Easter: Hope of Knowing Oneself and Others after Death

Easter Sunday      March 27, 2016

Isaiah 65:17-25  Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
1 Corinthians 15:19-26  Luke 24:1-12

Lectionary Link 

  One of the most important issue of personal identity is the issue of personal continuity.  I have included in the bulletin pictures of seven people who appear to be different people. 

But I also give you the information that the seven people who appear to be different are the same person.  There is a continuity of personal identity even though the appearance of difference could make an outsider say that these people are not related.

  But if in fact, these pictures are pictures of me, I cannot personally verify the continuity between all of the persons represented in these pictures.  Why?  I have very few memories in of my life before I was five years old.  My first five years of life are foggy in my memory so when I look at the baby pictures I have had to take my parents’ word that I am the person in the picture.  So as a person my continuity with my early years is pretty foggy; I have to rely on my significant community to convince me and let me know that the later pictures of me are in fact in continuity with my baby and early childhood pictures.  My foggy memory could create a sense of discontinuity between how I appeared as a baby and young child and who I am now if I did not have the community to let me know of my connection with the past.   What if I were to develop amnesia or other conditions of adult onset dementia which affected my memory?  These conditions would also create a discontinuity in me from personally knowing that I have always been the same person.  Again in the failure of my memory, I would be dependent upon my community to uphold my continuity as being the same person.  When I can’t remember who I was in the past to connect it with my present time, I then become the passive actor in the scripts of other people who can retain the fact that I am still the same person.

  There is a further more profound and pronounced event of human discontinuity which all members of the human race who attain a certain age have to ponder.  Perhaps the most profound event of human discontinuity is the event of death.

  Will I know myself after I die?  Will I have memory of my entire life when I am dead?  Will there be a community who will know me beyond my death?  Will that community be those who remain alive and those who have already died?  Is my death a physical discontinuity and also  mental and spiritual discontinuity?  Is death a wall for my human consciousness or does my personal consciousness of myself continue in some way after I die?

  This issue of personal continuity after we die is a very important issue for us because I believe that all of us live with a great internal hunch.  We are born with this internal hunch that in some way our consciousness of being will always be.  Yes, we can conceive of our bodies wearing out and dying, but we are born with this internal hunch that once I am conscious, then I will always be conscious in some way.  Various religious psychological systems have arisen to deal with the hunch of everlasting consciousness.  Perhaps each person has an essential self called a soul or a spirit and this essential self is eternal because it is the mark of the eternal image of an eternal God upon the human life.

  The aging process and the great losses in life can bring us to disbelieve the evidence of God’s image within our lives.  We may even doubt this internal hunch about us always having a continuing consciousness.  We get so drawn into our bodies and into our external world that we begin to disbelieve our internal evidence of the image of God upon us.  When disbelief of our true nature sets in we need signs which will inspire us to recover the awareness of our essential selves.

  And this is what brings us to the significance of this day.  In the time of Jesus one of the most absolute way of experiencing death was by Roman crucifixion.  Roman crucifixion was a very public death; death was made into a public spectacle to discourage all insurrection movements.  The Roman authorities in putting Jesus on the cross wanted to bring about a discontinuity in the life of Jesus.  They wanted to end his physical life.  They wanted to end his social influence among his followers.  They wanted to discourage anyone who would become popular like Jesus and make them think twice about going public.  The purpose of Roman crucifixion was to cause a social amnesia, the immediate forgetting of Jesus as a significant person of influence in the lives of people.

  As we know, this Roman crucifixion while successful in being executed, ended up failing miserably.  Why?  Because many people discovered Jesus to have continuity with himself after he died.  Many people discovered Jesus still had personal consciousness of himself and others after he had died.  And this caused quite a bit of excitement.  It energized an entire movement which eventually took over the Empire which was once responsible for his crucifixion.

  The death of Jesus came to be known as a bridge into a new kind of conscious awareness which Jesus had of himself.  In the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, we have evidence that Jesus knew himself again after his death but Jesus also knew again his friends who had witnessed his death.  The evidence of the continuity of the life of Jesus after his death was so profound that it was confessed by his followers to be both physical sightings and tactile interaction.  The life of Jesus after his death had the appearance of a newly re-constituted psycho-social-spiritual-physical being.  It was so new that people began to confess this unique sort of resurrection.  This resurrection was not like the assumptions of Elijah and Enoch; this resurrection was not a belief in a general resurrection of all people at some future time, it was a personal dynamic and real manifestation of a new life of Jesus to his followers which continued until his disappearance in the event which came to be called his ascension.

  We need not be embarrassed that empirical verification seems to fail when we talk about this.  What we know is that unique events cause the birth of new language to account for the realness and profound impact of the experience.

  Now what does this mean for you and me today?  It means that you and I can believe with confidence this great hunch that we have about the image of God being buried somewhere inside of us as an essential self.  It means that instead of forgetting about our essential selves because of all of the harshness of the temporal world, we can begin to feed the eternal fire within our souls. Because we have the witness of Jesus knowing himself and others beyond his death, we can believe that we will have future continuous selves beyond our deaths.

  This is a comfort to me because I know that I will leave this world unfinished.  I will leave this world with desires and hopes to have done more things and become more than I will actually achieve. I will leave this world with everything that I have forgot to remember.  I will leave this world with many uncompleted relationships.  Many people have already left my world and left me feeling that my relationship with them was not yet complete.   I want to know that I will have continuity after my death with my pre-death life, not because I deserve to live eternally, but because it is really honest to the eternal hope for there always being a future.  And this deep hope seems to be planted within me.

  Let us be grateful that the death of Jesus and his continued state of being after his death has been played out before the eyes of human history because it draws out of us the full permission to keep hoping.

  The resurrection of Jesus Christ is  a narrative of hope and we need not be embarrassed with that great sense of hope deep within us which tells us that we will always have a future.  We have a future of knowing ourselves as ourselves in the future after our deaths.  We also know we are connected with others who will remember us as well.  We live in communities which know and define us and give us our personhood.  Our communities which outlive us will remember us for a short time after we have died.  But we will enter into our next welcoming community of people who have gone ahead to keep personhood alive and well in the next life, and we can know this because of Jesus the resurrected Christ.  And we can also know that the greatest personal computer memory alive is found in the eternal memory of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  The memory capacity of the Holy Trinity is able to preserve us and keep us as persons with continuity and reconstituted being in our afterlives.

  The resurrection of Christ is a message to us that we will always have continuity with ourselves.  Nothing can ever end us or separate us from ourselves, or with each other, not even death.  And I think this is worth a great shout.

  Alleluia.  Christ is risen.  The Lord is risen, indeed.  Alleluia.  Amen.