“For I know
that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and
after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God.” I
like the seeming contradiction seeing God in one’s flesh even after the skin
has been destroyed. Job seems to have wrapped his mind around something that
doesn’t make sense on the surface.
In similar
mind bending matters, tonight Jesus tells us that the children of the
resurrection will be like the angels. Paul tells we will obtain the glory of
Christ. And of course like a lot of mystical language, it loses something
important if you take it too literally. I’m reminded of how often John’s Jesus
rolls his eyes at people taking what he says too literally. But there is a
profound truth being spoken of, and the clue to it is in the last few words.
God is the God of the living. That in Moses’ time, Jesus’ time, and ours,
Abraham and Issac and Jacob are alive to God now.
Now
honestly, that thought is one to pray on and let wash over you and not pick
apart intellectually, because we cannot even begin to fully know the mind of
God. Christianity, does not and cannot make sense to us because it tells us
about God, who is not only beyond time, but beyond being. Beyond being that is
until the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ Jesus.
When the
apostles saw the resurrected Jesus, they did not recognize him at first. He
seemed both corporeal and incorporeal. The resurrected Jesus was different.
Through the resurrected Jesus, we get a glimpse of God’s actuality. An
actuality breaking into the world, that wasn’t part of this world before. God
who was uncreated now shared something with the created world, was in turn took
on something of the actuality of the created world through the body of Jesus of
Nazareth.
For now, we
see this through a mirror darkly, and quite frankly the mirror has seemed very
dark lately. For this actuality breaking in is not just the promised
resurrection, but about the manifestation of the Kingdom. And in times like
these, the Kingdom can seem very far away. In times like these one can take the
long view and think what life was like in the first century versus what life is
like now, and that we even know that there’s a lot of injustice now, means some
breaking through has happened. But that is trying to see God’s actuality in the
world, in the dark mirror itself.
Because look
how far we’ve come may be a source of hope, but it doesn’t help at all when
you’re sitting with a black mother who is weeping for fear of the danger her
son is in just for walking down the street. No, our hope is not in the created
world, it is in the actuality Christ revealed to us.
Hope in the
Kingdom, in God’s actuality, takes work though. It’s not something we can
measure or verify through experiment or any of the ways we can learn about the
created world. It takes prayer and contemplative practices and ritual. Like the
ritual we participate in earlier tonight - Joshua’s baptism.
Tonight,
Joshua entered the actuality we’ve been talking about, ritually, mystically,
sacramentally entered into Jesus’s death and resurrection, and inherited
Christ’s Glory. We all renewed our baptism, spoke the words we spoke or were
spoken for us, when we entered that actuality. This is where our hope lies, in
that we have already entered into God’s actuality.
So I’m
putting forth three main points to begin our theme that we’ll be following
through into Advent, the theme of hope as virtue and promise. Three of perhaps
many reasons why hope is a virtue would be, 1) That it can be hard to find hope
in the world, 2) That our hope is in an actuality we cannot fully grasp, and 3)
That hope takes time and effort and participation with others who have entered
into God’s actuality through Jesus Christ.
