Acts 10:34-43 Psalm118:1-2,14-24
Colossians 3:1-4 Matthew 28:1-10
Lectionary Link
In the moving river of time, we are ever living in the threshold of before and after. In our use of language we have inherited the traces of what has been before and we relay and relate them to the after, the future. And since we use the same identifying words for people and things of the past, we assume sameness of identity across time.
Sometimes sameness across time is recognizable, but not always. Only perhaps insiders could recognize the sameness of identity of the person in my baby picture with what I look like now. I, myself, could not recognize my baby pictures without being told by my parents. But as people, we carry within ourselves the memory pictures which tells us that we are the same person at 60 as we were at 16. I knew my identity at 16 and short of significant mental impairment, I know myself to be the same person now that I was when I was 16, even though I have added innumerable occasions of becoming like a tree with countless experiential age rings.
In the human life cycle there are two major change events in identity: birth and death. In birth, one is released from symbiotic unity with one's mother where one got oxygen from the umbilical cord and one is forced into an external world to gasp for the first breath of air, outside air. One is inspired, by taking air within one's lungs.
And when one dies, one no longer draws air from outside. One loses one's spirit, one's breath for ever.
You and I, with memory know how to process sameness and continuity in our lives and within our community. Our personal identities are tied up with our family and community identities. Our personal identities are interwoven with our community identities because of the places where we have learned language.
Our communities have told how to label and name the internal geography of our inward life. We call our inward life, soul, spirit, heart, mind, memory, and feeling, all of which cannot be empirically verified. We are taught to weave our inner lives with our outer lives.
As Christians we have inherited a tradition to talk about the continuity of our lives both after our births and after our deaths. Why would we want to address the life after our deaths? It is something which is unknowable. It is impossible to know and yet we are obsessed with the afterlife? Why do we want to know the unknowable?
We want to know the unknowable because we cherish the living knowable in such a way that we do not think that it should end, or if suffering make us want to end it, we think that there has to be something better to transition to.
The imaginations of resurrection derive from the language of the heart. Every culture has heart language; such language includes the vocabulary of things which cannot be proven or tested by science, but they are statistically proven by the number of people who confess to adhere to such language.
And what is some of the vocabulary of the language of the heart? Love, hope, joy, faith, gentleness, goodness, patience, justice and self-control. The language of the heart cannot help but get instantiated in human stories.
And on this day, we tell the story of hope. The story of hope is an endless future. And why do we have an endless future? Because we belong to God. We belong to Totality from which nothing and no one can be subtracted. You and I cannot be subtracted from the All; we can only be continuously integrated with everything that has been and everything that will be.
The resurrection of Jesus is our best story of hope about our future continuity. If Jesus knew himself again after he had died, and if other people knew him again after he had died, then the case for our future continuity is illustrated for us in a poignant and personal way.
The hopeful story of the resurrection is not meant to diminish our joy and delight with our lives now, with the people whom we have loved and lost. The hopeful story of the resurrection personalizes the inward intuition that our selfhood will never be lost because we are intricately connected to the great preserving All.
Resurrection and afterlife are different life, hopeful life, even while we mourn the loss of access to the people who have brought us the most joy in this life.
Today we do not use the resurrection of Jesus to deny the sadness of the loss of people in our lives. I am sure the disciple friends of Jesus wished that he had lived a full life into his eighties for nineties.
The resurrection story is the creation of the heart language of hope to instantiate in a story the intuition that nothing is ever lost, it is only preserved in some surpassing state of becoming.
It is this future state of becoming beyond our death which we confess today even as we thankfully and humbly mark the tentativeness of our current lives.
We are grateful today that Jesus embraced the tentativeness of human life and that he discovered death to be tentative too because he could not be erased from a greater afterlife.
Today, we let our heart language of hope cry again, "Alleluia, Christ is Risen. The Lord is Risen indeed! Amen.
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