REstory 3: Gardening Among the Galaxies
Risking on Resurrection for World-building Right Now
What if most humans are living out whatever story that we think we are in?1 If it’s true that we are understanding our lives with an internal narrative, that can make it weird or difficult whenever we go through an event or a season that doesn’t match the story we thought we were in.2 It’s tricky work to navigate the prolonged disorientation of outgrowing a narrative we were given. This is compounded when your community requires allegiance to that earlier story (and questioning it might sever or put strain on those relationships). The journey to finding a home in a truer story isn’t usually fast, but reality is larger and healthier there.3
In this REstory series we are investigating together the possibility that many of us have inherited the wrong narratives from church. Two weeks ago we used an illustration with chairs to ask What Is God Really Like? And last week we followed up with a discussion describing some of the initial contrasts between different stories we’ve heard about God. How do we find our way forward if we realize we’ve been carrying around a warped and watered-down version of Christian faith? (Maybe even for generations?)
Today I’d like to explain why Bodily Resurrection changes everything and makes me willing to risk it all on the possibility of that different narrative. In the Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, God is defeating Death with Life, not just for Jesus, and not just for humans, but for the universe. Resurrection is the hinge that draws together the whole story, expands it out into the cosmos, and invites our participation. Let me elaborate.
A robust understanding of Bodily Resurrection means that death is temporary.4 Because God will not abandon his beloved creatures to decay, humans will be raised like Jesus with new, healed Resurrection Bodies that are “more really real” than the bodies we have now. And it’s even bigger than that. This expansive understanding of “New Creation” extends to the whole cosmos, claiming that this whole weary world will be healed and made into a New Heavens and a New Earth that is “more really real” than they are now. Why? Because God loves all of creation and wants to be with us. Death is the enemy of Love because death is the enemy of presence, and God’s love has always been stronger than death.
Bodily Resurrection teaches that at some point in the future, long after my first body has decayed in my grave, we will be raised from death and given back our bodies, fully healed and indestructible. And not only humans, but also the natural world, from stars to seahorses, will be healed and remade into a New Heavens and a New Earth. But that is not what I heard in church growing up.5 Instead we were given ideas closer to (Plato’s) “Immortality of the Soul,” which often devalues bodily existence in deference to the more permanent “soul.” In that view, my disembodied soul after death would escape a used-up earth to a somewhere far away heaven.6
Of course, since the word resurrection it is found in scripture, it was never explicitly denied in my childhood, but it was ignored or misunderstood enough that “Immortality of the Soul” was never questioned. Resurrection was vaguely portrayed sometimes as God’s miracle on behalf of Jesus (“thanks for the sacrifice”), or sometimes as a post-crucifixion proof or a power move (as if God was flexing and saying “told you so” to the Romans).7
Again, resurrection was not denied, but it was definitely on the back burner and held with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Some explicitly preferred the “leave it” option — I remember hearing people point to our denomination’s weekly communion practice and explain that “we don’t celebrate Easter Sunday because we celebrate Easter every Sunday.” That logic meant that since we had communion every week (which supposedly focused on the “death, burial, and resurrection” of Jesus), we didn’t need to celebrate Easter Sunday or consider the deep implications of Resurrection for how we lived in the world.8
But when we take off the lenses of “Immortality of the Soul” and reread scripture with “New Creation” lenses instead, we get a very different story, and a lot more scriptures start to make more sense. When we connect Creation in Genesis 1 to New Creation in Revelation 21, we find God continually trying to live among humans all along the way and everywhere in between. We find hints of “New Creation” in Isaiah, and then in the gospels we find Jesus confusing people with hints that he will come back to life after three days of death. And after he is raised from the dead, in Acts and the New Testament letters we find the first groups of Jesus followers wrestling with the mind-boggling implications of Bodily Resurrection. The cosmos will never be the same!9
The most concentrated passages describing New Creation are found in Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 12-15. Apparently, some folks in Corinth were questioning or denying Bodily Resurrection, because in 1 Corinthians 15 we find Paul writing a manifesto, starting with an extended gardening analogy. He’s pretty repetitive, as if he thought he needed to insist and emphasize that the body you are in right now is like a seed, and the Resurrection Body you will have someday is like an awesome plant. We already know that the bodies we are in right now are aging and slowly decaying. We are on our way to dusty decomposition, but the dream and destiny of a seed is the plant. Both seeds and plants are beautiful! Both seeds and plants are good! And we know that the trajectory and telos of the seed is to become a strong, fruitful plant.
