A Sermon by Pastor Tom Lacey . . .
It’s a ghost!
Luke 24:36-48, Preached at Congregational Church of Boca Raton
While on a road trip, an elderly couple stopped at a roadside restaurant for lunch. After finishing their meal, they left the restaurant, and resumed their trip. When leaving, the elderly woman unknowingly left her glasses on the table, and she didn't miss them until they had been driving about forty minutes. By then, to add to the aggravation, they had to travel quite a distance before they could find a place to turn around, in order to return to the restaurant to retrieve her glasses. All the way back, the elderly husband became the classic grouchy old man. He fussed and complained, and scolded his wife relentlessly during the entire return drive. The more he chided her, the more agitated he became. He just wouldn't let up one minute. To her relief, they finally arrived at the restaurant. As the woman got out of the car, and hurried inside to retrieve her glasses, the old geezer yelled to her, "While you're in there, you might as well get my hat and the credit card."
What happens to our body happens to ourselves. It doesn’t always determine what we do, but it does influence us. We can overcome the bad; and we certainly know how to enjoy the good that occurs to us, to our bodies. We are in this respect our bodies, our corporeality, our physicality. When it feels good, we feel good. When it doesn’t feel good, when it doesn’t work well, we don’t work well. We live to the great extent and we die to a complete extent in response to our bodies, which reminds me of the story about the 83-year-old woman who talked herself out of a speeding ticket by telling the young officer that she had to get there before she forgot where she was going. Or how about the two little kids in a hospital, lying on stretchers next to each other outside the operating room. The first kid leans over and asks, 'What are you in here for?' The second kid says, 'I'm in here to get my tonsils out and I'm a little nervous.' The first kid says, 'You've got nothing to worry about. I had that done when I was four. They put you to sleep, and when you wake up they give you lots of Jello and ice cream. It's a breeze. 'The second kid then asks, 'What are you here for?' The first kid says, 'A circumcision.' 'Whoa!' the second kid replies. 'Good luck with that. I had that done when I was born. Couldn't walk for a year.'
This morning's gospel lesson perhaps shows us with some clues concerning what our resurrected bodies will be like. When we look at Jesus after his resurrection he has his first body still with him, to a certain extent. He doesn’t seem to have the same limitations that we might have, but he still has a body. He’s not locked in by anything but he still eats fish. The Early Church wanted to make sure everyone understood that Jesus was not only spirit before or after the resurrection. He was really human when he was alive and he was really resurrected after his death. Back in the beginning the great Christian thinker Ignatius, a second-century bishop of Antioch, paraphrased the expression, “See that I am not a bodiless ghost.” In our language, we might say that the disciples thought they were encountering the dead, not the living. But it’s not a ghost; it’s the gospel. It’s Jesus resurrected. Jesus died, and God raised him from the dead, and our hope takes its shape from that central affirmation.
After his crucifixion, Jesus’ disciples were trying to sort out the meaning of the reports they had been receiving about appearances of the risen Christ. It was most confusing to them. Was it a hoax? They were not completely immune to superstition. Perhaps it was some kind of ghost. Suddenly it happened. Jesus himself stood among them. The disciples were startled and frightened. Then Jesus said to them, "Why are you troubled and why do questionings rise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself..." Funny, though, Jesus doesn't say: "Look at my face. Listen to my voice. Give me a little quiz, the better to check out my memory. Ask me to preach a sermon, the better to check out my theology." Jesus doesn't say any of those things. Just "Look at my hands and feet."
The same Jesus who lived among them was the same Jesus who died before them and is the same Jesus who now stands in front of them. This Jesus is the Jesus who ministered, who healed, who taught, who wept for his friend Lazarus, who raised a daughter to life, and exorcised a demon from a beloved son. This Jesus was crucified and this same Jesus was raised. The risen Lord of the church had nail scars in his hands because the Gospel never considers a historical Jesus and then an eternal Christ having nothing to do with that man who lived once upon a time in that strange land and did unusual things. They are one and the same, Christ Jesus of Nazareth, risen Savior, resurrected Lord of life.
Christians do not just confess our faith in a heaven for souls, but in a resurrection of the body, of our bodies. The truth is that physical resurrection flies in the face of today’s spirituality emphasis. Heck, everyone has a spirituality. In today’s world probably even atheists claim to have a spirituality. It’s time for the church to reclaim “physicality.” That’s what this scripture should be about for us. The body matters. The body, this earth, creation certainly matters to God. The Lord called it good. That’s what the Early Church was affirming against whole cultures, societies and religions that denied this. When it comes down to it, what we do with our bodies, and how we treat the bodies, the persons of others, matters. We are to care for babies and children, because their bodies are vulnerable and still growing. We are to care for the elderly, our own loved ones and the aged among us, because their bodies, which are now weak but were once the bodies, the people who cared for us. To separate the person from the body is not Christian. God called them together, and called them good.
Perhaps the most important yet most underutilized passage in all of Scripture is in 1Corinthians 15:35 and onward, where Paul explains just how it is possible for us to have this body in this life and then that body in that life. “But someone may ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?’ How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. 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.”
Paul is saying that at the final resurrection, our bodies will be like beautiful plants that spring from grungy seeds. Once the plant grows, where is the seed? The seed is no longer there. To be sure, the plant came from a seed. The bodies that you and I have are like seeds and someday a beautiful plant will grow from that seed. That beautiful plant is your resurrection body. Of course, for all that to happen, in order for your resurrection body to grow, the seed has to disappear. It has to die. We die, and those beautiful plants grow to life. This is like the resurrection, the resurrection of the body.
In his book, The Case for Christ, Lee Strobel tells of his conversation with Dr. Gary Habermas, professor of theology and philosophy. The question Strobel posed concerned the importance of the Resurrection for Christians. He assumed he would get a stock answer about its centrality to the faith. And he did. But he got something more. Habermas went into a reflective mood in which he referred to the death of his wife Debbie in 1995 of stomach cancer. This is how Strobel describes it: I sat on our porch, [Habermas] began, looking off to the side at nothing in particular .... My wife was upstairs dying. Except for a few weeks, she was home through it all. It was an awful time. This was the worst thing that could possibly happen. He turned and looked straight at me. But do you know what was amazing? My students would call me ... and say, 'At a time like this, aren't you glad about the Resurrection?' As sober as those circumstances were, I had to smile for two reasons. First, my students were trying to cheer me up with my own teaching. And second, it worked. As I would sit there, I'd picture Job, who went through all that terrible stuff and asked questions of God, but then God turned the tables and asked him a few questions. I knew if God were to come to me, I'd ask only one question: 'Lord, why is Debbie up there in bed?' And I think God would respond by asking gently, 'Gary, did I raise my Son from the dead?' I'd say, 'Come on, Lord, I've written seven books on that topic! Of course he was raised from the dead. But I want to know about Debbie!'
I think he'd keep coming back to the same question--'Did I raise my Son from the dead?'--until I got his point: The Resurrection says that if Jesus was raised 2,000 years ago, there's an answer to Debbie's death in 1995. And do you know what? ... If the Resurrection would get me through that, it can get me through anything. It was good for A.D. 30, and it's good for 1995; it's good for 1998, and it's good beyond that .... I believe that with all my heart. If there's a resurrection, there's a heaven. If Jesus was raised, Debbie was raised. And I will be someday, too. Then I'll see them both.”
Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live.” Live, live again, live for real, live forever.
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