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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Today, we wrap up the beautiful body series, which has been all about our life together, inspired by the life Paul encouraged the Corinthians to get after in the first century. Granted, the Corinthians were a hot mess, and still Paul's letter shows us what it's like to course correct for the sake of relationships. So in this series, we've talked about our different gifts knit together to make us come alive and to actually heal each other. And we've talked about how love protects the ways that we care for each other, and without love, we are just clanging symbols. And last week, we talked about prophecy and ecstatic spiritual experiences.
Speaker 2:And surprise, surprise, all of that goes back to love. How we speak to each other is what makes us spiritual. So today, we bring this beautiful body series in for a landing with first Corinthians 15. But before we get there, let's take a moment to pray. Loving God, we take a moment to settle into the place where we are.
Speaker 2:A place of openness, a place of care, a place of curiosity. And as we look back on the journey we've taken through this beautiful body series, we are mindful of the ways church has been both beautiful and harmful in our lives and all over the world. And still, we've walked paths of determination, reconciliation, distance, healing, and peace. I'm so grateful for all of the ways we get to give community another chance. And so we just take a moment to catch our breath here at church.
Speaker 2:We notice our feet, our legs, our back connected to this place. And as we breathe in and out together, we sense a little more calm settle in, and we extend that peace to the bodies around us, and we extend that peace to the places of need in the world. May the beauty of the Lord rest upon us establishing the work of our hands. Amen. So we are in first Corinthians 15 and it is a thick chapter about the body and resurrection.
Speaker 2:Thematically, we are getting a bit of a jump on Easter. Your sermon outline, if you follow the flow, is creeds, futility, and first fruits, being bodies, and we will be changed. We'll talk about living and dying, so take care of yourself as you listen, but I think you'll be alright. To begin, a question. Do you ever have trouble telling people what you believe?
Speaker 2:Do you ever have trouble with that? Just telling people what you believe. I literally do this for a living, but in conversations or on the spot, it's not easy for me. Before Christmas, my brother told me that my six year old nephew, Layton, had been asking a lot of questions about God, and my brother and his wife just kept saying to him, you can ask your auntie Bobby when she comes to visit on boxing day. Here we are.
Speaker 2:I mean, just look at the kid in his Oilers jersey and Santa hat, that look. Like, you better believe he'd intimidate me with his questions. Thankfully, I got a pass this year as Layton was way more interested in playing with his cousins, but my brother assures me the questions, they are coming. Anyone who teaches kids and shapes the spiritual imagination of children, Like all of you parents here, like the volunteers in Commons kids, you have my respect because it's hard to get clear about what we believe. So as Paul brings this letter to a close, he practices a form of Roman rhetoric known as elaboration, and he roots the presentation of his theory of the resurrection in Jewish apocalyptic thought.
Speaker 2:And that just means there's a lot going on here. And Paul held a worldview that the end of all things was imminent, and that fundamentally changes how we interpret Paul because the end did not happen like he thought it would. But what Paul does at the beginning of chapter 15 is one of my favorite things we'll talk about today. He starts the argument with common ground. What you're about to hear is an early Christian creed.
Speaker 2:It preexisted Paul's place in the pantheon of apostles. This is it. For what I received, I passed on to you as of first importance that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas and then to the 12. After that, he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all, he appeared to me also as to one abnormally born.
Speaker 2:The whole reason for the creed is to give Paul's coming argument authority. So how does the creed do that? The creed repeats the phrase according to the scriptures. Now we have, more or less, welcomed the ways our relationship status with the Bible is complicated, And I'm all for that. But here, the story of Jesus' resurrection is meant to be the fulfillment of all the Hebrew scriptures.
Speaker 2:Like, finally, Paul says, we see how it all fits together in Christ. God has given creation, and now through the resurrection, God has given new creation. And the creed also expresses authority through the memory of Christ's appearances, first to Peter, then the 12, then 500 brothers, then a smattering of apostles, many of whom are still alive. This is Paul claiming credibility like, look, there are plenty of witnesses and they're still breathing. Go ahead.
Speaker 2:Ask around. See if what I'm saying is true. And finally, Paul gets out in front of his critics. He says, look, I'm a bit of a weirdo in this story. The timing of my birth is all wrong.
Speaker 2:I was spiritually dead, persecuting Jesus' followers before the resurrected Christ made me an apostle too. Everything Paul does with this creed is meant to say to the Corinthians, let's start with what we know. Let's claim this early creed. Let's let the commonalities hold us together. Paul's not making the content of the creed up, but is he leaving anything out?
Speaker 2:The answer here is, yeah. He totally is. Of course, is. That's the nature of a creed. Paul starts with the creed to oppose false beliefs the Corinthians had about the resurrection.