In Romans, Paul is trying to get Gentile Christians and Jewish Christians in Rome to stop excluding each other, and in chapter 8 he writes about their common reality — the Spirit of God now inhabits their bodies! Their dust-bound bodies may have previously separated them into Gentiles and Jews, but now both groups are hosting God’s Spirit in their bodies. Paul says the one who raised Jesus from the dead is already sparking Life even now while they are still in their dying bodies. When we host God’s Life in our dust bodies, we have already begun to taste and glimpse the fuller future reality, and we groan along with all the rest of hurting creation while we await the healing of all things.
But do the stories we’re telling ourselves about what “forever” might be like really matter in the choices of our daily lives? It depends on who you ask. There has been a split for over a hundred years among many Christians; one camp focuses on the future after death and teaches that what really matters is the “spiritual” concern of “salvation” defined as going to heaven (avoiding hell), while the other camp focuses on the present age, being concerned with “social justice” now to heal what’s broken during this earthly life. But it is the Resurrection of Jesus that insists that we hold both of these camps together. When we read scripture with New Creation lenses, we realize that God’s Love keeps us from divorcing the “then” from the “now.”
Back in 1 Corinthians, apparently some in Corinth had been arguing about whose Spirit-gifts were better (“My gift of healing is better than your gift of wisdom - HA!”), because Paul writes for multiple chapters on how this in-Spirited reality should be what draws Christians together. In the middle he inserts a beautiful poem on Love (that many of us have heard in wedding sermons, but Paul’s aim is so much wider). Love is more important than any of the Spirit-gifts they had been given. Each of their gifts from the Spirit is worthless without love. But what we read starting in v. 8 (after most quotations stop in v.7) is that although each of their gifts is temporary, it is Love that never ends.
Love is permanent.
Because of God’s Spirit living inside our bodies, everything you do in Love is permanent.
Paul is not just waxing eloquent in hopes that his listeners will be persuaded or charmed by his encouraging language. He is being emphatic: Love never fails. Everything else we experience in this world is partial and temporary, but every single thing we do in Love is somehow permanently continuous with the “more really real” reality in the coming New Heavens and New Earth. Our acts of love are the building blocks of New Creation. We participate in making it come true.10
We are enacting God’s future reality with every act of love we do, and that is how God designed this to work! Participation was God’s idea first :) Because we have the Spirit of Life inhabiting us even now in our dying bodies, every act done in love is already a reality in God's future world that is “more really real” than this one we can see right now. 11
When you are patient with a toddler, you are planting New Creation.
When you pay your neighbor’s utility bill, you are planting New Creation.
When you resist lashing out at your coworker (or roommate or sibling or spouse) and learn to listen longer, you are planting New Creation.
When you choose a smaller house with a smaller mortgage in order to be more generous, you are planting New Creation.
When you give up your self-deception and practice vulnerability, you are planting New Creation.
When you give away your vote to benefit your neighbors in poverty, you are planting New Creation.
When you compose music or paint or quilt or dance or study biochemistry or plant garlic or teach junior high history, you are planting New Creation.
Participation also levels the playing field - no one person’s contribution is better than another’s. Love never fails; each act of love becomes a part of New Creation.12
Because of the Resurrection, it is just as “spiritual” to unlearn pride as it is to baptize someone.
Because of the Resurrection, it is just as important to recycle as it is to preach sermons.
Because of the Resurrection, it is just as “spiritual” to be a missionary as it is to be a plumber.
Because of the Resurrection, it is just as important to have a hard conversation about injustice with a family member as it is to be an elder in church. 13
We are enacting God's future reality by participating in putting God’s love into the world, and that is a story I am willing to risk everything on. At the end of 1st Corinthians 15, Paul wraps up the chapter quoting Hebrew prophets saying, “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where O Death is your victory? Where O Death is your sting?” He reminds them that victory comes through Jesus, so they should be “immovable” since they know “that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” Again, this is not just warm encouragement. Because of the defeat of death; every single thing they do for God is never wasted. Nothing done in love with God is ever “in vain” because it is already a permanent part of the New Heavens and the New Earth. This is a more robust, concrete understanding of Jesus’s encouragement to “store up treasures in Heaven.”
Before I wrap up, I want to mention again that Resurrection is risky. In the face of death-wielding empires like the one I live in, it is profoundly political to claim that death is not the end but the planting of a seed. Knowing that our love plants New Creation, outlasting every temporary affection we’ve ever entertained, frees us for tremendous risk. Loving others when it is inconvenient or dangerous is risky, and New Creation frees us for the risk.
