steeple (Mainline) church today in North America
and start talking about culture and you will find yourself in the midst of a
group of people who can’t understand why people don’t come to church anymore,
why the Lord’s Prayer isn’t recited daily in public schools, why the Ten
Commandments aren’t courthouses, and why people say “Happy Holidays” instead of
“Merry Christmas”. It is because for so
long Christian religion was status quo and by Christian religion I do not mean
the Jesus Way, the way of cross-shaped discipleship. Christian religion was the duty of giving a
nod to God who is sovereign and being a good person so that God will bless you
and that you will go to heaven when you die.
Christian religion made for a good moral compass and that’s about it.
Christian religion is a false hope. It is false hope to simply live a good life
in the hopes that God will bless you and you’ll go to heaven when you die. Hard times come on good people too. In
Christian religion the resurrection of Jesus was simply the guarantee that good
people went to heaven when they died. Yet, in
the early church, the resurrection of Jesus meant that a New Creation had
begun; that God in, through, and as Jesus the Messiah of the Jews has defeated
sin, the corrupted powers, and ultimately death. To live the cross-shaped way of discipleship
was to strive to live life now according to the way things will be when Jesus
returns and all things are made new. It
means live prayerfully, striving for justice and equity first of all by being
indiscriminately hospitable to all people, and by sharing what we ourselves have
and not waiting on government to solve the worlds problems. It means actually loving our neighbours and
building them up rather than building privacy fences around our back
yards. It’s inviting people to come sit
on our front porches so that you can discuss how to make our neighbourhoods or
sideroads a fountainhead of the love of God.
Well-placed hope is to live now the way things
will be when Jesus brings the kingdom of God from heaven to earth in full
force, when Creation is made new and we are raised from the dead. Biblical hope is not simply wishing that what God
has promised will come true. It is
actually living according to those promises. Paul said
that until Jesus comes we have three things: faith, hope, and love and the
greatest of the three is love.
Well-placed hope in Christ is love lived in the present until he comes. Live hopefully. Amen.
