Concerts

Did you know that classical musicians are adrenaline junkies? Underneath the neatly groomed exterior of a brass player--okay, neatly groomed might be an exaggeration--there is a daredevil who sits onstage in tails, holding a metal tube as several thousand people look on. As the rests click by and the strings saw away up front playing whatever it is that they're doing (mostly just filler material until the brass come in again) we sit in the back row thinking "in about ten seconds I need to somehow buzz into this metal tube and get a pitch to sound at exactly the right moment without any sort of impurity in the attack, and it has to be exactly in tune with whatever the strings are doing, and the tone needs to be powerful but beautiful, and to do this I'll have to mash my lips into the mouthpiece in a particular shape that, if it varies even by a nanometer, will produce the wrong note, and I need to do this in a way that somehow sounds effortless, and if I screw any of this up then some viola player will turn around and give me a dirty look and a snooty man in a bowtie will write mean things about me in tomorrow's paper.

It can be a stressful job.

I tried to convey the problem of performance nerves to my high-school aged students, and I don't think they believed me. Mostly they were giggling at the spit valves and developing ephemeral romances. Despite my concerns about their nerves, they did very well at their concert yesterday. A little stage fright does wonders for the general level of focus on the task at hand. Special thanks need to go out to:

Lux, who despite forgetting about the concert until an hour and a half before it started, managed to get himself down to Lima without a working vehicle or cell phone. He arrived with a tuba, but I fear that it was procured by illegal means.

Pax, who also did not have a working vehicle at the time. Congratulations, by the way, on your new Toyota Yaris.

Kylie, who watched a very VERY fussy James D Bear while everyone else was performing.

our friend David, who nailed all the horn solos in the Rossini

and J, who not only read down the piccolo solo in Stars and Stripes with no rehearsal and an unfamiliar instrument, but also sight-read the choral accompaniments in the concert.

I'm glad it's all over.

The most stressful part of the past 24 hours for me, though, was the Steven incident. We celebrated Steven's first birthday (and James' year and a half birthday) on Tuesday. We had cupcakes, candles, and a hat for the birthday bear. James thought this was great. This afternoon J texted me: I can't find Steven.

She knew he didn't come inside from the concert the night before, and presumed he'd been out in the car. But she looked there and didn't find them. Without letting on to James (who was completely oblivious to his absence) what she was doing, she searched all over the house for Steven.

Once I got the news, I went back to teaching and made a mental note that I'd have to help her look once I got home.

Just kidding, of course. I immediately ran out to the parking lot and looked under all the cars to see if he'd fallen out of the PT Cruiser the night before and spent the night outside. I also looked under all the pews in the sanctuary and dug through the lost and found box. (There were lots of sweaty boy's gym clothes in there. I think that some of the boys just "lose" their clothes when they reach a certain stink because they don't want to worry about bringing them home to launder them.)

As soon as I got home I searched the car, the laundry room, under the furniture, inside the furniture, and under his crib. When J came in I was digging through the kitchen garbage. (Sometimes James will throw things in there.) As I separated moldy avocado halves from the remains of old yogurt containers she glumly informed me that she'd already looked there.

He turned up in the garage. J had moved the stroller in there yesterday to make room for Lux's stolen tuba, and Steven was sitting on the little footbar where James will sometimes put him when he wants to go for a walk. He hardly even noticed when I brought him back inside. He even gave a look as if to say "What were you guys so worried about? I knew where he was the whole time."

I'm glad that stressful ordeal is over. Back to practicing Zarathustra calls.

Ecclesiology Devos

When I was in graduate school, I began to indulge what I thought at the time was only a bad habit. I was living alone in a studio apartment in Chicago, a full time student, a working musician, a part-time library clerk, and a part time teaching assistant. I began to sleep in on Sunday mornings. I often wouldn’t get back from a concert or a late night shift until well after midnight on Saturday, and then I’d make myself a meager dinner and crawl into bed. I wanted to get up for church the next day. I knew that I ought to get up for church. I even liked the church that I was attending. But I didn’t really know anyone there very well, and for one of the few times in my week I had no official responsibilities. So, when my alarm went off at 7 AM, I’d turn it off and sleep in. Was that really so bad?

I’m one of the advisors for the senior class this year…though I should acknowledge that I am by far the lesser advisor, and that Kelly Wendlandt has, to the great advantage of the senior class, taken on the larger part of the responsibilities…and as I watch them stagger bleary-eyed into our homeroom at 8 in the morning, I worry about them a little bit. Next year they’ll be out on their own, most of them far from their home churches and the people who look for them on Sunday mornings. Knowing how hard it is already for them to get up in the morning and to take care of their responsibilities without prompting, it isn’t difficult at all to imagine that a good number of them will not be going to church with any regularity a few months into their freshman year.

I imagine it will look something like this: On their first Sunday on campus, they’ll get up, dress themselves well, and try a local church with which they have some preliminary connection. Perhaps they grew up in the same denomination, or a relative attends there. Over the next few weeks they’ll “church-shop.” (A loathsome term.) Then, as their Saturday nights get later and their dorm bed gets more comfortable, they’ll begin to realize that no one is going to wake them up and force them to go to church in morning. They can save themselves the trouble of getting dressed up and sitting with strangers they don’t know. They can save themselves the trouble of music they don’t like or polite conversations they aren’t interested in. They can even save some gas money, if they have a car, by staying parked on campus. And just like that, they’ll be where I was as a second year graduate student…without any sort of church home, without a pastor, without communion, and without the people of God.

Now, this is a rather glum picture, but we can do something about it. If you’re a parent of one of these students, you can always call on Sunday afternoons and ask how church went that morning. (A guilty conscience got me up on Sunday mornings very quickly when my at-the-time fiancée let me know her displeasure about my little venial sin of sleeping in.) I propose, however, that we can address the problem at a more foundational level. I believe that we ought to be engaging our students with the big questions of ecclesiology—what is “church?” What is “the church?” And why, especially if we’re saved by grace and not by works, does it matter so much if we go or not. I have four points around which we might begin to form an ecclesiology and address these questions.

The fancy classification for the ecclesiology you find among most American protestants is “contractual voluntarism.” Contractual voluntarism is a form of individualism emphasizing private choice. Individual people secure their Christian identity before joining the church by deciding for Christ in response to the gospel, thereby ensuring salvation and a place in heaven. Then, by a subsequent and entirely distinct act of the will, the individual joins a church somewhere, which to them is merely an aggregate of individual believers related to each other solely by virtue of their resolution to commit to Christ and that particular group. It follows, importantly, that relationships in this voluntarist structure are only important for the purpose of strengthening each member’s “relationship with the Lord.” To say it another way, going to church, for too many Christians, is something that is entirely unrelated to the act of becoming a Christian. That, in a nutshell, was what was wrong with my graduate school ecclesiology. Contractual voluntarism is an easy road to the church of the Holy Comforter.

