Sermon: ...if Christ has not been raised...

First Presbyterian Church

February 16, 2022, Epiphany 6C

1 Corinthians 15:12-26

 

...if Christ has not been raised...

 

 

To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause—there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

--Shakespeare, Hamlet, III:1

 

 

These words from Hamlet's famous "to be, or not to be" soliloquy, are of course broadly famous as a key moment of that character's struggle with what to do in what he increasingly sees as a hopeless situation. So burdened is he that he is contemplating suicide. 

This particular portion of the soliloquy contains a particular phrase that has taken on a life well beyond what Shakespeare might have imagined. The phrase "shuffle off this mortal coil" has become a commonplace slang reference to death, and especially death as a leaving behind of the physical life. Note that the soliloquy contemplates "what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil"; while the body is dead, evidently the spirit is still kicking, at least enough to be tormented by dreams. 

Based on today's reading from 1 Corinthians, we'd have to guess that the Apostle Paul would get pretty frustrated with this soliloquy, maybe even jumping up and exiting the theater in a huff. If anything is made clear in today's verses, it is that resurrection is real, and it is not merely spiritual. If you were wondering after last week's reading why Paul was so adamant about providing that whole list of witnesses to the resurrected Christ, you now have your answer. 

It seems that there were some among the Corinthian fellowship who were perhaps still (as they were in so many things) under the influence of certain Greco-Roman ways of thinking about the relationship between the soul and the body. In much philosophy, particularly following Plato, soul and body were separate things. In short, much of that thought saw the body as a thing to be escaped; let the cludgy old flesh die and the spirit be set free upon death. Not all Greco-Roman thought accepted this - the Epicureans and Stoics were two such examples - but a good bit of such thought held that death was the chance for the soul to be free of the body, fulfilled at last. 

It should be noted that such a philosophical bent doesn't necessarily result in an outright skeptical or denialist position about physical life after death. It isn't as if Corinthian objectors were necessarily getting all riled up about this talk of resurrection because it offended them intellectually; it's also quite possible that they were offended emotionally by the whole idea. In other words, such an objection might be framed not as "that's impossible" or "that's ridiculous"; it might as easily have been framed as "oh, gross" or "why would you want that?" When one is conditioned intellectually or emotionally to see the body as an encumbrance, being taught that your body is part of the whole resurrection package can be a shock to the system.

It might be easy for us moderns to scoff at such thoughts or fears, but let's check ourselves: are we that far from such attitudes about body and soul, really?

That line from Hamlet's soliloquy, for example, and the evolved interpretation of it as being freed from the body, seems pretty Corinthian in some ways. Are our old gospel hymns and songs completely free from the whole idea of, say, our disembodied souls floating off to Heaven while our bodies remain in the grave or in whatever state they have been treated after death? Or take the whole idea of ghosts, for example - what is that spirit doing floating around all un-embodied? If we're not making popular-culture fun with ghosts as disembodied spirits, we're making horror movies about "dis-emspirited" bodies, or zombies. For what it's worth, that image of a body in, shall we say, really rough condition, wandering the earth creating terror, is probably not that far off from what those Corinthians might have thought about resurrected bodies. 

There's another way that the whole "being rid of the body" idea becomes particularly alluring: when those bodies suffer illness or pain. I know that many of you here in this sanctuary, and likely many of you on the live stream as well, have experienced that struggle, either for yourself or for a loved one or friend; I know I have. We even acknowledge this struggle in the liturgy for the Service of Witness to the Resurrection, when we offer our thanks to God that for the deceased, "death is past and pain ended." Being ready to be rid of the physical stuff is not uncommon, when we think about it.

However we frame it, Paul is having none of it. And the biggest reason for Paul's agitation is not any particular concern about disembodied spirits or dis-emspirited bodies or anything like that. No, for the apostle, horrible thing about denying resurrection is that if you say there is no resurrection of the dead, then you are saying that Christ was not resurrected from the dead. And that Paul cannot accept.

