Home  Sitemap	Worship Services  Directions  Make a Pledge  Contact Us
	Sermons Preached at Church of the Redeemer Return to Sermons Index

                                                                                 The Church of the Redeemer

                                                                                         November 11, 2007

                                                                                                Proper 27

                                                                                      The Rev. Mr. Marc Eames

“I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.  And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!”  May I speak in the name of the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Just this past week, I had the opportunity to visit with my sister and my little niece.  My niece will very soon be five, and she is full of questions, which I try to encourage for the most part.  The visit reminded me of a conversation I had with my high school chemistry teacher concerning questions.  His theory on why Americans were losing ground internationally in the field of science was that we are beating the curiosity out of children by constantly telling them to stop asking so many questions.  He claimed that by the time children reached their late teens, there was little of their childlike curiosity left to fuel great discoveries.  He claimed that scientific greats from Einstein to Archimedes were all children at heart.  I tend to agree. 

Half of the science majors in the dorms in college had the poster of Einstein sticking out his tongue, and who can forget the story of Archimedes dancing down the street naked yelling “Eureka!” when he discovered that the volume of an object could be determined through the displacement of water.  It does appear that childlike behavior and curiosity fuel great scientific thinkers, so I have tried not to stifle children’s questioning.  Any parent or teacher will tell you, however, that this is easier said than done. 

On my latest visit, my nearly five-year old niece and I were playing a rousing game of Guess-who.  For those of you who have been out of child rearing for a while, Guess-who is a game played with two sets of cards with people’s faces on them.  The object is to guess who is on your opponent’s face card.  You and your opponent ask questions to narrow the field.  You can ask if the person has red hair, or wears glasses, for example.  While playing Guess-who, my niece stopped and asked, “Why are the people different?”  I successfully avoided the response “because the game wouldn’t be very interesting if all the people looked the same,” and instead said, “Because God likes people to be different.  God made all of us good, and different, so that we would all be special to God.”  At this point I was feeling good. Theological truths through Guess who – awesome, but you parents know what came next.  “Uncle Marc, why does God like us different?”  “Well McKayla, God does like us all different.  We each have special things about ourselves that God gave us as a gift.” 

“Well, Uncle Marc, why does she (pointing to one of the cards) have to wear glasses?”

“God doesn’t make anyone’s body physically perfect, but God made everyone’s body good.  The woman wears glasses to correct her vision, but they make her look smart and distinguished.  Her eyesight might not be as good as yours, but even her lack of excellent natural vision makes her body special and distinct.” 

“Uncle Marc, is my body special?”

“Yes, McKayla, you were made very special, and God loves you very much.”

 This conversation highlighted for me concepts that twenty-first century Christians have a difficult time understanding: the goodness of the physical body eventually leading to the bodily resurrection.  Many modern Christians would rather go to the platonic idea of dualism: the concept that our bodies are vile traps for our pure spiritual selves.  They believe that bodies are disposable and worthless, but the soul is good, and is the person you really are.  This is not a Christian belief.  Christians believe that the physical body is made good, and though it decays, it is not a trap for the soul.  Christians also believe that the body and the soul are not perfect, and both are capable of disappointing us.  Though imperfect, our physical bodies will be resurrected, not exactly the same, but we will still have bodies, just as Jesus has a body after he is resurrected. 

There is a lot of confusion over this concept.  We are not helped by popular imagination, which pictures saints (like you and me) turning into angels like St. Michael or St. Rafael.  Angels don’t have physical bodies like we do, and many contemporary Christians see that as being better.  After all, bodies decay.  I have to admit to walking with a slight limp for a day or two after tripping during the Redeemer Football game last month.  It seemed that my legs didn’t move as fast as my mind was telling them to move.  I know some of you might be ready to jeer, “Wait and see how it feels thirty years from now,” and you would be right.  Our bodies often seem to fail us, and yet in Genesis and other places we are taught they are good. 

Now we are not perfect in body, or mind, or soul.  Our bodies break down.  We do not look like the celebrity gods and goddesses that grace supermarket magazine shelves.  Most celebrities will admit that they don’t look like the cover of magazines either, before they are airbrushed.  We often can’t seem to lose the weight we want to, and we can grow very tired of chronic illnesses and injuries that plague us for years.  There are plenty of reasons to feel badly about our bodies it seems.

Our minds and soul are not so different, however.  Any student here could testify to seeing or hearing a question on an exam that you once knew, but cannot remember: arguments that you read, equations solved, or reactions memorized that seem to fall out of your head at the worst moment.  What about our souls, our moral compass, are they any better?  I think we all have been in situations when we knew what the right thing to do was, and yet, we were unable to do it.  As Paul says, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”  I think we all can relate to this.  As a young child, I used to dump powder over my little sister’s head.  As an older child, I tortured my brothers in creative ways, and now as an adult, I know I should visit certain relatives over the holidays, but let’s see if that works out. 

Though we are hard on our bodies, they do not let us down any more than the rest of ourselves.  We certainly now know that dependency and addiction are just as much physiological as they are physical.  Certainly anyone who has ever tried to quit smoking can attest to this fact.  We are truly imperfect in every way, but we were made good in the image of God, and through the grace of God, we can be made perfect at the end.  Our imperfect physical bodies will be transformed into new immortal bodies.  I don’t know exactly what this will be like.  I find imagining an immortal, transformed, physical body just as difficult to grasp as a pure soul that is so washed from sin that it is able to overcome sin completely.  It is hard to imagine a resurrected mind that is able, through the power of being in the presence of God, to understand the mysteries of the universe: how creation was started, or even what the purpose of a duck billed platypus is? 

This remade state can be hard to imagine, but through faith, and the grace of God, we will arrive there.  Job in all his suffering had faith in God that he would see his savior.  He knew that he wouldn’t see his savior during his lifetime, but he had faith that he would be resurrected.  He had faith that his body would be transformed into a new perfect body, and that his soul would finally be at rest.  Job’s heart yearned to see God, and this seeing involves everything that he was and is.  He loved God: with all of his heart, and all of his mind, and all of his strength, and he knew that God would save him. 

When Job cries out that his Redeemer lives, most scholars feel, judging from the grammar, that he is talking about a relative.  Job obviously lived before the incarnation of Jesus Christ, but he knew, through faith, that a relative of his in the human family would redeem him.  He was right.  A relative, who was fully human, did redeem Job, just as he redeemed you and me.  And just like Job, we will see our Redeemer with our own eyes someday.  The one who has redeemed us, will perfect us.  He will perfect our bodies, souls, and minds in ways that we could not possibly imagine.  Job, like my little niece, keeps asking questions, but he always remains faithful.  In the end, he knows that he will be redeemed.  Jesus is faithful to Job, as Jesus is faithful to us, and through the grace of God, we are faithful to him.  Job knows that his broken, boil-ridden body will be made new.  He knows that his soul, and everything he is, will be saved, and knowing this, his heart yearns to be with God. 

Let us pray:

Lord, give us the grace to have the faith of Job, to see that we were made special and good, and in all that we are, even with our imperfect bodies, we will be perfected by you.  Your good work has already begun in us.  Grant us the patience to see it through.  All this we ask through your beloved son, our savior, our redeemer, Jesus Christ.  Amen.