Instead, church life must be seen as intrinsic to the Christian life. The Enlightenment told us that going to church and participating in organized religion was a social act, and in a way, that’s true. It’s also true that, as a social act, organized religion can be boring, hypocritical, repressive, injurious, and dull. In that respect, it’s just like any other social act by human beings. Intrinsic ecclesiology, however, insists that this particular social act, of Jews and Gentiles, male and female, rich and poor, all coming together around the common table of the risen Messiah, is the means by which the Holy Spirit is poured out over God’s creation. Good churchgoing doesn’t start with private individuals making authentic choices…it starts with the acknowledgement that whoever is there, and however they got there, that place has become is become the table of Jesus. Even though we may seem like the Elk’s club or the Spencerport bowling league, our gathering together is the visible and intrinsic movement of God on earth.

Secondly, a healthy ecclesiology must be eschatological at well as historical. What happened in the past is important. So are the things yet to come. I don’t mean by this that all of our church services ought to be about reading Revelation and fixating on the end times. Rather, the church must keep an eye on God’s ultimate future so as to model it in the present and in some ways to help build it up and bring it about. Now, there are enormous questions about what that future will look like, but the very act of raising those questions is a healthy start. What we ought not to do is live the life of the church wholly in reaction to the past, whether that be in reaction against it or in preservation of it.

Thirdly, the church must be materially situated in the present. Yes, the church exists somehow as a mystical manifestation of the body of Christ. Yes, within the life of the church we celebrate an ethereal and spiritual relation to the Christ. However, the church also exists in real people and in this real world, and it matters that we actually show up physically every week, because so much of our task requires it. Just by virtue of being the church, material work ought to be done, like feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, looking after those in need, and doing extraordinary art, music, and architecture to the glory and worship of God.

Lastly, and perhaps most controversially, I believe any useful ecclesiology must be improvisatory. Imagine for a moment that someone found the manuscript to a lost play by Shakespeare, but that the last part of the manuscript was not preserved. How would you go about setting and performing this play? You could read and perform the first four acts, but the last act would have to be improvised by the actors. How would you go about this sort of project? The material from the first four acts would have to be authoritative, of course. You’d carry over the same scenes and characters. You’d have to guess at the author’s intentions based on what had happened earlier in the play. Whatever you made up for the final act, if would have to have continuity with what came before, but it would be de facto partly your own creation. The church possesses the inspired word of God and two thousand years of spirit-led tradition, but we are the only ones who live and work and pray in the 21^st century. The terrifying and elating challenge of improvising our fifth act is to live in continuity with our scriptures and our traditions and to speak a relevant witness to our own living world. We may just write a masterpiece, and that’s worth getting out of bed for.

A Day in the Life of a Fool

6:00 AM
My alarm goes off, the "marimba" ringtone on my phone. I roll out of bed, find my slippers in the dark, and make my way downstairs

6:03 AM
Put on water for coffee, grind beans, wash out french press

6:07 AM
Bowl of frosted shredded wheat

6:10 AM
I sit on the couch with my cereal and the french press on the end table and the Iliad in my lap, translating Book 13

6:16 AM
Coffee is ready. I plunge it, pour a cup, and get out my Vulgate Bible to read the last part of Jeremiah chapter 5

6:28 AM
Metamorphoses Book 2

6:41 AM
The gospel of John, chapter 19

6:51 AM
I do a quick scan through the BBC news on my phone

6:52 AM
James starts to cry upstairs. I go up and turn on his light. He's sitting in his crib rubbing his eyes and looking grumpy. I pick him up (with Steven and binky) and we pick out a button-up shirt for me to wear from my closet in his room. He attempts to tip over the humidifier when I set him down. We go into the bathroom and he watches me brush my teeth, apply deodorant, and put in my contacts, all with great interest. I change his diaper, then bring him into our bedroom. He sits on J, who is a sleep, then immediately rolls of the bed and wants to be held again.

7:13 AM
I go out the front door to vehement protestations by James, scrape off the windshield of the Neon, and connect my phone to the tape adapter. I listen to my practice sessions from the day before on the drive to LCS

7:51 AM
I chat briefly with the vice principal in the parking lot, who was sick the week before.

7:57 AM
I sift through my desk for a piece of blank paper, make a handwritten copy of the week's lesson schedule, xerox it in the copy room, and leave copies in the relevant mailboxes.

8:03 AM
Homeroom for the senior class.

8:26 AM
Back at my desk, I turn on my laptop so that it can start it's glacial powering-on routine. I "straighten" my desk and begin to read Dickens' Pickwick Papers

8:45 AM
19 minutes later, my school laptop has finished logging in. I check my school email and respond to a few messages that came in overnight

9:00 AM
Time to practice. I carry my horns down to the chapel, warm up, pull out two etude books, and record miniature performances of four different endurance-intensive etudes

9:45 AM
I pack up my instruments and walk back to my room

9:47 AM
I put on a cup of Keurig coffee and do a google search for "Briticisms." (More on that later)

9:57 AM
Three high school flute players and an oboist come to my room for a lesson. We work on some of the technical passages from Barber of Seville

10:45 AM
The school bells are going off at odd times. My band eventually trickles in, and I rehearse them on the 20 bars of Barber of Seville they were supposed to have practiced at home. They do surprisingly well. They read Stars and Stripes Forever for the second time, and it goes very badly. With dismissal bells still sounding at the wrong times, I send them out for lunch my keeping track of the time with my phone

11:36 AM
Lunch. I have two slices of leftover pizza and a raspberry yogurt cup while looking through more Briticisms. The idea is to collect enough to write a letter to J using only British slang as part of an ongoing "12 days of Valentine" project. (Counting only days when we'll actually see each other in the evening. Today, for example, doesn't count.) Earlier days have included a Greek alphabetic acrostic set of adjectival index cards, and a parenting playbook with actual football playcards organized in a three ring binder. At some point the office makes a very flustered announcement apologizing for the confusion about the bell schedule.

12:04 PM
I finish writing the letter. It is not particularly romantic, but it might be a little funny. And it also might vindicate me from the oft-recurring charge of Anglophilia. (Let the record show that I just finished a book of American literary criticism.) I walk down to the staff room to wash out my mug and heat up water for a cup of cocoa.

12:10 PM
One of my two high school clarinets tells me that her stand partner is going home sick and asks if they can come together to the make-up lesson on Wednesday. I give permission and get out my trumpets to practice some more in my room.

12:50 PM
J and I text a little bit, and then FaceTime so that I can say hello to James. He is excited to see me and plays peek-a-boo a couple of times, but then gets down from J's lap and tries to see if he can find me behind her iPad. He doesn't have any luck.

