Sermon: "The Resurrection & Death"

5th in the "The Resurrection" series.
Delivered May 6, 2007 by Rev. John Schmidt.
Other sermons in this series - 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5

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God, we thank you for hymns like this that were just sung in the anthem that remind us of the reality of our future with Jesus Christ, that remind us of the reality of a grace that's incomprehensible, that a future when this mortal flesh and heart fails, that we shall possess joy and peace together with you. We thank you for these promises and we thank you for today's scripture that again affirms to us what you have committed to us in Jesus Christ. So help us here today, help us to believe, help us to respond for we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.

I would like to read to you from the scripture in 1 Corinthians, Chapter 15, Verses 50 to 58. It's on page 815.

"I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed- in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory." "Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain."

This is the word of the Lord, thanks be to God.

Well I want to confess one of my habits to you. One of the things that I do occasionally is I walk through cemeteries, particularly if I go to a small town or a place that has some history to it. I go in to the cemetery and I read some of the tombstones. Sometimes I see something that catches my attention; dates or words that tell a story, sometimes a story of real loss as you see how young children were when they passed away; the declarations of love between people. Some epitaphs have become famous and you will find them in collections on line or in bookstores. As I was preparing for this sermon, I went on line and I took a look at some epitaphs and here are a few that I found. They come in all kind of sizes and different angles. There are the ones that are humorous whether they were intended to be so or not. There is one that says, "I told you I was ill" by Spike Milligan. Then there is the philosophical ones. There is one that is in Latin that says, "I was not, I was, I am not, I do not care." There are bitter ones. This is the one that is on John Keith's grave. "This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet who on his death bed in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies desired these words to be engraved on his tombstones; here lies one whose name was writ in water." There are hopeless ones. "Poor John Gray, here he lies. No one laughs, no one cries, where he's gone and how he fares, no one knows and no one cares." There are one that are descriptive of the life of the person. Here is the one that is on the grave of Billy the Kid. "Truth and history. 21 men. The boy bandit king. He died as he lived. William H. Bonney. Billy the Kid." There are some that are surprising. This is the inscription on Al Capone's grave. "My Jesus. Mercy."

There is an epitaph that caught my attention about 30 years ago when I was a young Christian. It's on the grave of a great English preacher, George Whitfield who was used mightily by God both in England and here in the United States and what's on his grave are these words. "Here lies GW. What kind of man he was the great day will discover." I've thought about that a lot in my life. Here is a person whose whole life was focused on the fact that what he did in this life only has value, only makes sense in light of the great day of the Lord, the day of the resurrection from the dead. On those days our works will be tested and George Whitfield lived and died in light of that. It says something about his whole approach to life. He lived life in light of eternity.

Now, if your tombstone were going to somehow sum up your life, what would it say? I think it's good every once in a while to think about something like that. What would a truthful obituary say about your life? The way you are living your life in what kind of hope; what kind of expectation?

Today we are finishing our series on the resurrection and I was crazy enough to make my final sermon on The Resurrection and Death. It's an uncomfortable thing to bring up. It almost feels rude as an American to talk about death. In general, Americans don't like talking about death. I know I don't. I saw how clearly that was true about myself about 12 years ago. I was in Japan in a room with a lot of Japanese young adults. They were Christians who were gathered together to plan an area wide, a Presbytery-wide conference and I was the one missionary in the room. We look at all kinds of topics that day. Should we talk about dating? Should we talk about urban life pressures? Should we talk about evangelism? Should we talk about discipleship? And finally one person came up with a topic that caught all of their attention. Everybody got excited about it. In Japanese they said: Let's think about death. I thought for a moment "is my internal dictionary wrong, did I get this right? Is everyone getting excited about talking about death?" I felt so strongly about this that I actually spoke up and said, "You know folks, I don't think this is a real great idea. Maybe something else would be more appropriate" and they listened very politely and not only did they do that conference, but they gave me the opening talk. I had to preach on let's think about death and I preached from this passage. That conference was twice as large as their normal conferences and it was very enthusiastically attended and people learned a lot. What did I know?

Death is uncomfortable to think about and generally we try to ignore it. A few years back a friend of mine happened to see on television a soldier leaning on a tank in Iraq and he was being interviewed and he said this, "I have learned one thing from this war. Death is real and I may not know when it's going to happen, but some day I am going to die." Now that is something that he didn't see until he was in the midst of war and yet it is something that is so obvious, something that should be so evident to all of us and yet I have a feeling that he never really believed it before he got on the battlefield. What do we as Christians hold out to people as hope in the face of death? The hope that is set out for us in the gospel is summed up in one word; resurrection. It's not spirits roaming the earth or sky or through buildings. It's not reincarnation. It's not even heaven if what we mean by heaven is eternal life away from earth, away from bodies while things go on here on earth as usual. If that's what we mean even that is not a Biblical hope.

Years ago I was sharing with my friend at LSU and I asked him, "Don't you want to experience eternal life?" And he said, "No way. It's boring. You would just be sitting on clouds with halos on my head playing harps forever. I don't want any part of that." Well, that isn't a Biblical hope. His picture was more from movies and commercials than from the scripture. The promise of the New Testament is the promise of resurrection, a time in the future when the dead will rise to live in a new heaven and a new earth and Paul is talking about that very hope in the passage that I read today. Let's take a look at that passage and just glean a few things from it in our moments here together.

