1 Corinthians 15: 35-38, 42-50

³⁵ But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” ³⁶ How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. ³⁷ When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. ³⁸ But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body…

³⁹ Not all flesh is the same: People have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another. ⁴⁰ There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the splendour of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendour of the earthly bodies is another. ⁴¹ The sun has one kind of splendour, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendour. ⁴² So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; ⁴³ it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; ⁴⁴ it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. ⁴⁵ So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. ⁴⁶ The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual.

 ⁴⁷ The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven.

 ⁴⁸ As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. ⁴⁹ And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man. ⁵⁰ I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

 Luke 6: 27-38

²⁷ “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, ²⁸ bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. ²⁹ If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. ³⁰ Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. ³¹ Do to others as you would have them do to you.

³² “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. ³³ And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. ³⁴ And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. ³⁵ But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. ³⁶ Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

³⁷ “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. ³⁸ Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”

 Albert Einstein was once travelling on a train when the conductor came down the aisle asking each person for their ticket. When he got to the great genius, Einstein looked through all his pockets and could not find the ticket. The conductor told him, “That’s okay, Mr. Einstein, I know who you are, don’t worry about the ticket.” The conductor moved on to another car. When he was retracing his steps back to the front of the train, he encountered Einstein again. Now, Einstein was on his hands and knees searching on the floor for his ticket. The conductor stopped and told him, “Mr. Einstein, I know who you are, you don’t have to find your ticket.” Einstein replied, “I know who I am, too. What I don’t know is where I am going!”

Where we are going after church today is called our destination – our destination might be home, the shops, a friend’s house. But where we are going after we die is our destiny. There are at least three common and very differing views about human destiny:

There’s the “phht…that’s all folks!”  Like a candle going “phht” when it’s extinguished there’s just darkness and nothingness. Like Bugs Bunny says at the end of his cartoons, “Th-th-th-that’s all folks!” there’s nothing to look forward to. It’s based on the idea that we are completely material beings, composed purely of physical particles. The trouble is if you make science the only reality then beauty, love, goodness, joy and ultimate justice are meaningless. But science is limited. No scientist will ever satisfactorily explain how chemicals can be transformed into living beings, let alone create life out of a chemical soup in a test tube. God is the life-giver, and the eternal God is bigger than death.

There’s the “bzzz…plop!” as the soul like a firefly vacates the dead body and moves on to inhabit another body. That body could be another human, an insect, a tree and so on. It’s based on the observation of the cycle of life. We see death and birth and death and birth in nature all around us. Reincarnation sounds good in theory, but a troubling question is what determines a soul’s next existence? If it comes down to Hindu karma it means if you’re a woman and been good you could end up as a man but if you’ve been bad you could end up as a dog. Hmmm. Then again, some people tell their children that grandma has become a star in the sky.

Then there’s the “taraa…a new, eternal body!” This is the Christian view, which is the resurrection of the body defies human logic. How can God reconstitute someone who has been buried in the ground for centuries let alone cremated? The Christian answer is “That’s what Easter is all about!”

In today’s reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul describes the resurrection body in contrast to our current, earthly body:

• Our perishable bodies will be transformed by God into imperishable bodies
• God will make our shameful, sin-stained bodies into beautiful, glorious bodies
• Our weak, increasingly decrepit bodies will be made by God become strong and effective
• God will transform our natural bodies made of the earthly elements into spiritual bodies
• Finally, and most wonderfully, we will be remade in the image of Christ instead of in the image of Adam.

That’s all the information God has revealed. Everything else is speculation because we move into an existence outside time and the constraints of our current earthly lives.

Our future resurrection isn’t some fringe idea floating around the edges of our faith. In the Apostles’ Creed used in baptisms we profess, “I believe in the resurrection of the body”, and in the Nicene Creed we look forward to “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come”. The most important celebration for Christians in all times and all places is Easter. In the resurrection of Jesus, we see the prototype for our own future resurrection. We need to go to the end of each of the Four Gospels which describe Jesus’s post-Resurrection appearance to his disciples. We read that the Risen Jesus was the same but different. At first the disciples didn’t recognise him, because they weren’t expecting him.  Then they recognised he wasn’t a ghost because he spoke, ate and showed his wounds for touching. Yet he had an eternal body that wasn’t limited by time or space, for instance he could appear and disappear in a locked room.

The resurrection body makes sense for Christians because our faith is all about relationships: with God, with other people, and with the rest of God’s creatures. We aren’t just minds or souls. Our bodies are important because they are the means by which we express our relationships. God has given us touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing and thinking all of which we process through that stuff in our skulls – our brains.  We can’t have hugs, smiles, tears, shared meals, conversations or eye contact without our bodies.

Today’s Gospel passage helps us: Jesus’ sermon is about difficult relationships, specifically with enemies and how God is our role model for transformed relationships based on mercy and forgiveness. In our resurrection bodies we will be able to live out transformed relationships in a transformed body.

A final thought.  1^st March 1975 was the best day ever. It’s when colour TV arrived in Australia. It’s hard to describe the impact – in the black and white TV era the ads were when you used to rush off for a toilet break. With colour TV there’s no way you’d want to miss the ads. Coloured ads were hypnotic. The difference between our earthly existence and our resurrection existence will be like the difference between black and white TV and colour TV. When as we Christians we say we are a people who live in hope, not least of which is the resurrection of our bodies and minds in full technicolour glory. Amen.