1:01 PM
My music theory student comes down for me to review his homework. (Intervals) We talk about triads of all sorts and I help him through the first couple exercises. Another senior percussion student comes down attempting to drop band in order to get another study hall. He is profoundly unsuccessful in this endeavor.

1:38 PM
My theory student leaves and I answer several new emails that have come in

1:45 PM
More Pickwick Papers.

2:11 PM
I write a letter of recommendation for a student and take care of several emails for my church account.

2:19 PM
I find a cleaner copy of Mendelssohn's Lord Hear My Prayer than the scrawled version I originally handed out to them and print it to distribute on Wednesday.

2:23 PM
I go out to the front entrance for bus duty. It is very very cold. The kids are too chilly to even think about throwing snowballs. They go straight to their buses.

2:40 PM
An emergency faculty meeting is convened about the clock crisis. Despite desperate fears, it appears the school will remain open. If all else fails, the staff may be asked to rely on individual time-keeping devices tomorrow. The mood is tense.

2:52 PM
I check my voicemail, and one of my HSM students has cancelled for the evening.

2:54 PM
I brew another cup of Keurig coffee and translate a few verses in Hebrew from Genesis.

3:06 PM
I submit my attendance for the day and begin to pack up my desk and my trumpets

3:18 PM
I leave the school lot, fill up at the gas station down the road, and listen to my practicing from earlier in the day while driving to HSM, where I park on the street

3:55 PM
I see several very stressed looking bassoon players who I've met at various gigs sitting on couches in the library. "RPO auditions?" I ask one of them. He nods. I wish him luck and head upstairs, where I meet a new student. His name is Steven, he is in the fourth grade, and he has a lisp. I do not tell him how I will remember his name, but I am pleased to meet him. His Mom wants him to start trumpet earlier than the rest of his class, because she wants to make sure he gets the trumpet when he picks instruments. (He has wanted to play the trumpet since he was five, and he likes to listen to the Canadian Brass.) I think Steven is a swell fellow.

4:30 PM
My second student comes in. We go searching in the library at the end of his lesson for a new duet book, but we can't find the one I'm looking for.

5:02 PM
A later student calls to confirm we are still on for a lesson. I practice more etudes.

5:35 PM
My little 5th grade Asian student comes in ten minutes early. She tells me that she practiced part A of the duet because A is for Anna. And B is for me. "Anna," I say "do you know what my name actually is?" She is quiet for a second, then says "No. You're in my phone as Mr. Trumpet." I do not tease her about this, because her mother is listed in my phone as "Anna's Mom."

6:05 PM
My last student is also early. He forgot his duet book, so I play (very badly) the accompaniment to "Theme from New World Symphony" and write out several bugle calls for him at the end of his lesson. He is also in 5th grade, and he came tonight with his shirt inside out. It was an Abercrombie shirt, and it had several lovely tags.

6:36 PM
I walk out to my car to drive to North Chili. On Monday evenings James spends a fifteen minute "handoff" period with our friend Joy while J goes to orchestra but before I can pick him up after my last lesson. She is very gracious about watching him, and he loves her pet songbird.

6:56 PM
I arrive at Joy's and as soon as James sees me he grins from ear to ear, yells "Dada!" and barrels into me. I give him a big hug, pick him up, and find out that I only missed J by two minutes or so--James just got his coat off. He is very eager to show me the bird, and we chat for a few minutes.

7:05 PM
James is bundled up and we are ready to drive home for the night. We flip through all three classical stations and nobody is playing anything but harpsichord music. I ask James what he thinks of this, and he laughs.

7:15 PM
We arrive home and James is deeply upset that I don't let him play outside. (It is dark out and he is not wearing anything on his feet except socks.) I suspect that he is overtired. We take his coat off and hang it up, and he wants to be held very badly. We heat up water for his bottle, and he fusses some more when I set him down to wash a bottle out.

7:18 PM
We change his diaper upstairs. He laughs a little bit and plays peek-a-boo, and when we walk out of the room he waves "good-bye" to the humidifier. When we go downstairs the bottle isn't quite ready, and he points and signs "please" repeatedly to play with the blender. Eventually he is mollified by listening to the recording of Grandma and Grandpa Davis reading "All the Ways I Love You."

7:26 PM
I take James, Steven, and the bottle upstairs. We snuggle in his rocking chair, and he covers his eyes with Steven while I give him the bottle. He drinks the whole thing nice and slowly, and then I lay him down in his crib for the night and turn on the humidifier.

7:37 PM
I straighten up stray toys in the living room and put away all of the books that James tore off the shelves over the course of the day. My Liddell and Scott Lexicon no longer has a cover.

7:45 PM
Dinner. I heat up some homemade beef stroganoff from the other night and have half of an orange with it.

7:51 PM
I wash some of the dishes that are left in the sink. There was a mountain when I left this morning. J must have spent at least an hour getting as many done as she apparently did.

8:01 PM
Upstairs for a shower, shave, and clean pajamas.

8:06 PM
I pour a glass of brandy and begin to write a narcissistic blog post...

Chapel at LCS

Given at LCS on 11/30 for 6th-12th grade...

You may put away your Bibles. Please take a hymnal from the pew in front of you and open with me to the following numbers:

533

Sing the wondrous love of Jesus, sing his mercy and his grace, in the mansions bright and blessed He’ll prepare for us a place When we all get to heaven What a day of rejoicing that will be When we all see Jesus we’ll sing and should the victory

311

This world is not my home I’m just a passing through my treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door an I can’t feel at home in this world anymore O Lord you know I have no friend like you if heaven’s not my home then Lord what will I do? The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore v.4 Just up in glory land we’ll live eternally The saints on every hand are shouting victory Their songs of sweetest praise drift back from heaven’s shore and I can’t feel at home in this world anymore

536

Don’t think me poor or deserted or lonely I’m not discouraged I’m heaven bound I’m just a pilgrim in search of a city I want a mansion a robe and a crown I’ve got a mansion just over the hilltop In a bright land where we’ll never grow old And someday yonder we will nevermore wander But walk the streets that are purest gold.

What’s going to happen to you after you die?

Most Christians, including myself for a very long time, have assumed that the great question about death is how to get to heaven when we die—to escape this earth and to go off somewhere else to live eternally. Yet the New Testament says very little to support this idea. Before we get into the New Testament we’re going to get some context from other ancient literature about life after death. The first example is the Iliad, which many of you have been studying recently. If you don’t know about the Iliad, it was one of the most important texts for the ancient Greeks. This is the view of death in the very beginning of Iliad chapter 1.

1) Iliad

 Sing, O goddess, the destroying wrath of Achilleus Peleiades, which brought innumberable woes upon the Achaians, and flung forth to Hades many valiant souls (psuchas) of heroes, and made the men themselves (autous) spoil to all vultures and hounds, and accomplished the will of Zeus.