Speaker 2:He's on a mission. And as creeds oppose heresy, they keep things lean and stuff gets left out. Let's take one example. Nowhere in these verses is it mentioned that the first witnesses to the resurrection according to all four gospels were women. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary in Matthew, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James in Salome and Mark, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and other women in Luke and the singular Mary Magdalene in John.
Speaker 2:And sure, the NIV offers a translation that says brothers and sisters, but the truth is that women are entirely left out of Paul's creed. Christ appeared to a brother, then more brothers, and then finally to him, now a brother. What are we supposed to do with that? What are we supposed to do with that? Do we call it sexist?
Speaker 2:Do we trace the trajectory of patriarchy in the history of the church? Maybe. But for what it's worth, I would argue, me of all people, I would argue, we actually don't need to do much with it here. I would argue, we just let the creed be. We just let it be.
Speaker 2:Because even sacred text and collaborative creeds, they leave things out. And it's not our job to always police them. They exist in their time and place, and reading them is a work of narrative literacy. And the fun, and it is fun, is to just notice and to name what gets included and what gets left out. We build from there.
Speaker 2:And build on Paul does. The creed is just Paul's prelude. Paul has bigger fish to fry or, for the sake of the relevant metaphor in the text, he has riper fruit to pick. He says, look, I am who I am, and God's grace is all over my life. I work hard.
Speaker 2:God's grace works harder. And then Paul gets to the topic at hand, the resurrection of the dead. And some people in the Corinthian church say, look, the resurrection really doesn't matter. We already, we're living our best lives. And Paul says, no.
Speaker 2:It actually really does matter. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile. It's empty and worse, deceptive. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead also through a man.
Speaker 2:For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in turn, Christ the first fruits, then when he comes, those who belong to him. Okay. Let's take a step back. The Corinthians are not denying Christ's resurrection.
Speaker 2:They are actually denying their own. In their world, heroes come back to life all the time. Hercules did. Achilles did. Asclepius did.
Speaker 2:So why not Jesus? No. What they are denying is their own resurrection. It's what is meant by this phrase resurrection of the dead repeated 13 times in the text. Basically, the Corinthians have it in their minds that they just don't need resurrection.
Speaker 2:They are already enlightened, super knowledgeable about God. They've got it. The best spiritual gifts, they've got them. Ecstatic experiences that transcend the body, yeah, they've got those too. And in their confidence, they have neglected to see the effect their beliefs have on others.
Speaker 2:And Paul has sniffed out a problem that their culture has planted deep in their bones. A low, rumbling, disdain of the body. What Paul believes is that the death and resurrection of Christ is an affirmation of the body, not just the singular body or the confident body or the privileged body, but the collective body, the wounded body, the picked up, dusted off, and carried by grace body. How do I know this? It's in the metaphor.
Speaker 2:In Paul's Jewish apocalyptic imagination, the idea of first fruits means that once the fruit is ripe, the whole harvest is sure to follow. So for Paul, Christ is the first fruit because he was raised the whole harvest of resurrection is sure to follow. Resurrection happens to bodies. Even your death won't separate you from God. And maybe Paul, maybe he was super clear about what resurrection looked like.
Speaker 2:But maybe, like the scholar Sarah Rudin says, and I love this, Paul urged his followers not to worry too much about metaphysics. God would simply meet them in their prayers, not halfway, but all the way. What if belief in the resurrection doesn't pull you out of your body but gives you a sacred path back to your body? What if resurrection is this loud affirmation that who you are and who you will always be is wrapped up in your form? We don't just drag these bodies around.
Speaker 2:We are bodies. I've been thinking a lot about my relationship with my body during this series, Beautiful Body, and maybe you have too. I remember the body of being little girl Bobby, feeling vulnerable and different. I remember the body of my teenage self feeling so much emotion and never knowing how to express it, mostly just anger. I remember the body of my young adult self.
Speaker 2:That's when I started to feel my own strength and confidence. There's my body in my late twenties setting out in the world and getting after new things. My body in my thirties was heroic. I was so determined, and I learned to trust myself. Now my body in my forties is both hurrying up and slowing down.
Speaker 2:She is loved really well. And I finally see there is no me without her. This is how Paul sees the church. It's shaky at first. It's full of emotion in growth spurts, but eventually able to set out for a life of its own.
Speaker 2:Like any good parent or apostle, Paul wants the Corinthians to have what they need to grow and get after the fullness of life in Christ. So strap on your seat belts because this next part of Paul's argument is kind of intense. But someone will ask, how are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come? And Paul answers by using two Greek words.
