(…continued…) I began with a question. “Where’s Eddie now?” his wife wanted to know. Just one year ago he was there yet, sitting in that very room. And then he died, and now where was he?
But we can ask that same question from another perspective. Courtney is here NOW– but where was SHE a year ago? How did she get here? Yes, of course, we all know the biology of the birds and the bees and all that– but how can one think that even begins to explain the miracle of life and spirit and personality and will and love and emotion and everything else that goes into being a person? If that grieving widow ever sees Eddie again, it will be by a miracle of God. But it is no less a miracle that Courtney is here today, or that Eddie was born in the first place, or that any of us were born. Life itself is the miracle– this life, or the next life, either way, it is a miracle. Scientists are great at ‘describing’ life, but no one is even close to ‘explaining’ life: why we are here and how it all began and where that first spark of life came from and how it came to enliven otherwise dead matter. That we have to learn from God, and He has put those answers in a book for us to read about and believe. And in that book, unlike in nature, the story moves freely, back and forth, between life and death and life again.
We hear about new babies being born all the time. We have grown used to that miracle. We haven’t yet seen someone back from the dead, so we might well wonder if that can happen. But why should that be any more difficult to imagine? What more proof do I need that I can live again? I am here now, God gave me this life. And after I am dead here, why shouldn’t God be able to give me life again? I believe in the resurrection of the body because I believe all of life is God’s gift. That might be hard to believe, but for me, it would be much harder to believe that everything just got here all by itself. It seems to me that it would take a great deal of faith to believe that. I don’t believe anything got here all by itself. I believe, as the catechism says, that ‘God created me and all that exists;’ and since he gave me this life in the first place, that is all the proof I need that God can do that again for me.
It has been wonderful these last several months to be anticipating the birth of this little Courtney, our first grandchild, baptized here this morning. Her parents were, of course, interested in every visit to the doctor to be assured that everything was going all right, and to find out how that little life looked, at each stage. Amy would come back from the doctor and say, “Well, the baby is this big now… or, now it’s this big… she weighs about two pounds now, and so on. And during those days I thought often about the Bible’s description of those days in the womb. Psalm 139:13-16 says: “For you, Oh Lord, created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful; I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in that secret place. When I was woven together…., your eyes saw my unformed body.” I thought of those verses as this little life was growing toward birth. And now she is here, and a baptized child of God, with a whole eternity ahead of her.
I have been talking about how the Bible moves back and forth freely between the themes of life and death and life again. God, the Creator and Giver of life, is not restricted by a little thing like the death of a body, but gives life and resurrection whenever and wherever he so chooses. And sometimes this back and forth in the Bible between life and death, blends into the same image. Sometimes, in the Bible, birth is even used as an image for what happens at death. When Jesus describes the death of this present age and the arrival of the age to come, he refers to the accompanying tribulations as ‘birth pangs.’ When Paul talks about the life to come, he refers to the body as a seed that goes into the ground, where the death of that seed, becomes the beginning, the birth, of a new life. And one of the most interesting of these passages is Isaiah 26:19 which says: “Your dead will live; their bodies will rise; You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy… (for) the earth will give birth to her dead.” In each of those passages, the images of birth and death are mixed. It is, after all, in death that we are reborn into that other kingdom. This is an incredible image. We have the image of death as the end, and that’s bad, and we don’t want to go. We know what we’ve got here, and we like it, and we are a little afraid of what’s next, because we don’t know much about it. But these verses say that death is like birth. How can that be? (continued…)
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