When we use the word “soul” in English, we use it to refer to the “real” person, to which the body is an outer shell. We call the soul immortal, and the person that is “Mr. Smith” or “Mrs. Wendlant” or “Ethan Paszko” dwells within the flesh and blood that we see. In the ancient world, it was very much the other way around. Homer says that the souls of the heroes went to Hades and when he writes a visit there later in Odyssey book 11 he describes not disembodied “persons,” but merely echoes—they’re often translated as “shades.” They can’t speak in anything but gibberish unless given an offering of human blood—sort of like my percussionists--and their dwelling is in Hades, which is the home of both the righteous and the wicked, not at all like our heaven and hell. It’s a permanent stupor where only the faintest memory of the real person carries on. By contrast, the men themselves (autous) lie on the battlefield being picked apart by vultures and dogs. Do you see what’s happened? The ancient world has it the other way around from us. The physical body is the real person, and the spiritual substance that survives is only a grotesque memory, like bones in a grave. Next is a passage from Plato’s Apologia. The philosopher Socrates has been put on trial before the Athenian senate, and has just received news that his death sentence was confirmed. This is an extraordinarily sad and beautiful passage as he reflects on his own imminent death.

2) Apologia

Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good…as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another…if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good can be greater than this?

Socrates’ description sounds quite a bit like what most Christians believe! Does the soul pass on from this world to a spiritual place the dead live together in peace? We don’t have time to examine the rest of Plato’s writings, but if we did we’d find them to be dualistic. That means this world, the visible, physical world is bad, and the spiritual world is good and desirable. In short, the goal of a dualist/Platonist is to escape this world and to become more and more spiritual until passing off into the spiritual world altogether into death. This is the sort of view you’d expect from the hymns we read, isn’t it? “This world is not my home?”  “I’ll see you across the golden shore?” “We’ll meet when we all get to heaven?” Dualism is the view of life after death we have accepted in place of the New Testament view.  The New Testament view is all about one thing: resurrection. We’ll get to that in a moment, but we’re going to look first at one more ancient text, chapter 7 of II Maccabees, a Jewish book about the defeat of the Syrian megalomaniac Antiochus Epiphanes IV, who was the sort of man you might expect to be the child of Darth Vader and Lord Voldemort. Antiochus defiled the Jewish temple, in this rather grisly story about seven brothers and their mother being tortured to death for their faith you’ll hear what the Jews of the 2^nd century thought about life after death.

3) II Maccabees

The king brought the brothers and their mother before him and tortured them, and their mother encouraged one another to die nobly. The king killed the first brother, and then did the same to the second, who with his dying breath said to Antiochus: ‘You accursed wretch, you dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws.’ When the third brother was brought forward he held forth his hands and said ‘I got these from Heaven, and because of [God’s]  laws I disdain them, and from him I hope to get them back again. Then the dying fourth brother said: ‘One cannot but choose to die at the hands of mortals and to cherish the hope God gives of being raised again by him. But for you there will be no resurrection to life!’ And all the rest died similarly…
To sum up, we read a passage from Homer which expressed a belief that the soul only carried on as an echo. We read a passage from Plato that said the disembodied soul was the real self and the hope for eternity. And last we read of this Jewish hope of a great resurrection of the righteous at the end of history. It’s expressed in the dry bones of Ezekiel 37 and the dead rising to shine like stars in Daniel 12, and it was, until the 1^st century, unique to Judaism. And then, something happened that Death did not expect. A small group of peasants and fishermen, after their leader was executed under Pontius Pilate, came out and declared that one man had already been resurrected from the dead right in the middle of history, and they began to write and talk about their own resurrection as well. Let’s take a look at what St. Paul says about resurrection in I Corinthians 15. (p. 1139 in your pew bibles)
³ For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, ⁴ that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, ⁵ and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. ⁶ Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time,
We don’t have the time to do a full analysis of of Jesus’ resurrection in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—a difficult task anyway—but remember three points about Easter morning. 1) Jesus really was dead on the cross and in the tomb. 2) Jesus was bodily raised. His hands can be touched. He was recognizable to those who know him. He could eat a piece of boiled fish. 3) Even though he returned in his body, it was changed in strange ways—Jesus apparently traveled great distances instantly, passed through a locked door, and could disguise his physical appearance and “reveal” it to the disciples he encountered—but it was a physical body, which was witnessed by well over 500 people. Let’s return to the text in verse 12.

The Resurrection of the Dead

¹² Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? Paul goes on to argue that if there is no resurrection, therefore Christ was not raised, and then in verse 17: ¹⁷ And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. ¹⁸ Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. ¹⁹ If in Christ we have hope^[b] in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.
I don’t doubt that you all believe in the resurrection, but if we buy into what some of those hymns are saying we are passing on the resurrection—we are passing on reclaiming our physical bodies.
²⁰ But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the (first installment) of those who have fallen asleep. ²¹ For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. ²² For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive……²⁶ The last enemy to be destroyed is death
Note that through Adam came the curse of the body dying.  Jesus works out that problem, defeats death, and offers the promise that our bodies will be made alive. Now you and I will all die at some point, because we still must pass through it—but the promise of Jesus is that we’ll come out the other side. That’s what resurrection is.
²⁹ Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf? ³⁰ Why are we in danger every hour? ³¹ I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day! ³² What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” ³³ Do not be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals.”^{[d] 34} Wake up from your drunken stupor, as is right, and do not go on sinning. For some have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame.
Ask me about vv. 29-34 sometime in private for an explanation

