Sermons

The sting can be in one’s heart in the grief of loss.

The sting can also be in one’s nerve. There is an old story about that:

Death was walking toward a city when a man stopped Death and asked, “What are you going to do?”

Death replied, “I’m going to kill ten thousand people.”

The man said, “That’s horrible!”

Death continued, “That’s the way it is. That’s what I do.”

As the day went on, the man warned everyone he could of Death’s plan. It didn’t help. In fact, many more than 10,000 died.

At the end of the day he again met Death and he asked, “You said you were going to kill ten thousand people, and yet seventy thousand died.”

Death explained, “I killed only ten thousand. Worry and fear killed the others.” [1]

“Oh death, where is thy sting?” Some would tell you the sting is in their nerve as they fear death.

How about in the conscience? Very much on Paul’s mind, if not so much on ours, is the way death gets entangled with sin. I just finished teaching a Wednesday Night class on Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr said that death is not itself sinful, but it a great occasion for sin because of what it inspires in how we think and live.

Grief over death can cause one to lose hope, be trapped in the past, and live in despair.

Fear can cause one to become a coward.

Denial of death can cause one to take risks with the foolish confidence of the gods.

Death is the debt we all owe nature, Fabyan said, and acceptance of it is one of the great acts of maturity. Ignoring it, or granting it too much power, can lead to inhuman decisions and that, Paul knew, meant sin. When you are clawing in life to fight off death and make of yourself a god, people get hurt in the clawing. Where, oh death, is thy sting? It can be in the conscience when we realize our sins.

Or how about the mind? There can be a logic to death. On the one hand, knowing that life has a final limit, that our days are numbered and are gifts of God, can help us be creative and productive in life. We know each day is a gift so we don’t waste the day. Such thinking is enhanced when we live with the hope that God will take us beyond the limit of these days.

Yet, knowing that life has a final limit can lead to the opposite conclusion. It doesn’t matter what we do, for tomorrow we die. How can our days have meaning?

Back in days of the Cold War, when atheism was the official position of the communist party in the Soviet Union, George Kennan, historian and American ambassador to Russia, said that there is nothing sadder than attending a communist funeral in the Soviet Union; no hope to proclaim, no answer to grief. What is there to say? “This is the end of him. Let’s go home.” But then what do we do at home. Isn’t life just making time? Good or bad actions, what’s the difference, for all decay together.

Oh death, where is thy sting? When we look ahead with fear and backwards with regret, [2] we’ve let death define our thinking. The sting can be in the mind that buys death’s logic.

Paul knows all this. He knows about how the sting of death can be felt in the heart, the conscience, the nerve and the mind. He knows about death being the occasion for sin. So he preaches the Gospel about death being overcome- losing its sting- in the victory of the resurrection.

One might think it was a Gospel he preaches to nonbelievers, and we can be sure that’s true. But that is not the case in I Corinthians. Paul is not trying to convert unbelievers here; he’s trying to straighten out followers of Christ. In our passage from I Corinthians 15, he is speaking to Corinthian Christians who have lost their confidence in the resurrection. They have become practical atheists.

You see, in the Corinthian Church, there are some “cultural elite” members who scoff at the idea of the bodily resurrection. As the cultural elite are sometimes prone to do, they ridicule the notion of a bodily resurrection as some hayseed superstition. The Corinthian elite are taken with Greek philosophy-- its love of perfection and it’s disdain for anything that breathes or eats or has to dispose of waste. In their ridicule, they give a Halloween interpretation of Paul’s teaching about the resurrection of the body. “Paul is preaching nonsense,” they say. “Bodies coming out of the grave? What are our bodies but vessels of disease and instruments of sin? Who would want these bodies, which grow old and then are wracked by age and disease, to be resuscitated? Nonsense! We are spirits trapped in these bodies. At death, our spirits are released to the Spirit world.”

