UNEMBARRASSED BY THE MIRACLE
Luke 24:1-12

A sermon given by the Rev. Richard H. Taylor
April 11, 2004 / Easter Sunday

Well there we have it. That old familiar Easter story: a real stone is rolled away. A real body is missing. Luke contends that it is not an "idle tale." He even admits that some disciples at first thought that was just what it was: an idle tale. But Luke wants to tell us that something really happened. And so here I stand today on Easter Sunday to tell you the same thing: something really happened.

This is the thirty-sixth Easter that I have stood in a pulpit to talk about resurrection. This is the most popular day on the Church calendar. The most people come. And yet in our mainline churches there is a certain uneasiness, a certain hesitancy about this Easter tale. Do you really believe it? Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?

There are at least two schools of thought on this that I have encountered in our churches. Maybe three.

Some actually believe that it never happened. They see it as a nice story used to inspire people: "a metaphor, an analogy, a parable." A little bit of inspiration for the uninspired. But in a scientific world: impossible. These church people like to do good: feed the hungry, teach love of neighbor. They do well with the ministry of Jesus. But ultimately there is some great despair. It is all headed nowhere. "We all go into the dark." Resurrection is something left to thoughts, ideas, even books, but not people.

Then there is a second thought spread perhaps by some Gnostic writing, Mary Baker Eddy, or a dear desire to be modern and spiritual at the same time; or perhaps by a mis-reading of Paul which tries too hard to separate the flesh from the spirit. In this way of thinking the body is evil, a veritable veil of tears, a horrid experience we must endure. Contrasted to that is the wondrous ephemeral, gaseous, but not bodily existence with God. Our bodies – and Jesus body – die and rot in the dust, all to be forgotten. While in some disembodied reality, in some vacant way, we go on to eternity. "One prays, not for healing, social change, or the realization of life in its fullest sense, but rather for escape from the cloying garment of flesh and restoration to the spiritual world of the Beyond."1 This kind of "life after death"is "a substitute for genuine life… a rejection of sexuality, pleasure, and the goodness of matter."2

If there is a third way, it is the old traditional view of the resurrection of the body, which still seems so archaic in a modern world. Yet today this is where I stand. I believe in the resurrection of the body. True, scripture says that God shall change our bodies that they may be like Christ’s "glorious body."So it may not be exactly the same kind of embodiment. But that is still embodiment. Isn't the goodness that God saw in creation bodies, things, corpuscles, reality? If God saw that it was so good, why would God turn around and make eternity body-less? Isn't "the hint half guessed, the gift half understood…" of all living "Incarnation?"3 If the miracle of life is that spirit can be in body, why would God design an eternity of spirit without body?

Now I have been helped a lot in this by – of all people – John Updike. Updike is probably not the kind of person that many think would reveal religious truth. His novels, from Rabbit Run to The Witches of Eastwick are probably more middle class, more sexually explicit, more banal that what would seem to be normal sermon fare.

Yet Updike is not only an active member of a United Church of Christ congregation in Massachusetts, he oft seems to call forth a wistful spirituality, a distant religiosity. A person in a supermarket may have thoughts which suddenly turn to God.

Updike writes:

"Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the
molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

"It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

"The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that – pierced – died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose."4

Doesn't the cross say to us that the body has spiritual significance? Are we to honor the body as the Temple of God, if our inner hope is only to throw it away?

If we declare in our mock sophistication that the body is corruptible, and faith can not change it; then we similarly condemn the physical world, this very earth. We create a world where entropy leads to physical doom, and the spirit is – in this reality at least – ineffectual and impotent.

Instead I call forth from you today merely belief. Not explanations. You don’t have to be able to explain in detail how God or creation can or might do something you have not yet seen. You don’t have to explain it to believe it. But I ask: believe it! Imagine it! Picture a new different re-embodied creation. Affirm that we are bound toward miracle.

Listen again to Updike:

"Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

"The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

"And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

"Let us not seek to make it less monstrous
for our own convenience, or own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance."5

The plea is simple: believe the resurrection. The affirmation plain: "Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief."

So let it be. Amen.

1 – Wink, Walter, The Powers That Be, (Galilee Doubleday, New York, 1998), p.183.
2 – Ibid.
3 – Eliot, T. S., Four Quartets, (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1943/1971), p.44.
4 – Updike, John, Seven Stanzas at Easter, (in Bread and Wine, Plough Publishing House, Farmington, PA., 2003, pp.261-262), p.261.
5 – Ibid., pp.261-262.