The Resurrection Body

³⁵ But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” ³⁶ You foolish person! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. ³⁷ And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. ³⁸ But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. ³⁹ For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. ⁴⁰ There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. ⁴¹ There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.
Paul compares it to a seed that goes into the ground and dies.
⁴² So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. ⁴³ It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. ⁴⁴ It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. ⁴⁵ Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”;^[e] the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. ⁴⁶ But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. ⁴⁷ The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. ⁴⁸ As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. ⁴⁹ Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall^[f] also bear the image of the man of heaven.
So what about natural and spiritual? Is Paul saying that the resurrected body is spiritual only? If you are reading from your own bible and have a pencil with you, you might want to take it out and make some notes about these words. Verse 44 reads that “it is sown a natural body,” and the word that the translator has rendered “natural” is psuchikon. In contrast, it is raised a spiritual body, which is a translation of pneumatikon. If you’re reading the RSV or NRSV, I believe that your translator decided on physical, and then spiritual. No matter what translation you’re holding there’s a twofold problem that’s led to some confusion about what St. Paul is really saying. The first problem is just deciding on how to take the word Paul was using in the 1^st century and then to translate them in a way that conveys the closest possible meaning in 21^st century English. The adjective psuchikon in the first part of the verse comes from the Greek noun psuche, which is translated throughout the rest of the New Testament as “soul” or “life.” (As in, what does it profit a man to gain the whole world yet lose his psuche? Or, you fool this very night your psuche is required of you) Psuche is the same word that we heard in the Iliad passage we read, when we heard that the souls of the warriors—the echoes of them—went down to Hades while the men survived. The second word, pneumatikos, is an adjective from “pneuma,” which is spirit throughout the New Testament, as in the Holy Spirit, the hagia pneuma.  The most literal translation you can get of this verse is “it is sown a soulish body, but raised a spiritual body.” This brings us to our second difficulty in translating this passage—there’s no clear way to render in English that Paul is describing the animation, and not the composition of the bodies. For example, when I offer you a balloon, I can describe the composition of the balloon by calling it a rubber balloon or a leather balloon, but I can describe it’s animation by calling it a helium or a hydrogen balloon. What Paul writes in vv. 44 is that even though our bodies are sown with the soul—our own broken personhood and frailty as its animating principle—the animating principle when it is raised will be the Spirit, with a capital S. Please read it again with me in this light. It is sown a body animated by ourself our own soul, but it is raised a body animated by the spirit. And if there is a body that is animated by the soul, there will be a body which is animated by the spirit. The first man Adam became a living life…a living soul…a living being psuche. And the last Adam became a life giving pneuma. But it isn’t the spirit first and then the soulish, rather the soulish, and then the spiritual can come. The first man was animated from the dust of the earth, but the second man from heaven.

Mystery and Victory

⁵¹ Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, ⁵² in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. ⁵³ For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. ⁵⁴ When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
⁵⁵ “O death, where is your victory?
    O death, where is your sting?”

Death must be swallowed up in victory. It is not a victory to jettison our bodies and exist only as disembodied spiritual vapor. That is the definition of death. Victory over death is to undo what death and corruption tried to do, not only in us but in all of God’s good creation. Victory over death, which we share with the death-conqueror Jesus, is the ultimate undoing of Death and eternal life in the resurrected body and the restored creation.

III.

So what? Here are six thoughts about what this means for you who are sitting here in the pews.

1. First, your ultimate hope is not to escape from this earth when you die and to live in heaven forever. Your ultimate hope is that after you’ve died God will resurrect you from the dead, just as he resurrected Jesus. These hands, these faces, and these fingernails have hope for eternal life. (The idea that you’re the steward of a body with an eternal future ought in itself to convince you to never eat fast-food burgers again)
2. Secondly, we’ve pushed back hard against the idea of heaven as a final destination, but this is not to distress those of you who have lost a loved one or know Christians who have passed away. While the New Testament doesn’t have anything to say about a disembodied heaven as our ultimate home, it does promise very clearly that those who die are “with Christ” in some sense, basking in the comfort of his presence. Life after death for the believer absolutely involves heavenly comfort. What we’re talking about when we discuss the resurrection is life after “life after death.”
3. Thirdly, it is your task going forward from here to think about this stuff again before Easter 2013. You need to be, in a humble and loving way, critical thinkers when you sing worship songs, listen to sermons, and read jokes about three men standing before St. Peter and pearly gates. Study the relevant biblical passages, and—again, in humility and gentleness—examine every lyric you sing and every book you read to see whether it is in harmony with Biblical theology or dualism.
4. Fourthly, if you take seriously the notion that God will resurrect not only your own bodies, but will also fulfill his promise s in Romans 8 and Revelation 20&21 to restore all of creation, the task of caring for God’s good earth is much more important and interesting. I know that many to most of you in this room are Republicans, and American Republicans have not always done a very good job acknowledging the real dangers to God’s creation. Environmental concerns are thought to be the business of the Left. If God wants to redeem and remake and heal his whole creation, we can’t treat it like it’s all going to be chucked into dustbin, as if therefore strip-mining and whaling and polluting don’t matter
5. Fifthly, on a related note, a robust resurrection theology makes some punctures in the Left Behind view of the end times, where we all get raptured away from the Earth, and it doesn’t matter since God blows it up at Armageddon anyway. This is deeply controversial stuff, and I won’t pretend to have all the answers. I will say, however, if staying faithful to I Cor. 15 is damaging to our assumptions about the end times, so much the worse for our assumptions about the end times—let’s begin reworking them in light of the resurrection hope we share in Jesus.
6. Finally and most importantly, it all comes back to Jesus. Read the gospel accounts of his resurrection. That’s the hope we have. That’s what we believe is going to happen to us and to the world. And what happened to Jesus wasn’t just a divine magic trick to pull one over on the Pharisees who thought they’d finally gotten the best of him—the resurrection of the crucified son of God was and is the key to God’s plan to rescue us and creation. If escaping off to heaven isn’t the name of the game, what is it? It’s the stone rolling back and the resurrected Jesus coming out of the tomb.

I’ve covered quite a bit in the last 20 minutes, and I’ve done so with very broad-brush strokes. This is such explosive stuff, and I’ve left out and summarized so much, there must be some questions. We’re going to pray, and then I’d like you to take 30 seconds to buzz with the person on your left and 30 seconds to buzz with the person on your right about one or two things you found interesting, exciting, confusing, or heretical, and then we’ll gather in again and have a few minutes for questions and comments.

Heavenly father, we praise you for the mighty victory you have won over death for us and for all your creation in raising your son Jesus from the dead. We pray that you would give us wisdom and understanding to work this amazing event out in our own lives and in the world around us. Help us to be resurrection people, and sustain us in our hope that you will one day clothe us with immortality and animate us with your holy spirit. We thank you for the incredible hope with which you have blessed us, we thank you in all the joy that comes with that hope, but most of all we acknowledge your great and eternal love made manifest in your Messiah. Bless us and our work this day. We pray these things in the mighty name of Jesus the death-conqueror and our great King, Amen.

LCS Devotions: Kingdom

With credit to Dr. Wright:

A few years ago I noticed how often I came up against the phrase “Kingdom of Heaven” in my reading of the New Testament. It bothered me that I understood the term in only a shadowy sort of way, especially since it seemed always to be connected to Jesus. We don’t sing about it very often in our songs, and I noticed that when Christians talk about the “gospel”—a term which was almost always connected to the “good news of the kingdom” in the New Testament—we have a lot to say about atonement theology and almost nothing to say about this “kingdom of Heaven,” at least not in any way connected to mustard seeds and pearls of great price. In each of the synoptic gospels, Jesus talked about the kingdom almost exclusively. In fact, the first words of his public ministry were “Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is near.” (I take it for granted, by the way, that kingdom of Heaven is an interchangeable term with kingdom of God, but that Matthew, observing Jewish scruples, didn’t write the name of God.)

