EpiscopalCenter at Duke University

The Hope of the Resurrection

by Colin Miller

The church is a city of hope; a society of people who hope for the second coming of a crucified and resurrected Jew. But we usually don’t think of ourselves as people who hope, and so this afternoon I want to explore with you and with St Luke and St Paul why this might be. I want to suggest to you that both these Saints may be telling us that the Christian hope of the final resurrection is the key to avoiding the deception of Satan. So that in the end our lack of hope ends up evincing just how deceived we may be.
And to focus on the hope of the resurrection is particularly fitting at this point in our liturgical year. This time of year, the season after Pentecost, remembers that phase in the history of salvation in which we currently do stand, the age of the church, in which God’s spirit moves forward through us to renew the face of the earth. As we liturgically near the end of this time, our texts have turned to begin to consider the coming judgment, the time of trial and the restoration of all things in Christ. This is reflected in the Collect Sarah prayed:

O God, whose blessed Son came into the world that he might destroy the works of the devil and make us children of God and heirs of eternal life: Grant that, having this hope, we may purify ourselves as he is pure; that, when he comes again with power and great glory, we may be made like him in his eternal and glorious kingdom

This liturgical movement will climax in two weeks on the last Sunday after Pentecost, when we celebrate Christ as King. But we’ve not gotten there yet. We stand in liturgical time the same as we stand in real time: as the church in a world full of deception but eagerly hoping for the final renewal of all things in which time God will be all in all as we worship Christ the King.
Our lack of concern for our future resurrection of course stands in stark contrast to nearly all previous Christian tradition. The Gospel of Matthew is of the opinion that already Isaiah the prophet had spoken of this Jesus in whom the Gentiles would hope (chapter 12). Acts says Paul was on trial precisely for the hope of the resurrection. And this is of course a constant theme in Paul’s own writings: he tell us famously that the three most important things are, as they are commonly rendered, faith, hope, and love. Ignatius of Antioch is adamant throughout his letters that we be of one, common hope of the coming of Jesus. Saint Thomas Aquinas lists this hope among his theological virtues. The Catholic Catechism says that “hope is the desire of the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness.” The short Catechism in our prayer book has an entire section on “Christian Hope” which is defined as “living with confidence in newness and fullness of life, and awaiting the coming of Christ in glory, and the completion of God’s purpose for the world.”

So what is our problem? Here’s this rich and seemingly endless ancient Christian tradition of the hope of the resurrection, and for us its rarely more than a comforting nicety that we maybe think about on Easter or at funerals. The tradition suggests that most other Christians have been obsessed with this. What make us so different?
Well, I certainly don’t know for sure, and there must be a million different answers, but one answer would be that we don’t really need to hope. Though we would never say as much, our lives imply that we don’t really have anything to hope for. On the whole, people do not need think they really need the church’s hope, because in reality the state and our modern world is the savior. Despite what we may piously claim to our priest, or what, on the other hand, we may cynically mock during a presidential campaign or debate, our lives demonstrate that we largely buy the rhetoric of worldwide salvation through human rights, democracy, free markets, upward mobility, and “development”. Our salvation, in the sense of what is really important to us, comes thence.

Recently moral philosopher Charles Taylor has charted this movement as it developed out of the mideval church and into the modern world. He writes that

In the mediaeval period, it was generally understood that the full demands of Christian life would never be met…in history…but only at the Parousia, at the end of time. There were structural features of our existence here, for instance, the existence of states, and of private property, which were inseparable from our fallen condition…This meant that the two orders in which the Christian lived, the City of God and the earthly city, could never be in tune with each other…. [But beginning with the Reformation in the 16th century, it was] required that one define a way of life open to everyone which would amount to an integral fulfillment [of the Gospel], and this couldn’t help but bring about a definition of the demands of Christian faith closer in line with what is attainable in the world, with what can be realized in history. The distance between the ultimate City of God and [the city of the World] has been reduced….The “Next World” now has a different function, not to complete a path of [deification of the believer already] begun here, but to provide rewards and punishments which fulfill the demands of justice on our actions in history….It became hard for many to answer the question , what is Christian faith about? The salvation of humankind, or the progress wrought by capitalism, technology, and democracy? The two have blended into one.” (A Secular Age, 735-6)

It is no surprise then that when we use the word hope we are usually thinking of some possibility of a better life. We hope for that promotion, to get into that good school, that medicine will save us from death, for recognition from this person, and for physical well being and security, for lack of worry or early retirement. Our modern American world with all its freedoms, comforts and amenities has saved us. Our hope, when we do hope, is on it. But we don’t need the resurrection anymore.

