Life and Death
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Rev. Dr. Mary Alice Mulligan
Last Sunday and today we hear St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians tell us: we are weaklings in our bodies. However, he is quick to add, God does mighty things through us. Our weakness demonstrates God’s power. Our life together as church celebrates such news. But we also know this life is impermanent. Each of us faces the eventual deterioration of the physical body. Mostly we ignore our mortality, but underneath our denial, we know bodies do not last forever. Paul speaks right to it.
The part of the letter we hear today is powerfully written. Paul is a poet. However, his metaphoric imagery cloaks that fact that we don’t get many specifics. He claims following Christ orients us toward an eternal abundance of glory, even though we don’t know details. Paul sets us on a course toward the unseen and the eternal, even as we exist in this visible and transitory realm now. As we struggle here, the Spirit is our guide, who yearns with us for our eternal home. From the 4 and 5th chapter of Second Corinthians, listen for the Word of God.
But just as we have the same spirit of faith that is in accordance with scripture—“I believed, and so I spoke” —we also believe, and so we speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will bring us with you into his presence. Yes, everything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God. So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.
For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
Haven’t we all seen movies where there’s an auto accident; the heroine is thrown from the car? She gets up, confused; finally an ambulance comes. She looks over the shoulder of EMTs who are working on a body on the ground – and she realizes it is her body. She has died. Left her old body behind and didn’t even know it. But that’s a movie. We can’t know if death is at all like that. But Paul makes a similar point. In Christ, eventually we leave our old self behind. We move toward an eternal dwelling, even while we keep waking up with this body every morning.
We should face it. We like living. Our day-to-day existence may not be perfect, but we like waking up each morning. On the whole, life is good! We wear orange today to protest senseless deaths from gun violence. The elementary school shooting in Uvalde 2 years ago last month was shocking. We grieve for the 21 children and teachers whose lives were cut short. Something is wrong when a person opens fire on other persons. Every life lost is a tragedy. Part of our feeling those deaths so painfully is because each of us takes our own life seriously. We like looking ahead, making plans for the future, in hopes we will have years yet ahead. We want to see the children we love grow and flourish. We enjoy spending time with friends; we treasure falling in love all over again, eating the perfect slice of watermelon, singing hymns that touch us. Life is joyous. Given the alternative, we choose life. If someone falls onto the track in the subway tunnel, everyone around him panics, until he is pulled to safety. And if the subway comes screaming through just afterwards, everyone is relieved. Life is precious; something to be protected and treasured. Even when life is difficult, given the option, most of us choose life, every day.
But we will each die. As much as we hate to admit it, every puny body ever born eventually fails. Earthly tents, Paul calls them. Every one will be destroyed. The Bible teaches us to honor our bodies; to take care of these earthly tents. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul tells them firmly, “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you….glorify God in your body.”[1] Our bodies matter; we glorify God through our bodies, our actions, our words. But these bodies are temporary. For some, a robust life goes on well past their 100th birthday. For others, life lasts only a few hours. Little bodies that were never able to survive.
A story is told of a NICU nurse who traveled to Saudi Arabia on vacation. Of course, she visited a hospital maternity ward. “In my home state, the infant mortality rate is 5%,” she mentioned to a doctor. “What is the mortality rate here?” And the doctor explained, “Since Allah has decreed it, our mortality rate is 100%.” It’s true. Every body born will eventually experience physical failure. We may not like to think about it much, but if we get honest, death comes to every household, every congregation, every person. Come November, for the 5th year, if I’m still alive, I’ll be leading us in honoring St. Andrew’s saints. Every year we remember them. People we love, some of whom we worship with perhaps even today. Death is a fact of life. We will each one of us die.
So, God gives us a future. We are promised a life after our earthly life is over, which is tremendous comfort when we watch someone we love die, or when we face our own mortality. The promise of a future in the presence of God. Glorious. But what is the future like? In Corinthians and Thessalonians, Paul talks of new life, but with imagistic language. We will put on a heavenly dwelling; we will be raised with Christ. But he gives no real specifics. Several biblical authors speak of life after death, but not in physical terms. No one says, “Approximately 3 hours after your heart stops, you realize your body is now porous,” or “3000 years after the death of Jesus, everyone will wake up as twelve-year-olds.” We only receive poetic glimpses which assure us our next life will be even richer than this life.
One way we have some idea of what our future will be, is from what we know about Jesus, whom we claim to follow. Wherever Jesus went, he showered divine love all around. He honored each person, made sure all, especially the least, had enough. He challenged people to learn and grow and love others, even their enemies, so no one would be enemies anymore. Wherever Jesus was, he spread healing and wholeness and full nourishment. And what did Jesus preach? “Prepare for the Realm of God. God’s Administration has come among us.” Theologians say, this implies wherever Jesus is, he is manifesting the Realm of God. So, when we are given the promise that we will exist in God’s presence after this life, I believe this means we will exist in the fullness of God’s loving Realm. We can’t fathom the details, but we sense it will be rich and whole and joyous; the full manifestation of the Realm Jesus guaranteed would come. We have been promised: after death, God gives us a future.
And the Spirit is our guarantee. We have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit as a living promissory note ensuring the promised next existence will happen. The Spirit is like a down payment, or earnest money paid to us, actually placed within us, indicating that the new life promised has actually already begun. Paul notes, even as things of this world (including our bodies) are wasting away, there are times we sense that God is renewing us from the inside out, and building a new heaven/Earth. Momentarily we sense God’s promised future interacting in the current world, even in us. Celtic Christians use the term “thin places” for the moments when we recognize something spiritual is just touching our common life. Such holy interactions happen when we sense God is renewing the world, building the Realm among us, even as what we consider normal is fading away. Theologian Christiaan Beker writes, “the Christian already lives in the dawning of God’s coming reign...”[2] Already within and among us, God’s Realm is being created. We recognize it because the Spirit is within us. So we don’t have to panic about the death of these bodies, because the Spirit confirms, we have a future. Paul indicates when this body fails, we will have a new shelter (he uses images of new clothes and a new dwelling) to live in. Our mortality is swallowed up by divine life; we put on immortality. We know the promises of Jesus Christ are true, through the Spirit living within us. We are already oriented toward the eternal abundance of glory. The Spirit bears witness, and becomes our guarantee.
When he talks about death, Paul uses metaphors. He doesn’t spell out the after death pieces, after the end of these frail bodies. But we don’t need details, He isn’t giving a biology lesson; he’s giving a faith lesson. So we can rest assured, through the Spirit of Jesus Christ, death is temporary. Life in Christ is eternal.
[1] 1 Corinthians 6:19, 20.
[2] J. Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle (Fortress Press, 1980), 366-67.