So what might this kingdom of God be about? I’ve heard several explanations that I find unconvincing. Most commonly, that the phrase “kingdom of Heaven” is a shorthand way of expressing “getting saved and going to heaven when you die.” That’s not a bad guess based on what most of us think Jesus was concerned with, but when you try to plug that meaning into the actual texts it doesn’t fit. In the big mainline churches you’ll hear a lot about the kingdom of God when people talk about soup kitchens and other types of humanitarian work. I think that the kingdom work is certainly no less than that, but I’m also pretty sure that it’s more than kindness to small children, old ladies, and stray dogs. It isn’t inner peace of mind, and even though there’s certainly an eschatological element to Jesus’ kingdom teaching, it doesn’t seem to be about the destruction of the space-time continuum either. So if it isn’t “getting saved and going to heaven,” and it isn’t “doing acts of kindness and making the world a better place,” what might this kingdom project be?

If we only had the New Testament documents to examine, it would be hard to answer that question, because no one at any point in the New Testament stops and writes out an exact definition of what the kingdom would look like and why everyone is so excited about it. We do, however, have plenty of other sources from the time and culture of the New Testament, and they are also filled with writings about the kingdom. After looking at those sorts of sources, starting with the literature of the Maccabees, we can get a much clearer picture of what the Jewish expectations were concerning the kingdom of God, and the ways in which Jesus was in continuity with those hopes and also in subversion of those hopes.

The major problems for the Jewish people in the last few centuries B.C. were their Temple, their Land, and their Torah. If you picture yourself as a citizen in the American colonies in the years before the Revolutionary war, you might be getting close to the Jewish mindset about being ruled by the Romans and by their puppet government, the Hasmonean dynasty. (the Herods of the New Testament) In this political climate the people began to talk of the Kingdom of God over and against the Kingdom of Rome. This wasn’t a spiritual or abstract idea at all—the Jews firmly believed that YHWH was their one true ruler and hoped for his enthronement (and Caesar’s defeat) in real time and in the real world. Furthermore, the temple had to be the place for their god-king. Even though a temple had been built when they returned from the Babylonian exile, the presence of YHWH had never returned to dwell there as it had during the time of Solomon when Israel was a mighty nation and YHWH did rule them through his servant-kings. Last of all, the land and the people had to be cleansed of their pagan impurities, most likely through a return to faithful observance of Torah, against the Roman and Hellenistic encroachments on true Torah-keeping. In short, as long as YHWH had not returned to the temple, the kingdom of God had not yet come. As long as the pagans ruled over Israel, the kingdom of God had not yet come. As long as the whole nation of Israel did not keep Torah together, the kingdom had not yet come. As long as the kingdom was not brought by God’s Messiah, the kingdom had not yet come. The kingdom of God hopes in 1^st century Israel were concrete and specific. To sum up, the Jewish expectation of the kingdom of God was the saving sovereignty of the covenant god exercised in the vindication of Israel and the overthrow of her enemies.

If we fast-forward 60 years or so from this picture to the letters of the early Christians, we see that something curious has happened. The disciples of Jesus and the first wave of Christians are also talking about the kingdom, but in a different sort of way. Imagine a 5-act play. If the Jews were talking about the kingdom as Act 3—awaiting the climax in Act 4 so that they could get onto the business of putting everything right in Act 5—the early Christians had relocated themselves to Act 5. According to them, the kingdom of God had already arrived, and while there was plenty yet to do and certainly some very important eschatological hopes, there was no doubt for them that Jesus had inaugurated God’s reign in a way that fulfilled Israel’s hopes according to the scriptures. Most curiously, the kingdom story was now told with those Jewish hopes reshaped—Israel was no longer the holy land of the covenant god and his people, but now the whole world. The temple in Jerusalem was no longer the dwelling place of the covenant god, but his spirit lived physically in his followers. Torah was no longer the boundary marker of the covenant people and their code for holiness, but grace and forgiveness instead. No one talked of Caesar’s power as something that YHWH would overthrow—in Jesus, it had been overthrown.

What then do we make of Jesus? Was his language about the kingdom a collection of religious teachings about love and grace, preferring inner observance of the heart over outward legal codes? In the context of the writings before and after him, I think we get a more historical and comprehensible alternative. He began his ministry with the announcement of the kingdom arrival. He told short stories and parables about what the kingdom would look like—a mustard seed, yeast, a sower sowing seed, treasure in a field, a merchant looking for pearls. Many of these stories illustrate how the kingdom would grow through a tiny remnant, others how the kingdom-bringer would suffer and be vindicated. He called disciples to himself and acted in highly symbolic ways to evoke Israel’s history. He emphasized that the nearness of the kingdom ought to bring repentance. He told his followers to seek the kingdom first, and to pray that it would come “on earth as it is in heaven.” He said that the kingdom would suffer violence and violent men would try to take it. He said only those born of water and the spirit would enter it. He talked of the new covenant people as critical to the kingdom task. He cleansed the temple of impurities and redefined observance to Torah. Finally, approaching Jerusalem to die, he mourned over the city since it did not know the time of its visitation—it did not know when or how YHWH was returning to the holy city.

How do we make sense of this in any sort of way for our own day? As the people of Jesus, what do we make of a kingdom that Jesus told us to seek first and to pray for on earth as in heaven if that kingdom story was so far removed from us historically and locally? To be frank, I have more questions than answers, and I ask for and invite everyone’s ideas about how this might look. If we begin to engage with Jesus’ kingdom teaching it does enrich our understanding of the cross and resurrection—surely these events were not merely for private salvation and the expiation of personal guilt (although they weren’t anything less than that either) but in some way the cross brings the kingdom. It is the kingdom of God that defeats evil. It is the kingdom of God that brings YHWH into dwelling with his people. It is the kingdom of God that reclaims the whole creation for his dominion. It is the kingdom of God that rewrites the rules on money, sex, and power. It is the kingdom—the reign of God, and of his Messiah, that speaks into any politics we would try to run on our own, Christian or not. And, I believe, it is the kingdom of God that we must make our central task as teachers of young Christians, whether that be through music, math, or Bible. As fellow citizens of that kingdom, I can’t wait to see what that looks like. Let us pray.

Heavenly father, we pray that you would instruct us what is your kingdom and that by your spirit we would have the understanding to seek it first. We pray that your kingdom would come in this world as it is in heaven, and we thank you in all joy and praise that you have made this possible by the victory of your son Jesus. Help us, father, to be imitators of Jesus in all we do, and we pray that we would be worthy dwellings of your spirit. We pray for our students and the work we have before us today. In your great and holy name, Amen.