Which brings us back to our final point from last week. Thinking that salvation was individual souls avoiding hell was always too small; God’s dreams are much bigger. God wants to transform us each into agents of Creative Love, joining God’s work to heal the cosmos. Like gardeners each working a plot of soil in the galaxy, this new kind of humans are being transformed into lovers of neighbors and enemies who will learn to plant New Creation everywhere they go.
“See!!! I am making All Things New!!!”14
© 2024 Ladye Rachel Howell. All rights reserved.
In case you missed it, about a week ago Merriam Webster gave us permission to end sentences with a preposition. It’s exactly what I’ve been waiting for ;) On the human knack for narrating our lives in the world, check out Jonathan Gottschall's book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human.
Sometimes they are called worldviews, sometimes they are called social imaginaries, sometimes they are called meta-narratives. Each of us has a way of connecting the dots and putting together what we think we understand about the world and our place in it and the passing of time.
Many wise friends have shared their Narrative-Expanding experiences; Faith Unraveled by Rachel Held Evans is one of my favorites.
There isn’t space in this post to have the supernatural-vs-material conversation that is connected to whether or not someone considers resurrection a reasonable belief in the world we live in. I’m happy to have that conversation (with absolutely no trace of icky 1990’s apologetics) in another post or perhaps over coffee - just let me know. For now, I will point out that N. T. Wright's book The Resurrection of the Son of God takes 800+ pages to cover every aspect of what it means to approach the question of the resurrection of Jesus as a historian. Unlike the natural sciences that study repeatable phenomena, history is a science that by definition studies unrepeatable events. Contrary to our occasional chronological snobbery, first century folks were not ignorant of the fact that dead people usually stayed dead. He summarizes the scope of the study on pp. 684-738, but you can also find a shorter summary article here.
In case anyone is wondering, anytime I say or imply that a church or a denomination or a preacher or an institution is telling the wrong story, I don’t ever mean “that church (preacher, etc) is 100% wrong and 0% right.” For example, in saying that my childhood church taught Immortality of the Soul instead of Bodily Resurrection, I would never claim that there were zero lessons on Bodily Resurrection into a New Heavens and a New Earth. There probably were some lessons that taught that! But if in 100 sermons there is 1 explaining Bodily Resurrection and 99 teaching Immortality of the Soul, what will people hear?
In my kid imagination, when I heard my disembodied soul would go to heaven, I always pictured my soul as a fuzzy gray blob-shaped thing that had been inside me, and heaven was gauzy and white — pretty much everything was cloudy and vague. I was told it’d be great to be with God all the time and that there would be lots of singing. And while that does sound much better than how “hell” was described, it falls far short of Bodily Resurrection in a New Heavens and a New Earth.
It is a well known critique of the model of atonement called “Penal Substitutionary Atonement Theory” that it makes the Resurrection functionally irrelevant. PSAT relies almost exclusively on Jesus’s crucifixion as a sacrificial transaction required to accomplish God’s forgiveness. This sets the stage for another well known critique — many concerned people have said that PSAT sounds to them like divine child abuse. When resurrection isn’t an important part of an atonement model, it can seem like a parent reconciling with a child after vicariously taking someone else’s spanking, “sorry but you know I had to do that to show you I love you.”
However, weekly communion in my experience focused almost exclusively on the crucifixion (not the resurrection) in order to summon enough guilty feelings about Jesus’s death so I could feel really sorry and “really mean it” to not sin again. This is not just a problem from my childhood. A few years ago, my youngest received a monthly calendar page from a Christian grade school — Good Friday had a clip art cross, but Easter Sunday had a clip art bunny.
I will propose a coherent whole-canon hermeneutic in an upcoming post .
Give yourself the gift of reading Desmond Tutu’s book No Future Without Forgiveness and then dream how you can translate Truth and Reconciliation into your neighborhood!
N. T. Wright’s book Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church helped me reread scriptures I had heard my whole life. It was like going from black and white to seeing in color.
Check out how the folks at Bible Project talk about it in their video You're Supposed to Rule the World (and Here's How).
Kelly Brown Douglas shows us how believing in the Resurrection of course means we participate in justice on behalf of our neighbors in her book Resurrection Hope: A Future Where Black Lives Matter.
Revelation 21.5
Your "planting new creation" and "just as important" bullet points made me cry. It is something I feel in my soul and so so validating to hear it said--said clearly, directly, convictingly.