Proper 27, Yr C
The Rev. G. Hendree Harrison, Jr.
There is hope!
Among my least favorite chores when I was a kid, was anything to do with the compost pile. My mother is a tremendous gardener, and good gardeners most always have a pile of rotting vegetation in some corner of the yard. These gardening types most always also have some poor kid or spouse whose job it is to both run things out to the compost pile and turn the heavy mess with a pitchfork so that air and water can get into every nook and fold. This, of course, enables the rotting process or decomposition to move along. My mother’s compost pile was full of fallen leaves, cantaloupe rinds, egg shells, tomatoes peels, and all manner of dead stuff. The pile attracted bugs and opossums. Aside from those critters and the family dog nosing around in it, there never appeared to be any life in the compost pile. As best I could tell – it was dead.
But if you left the compost pile alone for a while, the liveliest most colorful plants would start to spring up from the wet decaying mess. And when we spread the compost over the garden spot and mixed it into the ground before too long at all my mother’s flowers would come to life with rich, brilliant colors.
I always wondered at the contrast. The rotten skins of fruits and vegetables from our dinner table and the leaves my brother and I raked up in the fall were piled up and dead in winter, and then in spring and summer they were resurrected in the lush and colorful garden.
It is just this kind of resurrection, this dramatic - compost pile to summer garden- sort of coming to life, that Jesus is talking about in this morning’s gospel piece.
The first thing to understand is that he is not talking about what happens when we die. He is not talking about going to heaven after human death. He is talking about a much bigger, more mysterious, wholly grander thing altogether. He is talking about the full completion of things in the age to come.
See if this helps: We get a sense throughout the gospels that Jesus is trying to tell us that the present state of the world, all the suffering, the inequity, the sorrow and the pain, is not the way the world will always be. Right? Remember last week in the gospel reading Jesus laid blessings upon the poor, the hungry, the weeping and the hated, and he told them that they would not always be poor and hungry and hated? Remember he told them that the Kingdom of God would be theirs?
That’s resurrection.
The transformation of the human compost pile of hungry and hated into the righteous and beautiful flower children of the Kingdom of God is the sort of resurrection that Jesus is talking about. He does not spell out all the details of the how and the when of the great change God has in store for the world -in fact, this morning’s gospel is the only spot where Jesus speaks with any clarity about what we call the general resurrection. That’s okay though because we don’t need to be concerned with the why and the how, rather, we need to be concerned with the hopeful what. What will happen, what does resurrection look like?
My best lesson on resurrection came from a caterpillar and a kindergarten teacher.
When Kristin taught kindergarten she and her students most always had a few glass jars around the classroom filled with caterpillars transforming to butterflies. You know this story…
A caterpillar weaves a silk purse around itself called a chrysalis. Once encased in the chrysalis the caterpillar slips into a deep transforming sleep that seems to my unscientific mind, like death. In fact, the caterpillar changes from a solid creature into something like a liquid, and after a period of time, the caterpillar emerges altogether changed and uniquely beautiful as a butterfly.
That’s resurrection.
The caterpillar does not just die and come back alive- that would be resuscitation. The caterpillar changes entirely from crawling creature into a creature of the sky, fluttering and flying with patterned expressive wings. That is resurrection, and that is what will happen to children of God one day.
Now, I know that that is a deeply mysterious thing to say. One day we will be resurrected. I guess the mystery of that could even be unsettling for those of us who don’t care to be a bug in a sermonic analogy. A lot of us would as soon just go to the heaven of storybooks and vacation bible school lessons and relax with a mixed drink by the pool when we die. But that’s not how our God operates. Our God is the God of life, and our God seems to be promising us that at some point, He will bring us into perfect life.
So, in the resurrection, we won’t stop and sit around, rather, we will continue to be a part of God’s living creation. There’s no need to worry because Jesus assures us that we’re all going to love being butterflies in the garden. That’s what he’s doing in this morning’s confusing scene with the Sadducees and their absurd marriage question.
“Marriage is for caterpillars and men, says Jesus, in the age of the resurrection all the butterflies will live in perfect harmony married to God, and the things and worries of this present age will be made into something new in the age to come where, as Jesus says, death has no part.”
And don’t worry, we won’t miss anything, won’t miss our families and each other, because all that is precious, and living and holy will be caught up in the resurrection, and will be soaked through with joy in the very presence of God.
So, what does any of this strange talk of a future resurrection mean to us right here, right now? What does spinning on and on about some surreal and seemingly far off future transformation do for us today?
It’s simple, really – belief in resurrection means we are at our core a hopeful people. We are hopeful, and in this present day and age, hope is like a treasure found in a dark room. Hope is a commodity, a basic and valuable resource like water or wheat, which can sustain us in the face of the winds of disappointment and the fire of hardship. Know this – there is hope.
Jesus calls those children of God who are a part of the resurrection in the age to come – children of the resurrection. I think that is just the most marvelous and hopeful thing to call us.
It’s a particularly nice thing to hear in November when the earth is lumbering towards winter slumber, and cold is coming on. There is hope!
It’s all too easy for us to get caught up in the affairs of the world, spinning our wheels in our troubles; all too easy for us to get stuck in the compost pile, if you will, and forget the Easter promise and hope of resurrection. There is hope!
Jesus Christ is risen, and he is inviting us to be children of the resurrection. There is hope!
Oh, don’t you want to be a child of the resurrection!
Come, good friends, let’s carry on like we know there’s hope in the world! Let’s go forth from here and sew resurrection seeds in the compost pile so that come spring, the garden will be full with the gospel glow of fresh flowers.
For we are the hope-filled Children of the Resurrection indeed! There is hope!