Ascension at LCS Devotions

I gave this talk this morning at LCS. As I recently told Calvus, "It's much better to be an amateur theologian, because the pay isn't any worse, and you don't have to cite your sources." In the interest of due credit, however, I owe much (most) of this to N.T. Wright and J.I. Packer. Thanks to J, Mom, Calvus, and Dad Davis for contributing edits.

The last time I presented a devotional here I spoke about Paul’s exposition of the Resurrection in I Corinthians 15, and especially about how that text ought to inform the way we think of heaven and the afterlife against the dualistic popular notion that heaven is the place where we go after we die to live in an eternal state of disembodied bliss. Having just completed the Easter season and celebrated the bodily resurrection of our Lord, with all the rich and joyful implications of that event, I thought I might talk a little this morning about the great event that followed shortly thereafter: his Ascension. The Ascension is approached in all four of the gospels, but given its fullest treatment in Acts. From Chapter 1, Verse 1, Luke writes:

In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, ² until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. ³  He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. ⁴ And while staying^[a] with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me; ⁵ for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized in^[b] the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” ⁶ So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time reestablish the kingdom to Israel?” ⁷ He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. ⁸ But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” ⁹ And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. ¹⁰ And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, ¹¹ and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

I have a suspicion that this passage is misunderstood in modern popular theology, not because anyone disbelieves the core points, but because they have slightly forgotten what the core points are and gone on believing other things in their absence—as has happened with the resurrection. We are just now at that time of year when everyone has been reminded of the importance of the bodily resurrection, and it all seems clear again, but after a month or two we might revert back to some muddled compromises. The central truth of the Ascension, as far as I can see, is the entrance of Jesus into heaven as King and Ruler, rather than as a departure away from earth. In short, the Ascension doesn’t mean absence, it means sovereignty. I’ll briefly talk about what this sovereignty means, how this event was anticipated in the Old Testament and by Jesus himself, and what it means for us in the present.

No Christian would dispute the claim (just as no one would dispute the claim that Jesus is raised from the dead) that Jesus is Lord. But what does that really mean? The Evangelical movement in which most of us have served has taken great care to emphasize how Jesus is Lord of our personal and individual lives. We’ve been deeply concerned, and rightly so, with bringing people to confession of personal faith that Jesus is Lord. Thanks be to God, however, that he is not merely the Lord of our private interior lives, but is also the world’s one true Lord in the cosmic and political sense. To put it another way, he is not only a religious Lord, but the Lord of all lords, and all things are subjected to and summed up in him—one need not look further than Ephesians 1 for a great summary of this high Lordship. It is sovereignty in this sense that the New Testament writers meant when they announced the gospel to the 1^st century Mediterranean world. To call someone kurios kai huios theou—the Lord and Son of God—was not to use religious language, but political, and political language that threatened the other man who laid claim to such titles: the Caesar of Rome. When the New Testament writers call Jesus Lord, they do not mean only that we owe him private obedience, but that he is in fact the world’s true king, and Caesar, or whoever else might be claiming power against him, is not. What’s this to do with the ascension? Keep in mind that the ascension was not merely an entrance into heaven, but an entrance into heaven to be seated at the right hand of God the father. If your controlling metaphor for heaven is someplace a long way off where eventually we might go to strum ethereal harps in disembodied bliss, you might mistake the ascension as a departure story—E.T. getting back into his spaceship and returning home, only with the second person of the Trinity. If however, you draw from all the biblical language portraying heaven as the control room of earth—which is as much as to say, God’s domain—then Jesus’ enthronement at the Father’s right hand is about becoming the world’s true sovereign. When he said in Matthew, all authority in heaven and on earth is given to me, he meant it! We are even given a glimpse of Jesus in his glorified state in Revelation 1—where he is described as the ruler of the kings of the earth.

Thus was the language the New Testament writers used to describe the ascension event—an event prophesied in the Old Testament and looked for by expectant 1^st century Israel. The ascension was not an afterthought to Jesus’ Messianic career, nor was it a tidy wrap-up to the gospel accounts. Rather, it was the final task of the Messiah as foretold in Daniel 7: And behold, there came with the clouds of heaven one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. Though there were many varieties of Messianic expectation in second temple Judaism, all camps were roughly agreed that God’s Messiah would be the one to put an end to exile, drive out the pagan oppressors, restore the true temple worship of YHWH in Jerusalem, and lastly to share YHWH’s throne ruling as the king of Israel and the world. Jesus was keenly aware of all of these Messianic vocations, which he fulfilled in unexpected ways. His ascension represented the completion of this final task, having, as was foretold in Daniel, defeated Israel’s monstrous enemies, he went upon the clouds to share God’s throne, with all authority given to him for the everlasting kingdom he proclaimed. This would not only have been looked for by the Jews of his day, but was clearly anticipated by Jesus himself. Being tried by Caiaphas, he was asked directly whether he was the Messiah, the son of God. He answered thus: You have said so, and I tell you from now on you will see the son of man seated at the right hand of power and going on the clouds of heaven. When asked directly whether he was the Messiah, Jesus replied to the Jewish leaders that indeed he was the son of man foretold in Daniel, the one who would defeat Israel’s enemy—by his death on the cross—and would be exalted to share the throne of the Ancient of Days, being given the everlasting power and kingdom, that Kingdom not from this world, but the Kingdom from heaven, which Jesus at the ascension received as coronation.

This brings me to my third and most important point—that Jesus’ omnipotent rule and kingdom are a present as well as a future reality. As I said earlier, the meaning of Jesus’ ascension is not absence, but sovereignty. I believe, and am willing to discuss with any interested party, that the last 150 years of popular eschatology has misunderstood this badly, though it’s not my task to address eschatological questions here. As the people of God on earth we are not called to bemoan the degradation of a world ruled by evil—we are to remind the world that it already has a King. Some here might quickly object that the world does not look as though anyone were in charge, let alone the supposed son of God. But keep in mind, it was no ordinary king who ascended to the right hand of the Father—it was the man whose kingdom looked like peasant fishermen, and whose crown was made from thorns. The Jesus of the gospels rarely ruled as the kings we know, those kings who are but a parody of his power. Rather, his kingship is through service and suffering; ultimately, through sacrifice. It is in this present reality of his Lordship that the church is to act for the world, in religious and public life. We do not fill the vacuum of his absence. Rather, we pray, work, play, and act as the subjects of the already-crowned king. We should be constantly asking ourselves, “What would it look like if God were in charge here?” For in and through Jesus, he is. Ask yourself today, “What would it look like if God ran the show at Lima Christian School? Not, keep in mind, the God of watery Deism who looks down from way up high and pulls the puppet-strings, but the God who in and through Jesus forgives prodigally and feasts and creates. Or what would it look like if our Lord ran the city of Rochester? We remind those in power who is the true Lord of the world. We take care of the poor and widowed, we reflect the creator God, and we tell stories of his exalted Messiah—the Messiah whom God raised to heaven to share his throne. His ascension does not mean absence, but sovereignty.