"If Christ has not been raised," all of Paul's work is in vain.

"If Christ has not been raised," the faith of the Corinthians (such as it is), or of any of those to whom Paul has ministered, is in vain.

"If Christ has not been raised," Paul and his fellow laborers are liars. If the dead are not raised, somehow, some way, some time, then Christ is not raised. Paul and his fellow laborers have done all this work in proclaiming Christ raised from the dead, which can't be so if the dead are not raised, he says. 

"If Christ has not been raised," the faith of the Corinthians, and for that matter your own faith, are not only in vain, but futile, even pointless. You are hopelessly mired in sin with no redemption coming.

"If Christ has not been raised," the dead in Christ are not even that - not even "in Christ"; they're just dead.

"If Christ has not been raised," if our hope in Christ was only about this walking-around human life, then (in one of the most heart-wrenching lines of all scripture) "we of all people are most to be pitied." 

But! "But", as Paul reminds his readers, that's not the case. But, as Paul reminds his readers, "Christ has indeed been raised from the dead." Here he comes up with the evocative phrase "the first fruits of those who have died" to describe Christ. And of course, if Christ is only the "first fruits," we are led to believe there are more "fruits" to come. In case it's not clear, that would be us, when our time comes. 

Again, you have to tune in for one more week to get how Paul envisions all this working out. Verses 21-23 give some description: 

For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being. For as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.

 

We get just a little tease there of Paul's "big finish," speaking of the return of Christ and where we fit into it. But for this point, we are reminded that as Christ was raised from the dead, the same will be true for those who die in Christ. It's worth remembering that for readers of Paul's own time, Christ's death was in living memory. 

It's a different challenge for us, nearly two thousand years after the fact, to hold on to that hope, and clearly many today who call themselves "Christians" have none of that hope, but have placed all their hope on power in this world. But Paul is insistent that this is our hope. We don't live hopeless lives. We don't live in vain. We are not cast off by God to be forgotten or to disappear into oblivion. Our future is with God. We have a future, and our future is with God. 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #35, Praise Ye the Lord, the Almighty; #246, Christ Is Alive!; #250, In the Bulb There Is a Flower

Sermon: The Basics

First Presbyterian Church

February 9, 2022, Epiphany 5C

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

 

The Basics

 

 

 

"Let's get back to basics here..."

"OK, back to square one..."

"Remember how all this started..."

"Remember your fundamentals..."

"In a nutshell..."

We have a lot of ways to talk about the need, every now and then, to return to those things in our work or our family life or our life in general that are most basic, perhaps most foundational, to how we operate or how we live together or even to how we exist as a human being. It's not uncommon to get so caught up or maybe bogged down in the day-to-day details of that activity that we forget why we're doing that thing in the first place. Sometimes we really do need to get back to basics, or remember how we started, or to sum it all up "in a nutshell." 

As the Apostle Paul draws to the conclusion of his letter to the church in Corinth, after pages upon pages of instruction and correction and chastisement and sometimes downright frustration, he apparently decides that the Corinthians need to get back to the basics and remember why they're even a church in the first place. Today's reading constitutes those "basics," at least as Paul understood them; the rest of the chapter, which we will attend to on upcoming Sundays, describes how Paul concludes the Corinthians got off-track.

In this case, these "basics" are cast as the message Paul proclaimed to the Corinthians. Paul makes no claim that the message is in any way unique to his ministry; as we will see, he is quick to acknowledge that others proclaim this same basic account, and some of those have even borne their witness to the Corinthians themselves. But notice how carefully Paul casts this message before he even gets around to repeating it:

Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you-unless you have come to believe in vain.

 

That's kind of a mouthful, but Paul is taking pains to stress just how basic this message was to the Corinthians' (or snyone's) very existence as part of the body of Christ. He then reiterates again that what he has taught them he taught "as of first importance," as if he hasn't stressed this point enough already. 