Speaker 2:On the one hand, bodies are flesh, and the Greek word is sarx, and that word implies that the natures could be pulled apart. But on the other hand, bodies are the person, soma. And for Paul, that word implies the Hebrew idea of wholeness. So he says, how foolish. What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.
Speaker 2:When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps a wheat or something else. Not all flesh is the same. People have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another, and fish another. And just as we have been born the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man. Now to our ears, the argument is hard to follow.
Speaker 2:But what Paul says to his friends is this, you can't think about life in segments. The beginning or the end, flesh or the spirit, the individual or the community. Life is modeled after Christ and in Christ we see the whole. Christ is the pattern for life and Christ is the pattern for death. To restate verse 49, we are dust and we are divine.
Speaker 2:Now there's one more thing I wanna make clear about what Paul says about beautiful bodies aka the church. For Paul, soma, the body, doesn't stop at the singular person. For Paul, soma, the body exists for the sake of relationships. You are a body, so you can be in constant communication with the cosmos, with the plants and the animals Paul names as metaphors and of course with each other. This relational body is the mysterious extension of the body of Christ connected through relationships, moving toward some kind of revelatory future, and dancing on the edge of what could come next.
Speaker 2:And still we wonder, don't we? What form will it take? Will my body matter after I die? How literal is resurrection? You and me, we have knowledge that the apostle Paul couldn't have dreamt of.
Speaker 2:We know that the universe is almost 14,000,000,000 years old, that evolution is how we got here, and that all reality is head spinning interdependence. Animals, trees, bodies are made of the same elements that flung into existence in the Big Bang. All of the Earth's 92 elements, save the primordial hydrogen and helium, were made in stars. Could resurrection, elements turned into life, be the most natural thing? It's the challenge of a lifetime to take the bible's ideas about transformation and forgiveness and resurrection and actually live them with all that we know about the cosmos and our intricate, mysterious bodies.
Speaker 2:It's hard though. It is hard getting clear about what we believe. But we are not done with Paul. He shows us how to find what we need for belief. Paul starts with an old creed, a community's common ground.
Speaker 2:He names what has changed since the resurrected Christ appeared to him, and then he boldly wraps up the letter with new ideas about resurrection. And some scholars agree that all of Paul's ideas, they don't totally make sense, but you gotta love him for trying. Paul is working out something of a brand new creed. So ending the chapter the way it started, Paul says, here's what I'm saying to you. Your bodies are flesh and blood, but there's so much more.
Speaker 2:There's respect and great love and the way your choices matter to the people around you. You're not separate, you work together as a whole. It's a mystery, Paul declares, How life is constant change. You are physical and you are spiritual. You are life and you are death.
Speaker 2:You are mortal and you are immortal. Where, o death, is your victory? Where, o death, is your sting? Now, I think Hillary McBride knew what Paul was on about when she wrote, being fully connected to our body is about being fully alive. What is resurrection if not a total commitment to the fullness of life?
Speaker 2:To see through to the other side of our heartbreak, of disappointment, of things not working out the way we thought they were. Following the pattern of Jesus is just that. Seeing through all of life to the other side. And the words the words for your changing belief, they will come. They will come when you need them.
Speaker 2:Now here's a story about that. Back in 2020, when we were acutely aware of our bodies as we learned about COVID nineteen, here at Commons, we evolved a little experiment into something pretty new and cool. Many of you know the prayer book we made. It's called Through a Season Like No Other. Well, how it started was just me bossing around the staff team, telling them to write prayers with new themes every single week for a year for you.
Speaker 2:And God bless the team here. They wrote new prayers. They did it for three hundred and sixty five days. They did that. And then I took those prayers, and I put them in a book.
Speaker 2:And one of the chapters is called affirmations. And what we did with affirmations was we wrote new creeds. Remember, we were going through a hard time, and that hard time changed us, but it also focused us on what we believe. We got through, and we found words for our belief. To hold on to what is ancient and to express something new after you've changed, that's the sacred cycle.
Speaker 2:Death to life to death to life forever or at least for billions and billions of years. We'll end with a prayer from the prayer book. It's an affirmation. It's a bit of a new creed. Let us pray.
Speaker 2:Even when even when I am lonely, I affirm that God is all relationship, and I offer myself in love to others. Even when I am tired, I affirm that God is my rest. My prayer can be a Sunday afternoon nap. Even when I'm impatient, I affirm God's offer of much needed grace, and I respond with kindness toward myself. Even when I do not at all understand, I affirm God's tender way of making all things new.
Speaker 2:Listening to the world is my wisdom today. Amen.
Speaker 3:Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community. You can also join our Discord server.
Speaker 3:Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon.