The Resurrection and Affirmation of the Body

Author: M. Div. Maddie Tallman, Sermon from Sunday, May 24, 2020. Text: 1 Corinthians 15

Grace and peace to you, good people of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church. I cannot tell you how thrilled I am to be preaching and leading worship with you, alongside your own beloved former Vicar Corey. It really is an honor and privilege to worship with you this morning, even amidst the pain of distance and pandemic. 

This morning we get a taste of the lawyer side of Paul. His legalistic tendencies come out, as he makes a case for the people of Corinth to believe in not just Jesus’s own death and resurrection, but also their own resurrection. Like so many people before them, and people after them, the Corinthians are unsure about just what happens when perhaps the one common human experience finds us—death. And it’s clear they believe and hold fast to Christ’s resurrection. The Messiah could experience resurrection, that’s not being debated necessarily. But believing in their own resurrection—that one was harder to hold on to. 

And can we blame them? It’s a question that has haunted even the most faithfully assured. 

So Paul crafts his argument. First, we learn that Christ’s own death and resurrection are intimately connected to us. That Christ’s death and resurrection means our own death and resurrection. And vice versa. The Cross and the Empty tomb are not just singular historic events that only happened to Jesus, or metaphors simply to be pondered, but rather cosmic events that are very real to us today and always. 

And secondly we learn just what Paul believes and professes will happen at the end of all things. We learn his eschatological understanding. And eschatology is the part of theology that has often focused on the “end times” or “final judgement” or more simply, the theological understanding of limits. Corey and I had a professor at LSTC, Dr. Westhelle, God rest his soul, who I’m sure Corey mentioned in sermons before, and eschatology was one of his field of focus. And when I say that, I do not mean he was trying to calculate the end of the world, no. Instead his eschatology was more the study of limits. When something “ends” – like the extinction of an endangered species – or where something ends – like where I end and Corey begins. Throughout Christian history, eschatology has focused more on when time will end, and Dr. Westelle wanted us to understand that our history, our very human existence, is not just about time and the abstract, but also the physical, the life we grab in our hands, our own bodies. And even, the resurrection of the body.

By imploring the people of Corinth to believe in their own resurrection of their own bodies—and not just the possibility of an ephemeral or eternal soul, no, their flesh and blood bodies—we get a sense of Paul’s own eschatological understanding as well. That in the last times or the last things or whatever we call it, in something we categorically can know almost nothing about, we CAN have faith in one thing, in the resurrection of the body, our bodies, through Jesus Christ. Paul embraces a sort of restoration approach. That God is going to restore the universe to the paradise it once knew. But not in a “back in the good ole days” kind of thinking. Paul says “all will be changed.” God is doing that changing, that transforming, that restoring. 

Lutherans really don’t like to spend too much time or energy speculating what happens we die or what will happen at the “end of the world.”—beyond what’s said in our creeds of faith, that we believe in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” But in general, we try to focus our energy on today—the very real lives of ourselves and our neighbors, the grace of God reaching out to us today. But with all that’s happening today, amidst the pandemic and empty streets, further apart from each other than maybe ever before, and the reality of a lot more death right now, the cultural image of the apocalypse has perhaps loomed over us. Even though we know it’s not the end of the world, maybe it feels like that at times. And that pain is real. 

And that pain is perhaps felt most strongly in our bodies. The space needed to keep our bodies safe, a virus that makes it hard to breathe, the ache of losing things looked forward to, the ache of not knowing when we might be able to move on safely. The body feels this pain perhaps most strongly. 

But if there’s something else the resurrection of the body teaches us, I think it’s a strong affirmation of our bodies. This creedal belief is an affirmation of the bodies God created and called good. And an affirmation against the idea that our bodies are to be loathed, or bad, overly sexualized or infantilized. I wonder if the people of Corinth were struggling with a widely held belief – one that persists today – that the mind was good but the body was bad. Our intellect makes us human but our bodies make us vulnerable. This dichotomy was prevalent in Greek philosophy so no wonder if they struggled with an idea that the body could be worth resurrecting. But the danger in this worldview is not about what happens in the end times, it has very real consequences in the present. Because the idea that it’s okay to dismiss our bodies leads to dismissing others’ bodies. 

If our bodies are important, my body and your body, then our neighbor’s body is important and affirmed and called good too. Our neighbors’ bodies are worth protecting. Wearing masks, keeping distance, staying home, are all ways we acknowledge the value and importance of our neighbors’ bodies. Not only does Christ’s death and resurrection link to our own deaths and resurrections, but it also links us to each other. It affirms the bodies of each other. 

The Christian faith is an embodied faith. From the incarnation of Jesus Christ, to the messy life he lived, to his death and to his resurrection, a human body was central. Faith today is not just an intellectual adventure. It’s not just a series of philosophical arguments with no real physical component. An embodied faith has the deep potential to love and affirm our bodies too. 

Paul wanted the people of Corinth to see their own bodies as worthy of resurrection. It is my hope that we see our bodies as worthy of resurrection too. Not just in the last things, but in every moment. That in death and in life, our bodies are important. So we too can say with confidence, Where, O Death, is your victory? Thanks be to God who gives us that victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.