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We Will Be Changed
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis April 18, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill John 3:1-9 I Corinthians 15:35-36, 50-57
On this Sunday after Easter, we turn to words that remind us of the often unspoken reason we return, even on so-called “low Sundays”, to these pews: “They do not need us to help them live,” wrote Karl Barth to the preachers of his day, “but seem rather to need us to help them die.” When I think of the church’s life, of its incessant meetings and task forces, its suppers and soap boxes on this issue or that, its retreats and rummage sales, its petty differences and protests over matters of consequence, when I think of all the things we do to crank up and crank out a program year, I am struck by the enormous amount of energy spent instructing people about how they should live. But on the Sunday after Easter, I am left to wonder anew if the church has offered any real help to you: help not first to live, but to die. For if this community of faith fails to address the Word given us in Jesus Christ to our dying, then all of our living, all of the right action of our collective lives, finally will be no more than a stone skipping on the surface of the deeper waters we were meant, by God, to dare. “When death comes,” writes the poet Mary Oliver, “”When it is over, I don’t want to wonder/if I have made of my life something particular, and real./I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,/or full of argument./I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” I am speaking of the difference having a destiny makes in the leaps we are willing to venture day by day. A few years ago, a friend told me the story of an exchange between an alumnus of a well-known university and a panel of university chaplains. The man asked what students were like these days, and one of the chaplains replied, “Well, sir, I think you’d be pleasantly surprised. Students are becoming involved again in issues of justice; they are volunteering more and more to tutor in the city and help at the soup kitchen; they are constantly circulating petitions on human rights…” On and on she went about the students’ moral stands and ethical activities, while the rabbi on the panel—at first subtly and then breaking out into a grin—caused the protestant chaplain to stop what she was saying and turn to him. “Obviously, Rabbi, you have something to say,” she poked. “All you have said is true,” he said quietly, “but they have no eschatology.” Eschatology, from the Greek “last things,” has to do with what we believe about our own end and the ultimate destiny of humankind. They have no eschatology, he said. Which is to say that where we believe ourselves to be going has everything to do with what we do day in and day out…and with what keeps us keeping on. Or to put it in a more Presbyterian way, what we believe God to be up to with us, in life and in death, alone has the power to uphold us and direct us in freedom until we lie to die. Or to put it bluntly, your ethics have everything to do with your eschatology. How you live has everything to do with what you first believe in the face both of your own death and the end of human history. The reason we need help is that we tend either to believe too little or too much about the so-called “last things,” sending us to our graves, in either case, having only visited this planet. So on the one hand, there are those whose eschatology goes only so far as death itself. Practically, that means human beings can succeed in cranking out human existence day by day, can get up and go to work, can raise children and tend aging parents, can do good things and support causes which, for some inarticulate reason, seem to be right. Such doing may even culminate in an obituary full of accomplishments. But nine times out of ten, those whose eschatology ends at the grave are likely to grow weary and faint in the midst of their death-denying days. The responsibility is too great and the evidence is often all against them. Believing the future of the universe to be in human hands alone, they collapse under the weight of the world’s evil. “They have no eschatology,” said the Rabbi and by that he meant when there is no ultimate hope beyond the things we manage to accomplish, then we soon will despair in our well-doing and the hope, the assurance of things unseen will never resound in our minds and hearts and souls. But on the other hand, I am also convinced that human beings—especially good Christians--can say too much eschatologically. If you need evidence of this, just note how the Left Behind series has become more than a good read in the minds of otherwise intelligent people these days! If one’s eschatology has to do with who gets eternal life and who doesn’t…if what the church has to say about God’s ultimate purposes has to do with a set of judgments that strangely coincide with social privilege…if life after death, the grace of being with God eternally, is something we have in us to deserve, then the ethics that follow often have to do with matters private and personal and individual: what do I have to do to get in? Furthermore, having determined who is in and who is out eternally, a society need only work its way back from that determination into a social order that presumes God dislikes all the same people those in positions of power or privilege or piety do! Dutch Reformed Calvinists in South Africa have confirmed this fact. In response to such an eschatology, Karl Barth rhetorically asks, “Did the Son of God clothe Himself with humanity and shed His blood…simply in order that he might create for these people—in free grace, yet why specifically for them and only for them?