Verse 50 to 58, I just read them. The first thing we see if you have a Bible, the New International and many other Bibles has one set of verses set out as poetry right in the middle of it. It's the easiest thing to observe about those nine verses. Verse 55 says, "Where, O death is your victory? Where, O death is your sting?" Dead center in the Christian understanding of life and death and resurrection is that death is not a natural thing. Death is universal, but it is an enemy that Christ has conquered, because death in the scriptures is tied in with sin and sin is tied in with a penalty and that penalty is eternal separation from God. And so its not just the death of the body that is of concern, but it's the fact that the spirit as well can die and be punished and be banished from God's presence. And so physical death and spiritual death are intertwined and both are conquered by Jesus Christ. And so it says that eternity is inhabited by the imperishable, by the immortal. So death is something that Christ has conquered.

Now Paul says what is soon is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. Since Paul spends so much time on that point let's just think about that for a moment. Our present bodies perish. We get sick. We get old. We wrinkle. Our hair gets gray or maybe it falls out. Our eyesight fails. We get headaches and backaches and we get this incredible desire to share that with people all the time. I am there and then we die. And then it says that what is raised is imperishable. It will not grow old. It will not get sick. It will not, it cannot die. It will not, it cannot die. We can imagine these things as we read what this word imperishable means, as we read other places of scriptures, but we don't know that much about what we will be like. We don't know height or weight or eye color or what capacities this spiritual body will have. But we do know that we shall be like Christ. Not the Christ of weakness and the cross, but like the living, reigning Lord of the church, the Son of David, the Son of God who inherits the kingdoms of this world. The promise of scripture is that we shall be like him.

C.S. Lewis talking about our eternal destiny puts the resurrection this way in the book, "The Weight of Glory." I will paraphrase it. The dullest and most uninteresting person that we talk to in the church may one day be a creature which if we saw it now would be strongly tempted to worship. Glory. Our hope is resurrection. Resurrection of a spiritual body resurrected to be like Christ. That's the basic hope held out in scripture. And so, we as Christians are called now to live in light of that eternity.

Verse 58 sums up Paul's view about this. He says, "Therefore my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourself fully to the work of the Lord because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain." And that brings us back to our tombstones. What should be written there? When it is all over, what should our obituary say about what was really important in our lives? What were our priorities? The way we spent our time, the way we used our money, the way we treated people?

In Paul's final sentence there are some strong things that it says to us. It begins by saying stand firm, let nothing move you. When people look back on our lives, we want them to be able to see that we could face the tough things in life, that we didn't have a fair weather faith, that even when life as we know it now dished out its worse, we held on to God and held on to our faith. We stood firm along with brothers and sisters throughout the history of the church. It says, always give yourself fully to the work of the Lord. I like the way it is said in some other translations; always abounding in the work of the Lord, this sense of just overflowing with an energy and a time and an effort put towards the things of God. People should be able to look at our lives and know that our lives made sense only in view of eternity, that someone could look at our lives and say this person lived as if God was real, that people needed to be loved, that they needed to hear about Jesus Christ, that they needed to be turned from evil, that other things in life were just not as important as that and they needed to worship God.

And then the final phrase there; because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain; that all those times that you forgave people wasn't in vain even when they didn't deserve it. And all of those times that you served and nobody noticed, and my goodness it happens. It wasn't in vain. It wasn't empty. It is remembered. It's kept in heaven for you; that all those times you sacrificed out of love; those times that you gave sacrificially. It's not forgotten. It's not empty. It's not unappreciated. It's appreciated by the one person, the one being that it matters that we have pleased. It's appreciated by God. Nothing we do to serve God is in vain. It will not come back to you empty.

People need to be able to look at our lives and know that we believed enough in the resurrection from the dead that we were willing to live a life that just doesn't make sense unless that is the conclusion, that we have put all of our eggs in one basket; Jesus Christ, not worried that this might be a mistake. People should be able to look at us and say, "There was life lived in light of eternity." Now we all have Christian friends and loved ones who have already died. We have seen their lives and we have seen the investments they have made in eternity and I can't help but think of the person that God used to plant this church on this location Murray Smoot; the investment he made in eternity. Every relationship, every song; sure he wasn't perfect, but what a model, what a mentor.

There are other Christians like that in our lives and what they are like now and what they shall be like at the resurrection we don't clearly know at this moment, but what we do know is that they shall be like Christ. We do know that in Christ they will be raised imperishable and we do know that whatever they are like now, whatever they will be like at the resurrection, that the image of God shines clearly in them without shadow, without blemish, without fault, the work of God is complete. God has done it. And maybe most importantly of all, we know that that glory that they will experience at the resurrection has nothing to do with their righteousness, but entirely to do with the grace of God. They haven't earned something that we can't attain. They have received something from God; forgiveness, eternal life, peace with God, glory and that belongs to all who are in Jesus Christ. It belongs to the faithful of the past, the saints of scriptures; David, Paul, Mary, Isaiah, Rahab, Ruth, and the Apostle John. It belongs to brothers and sisters in the history of the church; St. Francis, Mother Teresa, Jonathan Edwards, John Calvin and Jordan Whitfield. It belongs to like mentors, like Murray and it belongs to countless unknown women and men who have trusted Jesus Christ and have served their Savior. It belongs to everyone who has lived in light of eternity.

So we end our series with this reminder that that future belongs to us. Their future, their glory is ours, because all of it belongs to a resurrected Savior. So I would like to end this by us reading again Paul's words. I would like you to look at the passage as I read Verses 55 to 58 one more time. Once Paul has investigated the issue of the resurrection from the dead and discussed this and taught about it, this is where he ends up and this is where we end up.

"Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain."

Let's pray. Gracious God, we know that you are holy and we know that you are loving and so now we come in faith and thank you for the great gift that you have given us in Jesus Christ and so we give you thanks, we give you glory and we open our hearts to you and we do this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen.

© 2007, Rev. John Schmidt
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org