Ephesians 1:15-23
Luke 24:44-53
When Jesus was asked who a re-married widow would be married to in the afterlife, he said she wouldn’t, that heaven doesn’t work that way. This is a passage that is mostly ignored, even by the selective literalists of fundamentalism, as we imagine reunions at the Pearly Gates with loved ones and pets of the past. I am agnostic on the matter, my faith being more about living than dying. Dying seems to take care of itself, while living takes considerable effort, at least done well.
Post-mortem marriage is the sort of very practical question that comes up when we try to map our certain existence in this life onto our unknowable existence in the next. It is not unlike the body problem, which comes in two parts.
The first is the problem of our particular bodies. The theology that developed in certain strands of pre-Rabbinic Judaism and carried over into Christianity was one of bodily resurrection. This is why, for example, certain traditions were resistant to cremation. No body, nor resurrection. There might have been a case for embodied resurrection in the first generation after Jesus, but two thousand years later, countless bodies are simply gone, and if I were to die tomorrow, or even more dramatically if the rapture were to occur and I made the short-list, who would get this particular set of atoms that comprise my body? For surely everything that is in me today has been part of something or someone else, even the microplastics.
The same sort of sticky questions arose right out of the gate for Christianity, the second form of body problem, when the followers of Jesus claimed he had been bodily resurrected. They claimed guards at the tomb so no one could accuse them of stealing the body. The authors of John have Thomas touch the wound where the spear entered the side of Jesus, hastening his death due to the Passover. Jesus eats post-resurrection, and presumably does the things that result from eating. Yet he passes through locked doors, so maybe they weren’t really clear about the story they meant to tell. In fact, Christians fought over the body of Jesus, pre and post resurrection, for centuries after his execution.
If you’ve got a resurrected body, then you have to account for that body, and they couldn’t exactly kill him again. Fortunately, there was precedents of sorts, two prior individuals who did not die. The first is less familiar, a patriarch in the Book of Genesis before the Great Flood named Enoch. Ancient languages are always a little uncertain in translation, but scholars mostly believe the text describes Enoch being taken to heaven alive.
The second immortal is better known, a tale we tell often in worship. The prophet of the Northern Kingdom named Elijah is taken up in a flaming chariot, which just goes to show you can get to heaven by being fabulous and flamey.
The early believers and gospel authors deal with the “beam me up” body of Jesus by doing just that, arms up and ascending like “touchdown” Jesus. Heaven is up, as is traditional, though I am not sure if that is a fixed up located over Jerusalem, an up that encircles the globe but is invisible, or maybe just some quantum slip in time and space.
Our Christian story is that Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father, though we progressives are a difficult lot when it comes to gender, so maybe the left hand of the Mother, and besides, Jesus can’t always be up there because he is so often down here leaving footprints in the sand on some beach or another.
Jesus was real, and his life and ministry improbably changed the world. In my personal theology, the one constructed out of the parts of ancient Christianity worth I find saving, Jesus is historical, a man in a particular context, an occupied land filled with corruption, despair, and violence, but Christ is timeless. Christ is a continuation of Emmanuel, God-with-us, in the way that the gospels say Jesus promises to be with us. Those are soft categories, of course, as God seems to hate being put in boxes.
Though you can definitely put this sermon in a box, for as I’ve shared in the past, preachers preach from their core theology, and the search for Jesus and/or Christ today is at the heart of my faith. It is a whole lot easier than a “Where’s Wally?” book, better known in the United States as “Where’s Waldo?”
You know them. Maybe your kids or grandkids had them. The task is to find the titular character in a crowd scene. Wally/Waldo wears a shirt and beanie with red and white horizontal stripes and has glasses. There are other red and white objects in the images to mislead the searcher, and as the reader progresses through the book, Wally gets smaller. There were seven books in the original series, but they were successful enough to become a cultural meme using the pre-cat video definition of that term, something that spreads from person to person in a culture that has or acquires symbolic meaning, so we can say “Where’s Waldo?” and most will know what we mean.
If Wally is identifiable in the books by his shirt, hat, and glasses, what identifies Christ for us in our context, late-stage neo-liberal capitalism in the 21st century on a planet we are destroying?
If this were the last Sunday before Advent, we might say that we can identify the Christ by his crown, for that Sunday many churches celebrate “Christ the King,” a feast of relatively recent invention and good intention, meant to move us beyond our crass nationalism in the wake of horrific wars. But the crown Jesus wore was of thorns, and the proclamation of his reign was a crude sign above his head as he was executed.
We talk about Christ being with us when two or more are gathered in his name, though that passage is about being sent to the church equivalent of the Vice Principal’s Office, a fact we tend to forget.
We talk about Christ being with us in the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the cup when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, though some traditions take that literally and we take it loosely, Christ being the spirit of love and grace in the room, making us the Body of Christ.
Of course, the parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25 tells us that we have encountered Christ in the hungry, the poor, the mentally ill, the imprisoned.
If Christ is real and present in so many forms in our life, the one place we can say Christ is not is in brick and mortar, despite the misguided thinking of so many churches that cannot imagine church as anything other than a building. Pre-rabbinic theology sometimes understood God as physically residing in the Holy of Holies, the innermost chamber of the Temple. The gospels tell us Jesus predicted the destruction of the Temple, his own body and maybe the building, and if this is history, it was a remarkable prophecy indeed, for in the year 70 of the Common Era, the Roman General Titus and his legions destroyed the building, just as the body of Jesus had been destroyed forty years earlier.
Surviving forms of Judaism coalesced around the Rabbinic tradition, no Temple and no blood sacrifice. And while the earliest Christians were Jewish and gathered on Solomon’s Porch in the Temple, our tradition had long outgrown the idea that any one place was more holy than the other.
Though we are human, so we fall back into the trap of attaching ourselves to places and things in ridiculous ways, so that that the Crown of Thorns on the head of Jesus becomes the not Crown of Thorns in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, formed from a plant in the Baltic region. It is not the worst sin in the world to venerate objects and places, though in the words of the great Inigo Montoya, “I do not think it means what you think it means,” and it puts us at risk of failing to see Christ loose and in the wild, so many Wally’s in so many crowd scenes.
Did “touchdown” Jesus float off into the sky? To quote the Rev. Yvette Flunder in the video series “Living the Questions,” “I don’t know!”
I don’t know! And truthfully, I don’t care. It is a story, one meant to clean-up the loose ends, a bit of narrative housekeeping. But it is not the point of the story. For they asked him, “Who is my neighbor?” And he said, “There was a man on the road. And robbers came and left him for dead in a ditch…”
That I do know. There are people in the ditch. Will we be like the religious folks who walked by? Or like the Samaritan, who brought the wounded body up out of the ditch?
Amen.