So I’m suggesting that we have been bamboozled. That we are often adrift in a vast sea of lies, and we’re not really sure which way land lies. Or, alternatively, we are sinking in that same sea, and we are not even sure which way is down and which way is up. We are confused about our salvation.

What do we do? We can’t just decide to hope more. Will ourselves into some kind of new state of mind or something easy like that. Its not a matter of having more of some emotion, or being more on the edge of our seat. Rather, we need to be taught by the church’s traditions the proper way to use the word hope. The proper way to hope.

And thankfully our New Testament readings this morning suggest that we are not first people to have had this problem. In the Gospel reading the Sadducees are specifically named as those who do not believe in the resurrection of the dead. It was not, of course, that they were good scientific rationalists ahead of their time, but the central reason for this denial was that they only accepted the first five books of the Bible – the Books of Moses - as authoritative and canonical, and there is very little in these books that point to anything like a resurrection. But on a second look, I’m not entirely convinced that these Sadducees are entirely different than we are. Sure, they had their “official” justifications for their lack of hope. But beyond this, they too were quite comfortable. They were the elites of the people, the Roman-backed Jewish leadership, the culturally respectable, the rich. They have a vested interest in the first being first and the last being last.

And indeed this is the score on which Jesus critiques them. The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage. Life just goes on as usual – there’s a certain “normalcy” about it. But, Jesus says, those who have part of the resurrection have a completely different way of life – they neither marry nor are given in marriage – and Jesus’s alternative society reveals that the normal, even seemingly natural, way the world works, the way it has always been, is precisely one that does not need and cannot fathom the hope of the resurrection. In other words, living a “normal life” simply being a good citizen, or whatever, is actually to be bamboozled into accepting a salvation that is not from God.

In other words, to recover the hope of the resurrection properly, we need to not just think differently, but to embody a way of life that lets us see the salvation that the world offers as a psudo-salvation, a deception leading us away from the Gospel. And this is precisely what Paul tells the Thessalonians who had been deceived into thinking that the Lord had already come and that they had missed out. The Lord Jesus, he says, has indeed given you a good hope. How to come back to it? Verse 15: Stand. Hold fast to the traditions which you were taught. In other words, live the practices of the church. How? Principally Paul must be thinking of meeting together, not least to share the Eucharist. For when we so do not only do we remember that this meal is the source of our salvation, but also that when eat it we are trained into the proper hope of the resurrection, for whenever we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

In other words, to live by the practices of the church is to be trained to see as a false hope the Rulers of this World’s offer of salvation by money, security, prosperity, longer and healthier lives, shelter, independence, invulnerability, civil rights and something called freedom. It takes participation in Christ’s body to remind us of the traditions that the church has always taught: that salvation actually consists not in money but in poverty, not in independence but in dependence, not in authenticating our individuality but in community, not in security but vulnerability, not in being one’s own master but in service, not in claiming our rights but in sacrifice, not in long life but in martyrdom. For only when we live this life of imitation of the crucified Christ do we realize that our only hope is resurrection.
I’m not exactly sure how to begin to do this, but I offer with fear and trembling one practical example: St Joseph’s policy of hospitality to our homeless neighbors. This policy is not just a matter of kindness or political correctness. And woe betide us if we convince ourselves and them that their salvation consists in becoming upwardly mobile, that their hope is in becoming middle class Americans. Rather, their presence is a matter of OUR salvation. Living in communion with them shatters any illusions we might have that God has saved us through our stuff. It shows us little by little how participation in the pseudo salvation the world offers can alienate us from the world God has sent us to save by incorporating it into his church. For it is more than a little awkward to give our poor brethren a blanket and say “see you in the morning”, knowing I am going home to sleep in my warm bed. Imagining these our friends as members with us of Christ’s body permits us neither to send them away to be dealt with by others, nor to turn a blind eye to their want in the face of our relative abundance. We are rather invited to imagine a community of sharing.

So my point has been that the church is an alternative city of hope.
The more that we live our lives in it the more we see that there is plenty of room for the hope of the resurrection, and that we would indeed be hopeless people without it. This will happen not least because as we build the city of God around the eucharist and the poor we will be persecuted for it. But this persecution produces steadfastness, and steadfastness produces character, and character hope. And hope does not put us to shame.
Amen.