But then, Paul probably had reason to be so precise about his proclamation. There were plenty of examples of churches in Paul's travels that had decided, on their own or through the influence of bad teachers, that other, nonessential or even non-justifiable thoughts needed to be elevated to primary or indispensable status. Perhaps the most notorious example is found in his letter to the church of Galatia, the one where Paul writes "I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting..." almost immediately in the letter (1:6), and later is moved to exclaim "You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?" (3:1). 

What had the Galatians done to provoke such ire from Paul? They had, under the influence of those "bad teachers," decided that, for example, male Gentile converts to this community of believers should be required to undergo the rite of circumcision according to Jewish practice; in short, they had to become Jewish to become Christian. Galatia wasn't the only place where Paul ran into this obstacle to faith - those bad teachers traveled almost as well as Paul did - but his literary outburst in that letter is perhaps most striking. Indeed, Paul had reason to be very precise and direct about taking the Corinthians back to square one.

The gospel in a nutshell, as Paul puts it?

that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures...

 

There it is. The basics. The gospel in a nutshell. 

The self-described "lectionary comic strip" Agnus Day takes on this passage in a humorous exchange between its two characters, sheep named Ted and Rick. Ted remarks of this passage that "there it is, the whole gospel in a handful of verses," to which Rick, the wiser sheep, responds that "Paul doesn't want them to forget the basics of the faith." Then the punchline, from Ted: "Makes me wonder why I'm carrying around the rest of this Bible...". 

No, this passage is not an invitation to toss out the rest of the Bible - there's a lot more to be said about how this gospel came to be and what it means for us. As far as the most basic element of why we are what we are, though, it's hard to add to this. We echo this in our Lord's Supper responses: Christ has died. Christ is risen. (Paul will get to the "Christ will come again" part later in this chapter.)

With this basic gospel stated, Paul then engages in some "human bibliography" - being careful to cite sources for this gospel, in particular the part about Christ being raised. (Yes, this might serve as a clue to what is to come later in the chapter.) He does this by rattling off a pretty impressive list of witnesses to the risen Christ. There might be an inclination to panic over the fact that this list doesn't necessarily correlate to any particular account of resurrection appearances in any of the gospels. Don't panic. Remember that Mark's gospel includes no such appearances, Matthew barely gets in any, and John flatly admits that there's a whole lot more he could have included in his gospel but didn't. Also, those gospels hadn't even been written at the time Paul is writing to the Corinthians to boot. Nothing in the gospels gives us any reason to question what Paul has received and passed on.

Of course, the last witness Paul lists is Paul himself, referring to his dramatic conversion recorded in Acts 9. Paul is quick to acknowledge his own dark past as one who "persecuted the church of God," but uses that failure of his past to illuminate the grace of God that made him into what he now was, even if he can't stop himself from going on about how hard he's had to work at this before acknowledging God's grace again. 

In short, here's the point, so far: Christ died and was buried, Christ was raised again (this is all consistent with scripture, Paul points out), and we have a lot of witnesses to the risen Christ, some of whom you know (it seems that Cephas, whom we know as Peter, might have visited Corinth at some point). That, Paul tells his readers, is the most basic foundation of your faith, of your being what you are. 

This is a challenging topic to translate into our own modern context. Those eyewitnesses are no longer with us, after all, and the church has blundered through nearly two millennia of trying, with intent good or ill, claiming all manner of other doctrinal assertions as "fundamentals" of the faith. This has inevitably done incredible damage to the church's witness, not to mention to those who are victimized by such assertions. 

No, none of that: the fundamental of the faith, Paul would say, is this: 

...that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures...

