Epiphany 7 - Grace Changes Us - Your Inheritance

35 But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” 36 Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37 And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, 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 Not all flesh is alike, but there is one flesh for human beings, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. 40 There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another. 41 There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; indeed, star differs from star in glory.

42 So it is 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 physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. 45 Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, 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 are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven.

49 Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven. 50 What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

- 1 Corinthians 15:35–50 (NRSV

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Dead Raised and Born Again

We start confirmation classes today, which, for those of you who don't know, is usually a short-term class that helps our youth learn about and make some intentional decisions about their faith life. They get to dig into what it means to be in a relationship with God and their church family together. Confirmation culminates in a ceremony where they join the church as full members if they decide to do so. We invite you to pray with and for our youth as they journey through this together.

My confirmation experience did not have an immediate effect, but it did have a lasting one. If my memory is correct, we took 2 years, with the summers off, going through an extensive curriculum, covering half of what I would re-learn in seminary much later in my life. It was a lot to take in as a young teenager, and I chose, rather than learning about the faith, to find ways to misbehave and get held after nearly every week. Nowadays, when I see youth or kids that are having trouble sitting still or don't seem like they are paying attention to what we are teaching in the church, I see myself in them and usually recognize that they are not as bad as I was when I was their age.

I remember working with Bekah in children's church one day and listening to her talk about the resurrection of Jesus and the raising of the dead. I looked over at a young man in the chapel with us and counted to five in my head. It only took him five seconds to go from raising the dead to walking around pretending to be a zombie, which was not what we were talking about. That was his point of understanding, though.

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The same can be said about being born again. How often have you ever been told that we have to be born again to go to heaven? We watched a comedy skit the other night where a comedian pretended he was an older man aging backwards. He acted out becoming a baby again and going back into the womb. It was a little gross. That was the same response that Nicodemus had in John 3 when Jesus mentioned being born again. It doesn't make sense, no matter how many times we say it, preach it, and sing about it. Too often, we say be “born again” when what we mean is we want people to show up, sit down, be quiet when others are speaking, sing the congregational songs loudly, and remember to pay their dues before they leave.

We don't think that we might be sitting beside the next Billy Graham. We've done a lot of borrowing ministers from other places through the local university and seminary. Still, you all have a preacher you raised from this community that used to preach to the Cincinnati Bengals in one of the churches he served. It's not just preachers either. I've heard your stories about dozens of folks from years gone by who were planted here like seeds, put their selfish ways to death, and were reborn as people who loved God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loved others the way Jesus loved them. They had this church working like a well-oiled machine and led folks to love and serve together in a way that made the entire community step back and take notice.

We can't go back to that, no matter how hard we try or how much we want to. We can only move forward together following Jesus into a new life, and that New Life requires total surrender and willingness to be changed.

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Different Vessels

Paul had a way of writing to both the philosophers and the grade school children at the same time. The Greek scholars were in love with this idea of form and substance in some of the most abstract ways. He pointed out how many different kinds of life there were in creation. All living things have some sort of flesh or covering, but every species is unique. God gives us the right kind of bodies for the work that He created us to do.

Birds fly, fish swim, cows graze, pigs roll in the mud, Old McDonald tends his farm, and the musicians make songs about it all. Paul even includes the sun, moon, and stars - each different from one another, yet all shining light to us in their own ways. Indeed, they not only fulfill their own purpose with their shape and substance, but they also work together with the rest of creation, giving life to plants, who give life to animals, creating vast ecosystems that reshape the world around us. God put us here to fulfill our role as managers of it all.

Paul points out that if God is good enough to make everything work together, so much so that those who deny the existence of God still see patterns and purpose in creation, why would we expect anything less of God for spiritual bodies that we have for eternity? We don't know what heaven will be like, what our bodies will be like, but we know God is good, and He will provide for us.

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Perishable and Imperishable

Can you tell if this flower is real or fake? Perhaps we could smell it. Sometimes we look for the difference between real and fake by spotting the imperfections. We all have flaws that prove how real we are.

Sometimes it makes us wonder why God bothered with creating us as weak, physical, mortal beings in the first place. Why didn't He just create us as perfect, heavenly spiritual beings in the first place? Why does He make both the perishable and the imperishable? We don't know.

What we do know is that God Almighty found the perishable things lovely enough, important enough, to die for. So our Eternal Creator became a flawed human being, weak enough to hurt and fragile enough to die. God shows us that a heart made of stone is not stronger than a heart that can break - when God's power overcomes death. In the power of the resurrection, meekness becomes braver than ferocity.

At least it does when you are wearing the imperishable inheritance that Jesus left you.

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Wearing our Inheritance

Scouts stand in a long line of inheritors of grace. They join, parents and guardians drive them to meetings and events. They help them raise funds that provide uniforms, badges, and other equipment. When they put those on, they become not just recipients of that grace but those that share it with others. They raise in rank by learning to give of themselves for others. The scout uniform changes you.

Yet Christ has set aside another uniform made for you, left as your inheritance from his death. Some people only take it out a couple of times a year and look at it. Maybe they wear it for their wedding and a few funerals. Others look at that inheritance every day, try it on, but just don't feel right about wearing it around others.

The truth is, the gifts that Jesus leaves to us never quite fit us at first. It is a uniform that you are meant to grow into as you wear it. That is how God's grace works with us. God sees more in us than we see in ourselves, which means God hopes for and expects more from us than we hope for and expect from ourselves.

What kind of grace did Jesus leave for you, and how are you wearing it and growing into it?

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