—this indescribably magnificent private good fortune, permitting them to obtain and possess a gracious God, opening to them the gates of Paradise which are closed to others. Can this really be the goal of the work once and for all accomplished in His death?...Is not every form of egocentricity excused and even confirmed and sanctified if the Christian song of praise consists finally only in a many-tongued but monotonous pro me?” An eschatology that professes to know the lay out of life eternal, that claims a definite insight as to St. Peter’s admissions policy--an eschatology that says too much--keeps death and eternal life in human hands, under human control, thereby failing to give people the help they really need in the inevitable face of death. “Listen,” says Paul to Christians in Corinth. “I will tell you a mystery.” Somewhere between saying too little and saying too much, Paul tries to find a word that will speak the mystery of our lives and our deaths in the light of Christ’s resurrection. Unlike those with no eschatology who would understand death as some natural transition, Paul insists that death is “the last enemy.” Unlike those with too defined an eschatology, his words only grope toward the mystery. Paul is dealing with a group of ecstatic new Christians in Corinth that believed the resurrection had removed death and its limits from human existence. In a way, they both believed too little and too much! Believing the end was near, Paul first of all insisted they stare the reality of their own individual deaths in the face. Since Paul’s time, the church, at her best, has had to become the community that casts a wider and longer glance into the face of death, naming the death every society has mistaken for life, the death we have institutionalized and made normal, the death we have sanctioned and made acceptable. Staring down the enemy that is death, individually and socially, is what the church first must do, can do because of the hope of the resurrection…because of the assurance that death will have no dominion! In fact, the church must do this if it is to give people the help they need. But what does this really mean for the rest of your life and mine? “Why,” Paul asks, “are we putting ourselves in danger every hour? I die every day!” Not only Paul, but Peter and James and John and Stephen and all the Marys found themselves living after the resurrection as they had never lived before: living in the face of death with an incredible courage and confidence. How is it that the resurrection changed eleven fearful, ready to run, quick to deny disciples into people who put themselves in danger every hour, who died every day for Christ’s sake? Was it some insight they had in looking back and comprehending who Jesus was and what he had taught them? Was it some sense of obligation to carry on what this great man had begun and so what had ended too soon? No! Rather the resurrection of Jesus from the dead turned them from asking what they were doing and why to what God had done, was doing and finally would do in the end. Not how we will change things, but how we will be changed! The resurrection of the body reveals the truth that God is even now taking and will finally take the very stuff of death in us and around us and among us [the decay that makes us fall in upon ourselves and the enmity that finds us doing each other in; the pain that is at the heart of our incompleteness and the sorrow that is our separation from all we were made most to love; the hurt that will not be healed by our hand and the hopelessness that defies our every optimistic surmise; the powers and principalities that would do in a whole people and the hatred that would have at the least of these], God will finally take all that is perishable, all that is dishonored, all that is weak, all that is mortal, and we will together, with all creation, be changed. Now what follows from such an eschatology is an impossible ethic, an ethic which puts our lives as we know them in danger every hour because we have been freed finally to live as those who know death shall have no dominion! Because in him who lived and died and was raised, we have been given the help we need to die to ourselves: we have been changed and may really live! “During the darkest days of apartheid,” writes Bishop Desmond Tutu, “I used to say to P.W. Botha, the president of South Africa, that we had already won, and I invited him and other white South Africans to join the winning side. All the ‘objective’ facts were against us—the pass laws, the imprisonments, the teargassing, the massacres, the murder of political activists—but my confidence was not in the present circumstances… There is no way that evil and oppression and lies can have the last word…God is in charge…That is what had upheld the morale of our people, to know that in the end [God] will prevail.” Ethics and eschatology! Listen! I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed. Thanks be to God. |