 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #485, We Know That Christ Is Raised; #441, Hear the Good News of Salvation; #649, Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound

 

 

Sermon: The More Excellent Way

First Presbyterian Church

February 2, 2025, Epiphany 4C

1 Corinthians 13:1-14:1

 

The More Excellent Way

 

 

One of the challenges of preaching a text like this one, which has gained tremendous familiarity over time due to its popularity as a text for weddings, is that we forget that it is not a free-standing, isolated poem unrelated to anything but itself. Even in the act of preaching outside of a marriage ceremony, seldom does all of this other stuff in Paul's letter to Corinth get looked over and considered. We might even forget, after a fashion, that Paul didn't write his letters in chapters - these divisions were created much later, mostly for reading convenience. There are probably quite a few churches where this text is being heard today, in isolation, after weeks of sermons from Luke's gospel, where folks switched over for today because this is such a popular text while the reading from Luke, where the people of Jesus's hometown get so mad at his sermon that they try to kill him, is less appealing. What gets missed in that case is all the connections between this chapter and what has come before in Paul's letter.

To take one example, consider the very first verse of chapter 8 of 1 Corinthians. It would seem to be a strange place to look, given that its first words are "Now about food sacrificed to idols...", which doesn't seem like the introduction to a statement on the importance of love. Nonetheless, before we can even get away from verse 1, Paul has reminded his readers and hearers that "knowledge puffs up while love builds up." He goes on to add that whatever anyone knows (or thinks they know), it's not sufficient, but one who loves God is fully and completely known to God. 

Additionally, a number of other passages earlier in the letter lay a foundation for this discourse on love by pointing to God and our utter reliance on God. It is because of God that "you are in Christ Jesus" (1:30); God is "the one who makes things grow" no matter who planted or watered the seed of the gospel (3:7); God is the one "through whom all things came and through whom we live" (8:6). The God who is this foundation and source and root and all is the one who is the source and direction of our living, and that is found in the love God loves for us, which we then are directed to love towards one another. 

For that matter, other portions of chapter 13 are also echoes of earlier discussions in this letter. Take a look at the list of characteristics of love in verses 4-7:

o   "Love ... does not envy" (4), but the Corinthians are apparently full of "jealousy and quarreling" (3:3); 

o   "Love ... does not boast" (4), but the Corinthians do (4:7, 5:6, where Paul flat-out says that their boasting "not good"); 

o   "Love is not ... proud" (4), but the Corinthians are often described as arrogant or "puffed up" (4:6, 18-19; 5:2, and 8:1); 

o   "Love does not delight in evil" (6), but some of the Corinthians have engaged in taking advantage of unjust courts to exploit others (6:7-8).

Paul has been building the case against the Corinthians throughout the gospel, and far from being cut off from that case, this chapter is very directly addressing their condition. All of these faults that have been noted in this letter point to a decided lack of love in the community.

There is something else to note about this list in verses 4-7. While those in verses 5-6 are more regularly translated actively - " rejoices..." "bears ... believes ... hopes" - some get translated in such a way that we probably don't notice that Paul is using his verbs here. If we were to diagram the phrases "love is patient" or "love is kind," for example, we would place "love" as the subject, "is" as the verb, and "patient" or "kind" as the "object," an adjective modifying "love." That's not how the Greek in which Paul writes works, though. What we translate as "is patient" or "is kind" is the verb of Paul's statement; we might come closer to catching the force of his instruction if we rendered those clauses "love acts patiently" or "love does kindness," representing how these traits are not passive feelings but actions, or even more ways of behavior rather than only of thought or emotion.

This brings us to perhaps the biggest challenge to our knowledge of this chapter, the part that tends to get most buried in marriage-service renderings: love is action. Love is not a thing that is felt; love is a thing that is done, no matter whether the feelings or emotions are there. That is indeed the animating principle behind this whole chapter, and again what the Corinthians seem to be sorely lacking, for all their other spiritual gifts they so liked to boast in.

I've no doubt that we can all come up with times and occasions in which we have witnessed the very people who talked the good game about loving turn around and engage in the most hateful and destructive actions imaginable, maybe even claiming to do so in the name of love. Paul isn't having it; "knowledge puffs up while love builds up."