That’s what they were saying, and Paul thought they had it all wrong, both what they said Paul said and what they said God said in Christ. That’s what some in the church are saying today, and Paul would say they have it all wrong as well. But before I tell you how they have it all wrong, let me first tell you how seriously Paul takes theology. More to the point, let me tell you how seriously Paul takes his doctrine of the resurrection of the body. In the first 14 chapters of this letter to the church in Corinth, Paul has been complaining about misbehavior, particularly the behavior of the cultural elite in the Corinthian church community. He criticizes their going to social events where they eat food dedicated to idols and offend the faith of new members of the church who just escaped idol worship. He criticizes their dishonoring the Lord’s Table by dividing it, having a set-aside meal for the moneyed and cultured. He criticizes them for sexual and financial misconduct. And here in chapter 15, Paul says that the root of all this unethical and immoral behavior has been their lousy theology about the resurrection of the body. The root of their bad behavior is bad theology. Paul is convinced of it.

Paul is convinced that when you don’t care about the body you don’t care about bodily life. The cultural elite of the Corinthian church excuse their behavior because it’s just food. It’s just sex. It’s just money. The spirit is all that matters, the life of the body doesn’t. Paul quotes them: “If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’” A modern paraphrase could be, “Party like there’s no tomorrow.” If that’s what you think, Paul tells the Corinthians, then your Gospel is in vain. It means nothing that God met us where we live by living with us. It means nothing that Jesus healed the sick, fed the hungry, raised the dead, and went to the cross to save us. It means nothing that Christ was raised. God’s bodily life among us was just a heart starting and stopping among us; there is no final significance for bodily life doesn’t matter.

Perhaps I can give Paul a better hearing if I turn this around from a negative criticism to a positive proclamation. Paul’s Gospel is that there is a bodily resurrection. Now, he is not trying to say that these flesh and blood bodies that we have come out of the graves. His is not the Halloween Gospel. He is saying that beyond the death of these bodies, we have bodily lives with God. He doesn’t know exactly what that will mean, what that will look like, but it does know that we don’t evaporate into some spiritual mist. We don’t dissolve into God. We will have embodied lives with unique identities. God will still know us by name. It takes separate beings to have a relationship with each other, and that is what is promised to us in a bodily resurrection. If, in this world, our relationship with God is one where we only see dimly, then it shall be face to face, name to name.

If we will have a bodily resurrection, than that means it matters, a lot, how we live these bodily lives. We can’t treat others like dirt because God took dirt and breathed life into it and made Adam and Eve and told them to take care of the earth, each other, and other living beings around him. God took a child of Mary and breathed his own life into her womb. God cares how we eat and whether or not we help others to eat; if we get sick and if we visit the sick; how we are treated in the marketplace and in the courts and how we treat others there. There is a resurrection where the best of our bodily lives, the ways we forgive and love each other, the ways we promote and maintain justice and righteousness, is given eternal significance. If Jesus’ body is raised, then while we have these bodies, we must treat them as God’s temples. And we will treat this world as God’s creation. Christ’s death is honored in how we live. We live for God, willing to die for God, for we know that whether we live or we die, we are God’s.

Paul is upset when he writes these words, mad at those he expects to read them. But we read those same words and they comfort us. We are especially comforted when we hear his words read at funerals. We know death’s sting. Don’t try to tell us that the void should not be there after a loved one is gone, that the hurt doesn’t exist from the loss, that fear and confusion have no place on our hearts. But Paul isn’t demeaning that experience of the sting. Notice in our passage that he uses the future, not the present tense. He says that the sting is gone at our resurrection, when our mortal bodies have put on immortality. He is telling us the good news that in Christ’s death and resurrection, death is defeated the sting is lost in a twinkling of an eye. And when we hear and believe this good news, we leave those funerals with hearts both glad and grieving, both sad and full of joy, honoring life as it has been lived and with a determination to make the most of the life we have yet to live.

Winston Churchill had a faith that helped him understand this. And it was a Gospel he wanted proclaimed at his funeral. So he left instructions for how his funeral was to end. At the end, a bugler would play Taps to signify the end of a life. At his service, that’s what happened. A bugler out of sight played Taps and those attending got it. They realized that this meant more than the end of a life but also the end of an era. The lion whose courage inspired them and whose leadership sustained them through the horror of the war had died. There were many tears at the finality of the song the bugle played. But, again by Churchill’s request, the bugler went on to play Reveille letting everyone know that it was time to get up and get going. He had begun a new life with God; they were to begin anew with each other. It was a theological affirmation that at the end, the final sounds will not be Taps but Reveille, and death, defeated, has lost its sting. [3] Or as Paul put it, “For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable.”