Let us pray. Almighty God, we thank you this morning that you have raised your son Jesus to the right hand of your throne, and him we do confess to be our Lord, he to whom all authority and power is forever given. We pray that we might be faithful stewards of his kingdom on earth, and that through our efforts and the working of the Holy Spirit that kingdom might be realized on earth as it is in heaven. Give us, O Lord, the courage and wisdom to bring Jesus’ kingdom to the world’s believing and unbelieving, and especially to our students. To you be all glory and praise forever more, our gracious God. All these we ask in the name of your son, our Lord, Jesus Christ.

LCS Devotions

To many or even most of you, what I’ve brought in to speak about may be so rudimentary that it is either boring or laughable. For me, this was a revelation which re-charted my worldview quite dramatically, but for you who discovered it long ago, or perhaps even had the good fortune of never needing to “learn” the lesson at all, having grown up in nutritious soil, what I have to say may be like going back to multiplication tables. Still, if there is any one of you who has not given contemplation to this thought—and it is certainly not a sin if you haven’t—I encourage you to work out the wondrous consequences.

The truth, previously hidden from me, to which I refer, is this—that this body, according to St. Paul, these very hands and this hair and these fingernails, is in some mysterious way, headed towards immortality. Again, this would seem too obvious to merit comment, but it is a resounding note indeed to someone who, all his life, has assumed that only his disembodied consciousness was eternal, to which the body was but a temporary husk.

This all began to boil when I undertook to answer the question “What was it exactly that the first apostles brought to Asia Minor and the Mediterranean when they announced the euangelion for the very first time?” How would any of you choose to summarize the Christian gospel to those who have never even heard of it? Would you start with the Creator God, as Genesis does? Or the Ten Commandments, the natural law imprinted on the heart of humankind? Perhaps Yaweh’s dramatic actions on behalf of Israel? The foretelling and incarnation of Jesus? His moral teachings? It is certainly typical of modern evangelists to start with the actions on the cross, especially as they concern our atonement theology. All of these threads are found in the kerygma of the first apostles, but there is one idea super-eminent, to which these truths are but supporting points; important structural pieces to the central fact which the apostles made their theme to the Gentiles: The Resurrected Christ. When Paul entered the agora, before he discoursed on propitiation or justification, he announced that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead. I Corinthians 15:3-4 says “for I entrusted to you in the foremost, even what I received, that the Messiah died for the sake of our sins according to the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures.”

It is fitting here to open I Corinthians 15, Paul’s defense of and treatise on the Christian resurrection doctrines. It is often quite correctly said that the Jewish hope of the 1^st century, while widely expecting a Messiah, did not expect one that would mildly dismiss their revolutionary hopes by ordering them to “render unto Caesar.” It is similarly true that the Jewish hope of the 1^st century, while expecting, at least among the Pharisees, some sort of universal resurrection of the dead, did not anticipate the Messiah to be slain, and then, before the general resurrection, raised himself. This is why Paul calls him the aparche, the first-portion of the general resurrection. “For since through a man, Death, even through a man, the resurrection of the dead. For just as in Adam all died, thus even in the Messiah all will be made alive.” Jesus is therefore the archetype to which we look for our own hope, and the means by which that hope will be realized.

What can we know about our own hope? The accounts of his early appearances are certainly stranger than fiction. The Lord’s body and countenance were changed, but also recognizable. He passed through doors and over long distances in the manner of a ghost, but it is clearly recorded, in each account, that his body carried on normal functions. It could touch, be touched, and eat a piece of fish. N.T. Wright, the Anglican theologian, has suggested calling this state “transphysical”—the body which is a human body, but no longer subject to death, corruption, or apparently, some of physical laws which otherwise govern us. Our hope is our own body, but changed. Paul says “it is sown in corruption, but raised in incorruption, sown in dishonor, but raised in glory, sown in weakness, raised in might, sown a soulish body, raised a spiritual body. If there is a soulish body, there is even a spiritual, and thus it is written the first man Adam became unto a living soul, the last Adam unto a life-making spirit.”

I have neither the time nor the expertise to give a full analysis of this passage, but I ought to say that there have been some very bad mistranslations of this passage, given precedent by a liberty in the KJV for psuchikon as “natural” instead of “soulish” which has led to some confusion on what sort of hope we have. Neither was the psuche, in Paul’s language, an eternal consciousness which was merely housed in the body before its release at death, but it was rather the animating principle of a man’s “natural” and “supernatural” existence. What Paul says in these few verses is not “through Adam we exist in bodies, through Christ we will exist without bodies in heaven.” If so, he would contradict 41 preceding verses on the importance of the resurrection! Paul says through Adam we are creatures whose existence is “animated” by our own souls now…through Christ, we will be made alive by being “animated” by God’s Spirit.

What then, are we able to take from this? First, we ought to rethink our future hope, especially as it’s expressed in our hymnody. We are neither “going to a golden shore,” “escaping this world of woe” or “going to the blessed land.” A great deal of our talk about “getting to heaven” has to be rethought and reinterpreted through the resurrection of the body. It would be much more to St. Paul’s point to suggest that heaven is coming to this flesh, this hair, these kneecaps.

Secondly, we shouldn’t give any ground to the Platonic dualism in which the body/matter is evil, and the spirit is good. There are some passages in John’s writings that lean towards this, but his indictment of the flesh, or sarx, never goes so far as to say that it is irredeemable. In other words, we mustn’t think that the Messiah came only to save our souls…he came to save our lives, body and soul, and we don’t help ourselves by attempting to scapegoat the one and sever ourselves. This world, this whole cosmos, is promised a redemption/resurrection as well, and there is likewise no place in Christian political theory for writing the whole thing of as a doomed venture headed for destruction. Whatever destruction does come, there is a revivification to be had afterwards.

And lastly, the doctrine of the resurrection gives enormous dignity to what you and I are doing. You see, if the extent of our future hope is to simply exist as disembodied vapors of personality (and I realize I’m considerably underselling the reality that, even in this theory, we would be vapors in the presence of God’s throne) there would be very little point to whatever we do on this physical earth. St. Paul would suggest we ought to be pitied above all men, if there be no resurrection. D.L. Moody, laboring under this mistake, once suggested that he was aboard a sinking vessel and his task was to get as many souls into lifeboats as he could. But what if we were not only to save souls, but to salvage the ship itself? And, to extend the analogy, what if the repaired ship might some day come into harbor? If the dead are raised, let us write symphonies, let us teach children about the Pythagorean Theorem, let us read Herodotus and build universities. “Where then, O Death, is your victory, and where is your sting? But thanks be to God, who gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”