It is also this understanding that makes all those other spiritual gifts marked by Paul in chapter 12 so utterly dependent on love. While addressing multiple of those gifts, it becomes clear quickly that the business of speaking in tongues was a particular source of boasting among the Corinthians when Paul takes it on first and most elaborately in verse 1. To speak in "the tongues of mortals or of angels" without love is not merely "nothing," as later phrases will conclude; it is the equivalent of "a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal." Here the reference seems to be to the practices of some of the temples devoted to Greek and/or Roman gods in Corinth, whose observances were sometimes marked by the regular and prominent sounding of exactly those loud percussion instruments. It's almost as if Paul is saying when you go off on your ecstatic utterances just for your own elevation, with no care or love or concern for your fellow followers of Christ, you're acting exactly like the lost souls you used to be - remembering that before being added to the church many of the Corinthians had been participants in those temple rituals to those Greek and Roman idols. 

The point of this section, which gets elaborated in chapter 14, is not to dismiss those spiritual gifts; the point is that none of those gifts - not prophecy or knowledge or faith to do great things or those tongues - are of any use when not practiced in love, the love that forms the body of Christ and in which that body both lives together and lives toward the world around it. It's even possible that such gifts practiced not in love are more harmful than good. If you can't do it in love, honestly, you're better off keeping it to yourself. Love is the reason any of those spiritual gifts have any value. Love, that divine love infused into human existence, is why any of those works matter.

All of this is part of why Paul could refer to love as "the most excellent way" back at the end of chapter 12, but we shouldn't leave out the end of this chapter in that respect, either. Of all the gifts or behaviors or traits of the life of the body of Christ, love is the one that is eternal. Prophecies will end; when at last we live in eternal union with God, what is the need for prophecy? The gift of tongues, or ecstatic utterances believed to be given by God, seems rather superfluous when in God's eternal presence, yes? Our partial and unfinished knowledge will, at minimum, be finished in the presence of God. 

Even faith and hope, as Paul describes in this famous chapter’s final and most famous verse, are secondary to love in this way. Faith and hope are beautiful. They are amazing gifts of the Spirit. But like the others Paul describes, they are finite gifts to help sustain us through this in-between time. If faith is, as the author of Hebrews describes, “confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see,” then what is the point of faith when we are in the very presence of God, seeing God face to face? What is the point of hope, or what is the need for hope, when God is unmistakably and unshakably in the midst of us, for all to see? The partial things, as Paul says in verse 10, come to an end.

But love never ends. Love is as eternal as God is eternal. 

Love. Never. Ends.

Though it is technically not part of today’s lectionary reading, the first verse of chapter 14 is useful, or even needful, to place chapter 13 into proper relationship with chapter 12: “Follow the way of love and eagerly desire gifts of the spirit.” 

Not either/or, both/and. 

Paul’s instruction does not mean that the Corinthians, or we, should somehow deny the gifts we have been given by the Spirit – and remember from back in 12:3 (a couple of weeks ago) that anyone who truly confesses that “Jesus is Lord” is gifted by the Holy Spirit. Rather, Paul needs the Corinthians, and us, to understand that the care and feeding and usage of our spiritual gifts within the body of Christ and out in the larger world only works in the context of love – the love that God has shown us so that we might show love for one another and for all of God’s creation. 

Our stories of love will not necessarily be showy or dramatic. They will be heartbreaking at times. They will try our patience or our virtue. We may stumble in grief and leap for joy at the same time because of that love. But if we dare to call ourselves followers of Christ, we will love, without reservation and without qualification.

We will love because God is love, eternal and unending. We will love because God loves. We will love because Christ loves. And we will love because that’s what the body of Christ does.

For love, eternal and unending, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #14, For the Beauty of the Earth; #525, Let Us Break Bread Together; #693, Though I May Speak (The Gift of Love)